After the Future

Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism

The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.

One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights. (Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)

Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.

The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980. That progress, though, stopped after 1980, and the gap remained roughly unchanged for the next three decades. Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.

...The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.)

Ronald Brownstein, "America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good"

Until Reagan, even in the South, we were making real progress, and then it all stopped. 

I know it's more complicated, but I trace the acuteness of the current crisis of American democracy back to Reagan. Morning in America was really the beginning of a journey into the heart of darkness, a journey that led us to Trump. With him the sorting and the polarizing tribalism begins. He opened up the space for the more cretinous, resentment-driven and hateful characteristics of the American character to emerge and to be legitimated. Because at the root of the current crisis is a fundamental inability of great swaths of the American populace to distinguish truth from fantasy.

Reagan's was always an American-greatness fantasy that had little to do with the complex realities of living in America. It gave Main Street Americans a meaning story when they intensely felt the need for one, but while it might have seemed benign and Norman Rockwell-y enough at first, Morning in America was the beginning of a longer story that has led so many Americans into a blindness that has led them to see Trump as the savior of American idea rather than its destroyer. 

Conservatism, traditionally, has never really had a program; it was always primarily about protecting the interests of the the wealthy and resistance to change. They thought of change as destabilizing and driven by naive, do-goody Liberals, who, even with all the best intentions, promoted a project that was bent on destroying the social and cultural infrastructure that makes civilization possible.

There's a partial truth buried in all that, but the deeper reality is that Liberals simply adapted to the dynamically changing world that post-WWII consumer capitalism created. Capitalism's consumer driven choice ethos was the acid that slowly dissolved whatever feeling Americans had for the public interest. It was an ethos embraced by Conservatives and Liberals alike, and it has eroded the civic foundations and republican virtues upon which a healthy democracy depends. We live in a sick society right now, and while Liberals are not the cause of this illness, they live a little too complacently within the rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary and its utilitarian moral framing that philosophically justifies it. 

So conservatives don't like the way America has changed starting, and they want to roll things back to the America as their grandparents remember it from the 30s, 40s, 50s and early 60s. But while that America started to unravel in the late 60s and 70s, it was not the fault of Liberals but of the kind of mass society that consumer capitalism created. Reagan couldn't bring himself to blame capitalism, so he blamed government: His laugh line--“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."--became gospel for Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats went along with it.

The enemy became the administrative state, the state that in its New Deal and Great Society programs provided the infrastructure for the progress described in the Brownstein excerpt above. Conservatives blame Liberals for getting in the way of their restoring the America they love and that they believe was taken from them, but it's rather like blaming Liberals for hurricanes and tornadoes--and then doing everything possible to prevent them from taking steps to mitigate their most destructive effects because they don't want them to get the credit.

Not all change is good, of course, but in order to resist what's bad in it you have to have a model of history that has some working relationship with the dynamic forces that are shaping it. In other words, you need a philosophy or a theology of history to make sense of it, but it has to be plausible and intellectually honest, which requires that it never present itself as the absolute truth, but rather a working model to help us navigate history in the most humanly productive way.

Americans have no such philosophy. They believe, if anything, in the Invisible Hand, the market deity that makes everything turn out right if we just don't get in its way. But the Invisible Hand doesn't care about traditional values. It's a rapacious deity that is fed only by human greed and a compulsive need for growth. And it is greed and growth that have destroyed what Red America feels so deeply the loss of. They blame Liberals, but they should blame the Invisible Hand. And if they're honest, they will recognize that they, too, are worshippers in its cult

So resisting change can never mean stopping change, but only directing change that promotes broad human flourishing, on the one hand, and constraining change that works against human flourishing as best one can, on the other. This is almost impossible to do when there is no consensus about what constitutes human flourishing. We live in a culture dominated by an Invisible-Hand worshipping Libertarian ethos, which means all choices are equal, so we are constrained from making judgments about the choices people make. Who are we to judge? So this in turn leads us to a least-common-denominator imagination of human possibility, human possibility as Judd Apatow or Mark Zuckerberg might imagine it. I sympathize with Red Americans who are sickened by their vulgarity and callow superificiality, but it's not Apatow's or Zuckerberg's fault. They are simply in their different ways acolytes in the amoral cult of the Invisible Hand. 

But most normal humans want to think better of themselves than that, and so they are likely to grab onto anyone or anything that tells them they can be better. One very powerful and broadly popular way for Americans to do that is to buy into the 19th-century American mythos to which Reagan gave new life--a mythos of rugged individualism, never-stand-down toughness, and loyalty to god and country.

I understand the appeal. It's a way to push back against the anything-goes nihilism, but it has become a force for nihilism insofar as it feeds a fantasy of real America that does not map to the complex world given to us by the hurricane of consumer capitalism after WWII and accelerated by the tornado of technocapitalism more recently. It was an ethos that mapped to pre-Industrial-revolution America, but not to the complex, globalizing world late capitalism has created. 

But what do Liberals have to offer them that's better--career advancement in a meritocratic technocracy? Jobs in a cubby in some soulless high rise in Oklahoma City? For many of the people whose customary culture has been destroyed in the decades since WWII, to pursue such a life feels to them like surrender to the enemy that has taken everything from them that they and their ancestors held sacred. 

But Democrats and Liberals in general seem incapable of understanding this simple idea: It's the meaning, stupid. They keep thinking that the solutions to the crisis are primarily economic, and of course there must be an economic dimension to any solution that might work. But such a solution can only be advanced within a larger meaning story, a story that Liberals haven't the resources to tell. They see religion as a consumer choice, like preferring Thai food to Chinese. They don't feel a need for its comforts, they say, as if that's all religion is, a teddy bear to cling to at night. Liberals don't feel a need for such a meaning story because for the most part their lives feel meaningful enough. They are mostly educated and prosperous, and so have the financial and cultural resources to live decent, interesting lives. Why can't everybody be like us?

Blue America can't understand why Red America hates them so much and why they won't. become more like them. And because they don't, Blue America thinks its contempt for Red America is justified. It's rather like the way white settlers came to see Native American drunken layabouts and obstreperous fools for their unwillingness to assimilate. Of course, it never occurred to them that the fact that they just destroyed their thousands-year old culture might be a factor causing them to resist. Is Rust-Belt and rural resentment toward educated elites essentially different? Aren't their resentments cognate with the resentments of Native Americans toward the whites who held them in contempt for similar reasons? 

That's why Liberals are so obsessed with education. Education is always the solution for Liberals because it was the key to their own success. But their getting educated has come to mean for Red America their becoming brainwashed in institutions dominated by the ideology of the enemy, the enemy that destroyed everything they and their ancestors held sacred. The brouhaha about CRT has nothing to do with CRT; it's all about the fear that traditionalist Red Americans have about losing their kids to the enemy. 

Now I say I blame Reagan, but you might retort that if it wasn't Reagan it would have been someone else. Maybe. But what if the someone else would have have been someone with the stature and charism Lincoln or FDR, someone who could have faced down the dark side of the American character and led the nation out of the confusion of the 60s and 70s toward "greater convergence", i.e, toward a more perfect union. Is that so hard to imagine?

Carter, as admirable as he was in so many ways, was just not the man for the moment.  He was a morally serious guy who wanted us to eat our spinach, but people won't eat it if there's someone offering them ice cream instead. And that's what Reagan's Morning in America was--junk food. What Americans needed in 1980 was someone to inspire them in a way Carter was incapable of, and so his failure cleared the way for Reagan who was indeed inspiring, but he was selling the sugar high, and it made the country sick. 

Reagan was charismatic, but he was no Lincoln; he was more in the mold of Andrew Jackson. As Jackson's defeat of Adams was a fork in the road in 1828, so was Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980. Both Jackson and Reagan were larger-than-life characters, and both left toxic legacies. After Reagan in the 80s, morally deformed figures like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Ailes were given the space to emerge into the mainstream to do their destructively polarizing thing in the 90s. There are similar paths taken from Jackson to Jefferson Davis and from Reagan to Donald Trump. 

So yes, I blame Reagan. I don't think America had to go the way he diverted it, but arguing counterfactuals isn't useful unless it can help our understanding the problem we're trying to solve. If 1980 was a fork in the road in American history that led us to this moment, what would the road untaken look like, and is that a route that is open to us now?

***

The argument that I've been making here over the years is that fundamental to the crisis in our political order is a deeper crisis of meaning in our cultural order. This dimension of the crisis is something most Liberals in Blue America don't feel acutely for reasons alluded to above. And so their ideas about progress have always been about material progress and their program limited to economic policies designed to mitigate the destructive effects of capitalism on those most vulnerable to be hurt by them. That's fine so far as it goes, but...it's the meaning, not the economy, stupid.

The Liberalism that gave us all the progress that Brownstein describes above was incapable of dealing effectively with the crisis of meaning that Main Street Americans experienced in the wake of the disruptions of the 60s and 70s. All Democrats had to offer were programs that never addressed the underlying causes of the crisis, which was Traditional America's losing its customary culture, which was accelerated by Reagan's program to dismantle the New Deal and unfetter the nihilistic forces of corporate capitalism.

Reagan's program was abetted and advanced by Neoliberal Democrats in the 90s. The Washington consensus for deregulation and free trade endorsed by both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats insisted that lower prices were good for everyone, and if in order to get them some people needed to lose their jobs, well that's unfortunate, but they can be retrained to do something else.

Was it ever a consideration how such policies atomize American society and have destructive effects on families and the communities that support them? Conservatives are right that government programs are no substitute for healthy families and communities, but conservatives, guys like Romney and Paul Ryan, never understood the forces that worked so mercilessly to destroy them. (Oren Cass is an interesting exception.) They thought liberal programs were to blame, when all the liberal programs were trying to do is respond--often inadequately and hamfistedly--to capitalism's destructive effects. No, say these conservatives, Don't interfere with the work of the Invisible Hand. 

So I would argue that most Liberals don't understand that there's double whammy here for Red America in its feeling that Liberals are the cause of thei having become both culturally and economically marginalized. While Republicans are more to blame for their economic losses, they blame Democrats instead because Republicans at least respect their need to cling to their religion, their guns, and their whiteness. Obama was right--what else does Red America have once the destructive effects of capitalism have taken everything else away from them?

So Red America is stewing in a deep resentment toward Liberals whom they blame for their losses. While some of that loss might be their share of the national wealth as well-paying jobs were offshored, what they felt more acutely was the loss of meaning. The framework that gave these folks their sense of identity, dignity, and purpose slowly dissolved in the 90s and 00s. Capitalism is a fundamentally nihilistic force whose inner logic is simply greed and growth, and it is no respecter of local communities and their  traditions when they get in the way of what the logic of capitalism requires.

That's not the fault of Liberals, but Liberals are at fault for not understanding why they are being blamed by Red America, and their cluelessness leads them to endorse attitudes and policies that make things worse. It's astonishing to me to think that Democrats could ever think that nominating Hillary Clinton was good idea. It only makes sense from within a particular kind of technocratic/meritocratic cluelessness that has no sense of the causes that have led the broader society into this crisis.

But as bad as the Clintons were, they were simply adapting to the world that Reagan created. His Morning in America was a celebration of both unfettered, deregulated capitalism and traditional American values. And so follows the irony that in the name of traditional American values he unleashed the forces that in subsequent decades destroyed the social infrastructure that supported them. In doing so, Reagan began the process of creating a deracinated, anomic mass that was ripe for exploitation by the first demagogue to come along, which turned out to be Donald Trump. That such an absurdly ridiculous figure should be so successful in not a testament to his talent, so much as it is a testament to the social psychological damage done to the country by Reaganism. His unfettering of the nihilistic forces of capitalism, dressed up in a 19th century rugged individualist fantasy, thrust Red America into a ferocious ontological vertigo.  

That's what explains MAGA and J6. Red America's culture was stripped from it by the disruptions of capitalism, but they blame Liberals and their government programs because that's who Reagan and the right wing demagogues who emerged after him told them to blame. Even smart people who should know better believe that small government and deregulation is the answer to all America's woes. They believe it not because it's true, not because it gives a plausible explanation for what is ailing us, but because that's what their tribe has come to believe, and they can't be bothered to think un-tribal thoughts. It's more important to blame the Libs. 

Since Reagan, the GOP, with the acquiescence of Neoliberal Democrats, has not only impeded the country's social and material progress, but has led us to a condition where it's not enough for the worst tendencies in American society to be tolerated, but rather for those worst tendencies to become the norm. The Reagan fantasy of America created the space for the most regressive and shameful elements in the American psyche to emerge. It shouldn't be that difficult to understand how it created the shame-denying, resentment-driven, reality-averse habits of mind that inevitably led so many conservatives to embrace Trump.

So rather than admit that they were wrong, they must do whatever is necessary to shut out the truth and the shame of their having enabled such madman and in doing so smashed basic norms and impediments without which a healthy democracy can survive. Their repressed shame requires that they double down in their hatred of the morally smug Libs who they can never acknowledge were right. So they must do whatever it takes, whether legal or illegal, to shut Blue America out of power because that's the only way to shut them up. This was true of the slaveholders in the 1850s, and it's true now of any conservative who is not a Never-Trumper. Brownstein reinforces the point:

The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart. History, in my view, offers two models.

During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.

By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially, to the point of overriding the prohibitions against slavery in the free states.

It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”

The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.

And as in the 1850s, the forces of resentment and reaction are aggressively overreaching today. Conservatives are justifying their support for Trump because he gave them the court that overturned Roe, but more consequential is that he gave them the court that seems bent in its overreaching project to dismantle the administrative state. Reagan's Morning in America will thus be fulfilled in Bannon's "Leninist" dark fantasies to destroy the Liberal Order and the open society that it protected. And to replace it with what? Some Putinesque, synarchist-theocratic nightmare?

Will such a project or something like it succeed? There's a good chance of it. Reactionary Red America has short-term structural advantages--the courts, the electoral college, the Senate, a majority of state legislatures, the obliviousness of a center-right-leaning electorate. But Progressive Blue America has cultural, economic, and intellectual energies that Red America simply can't constrain indefinitely.

It's possible we'll have a decade like Cromwell's parliamentary dictatorship in the 1650s, but that will prove so unattractive that it cannot last. Maybe we will need Red America to do its worst before a backlash will develop that will empower a broad consensus to push back against it. Perhaps that's the only thing that can galvanize the political will to push for a Progressive Restoration that picks up where it left off in 1980. Perhaps only then can we get the constitutional changes that will free the country from the 18th/19th century thinking and institutions that prevent it from dealing with 21st century challenges. That's as much optimism as I can muster at the moment. 

See also "How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name", a reflection Rick Perlstein's Nixonland shortly after it came out.

Also "Growth Idolatry" about the tradeoffs between fairer wealth redistribution and rates of economic growth.

 

I was Wrong about Trump--and Some Thoughts about Cassidy Hutchinson

On January 7, 2020, I wrote a post entitled "Trump the Coward". Here's an excerpt: 

If I knew anybody who was part of the riot yesterday, the first thing I'd ask him is why wasn't Trump with you when you made your assault? He said that he would parade with you the capitol, but instead he went back to the safety of the White House to watch the event on TV. It was great entertainment until his lawyers started to scare him that he might be legally liable for inciting a riot. 

Think how much more successful your insurrection would have been if he marched into the capitol with you. But that would require that he take a risk that he simply wasn't willing to make. He wanted you all to take the risk, and if you succeeded in "stealing back the election", so to say, that would be great for him, but you failed, and it didn't take long for him to  back away from you as fast as possible.

If he's so worthy of your devotion, why did he condemn the violence and say that everybody who broke the law should be prosecuted?

That's how it looked then. I assumed that Trump never intended to go to the Capitol with the mob because it was too risky. But now it's clear that he really, really wanted to go, that his going was a part of the plan all along. And it's clear that the only reason that he didn't go was because his secret service detail wasn't read in on the plan, so it didn't know that all those people with weapons were part of Trump's plot and thought they were protecting the president from them by refusing to take him to the Capitol.

We know now that the plot failed, but also that an important part of the plan was not implemented--Trump's leading the mob into the Capitol. So I have to give him props for being willing to put his body on the line, something I thought at the time was beyond him and his bonespurs. And as I wrote back then, there's good reason to think that the plot would have had a better chance of succeeding if he were there to lead the mob into the Capitol. Imagine the confusion. Would the police have resisted him and the mob following him into the Capitol at all? Would his personal presence with the mob behind him have intimidated Pence to refuse to certify the electoral count? We owe a debt to the Secret Service. 

These hearings have been a strange experience for people like me because they don't tell a story I didn't already know. They are just filling in the details. Sure there are little things like the reason Trump didn't go to the Capitol that I got wrong, but the real story is much worse. The only way to be wrong about Trump is to underestimate how awful he is. We will learn nothing in coming weeks as more details become exposed that exonerates him or makes him look better. The only question is whether learning all this will matter. Will this information break the spell on the Trump supporting public as it broke the spell for Cassidy Hutchinson? 

Her testimony was remarkable on so many levels. Who is this young woman? What was she--three years out of college? Why was someone so young so quickly promoted to a position of such importance? This wasn't an intern position. Could they no longer find anybody older and more experienced willing to take the job? Why was she so highly thought of and trusted by all those she interacted with from Pat Cipollone to Rudy Giuliani. Why would she presume to be taken seriously  when tells Meadows, a man more than twice her age with decades of insider experience, not to go to the Willard Hotel plot meeting? Why would anybody confide in her or take her seriously in the way people seem to have? Again, why would she have been so trusted?

She is clearly, bright, competent, and well spoken. But more important I think is that she's a Conservative idealist, a true believer, who had not yet been made cynical. I wouldn't be surprised if it was her youth, her naïveté, and her idealism that made her so trustworthy in the eyes of her Machiavellian elders. Perhaps she reminded them of a younger version of themselves before politics killed their idealism. If she believed in what they were doing, then maybe they could believe in themselves. They were like Dads who wanted their innocent daughter to trust and believe in them, and as long as she did, all's right with the world. And she did, until she couldn't anymore. 

I've been a teacher of young people in her age cohort for over thirty years, and I have taught many young conservative idealists like her. They are usually former military who have come back to get their degree, or they are kids in ROTC. They want a life of significance. They are looking for a noble calling, a life of service, and the military provides an avenue for them to achieve that. They have a maturity and a sense of moral purpose that most of their peers do not. There is something deeply admirable about them while at the same time something deeply tragic. Tragic because the earnestness of their idealism is precisely what makes them so manipulable by their cynical elders. How many young idealists have died in the unworthy wars waged by their elders?

The best and most spirited young people are idealists, but what matters more is what happens when their elders disappoint them. Do they become cynics or do they become wise. Cynicism is the disease of idealists who have come to think their ideals were delusional.Wisdom is idealism tempered by understanding how the real world works. Wisdom requires retaining one's ideals and moral commitments but becoming less absolutist about them. It requires retaining the capacity to do what's called for, no matter how difficult, when the situation demands it. Was Hutchinson wise beyond her years in this sense?

In Cassidy Hutchinson, we encounter a remarkable young woman who didn't enter the military, but she entered public service as a conservative idealist. She was not made cynical by what she learned in her encounter with the dirty reality of politics, but retained her ideals and her moral instincts in a robust enough way that enabled her to do what was called for, including giving her live testimony yesterday. To do so meant turning on the leaders of her tribe, people who liked and admired her, people like Meadows and Giuliani. Apparently she thought well of Trump and was proud of her role in supporting what he accomplished, but she could not stomach what she learned about him as a witness to the events surrounding J6. And that's what led her to testify publicly yesterday. Both Trump and Meadows disappointed her, and so she was able to overcome whatever compunction might have impeded her from telling what she knew about them. 

On Monday night, before learning that Hutchinson would be today's witness, I had the impulse to watch a John Grisham movie. It was either The Firm or The Pelican Brief, and settled on the latter. It's the story of another young idealist in her mid-twenties played by Julia Roberts who had the courage to confront people with enormous power to do her harm. It is a story of Washington political intrigue but about different issues with different levels of violence. The Roberts character is being pursued by professional assassins to keep her quiet, and she is particularly good in this movie for giving us a feeling for how terrifying her situation was. It's clear to me that Hutchinson was under some threat, which was reinforced by Cheney's warnings about witness tampering at the end. I doubt Hutchinson had reason to fear being assassinated, but she has exposed herself in a way that required enormous of courage. When the dust settles and the movie is made of these events, I doubt Hutchinson's character will play a major role, but I suspect there are a behind-the-scenes events that remain yet invisible to us that would make a very compelling, Grisham-esque story. 

In the movie there is a very Trumpy president played by Robert Culp, but the really sinister character is his chief of staff. Unlike the Chief in the movie, Meadows is not nearly so sinister or villainous. Meadows is rather a cypher, a zero, a banal yes man just doing as he's told, telling everyone what they want to hear. He is a man without either ideals or dark ambitions. He's just there in the midst of it all aware of it all and doing nothing one way or the other and by his enaction enabling these crimes. 

And I wonder what the next step will be for Hutchinson? I want to think well of her, but I fear that what we might hear next about her is that she's working for Lindsay Graham or Jim Jordan. But perhaps her path will be more like that of Amanda Carpenter, another young Conservative idealist who earlier in her career worked for Ted Cruz. She's an intellectually honest one, though, who is now a never Trumper at The Bulwark.

Bremerton Coach Wins His Crusade

Speaking of religious fanaticism and the courts, I wrote about this guy in May in response to David French's defense of his right to pray on the fifty yard line. He won his day in court 6-3 with Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. Here's how I concluded in my piece in May:

It's not clear from the reporting what the nature of his prayers were. While I am myself someone who prays, I am not someone who believes that God has or should have a rooting interest in my team winning, and it goes against everything that I believe that I should pray to him that he may help me to defeat my opponent. I'm not saying that this is what Kennedy prayed about because I don't know, but a court precedent would open the door to coaches who would pray in this way, and if I were a religious student athlete, I would feel that I was being coerced to pray to a God I don't believe in because that God doesn't take sides in such matters. He's not praying to the Christian God revealed in the gospels but to a deity more like Mars, the Roman god of war. 

And to take it a step further, once you set the precedent, what is to prevent a coach from praying to Moloch or Satan--or some Wiccan deity? Is French willing to stand by some other coach if such entities are the object of his worship and parents and school administrators object? Do you really want to open that can of worms? Where do you draw the line? Once again, the fundamental problem here is trying to litigate a metaphysical matter in the political sphere. It just doesn't work. 

If the coach prays for each student to do his best and may the better team win, let him do that quietly, and then publicly tell his students that he knows that each has his best game in him on that day. That would be laudable. And it would be the more Christian way to pray. Coach Kennedy and David French might well be reminded of Jesus's advice on the matter:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. ⁶ But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. ⁷ And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. ⁸ Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matt 6:5ff)

The Woe of Roe 2

Setting aside the record of insincerity from Alito himself and the other conservative justices, the reason not to trust his disclaimer is that the Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country. The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whatever stances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undead constitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along.

Adam Serwer, "The Constitution is Whatever the Right Wing Says It Is"

I have nothing much to add to what I think about overturning Roe than what I said in "The Woe of Roe 1" in May. This is a symbolic issue, and it symbolizes different things to different people. For the Left it symbolizes a regression to the Middle Ages, for the Right it symbolizes a restoration of traditional moral order. What it means in practice remains to be seen. Fifty years from now it will mean something very different from what it means now. A lot depends on the kind of society that we will have become. 

Context is everything. Insofar as this decision is made at a time when American Democracy is in jeopardy from threats posed by fascists and religious fanatics, it's understandable that whatever the moral or legal merits that support the case for overturning the Roe decision, it feels like a victory for the religious fanatics and fascists. This decision has also to be seen in relationship to the decision the day before regarding its ruling on New York's concealed weapon law. If the argument that all Roe does is allow the states to decide their own abortion laws, shouldn't the states also  be allowed to decide their own gun control laws? There isn't even a pretense of consistency. "We don't have to make credible arguments," they seem to be saying, "because we don't have to anymore. We just rule as we please because we have the votes." As Serwer points out elsewhere in the article quoted above regarding the New York decision--

In his concurrence in that case, Alito sneered, “How does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.” The logic of the assertion suggests that laws against murder are useless because murderers continue to exist; it is a quality of reasoning that might come from a fifth grader. The argument is also not in any sense a legal one, just a paraphrase of culture-war blather one hears in right-wing media—which are a much more significant influence on the majority than the law or the Constitution is. Clearly Alito does not believe laws against abortion to be similarly pointless even though abortions will continue regardless.

These are just Fox New talking points. As the Eastman/Trump scheme was a coup plot in search of a legal theory, so are the majority's opinions conservative outcomes in search of rationalizations to justify them. Like most ideological conservatives, law and order does not mean for them a respect for the rule of law, but to use any cockamamie justification to bend the law to conform to their idea of order. If you understand that, you understand why someone like Ginni Thomas feels perfectly justified in supporting Trump's coup attempt. The rule of law has no legitimacy for her and people like her to the degree that it does not reflect their reactionary vision for social order.

So the problem is not just their decision on this issue, but the lack of judicial constraint that it portends. Thomas and Alito are fanatics. And the others? Gorsuch and Barrett seem cluelessly, nerdily naive in their Federalist Society ideological bubble. Kavanagh is a chameleon. No surprise there. Roberts seems, relative to the others, to be more in touch with reality. But as has been pointed out, he no longer matters as a swing vote now after the Barrett appointment. I have to say that I was open to giving Barrett the benefit of the doubt. I thought she might be a conservative more in the Roberts vein, but alas. 

Whether or not this is a Pyrrhic victory for the conservatives remains to be seen. Like the original Roe decision, the decision to overturn it now is perceived by huge swaths of Americans as overreach, and overreach did then and will now create a backlash. It would be ironic indeed if this decision, even moreso than the revelations of the J6 Committee, leads the country to retain the Democrats in power come November.One thing's for sure, though. Whatever legitimacy the court might have had until now is gone for the foreseeable future. For the conservatives on the court and elsewhere, it's about the exercise of raw power. 

Will Rusty Bowers still vote for Trump if he runs from jail?

 

Making Sense of Rusty Bowers

As another of my colleagues, Juliette Kayyem, wrote recently, the January 6 hearings offer an off-ramp to Trump-ambivalent Republicans. But not enough of them are taking it. Many Republican leaders have talked themselves into the position that the policy views of Democrats are so dangerous, or Trump’s policies are so good, that it is more important to support him than it is to defend the basic process of democracy.

This is partly a product of an era when the parties are further and further apart on policy; partly a product of an era of affective polarization, in which partisans are driven as much by hatred of their political adversaries as affinity for any cause; and partly a result of diminished attachment to democratic ideals among voters around the world.

Once you’ve decided that your specific policy planks are more important than ensuring that the fundamental system survives, however, the result sooner or later is a government that has no interest in the will of the people. Imagining this doesn’t take much creativity: After the 2020 election, Trump tried to ignore the will of the people and remain in power. He was stopped only by the courage of people such as Rusty Bowers. If even Bowers is willing to back Trump again, despite his eloquent condemnations, the outlook for popular democracy is very bleak.

David Graham, "The Comment that Reveals the Depths of the Republican Party's Collapse"

The comment in the title referred to is Rusty Bowers' statement, as reported by the Associated Press, that should Trump be the nominee in '24, he will, alas, vote for him. Bowers, of course, was a compelling witness on Tuesday concerning his resistance to a pressure campaign by Trump to break his oath and go along with his plot to overturn the Arizona election results. How to explain how a man who seems on the one hand to have such integrity can support another man who has none?

I don't know Bowers, but he reminds me of some conservatives I know who live in a very, very small, very tightly structured formulaic world that makes it very difficult for them to deal with complexity. Within that small world, life is simpler, and for some with a scrupulous superego, it's possible to be both principled and foolish. 

Many people mistake moral rigidity and/or moral absolutism for integrity. It's not. It's better to have some moral principles than to have none. But it's better yet to have a well-developed conscience, which is the cognitive capacity to think through morally complex issues rather than to just apply simplistic formulae. Bowers appears in this instance to have two operative rules or moral formulae: First, be faithful to your oath. Second, always be loyal to and support the GOP candidate once nominated. Morally formulaic people He can mechanically apply both rules and not be bothered by how they contradict one another. 

So a person who seems to be morally principled can be both admirable in some situations and foolish in others. Is Bowers a fool? I won't go that far because (1) I don't know Rusty Bowers, and he might have reasons for saying he'd vote for Trump again that I'm unaware of. And (2) he hasn't actually voted for him again yet. What matters is what he actually does, and, like Mike Pence, when it counted most, he did the right thing when pressured by Trump.

So for now, let us all be grateful that if it was Bowers' formulaic moral rigidity that caused him to resist Trump, it was enough to stop him from stealing Arizona. It's more than we could have expected from many other politicians, and for that he should be remembered, not his statement about what he might do two and a half years from now. 

Why It's Hard to Admit You're Wrong

 

“We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have any evidence.”

--Rudy Giuliani, as testified by Rusty Bowers in the J6 Committee Hearings

After more than 60 lawsuits brought by the former president and his allies failed to overturn the 2020 election results, Cudd’s brother Jarrod thought, “Maybe she’ll come back off the ledge here.” Even if she felt that her actions at the Capitol were righteous, overwhelmingly, others found them repugnant.

Instead, Cudd doubled down. When pressed, she says she regrets entering the Capitol, but she’s clearly still angry at how she and other Sixers were treated. The experience galvanized her, proving her worst fears about the government, Democrats, and the media.

Olga Khazan, "The Insurrectionist in the Flower Shop"

I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.

We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.

--Tom Nichols, "What Are Trump Supporters So Afraid Of?"

Bottom line: Admitting you're wrong requires that you be a grown-up, that you take responsibility for your mistakes, and when appropriate to make amends. In reading the story of Jenny Cudd, the flower-shop insurrectionist, you see the profile of a woman who is in many ways admirable and spirited, but she reminds me of people I know who are dry drunks. They may not be drinking, but they're not sober. Nothing changes until they admit they are not sober. Yes, it's humiliating. Yes, denial is so much easier. Yes, it's so much easier to blame others. But if they face up to it, they'll get over the humiliation, and they''ll realize that there addiction doesn't define them.

Overcoming the fear of humiliation is the first step toward becoming who you really are. It then becomes possible to learn that your identity and dignity subsists in something more deeply true, and does not depend on the good opinion of others. Only after the getting through the fear of humiliation can recovery begin. To live in thrall to the fear of humiliation and to the hatred of those who make you feel humiliated is to live inside a prison of your own making. The prison door is not locked. You can walk out any time you choose to. It's a frightening prospect to live in the world outside, but it really is so much better there than inside. 

But instead of walking out and going to an AA meeting, Cudd is like the drunk who organizes meetings with other drunks where they all agree that getting drunk is like a sacrament--nothing nobler or more beautiful. How can all of us be wrong, right? Their drug of choice is MAGA.

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 2

After posting yesterday, It came across this Thomas Edsall column from May in which he quotes Stiglitz and Korinek:

In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to create a high-tech dystopian future.

Korinek and Stiglitz argue that without radical reform of tax and redistribution politics, a “Malthusian destiny” of widespread technological unemployment and poverty may ensue.

Humans, they write, “are able to apply their intelligence across a wide range of domains. This capacity is termed general intelligence. If A.I. reaches and surpasses human levels of general intelligence, a set of radically different considerations apply.” That moment, according to “the median estimate in the A.I. expert community is around 2040 to 2050.”

Once parity with the general intelligence of human beings is reached, they continue, “there is broad agreement that A.I. would soon after become super‐intelligent, i.e., more intelligent than humans, since technological progress would likely accelerate.”

Without extraordinary interventions, Korinek and Stiglitz foresee two scenarios, both of which could have disastrous consequences:

In the first, “man and machine will merge, i.e., that humans will ‘enhance’ themselves with ever more advanced technology so that their physical and mental capabilities are increasingly determined by the state of the art in technology and A.I. rather than by traditional human biology.”

Unchecked, this “will lead to massive increases in human inequality,” they write, because intelligence is not distributed equally among humans and “if intelligence becomes a matter of ability‐to‐pay, it is conceivable that the wealthiest (enhanced) humans will become orders of magnitude more productive — ‘more intelligent’ — than the unenhanced, leaving the majority of the population further and further behind.”

Key phrase here is "without extraordinary interventions". Who will the agents of such extraordinary interventions be? Will it come from the class of elites who are best positioned to benefit from these enhancements?  You can be sure the technocapitalist elite are making sure they are at the front of the line to get these enhancements. Who will stop these sociopaths? 

 

The article goes on:

In the second scenario, “artificially intelligent entities will develop separately from humans, with their own objectives and behavior, aided by the intelligent machines.”

In that case, they write, “there are two types of entities, unenhanced humans and A.I. entities, which are in a Malthusian race and differ — potentially starkly — in how they are affected by technological progress.”

In this hypothetical race, “A.I. entities are becoming more and more efficient in the production of output compared to humans,” the authors write, because “human technology to convert consumption goods such as food and housing into future humans has experienced relatively little technological change.” By contrast, “the reproduction technology of A.I. entities — to convert A.I. consumption goods such as energy, silicon, aluminum into future A.I. — is subject to exponential progress.”

Evolution without grace, i.e., evolution driven by the logic of the will to power and greed, has no particular interest in human beings, not even as much as the Mongol horde was interested in the thousands of humans they massacred or enslaved in their manic project to expand their power and control. Evolution without grace is the default and can be resisted only by moral actors who are grounded in something that transcends it. Evolution without grace only cares about expansion, and if that means that humans are no longer needed at the leading edge its expansion project and machines will serve evolution better, then what reason have we to think that hyper-intelligent machines won't take over? 

I don't think either of these two scenarios are inevitable, but because they have become the fodder for so many Hollywood dystopian entertainments, we tend to dismiss such concerns as unlikely. But what argument is there against all the evidence that supports that this is where unchecked technocapitalism is headed? And what argument is either of these two scenarios is more of a likelihood than not if there is no intervention to insure that machines serve human purposes rather than the reverse. Do we just shrug and say, "Well, it will all work out one way or the other."

How can such an intervention be marshaled if there is no consensus about what human purposes are? Certainly no intervention can be marshaled from within the hegemonic rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary, because it's precisely that imaginary that supports the values presuppositions of Social Darwinism, i.e., evolution without grace. The point I'm trying to make here is this: These scenarios are, if not inevitable, extremely likely unless there's an intervention. But from where shall it come? Who on the scene today has the moral authority to say No to technocapitalism and the power to enforce such a No?

Our situation vis a vis AI is very much like the one depicted in Don't Look Up. In that movie, the impending disaster was a comet heading toward the earth that is a MacGuffin for what could be any potential human extinction event from eco-catastrophe to the rise of the machines. The most important insight around which the premise of the film is based is that even when confronted with extinction, humans are so fragmented, so distracted and so morally feckless that they are incapable of uniting around an obvious human value--survival. The logic of technocapitalism is the default, and that logic, left unchecked, leads to the extinction of the human project. Only a few sociopaths escape to despoil a planet elsewhere. 

So as long as the nihilistic sociopathic logic of technocapitalism and its rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary plays such an outsized role in shaping our moral and material priorities, what reason have we to think that any kind of resistance to its logic can be mounted? What reason have we to think that any good can come of just letting that logic play out?  And where within the rationalist materialist imaginary can we get a foothold to push back against this logic?

On Sunday in a post entitled "The Coming Discontinuity" I wrote:

But whatever is going to happen probably has nothing to do with what we expect or with what we want or don't want. So perhaps, for precisely that reason, we should entertain the possibility that it might be smarter to think about the future with imageless hope. That's the attitude of a true wanderer who wonders in the wilderness. 

What I've written here yesterday and today is not meant to contradict that but rather to put us on alert that an attitude of hope requires active vigilance. It does not justify a lazy complacency that whatever happens happens. Imageless hope for me is rather like Keats's 'negative capability', i.e., a way of being attentive to the world with a kind of radical openness that expects to be surprised. But it's quite possible that we will miss what's there that might actually be a solution if we're not paying attention. And maybe more than we can understand now depends on our not missing it. 

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 1

“I don’t anthropomorphize,” Chowdhery said bluntly. “We are simply predicting language.” Artificial consciousness is a remote dream that remains firmly entrenched in science fiction, because we have no idea what human consciousness is; there is no functioning falsifiable thesis of consciousness, just a bunch of vague notions. And if there is no way to test for consciousness, there is no way to program it. You can ask an algorithm to do only what you tell it to do. All that we can come up with to compare machines with humans are little games, such as Turing’s imitation game, that ultimately prove nothing. 

From "Artificial Consciousness is Boring" by Stephen Marche

Boring? Depends on the question you ask.

I do not think that artificial intelligence will ever be able replicate human consciousness. That's not really even an interesting question from where I stand.  The not-boring question is will AI and machine learning evolve a kind of inhuman consciousness that will supplant or push aside human consciousness?

I think there is reason to fear that machines can become more sociopathically intelligent than human beings and operate at a level that is incomprehensible to human intelligence. And I think there is reason to fear that with a malevolent programmer or even with an unintentional programming mistake, machines can become a destructive, malevolent, and uncontrollable by humans. Maybe for Chowdhery that makes AI boring, but maybe he's asking the wrong question. Whether or not machines can ever become conscious in the human sense is not the important question. Whether or not they can become powerful enough to destroy the human evolutionary project is. Artificial Intelligence need not be seen as possibly attaining human consciousness to warrant our alarmed interest. 

Machines can be programmed to create Bach cantatas that even Bach experts would think were composed by Bach, and they can be programmed, as this article describes, to talk and converse with humans in ways that humans will be convinced pass the Turing test. They already play chess better than humans and they could probably be programed to write jokes and do a stand-up routine that might be genuinely funny. There are algorithms for all of that, and once those algorithms are part of a machine's intelligence and once a machine has access to all the music or jokes ever written they will be able to use the algorithms to develop novel variations on those algorithmic themes. They might even be able to combine algorithms in ways not done before by humans to make something truly novel that no human ever thought of before or maybe could ever have thought of. 

But novel isn't original. To be truly original you have to be connected to the originary power of the Living Real, and while machines might even develop a concept like monotheism as the fictional Cylons in Battlestar Galactica do, that doesn't mean they will ever have the capacity to experience awe. They can mimic awe, but they cannot experience it. The Living Real is something that humans can experience, and machines simply will never be able to. You can create machines that mimic human thinking and human feeling, but not machines that have souls with depths capable of experiencing the mystery of Being. The Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus makes similar arguments.  

The problem for human beings in the future lies in that the kind of mentality that drives technocapitalism is sociopathic, at least insofar as its principals proceed without any consideration for or connection with the Living Real. Technocapitalism's energies are Social Darwinist, and so its Social Darwinist biases will be consciously or unconsciously programmed into the machines it makes. And therein lies the danger. Humans can make machines that mimic and exaggerate by their sheer power of intelligence the worst traits of sociopathic Technocapitalist thinking and behavior unless they are held in check by human beings who embody the best traits of being human. Is there anybody among the principals in technnocapitalism either here or in Europe or Asia who embodies what is best in being human?

No? What could go wrong?

The Coming Discontinuity

At the heart of our difficulty predicting the future is our assumption of stability. It is like this today and so it will probably be like this tomorrow, too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it is, usually, true. And then, all at once, it’s not.

--Ezra Klein

What makes discontinuity discontinuous is its being unpredictable. If it were predictable, then it would be in some way continuous with trends we already understand. It is predictable that humans dread discontinuities because they are so destabilizing, and the fear of instability is continuous with historical trends in human psychology. But whatever is going to happen probably has nothing to do with what we expect or with what we want or don't want. So perhaps, for precisely that reason, we should entertain the possibility that it might be smarter to think about the future with imageless hope. That's the attitude of a true wanderer who wonders in the wilderness. 

Constitutional Jump Ball

If it wasn't clear already, it is now. January 6 was a coup attempt, and it had a good chance of working had Mike Pence been the wimp that Trump always thought he was. Pence is reported to have thought of himself as on a mission from God, and maybe this was it: to stand in the way of Trump's plot to stay in power. Would Kevin McCarthy have resisted Trump if he were in Pence's shoes? It's hard to say because I would not have thought that Pence would have the spine to do it, but he did. Perhaps McCarthy would have surprised us as well. I look forward in eager anticipation of his surprising me some day. 

What became clearer to me from yesterday's testimony was how much pressure was placed on Pence, who told Trump that he was looking for every way possible to go along with the plot, but he couldn't find it. His chief counsel, Greg Jacob, told him there was no way. Michael Luttig told him there was no way. Dan Quayle told him there was no way. But right up to a phone conversation that Trump had with Pence on the morning of 1/6, Trump was putting all the pressure he could on him, shouting at him that he was a wimp and a pussy, and that he hadn't the courage to do what Trump wanted. And it became pretty clear that Trump was, at best, indifferent to Pence's safety in his tweeting to the angry mob that Pence had betrayed him--and them. And the mob reacted as we've all seen from previous video footage. There is testimony from and FBI agent embedded with the the Proud Boys that had they found Pence, they would have killed him. 

So hats off to Mike Pence. I do not think he is a particularly good or admirable man, but few of us are, and our lives are often defined by doing what's called for in a particular moment. This was his moment, and he rose to the occasion despite a monstrous amount of pressure to get him to do otherwise. It was, so to say, his Sydney Carton moment--"a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done..." Maybe that's a bit much. Nevertheless I think that people are being unfair to him who say he was just doing his job. 

What also became clear is that should Pence have gone along with the plot, we would have had a 'constitutional jump ball', to use Greg Jacob's phrase. It's not at all clear what would have happened. Eastman argued in his conversations with Jacob that the supreme court would have stayed out of it because of the 'political question doctrine'. If that were the case, then Jacob and Eastman both understood that the question would have to be resolved in the streets. Let that sink in. Eastman and Trump were willing to create the conditions for a violent defense of this coup, and it's clear now why all those weapons were being held  in reserve by the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in the D.C. suburbs.

But what if the court took the case and decided against Trump and Pence, who would enforce it? The executive branch?  Trump/Pence would still be running it, and they certainly wouldn't enforce the court ruling. Perhaps DOJ would revolt, but it's clear now why it was so important to get Jeffrey Clark in place at DOJ. Had Pence gone along with the plot, no doubt Rosen would have been fired and a plot-compliant Clark would have been appointed AG. Would the military intervene? Under whose authority? General Milley's? But then that would be a military coup against a sitting president. Would he do that? Would others in the military follow his lead? Perhaps, if he were to pledge his allegiance to Biden, despite his not yet being officially certified or sworn in as President and Commander in Chief. Would pro-Trump factions within the military violently resist? Who knows? That's the point. Nobody knows how this would have played out. It would be chaos, and Trump thrives on chaos. 

So it's clear that all the Trump people saw Pence as the weak link. If he caved, it was a jump ball, and there was a very, very good chance that Trump could have stayed in power. At the very least there would have been a crisis unlike anything we've experienced in American history. Luttig was called upon to make that point rather emphatically. All this in the service of a sociopath, and yet it's still very unlikely that neither he nor many of the the people in Congress who were complicit in this plot will be held accountable. Eastman and Giuliani are in trouble and maybe a few other minor players. But will Garland go after Trump, Meadows, and the coup-compliant in Congress? Clearly the committee is giving him all he needs to do so. But it's a bad precedent, and he has good reason to be worried that should the GOP take the White House in '24, the new AG will come after him. That's where all this is going if the Dems lose in November and then again in '24. When it comes to revenge and reprisals, we ain't seen nothin yet. 

That's the thing. This isn't over. 

Hip to be Catholic?

What’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?” 

From "How Catholicism Became a Meme" in Vox

This is from a quote from Dasha Nekrasova, " a central fixture of the so-called “dirtbag left,” a cadre of progressive podcasters, posters, and provocateurs, according to Interview. She's also a practicing Catholic. 

The meme article is mostly about trendy silliness that overlaps with themes I wrote about in a post entitled "Reactionary Chic." But it struck me as I read it that one of the main reasons I remained Catholic when I was most sorely tempted to throw the whole thing off was precisely because it was for me a countercultural statement. It's also because I came to believe the Church's fundamental assertions, but I could believe them without being officially "Catholic". But it's that feeling of homelessness in the whole capitalist, materialist, rationalist, soul-flattening, utilitarian world that Enlightenment rationalism constructed, even if with all the best intentions, that drives many like me to search for something deeper and richer. So I sympathize with what Nekrasova is saying and to what the rest of the Vox article points to inchoately even if trivializing, vulgar way. Irony can often be a way for someone to present what he hopes is true but hasn't the courage to commit to it. He can put it out there to test the waters while his tone gives him plausible deniability. The author, despite the mandatory ironic hipness her pop-culture perch at Vox requires of her, has an earnest moment or two near the end of the article. 

And I remain Catholic for the same reason I remain an American. I see what is best in both for all that is embarrassing and corrupt in both. I came to see Catholicism as the great tradition of the West, for whatever its failures and crimes, it is still the custodian of the great marriage of Greek thought with Jewish revelation--and a liturgical tradition that preserves a participatory epistemology/aesthetic that must be retrieved by the broader culture in the future one way or the other. I see it as playing this preservationist role, much as the medieval monasteries preserved classical learning in a brutish society that had no use for it, and of a sacramental sensibility and sense for the sacred that must at some point be retrieved to energize a future renaissance.

The Vox article reflects a broadly experienced longing for something lost. This longing is valid, and even if it leads many to look for love in all the wrong places, it doesn't mean that there isn't a right place that what is longed for can be found. A wrong place is nostalgia.  Many of the norther European Romantics in the late 18th and early 19th century converted to Catholicism out of such nostalgia for the richly symbolic world mostly rejected by the Reformation. And we see a similar nostalgia as a underlying motivation for the interest in Catholicism to which the article points. But there is no future in nostalgia, and the longing that leads some Catholic restorationists and integralists to go native in the past is unhealthy and fundamentally delusional. And yet, I would argue, there is something in this longing that can be worked with in a positive, constructive way.

In retrieval we have something that is quite different from nostalgia. It's born of the same longing that leads some to nostalgia, but its project is not about restoring the lost forms, but about reconnecting with the deep, living energies that gave them their form in the first place. The experience that leads to retrieval is rather like remembering something that has been forgotten, and wondering how one could have been so absentminded about something so essential, so necessary for life. What has been forgotten is, to use Heidegger's term, "Being", but I prefer to call it the 'Living Real'. It is the source of all true creativity because to be connected to it is to be connected to the origins of all true creativity. To have achieved such a connection is the only what to be truly 'original' in the deepest sense of the word.  Our lack of creativity is directly related to our forgetfulness. Nostalgia is the experience of the loss of the Living Real, but it has none of the creativity of being deeply connected with it. 

The Church, for all its failings and limitations, points to this deep originary source and seeks in its liturgies to connect us to it. All true art, whether or not it is churchy, is deeply liturgical in this sense. That the Church isn't doing this particularly well in this moment is really a reflection of how it has been weakened in a society whose cultural operating system is a rationalist materialism in which it cannot thrive. And so it's understandable that the future for such a church seems rather bleak. Because the Church's life is deeply implicated with the life of the culture in which it is embedded, it suffers the same problems as those that afflict the broader culture. What ails both the Church and the broader culture is its lost confidence in their ability to live something that manifestly expresses its connection the Living Real.

The Church, however, performs an important function for the broader society in its preserving a portal to the Living Real, which at this moment for the most part works underground and out of sight. If in good faith, you knock on this portal, it shall be opened unto you. But to be truly receptive to it requires that you be open to having most of your presuppositions turned upside down. 

It's there. But for now, it's mostly unmanifest. Its presence is subtle, and so its power as a culture-shaping energy is dormant. I don't believe that will always remain dormant, but for now it is. And so we find ourselves rather like the ancient Jews wandering in the wilderness, neither here nor there, neither in Egypt for which the nostalgists long, nor in Canaan toward which some (like me) retain hope that however long we must wander, it will be our destination. In the meanwhile we wander, we put one foot in front of the other, and we wonder. Unlike those who long backward to return to Egypt, we long forward in wonder. 

Such 'wondering' is a big part of what constitutes the content of this blog; hence its title. It's not data driven, to say the least, but what of any real significance is?

Trump: Delusionist or Illusionist?

If we remember Norman Vincent Peale’s belief that “attitudes are more important than facts,” and chaos magick’s aim to escape our existing “cognitive habits”—not to mention Hitler’s power to release his followers from the “limitations of all conventional restraint”—we can, I think, see a connection between Trump’s “bullshit” and much of what we have been considering so far. If we bring in postmodernism’s rejection of any notion of an “objective” truth—all truth for it being strictly relative—we can see why Trump is the “post-truth alternate fact” patron saint par excellence.

For chaos magick and postmodernism, whether something is true or false simply no longer matters. Truth or falsehood are beliefs which we can take on or put off as need be. This is why confronting Trump or his followers with proof of his mistakes, inaccuracies, and downright lies has so far had little effect. Pointing out that Trump is bullshitting makes no difference. He knows he is. He is doing it on purpose and has done so throughout his career. For him it is “truthful hyperbole,” what he calls “an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.” [Art of the Deal, p. 85]

...When the board of directors of Holiday Inn asked to see what work was being done on a project that had stalled, Trump arranged for his construction team to pretend to work, with a digger clawing up tons of earth and dumping it on the other side of the site.[Art of the Deal, p. 142-43] The board saw what they wanted to see and were duly impressed; Trump got their approval.

Like all good illusionists, confidence tricksters, and demagogues, Trump knows how to read his audience. It is a trait indispensable for his success and gave him a leg up on his competition. “My leverage,” he writes, “came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe,” something demagogues make much use of.[Art of the Deal, p. 38] Hitler, Mussolini, and other charismatic leaders were successful because they convinced their listeners that what they already felt about the state of things was right; they only confirmed this. Illusionists do much the same.

Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising (2018), pp. 75-76

Bottom line: Trump knows what he's doing. He's not delusional. He simply doesn't believe he's constrained by reality as most people experience it. He believes that he can bend it to his will, and if you look at his career, he has good reason to believe he can do it. He's not delusional. He just has a relationship to reality that is different from the rest of us. Question is whose reality wins in the long run. His reality has nothing to do with the deep Living Real, of course, but that's a problem these days for almost everyone. And it provides the conditions for the possibility of a Trump. 

Progressives v. Jacobins

For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothing’s given me more hope than the rage and the recalls. “San Franciscans feel ashamed,” Michelle Tandler told me. “I think for the first time people are like, ‘Wait, what is a progressive? … Am I responsible? Is this my fault?’”

San Franciscans are now saying: We can want a fairer justice system and also want to keep our car windows from getting smashed. And: It’s not white supremacy to hope that the schools stay open, that teachers teach children, and, yes, that they test to see what those kids have learned.

San Franciscans tricked themselves into believing that progressive politics required blocking new construction and shunning the immigrants who came to town to code. We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.

From Nellie Bowles, "How San Francisco Became a Failed City" in The Atlantic

Bowles, a progressive in good standing, laments, at least as I see it, the takeover of San Francisco by Jacobins on the identitarian cultural Left, which is a parallel phenomenon to the way the Republican Party has been taken over by Jacobins on the identitarian Right. We see much of what she points to in San Francisco dysfunction here in Seattle. There seems to be in both "progressive" cities a deficit of common sense that directly results from a kind of woke Jacobinism. By Jacobin I mean a kind of political fanaticism born of an unbalanced idealism that takes absolutist positions on particular values and issues. It's not that there isn't something true and important in what Jacobins assert; it's rather the absolutism of their assertions and their need to forcefully repress any dissent as being in bad faith or counterrevolutionary . 

The Jacobin is someone who becomes captured by the logic of an abstraction in such a way that the abstraction and what one extrapolates from it become more real than reality. Jacobinism is usually associated with a kind of revolutionary zeal on the Left, as in the Jacobins behind the terror in France in 1793. But Neoconservative Jacobinism was the driving force behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003. MAGA Jacobinism was behind the storming of the Capitol on January 6.

As a side note, I haven't paid much attention to Jacobin magazine over the years since I assumed by its choice of the name that it was run by Leftist absolutists, but I was interested to learn this week on the Ezra Klein podcast that Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, is not himself a Jacobin by my definition of the term. Rather, he's a common-sense, 'non-identitarian' Democratic Socialist, which is how I would describe myself.

His interview with Klein made clear to me that he gets how the culture war is the biggest impediment preventing progress toward more important structural goals with regard to wealth distribution. Why?  Because insofar as its brand has become aligned with Left identitarian politics, it prevents the lower 80% on Main Street--working class, and non-college educated people--from feeling comfortable with Democrats. It's precisely this kind of Left cultural politics that has led to the dysfunction Bowles describes in San Francisco. I don't know that Sunkara, if he lived in San Francisco, would have voted to recall Ches Boudin, but he is very clearheaded about the limitations of imagination and thinking on the Left that led San Franciscans to recall him. In any event, Sunkara has made a Jacobin subscriber of me after listening to this interview. 

Despite Sunkara's not fitting my definition of Jacobinism (I'd say he has misnamed his magazine), I'd argue that a true Jacobin is someone who has an important insight or intuition, and he builds a reductionistic worldview from it that excludes any evidence that doesn't fit into it. It becomes crazy because of its surfeit of rationality and a deficit in understanding how people actually live and think.

To understand a Jacobin, you have to understand his foundational intuition, and then how he extrapolates from it. For Neocon Jacobins, Saddam ran a corrupt autocratic regime that that needed to be toppled so that in its place a model democracy could be created that would inspire other Islamic states to emulate. Again, a worthy ideal is at work there, but it's completely divorced from how people actually live and think in the Middle East. For MAGA Jacobins, the foundational insight is that the political system is run by corrupt elites from which the country must be saved. There's some truth there, but their idealism and the fanatic militancy of their solutions is completely divorced from reality. The fault does not lie in the validity of the original intuition about corrupt elites, but in the reductionistic worldview it engenders, which leads them to misidentify who exactly those elites are, which are mostly people the GOP's entire mission is to protect. 

And a similar dynamic plays out for the Jacobins on the Left. There is a difference between having extreme views and being a Jacobin. Bernie Sanders or AOC are not Jacobins. They might appear to have extreme views in relation to others on the political spectrum,  might but they are not purists. Sunkara talks in his interview about how AOC is taking flak from her Left because she actually wants to work to get some things done, and that requires compromise and working with the enemy, which the Jacobins to her Left cannot tolerate. A true Jacobin is an absolutist for whom compromise is anathema.

For Left identitarian Jacobins, the fundamental intuition is that American society is built on the exploitation of people of color and other marginalized populations and that justice requires that those historically marginalized be become privileged. In order to do this, the justice system, so historically biased toward oppressing the marginalized, must be constrained from doing so in the future, and if that means a reduction in public safety, or homeless people shooting up and dying on the streets, or street muggings, store robberies, and other street crimes going unpunished, it's a price justice requires that the heretofore privileged must pay.

In their minds it's a way to restore balance, a balance that I'd agree needs to be restored. The question is how?

The problem with Jacobins is that there is a moral absolutism that is incapable of patience and their contempt for anybody who does not share their absolutism that is to say the least, alienating and counterproductive if you have any understanding about how politics work. Jacobins have no real understanding of human nature or a sense for how humans--and human societies--actually grow and change. For them there's no faith in the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice; it must be justice now.

It's for that reason that Progressives are not Jacobins. Progressives in my definition believe that both moral and material progress are a possibility, but that it is a long, difficult slog toward their achievement. Jacobins--whether on the Left or the Right--are like adolescent idealists who are spirited enough to feel deeply the transcendent power of Justice, who see clearly and are disgusted by the hypocrisy of those in charge, and who in their youthful zeal want to destroy the whole corrupt thing.

I sympathize. But it's one thing to be an idealist, and it's another thing to know how to make progress toward those ideals. Wisdom requires that we not only feel deeply the ideals that inspire us to work toward bringing the world into a deeper alignment with Justice, but to have a felt understanding of the intransigency of the resistance that impedes us. And a big part of that intransigency is to be found in the depths of our own souls, where progress toward an inner transformation of that intransigency must be made first in order that we might actually have the capacity to confront and overcome the intransigency in the world. That capacity is moral, and moral capacity has nothing to do with Jacobin moralistic absolutism. 

There is simply no true material progress without moral progress--the two are one and the same. One without the other isn't progress. That's why developments in technology are not progress by themselves. They become part of the movement toward progress when they serve moral ends. Technocapitalism has no moral ends. But there is no true individual moral progress that does not in some small way have a correlative transformative material effect on the world. The progress of the human spirit is deeply entwined with the spiritual renewal of the earth. [See note 1] 

Patience with ourselves leads to a patience with with the world. The trick is not to confuse patience with complacency, and to refuse cynicism, and to believe that the little things matter, that the small, often faltering steps we take forward matter--often more than we know. 

-----------------

Note 1. Such a grand statement needs more unpacking than I can give it here. My main point is to counter the broadly held idea both east and west that spiritual progress is all about getting out of space time, the house of illusions and exile, and into eternity. I would argue that the solution to the feeling of cosmic homelessness is not to find a home elsewhere, but to gradually build it here on the earth. The goal is not to escape into transcendence but rather the be focus points in space and time through which transcendence is infused into the earth, which is the historical evolutionary process that will effect its renewal. The Christian Neoplatonic frame I use to support this idea can be found here.

I realize that such a framework for most people--even Christians--seems too fantastic to take seriously. So it seems for now. But a metaphysical imaginary like this is required if humans are to find the inner resources and the practices that will give them the moral capacity to fight what is coming. A purely secular progressivism cannot provide that. 

My ongoing series--temporarily suspended, but to be resumed shortly--A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity is an attempt to rehabilitate Christian Neoplatonism in a postmodern key. I argue that Christian Neoplatonism is the ur-cultural operating system for Western Civilization. It lies there in the background mostly misunderstood but still shaping us in ways we are mostly unaware, but can be more fully awakened and developed in a way that could be restorative.  

The Case against Trump--and the GOP

Liz Cheney's indictment as summarized by Amanda Carpenter:

1. Trump’s misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th.

2. Trump corruptly planned to replace the Attorney General of the United States so the U.S. Justice Department would spread his false stolen election claims.

3. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on January 6th.

4. Trump corruptly pressured state legislators and election officials to change the results.

5. The Trump campaign and other Trump associates instructed Republican officials in multiple states to create intentionally false electoral slates, and transmit those slates to Congress, to the Vice President, and the National Archives, falsely certifying that Trump won states he actually lost.

6. Trump summoned a violent mob and directed them, illegally, to march on the U.S. Capitol.

7. Trump failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol. 

That's the case, now the question is whether proving it over the next several weeks will disqualify Trump from running for office in '24.  It's still probably too much to hope that he'll be in jail by then. 

It's interesting that if the Republicans just bit the bullet and voted to impeach him last year, all of this would have been easier for them to put in the rear-view mirror. Instead their fate is very much linked to his. They wagered they could just make the hearings look like a partisan exercise, as their Benghazi hearings were. But the difference here is that while Benghazi was just a bad-faith effort in blowing smoke, the 1/6 hearings are all about about an outrageous criminal act of political arson.Most people can tell the difference. And more importantly, there are no Jim Jordans on the committee to obstruct the telling of the story with bad-faith irrelevancies.

It very well might be wishful thinking on my part, but holding these hearings now could be the one thing that prevents a GOP sweep in the midterms. It's up to the Dems to make the case that it's not just Trump who is culpable, but every GOP congressperson who refused to vote against his impeachment and conviction. They need to make that case that the vast majority of Republicans were essentially part of an effort to whitewash what was clearly a failed coup. That makes them as a group fundamentally unworthy of public trust. The committee has an enormous amount of evidence to make this case.

This might be enough to scare conservative-leaning independents and suburban Youngkin-adjacent Republicans from giving McConnell and McCarthy back their respective houses. At Charlie Syke's Newsletter, Terri wrote this in a comment about the first hearing last night:

I watched the whole thing. I will NOT look away. As a lifelong republican (no more), all I kept thinking was, THIS is what our government should be like. Serious people, not crazy, craven sycophants posturing for 'sound bites' and prostituting themselves for MONEY at the people's expense is what hundreds of thousands, millions even, of men and woman and given their LIFE for. We owe it to them and our children to STOP republicans and their dishonest and ugly vision for the future of our country. Am I naive to think that most Americans are capable of understanding what Terri does? That the GOP no longer has legitimacy? That some things are more important than inflation and baby formula? Maybe, but we'll see.  Cheney's close summed it up: I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain. Amen, sister. And kudos to the Dems who are grownups enough to stand back and let Cheney take the limelight.

Quote of the Day: Nate Hochman

Today’s culture war is being waged not between religion and secularism but between groups that the Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz has described as “the woke and the unwoke.” “Catholic traditionalists, Orthodox Jews, Middle American small-business owners and skeptical liberal atheists may not seem to have much in common,” he wrote in 2020. But all of those demographics are uncomfortable with the progressive social agenda of the post-Obama years.

The upshot is that this new politics has the capacity to dramatically expand the Republican tent. It appeals to a wide range of Americans, many of whom had been put off by the old conservatism’s explicitly religious sheen and don’t quite see themselves as Republicans yet. As the terms of the culture war shift, Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — the mix of millennials, racial minorities and college-educated white voters whose collective electoral power was supposed to establish a sustainable progressive majority — is fraying, undermining the decades-long conventional wisdom that America’s increasing racial diversity would inevitably push the country left.

That thesis was prominently advanced by the progressive political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, but both of them have grown alarmed about the rightward movement among nonwhite voters in recent years. “If Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not canceled out entirely,” Mr. Teixeira wrote in December. “That could — or should — provoke quite a sea change in Democratic thinking.” In the absence of that sea change, however, it is likely that disaffected people of all races will continue to move into the Republican coalition.  (Source)

I've been saying for years that Dems are delusional if they think the browning of America works in their favor because unless you are an elite brown American, the party doesn't really represent your interests except to be not the party of white nationalism. 

Republicans will sooner or later figure this out and quash the white nationalist factions within the party and become simply the party of traditional values. Some already get it. As soon as they do, Dems become a rump party of coastal and urban elites. Once again, as I've been saying for years, the Right/Left divide is not primarily defined by economic policy. Sanders/Warren policies would be embraced by large swaths of traditional-values Americans if Republicans proposed them rather than Democrats.

Is that likely to happen? Well, the GOP would have to oust the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells from leadership if the GOP were to become truly representative of the cultural and economic interests of the bottom 80%. The question is whether the 1% will continue to be the real power in the GOP or whether MAGA crazies will come to dominate it. The strategy so far has been for the establishment (non-MAGA) GOP to use the culture wars to alienate as many of the non-elite 80% as possible from the Dems so that it can continue to represent the interests of the 1%.

If the MAGA folks take over, does that mean that there's no future for McConnell and his 1% politics? Will the 1% be able to keep control if leadership passes to people like Elise Stefanik and Josh Hawley? Probably. The House is more vulnerable to be led by a true believer MAGA crazy than the Senate would be or even, despite his anti-corporate MAGA posturing, a DeSantis White House. Hawley, Cotton, DeSantis know who butters the bread in the GOP, and they will do what they need to to keep the MAGA base in line while doing their work for the 1%. And in the long run it's more likely that most corporate cultures will bend to right-wing conservative pressure than the other way around. 

In effect that describes exactly what happened during the Trump years. Bannon's populist nationalism was never really taken seriously. The most important accomplishments of the Trump presidency was his tax cuts and his getting a Supreme Court majority whose Federalist Society ideology is pro-Big Money and anti-voting rights, both of which favor the 1%. Everybody is obsessing about abortion, about which the 1% couldn't care less one way or the other. For them, the truly important thing about the Trump/McConnell  court appointments is their having a court that supports a 18th century fundamentalist interpretation of the constitution that gives them an open field on which to run.

Bottom line--so much depends on which party captures the allegiance of non-elite Americans. The culture war, because it is the most salient driver of American politics, will be lost by Democrats in the political sphere unless they find a way to navigate cultural issues in ways that aren't so alienating to most non-elite Americans--whatever their color. If they lose the culture war, the GOP wins the political war, and whether or not that leads to a banana-republic or an Orban style autocracy, it certainly leads to the unfettered dominance of American society by the interests of the 1%. 

Crazy Always Wins...

...in a culture that has lost its mind.

This isn't a statement of hopelessness, because I believe that we will eventually recover our minds, even if it takes fifty or sixty years  to do it.

I haven't said anything about the mass shootings of the last few weeks because no solution seems possible until we have recovered our minds. The real problem is that most Dems, Never-Trump conservatives, and moderate Independents are sane, and sane doesn't have a chance against crazy when crazy is motivated, well organized, and well funded. In other words their institutions, norms, and rules don't have a chance when crazy becomes institutionalized, which it has done now in the GOP.

Most of those in Blue America, because they know nothing about guns and gun culture, have no idea what guns symbolize for Red America. Blue America just can't understand why common-sense gun control measures can't be passed. They don't understand that their common sense and decency is no match for the insanity that will stand in the way of any such measures. It doesn't matter that sane gun control measures poll well. If the Blues are for it, the Reds will be against it. Actual policy has no political salience, only Blue- and Red-team loyalties do. 

Guns have become fetish objects in the culture wars. They symbolize power and agency for a huge segment of Americans who feel they have neither. They've invested whatever is left of their identities and sense of dignity in their ownership, and to take their guns away is to take what's left of their dignity, and so they will use them to defend that dignity when they are made to feel disrespected, which is what any kind of sane gun control makes them feel. The NRA understands this, and hence its bumper sticker: "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands" 

It's too late now. It was criminal negligence on the part of the Republican congresses in the 2000s that that it didn't support the renewal of the assault weapon ban. Now there are so many assault weapons out there, that anybody who is determined to get one by extra-legal means and to use it will not be significantly impeded by such legislation. The assault weapon black market will grow and thrive, and in red states, and in red counties in any state, the police will do nothing to crack down on it. Such a ban will only reinforce the de-legiimzaton of Democrats in Washington and increase the motivation of the kind of people I described in the previous post to take power by any means necessary and to prevent Dems from ever getting it back again.

The problem is not that there are many sane, decent people who own guns, but that there are so many unstable Americans who do--or can get them so easily when they feel the "need" for one.  And so the only real remedy is to address the underlying causes of the identity loss and its ontological dizziness that has made America so crazy. This is partly a metaphysical question, but it's also a social political one caused primarily by the destructive effects of Neoliberalism on the American social fabric. The second flows from the first, but the most egregious negative effects can be remedied by a politics of decency that strives to support American families. 

I think that most Democrats understand this, but they get in their own way by having allowed themselves to become branded as "woke", which everyone outside the media and the universities finds at best irritating for its priggishness. It's not that 'woke' is technically wrong, but nobody likes a prig except other prigs, and so it makes Dems so unpopular at at time when they really, really need to be popular if we're to save our democracy. If there is any political solution, it would have to come from a political realignment that would require a new party to emerge comprising thoughtful social conservatives and communitarian (anti-Neoliberal) Progressives who were willing to agree to disagree about culture-war issues and start confronting the all the ways that Neoliberalism has destroyed the basic social infrastructure of working-class America. Obviously this is not something that will happen any time soon, but something like it is what's called for. 

There is not that much in economic policy differences that separates social conservatives on the Red Team like Patrick Deneen, Oren Cass, Sohrab Ahmari, and Erika Bachiochi from social Liberals on the Blue Team like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren when it comes to policies designed to help American families. Both factions understand how destructive Neoliberalism has been in the lives of most ordinary Americans, but they can't get together mostly because of differences about sex and identity politics. But that's part of what makes us so crazy now. Progressives have become the party of "woke" and Conservatives the party of "anti-woke". As I said above, nothing else has political salience.