After the Future

The Social Bandit

Whether Rob Roy MacGregor, aka the Scottish Robin Hood, or Ned Kelly, a 19th century Australian outlaw, “the crucial fact about the bandit’s social situation is its ambiguity,” Hobsbawm wrote. “He is an outsider and a rebel, a poor man who refuses to accept the normal rules of poverty. … This draws him close to the poor: he is one of them. It sets him in opposition to the hierarchy of power, wealth and influence. He is not one of them. … At the same time the bandit is inevitably drawn into the web of wealth and power. Because, unlike other peasants, he acquires wealth and exerts power. He is ‘one of us,’ who is constantly in the process of becoming associated with ‘them.’” (Of course, being “one of us” doesn’t mean the social bandit cannot come from wealth or privilege. As the Robin Hood lure evolved from its 14th century roots, the masked bandit became a former nobleman who turned traitor to his upbringing and cast his lot with the poor. It’s about affinity and identity, not background.)

This is from a Politico article by historian Joshua Zeitz that draws upon Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's theory of "social banditry" to explain the broad positive response on social media to Luigi Mangione's (almost certain) murder of Brian Thompson. But as I was reading it, I was struck how it might also describe Donald Trump's populist appeal and why his crimes have been so easily overlooked by the people who voted for him.  

Now the idea is absurd that a self-absorbed and utterly transactional character like DT, who hasn't an idealistic bone in his body, cares a whit about the 'have nots'.  But that doesn't mean that he isn't perceived as caring or that even in some bizarrely delusional way he sees himself as a "man of the people". He clearly is channeling their resentment and grievance, and he has positioned himself as their "retribution" on an establishment system that they see as crushing them. And in that one respect Mangione and Trump are alike, right? Agents of retribution against the system.  

The illegitimacy of the "system" is the dominant mood in the country right now, and this is something that the Liberal talking heads on cable TV don't seem to get when they talk so rhapsodically about the "rule of law": It means nothing to people who see the law as serving the interests of corporate and political establishment and working against the interests of everyone else. 

Zeitz goes on:

Hobsbawm linked banditry to moments of economic and social upheaval, where a weak or unstable state infrastructure failed to meet people’s needs. In the early modern era, such instability could be the result of the enclosure of common lands, the transition to capitalist or market-based agricultural systems or the collapse of traditional feudal structures. Bandits filled a power vacuum created by the state’s inability to deliver justice or provide economic stability.

The federal government in 2024 is of course a great deal more powerful than the weak state structures Hobsbawm studied, but it is arguably about as ineffectual in key areas. In recent years, Congress has effectively stopped legislating, failing to pass routine budget and appropriations bills, let alone sweeping structural reforms that might make permanent fixes to, say, the health care system. In turn, presidents have assumed greater executive authority, only to be reined by the courts, which — at least when the incumbent president is a Democrat — have sharply limited the executive branch’s purview in areas as diverse as immigration, student debt relief and environmental protection.

Not just ineffectual, but since the '80s pursuing policies that actively atomized society and obliterated any idea of the common good that lingered from the post-WWII era. The irony, or course, is that the GOP has been the primary driver for all this government dysfunction and failure to deal sanely with solvable problems. And yet it got rewarded with the trifecta last month. When there is such a huge gap between perception and reality, it's hard to imagine how any sane, lower-case 'd' democratic politics can be possible in the near future.

Vigilantism and terrorism are the responses of the powerless in asymmetric power relationships. In no way do I think such responses are justified, but "What goes around comes around."  It's the law. At least in a fallen world that in our moment seems all but bereft of grace. 

I Loved "Yellowstone" and Hated "Succession"

What does that say about me? 

I wrote this almost exactly two years ago, but it came up in a NYT podcast ‘The Highbrow and Lowbrow of the Trump Era’, and the same contrast between Yellowstone and Succession was made, so I thought I’d share my two cents. As I recall, 

The shows are very similar in that they are both about two powerful American overlords and their families. What's different about them is more interesting and significant. To understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America.

John Dutton is a ruthless Montanan rancher with massive landholdings. He’s nasty, and you never want to get on his wrong side. But at least there are some things--the land and its traditions--that are sacred to him. And he's willing to sacrifice his fortune to preserve and protect them in what he  knows is a losing cause. This romance of the “lost cause” is partly what makes him a hero for viewers in Red America. But is there anything analogously sacred for the Logan Roy and his kids?

I have never lived in America's rural heartland, but I've always had a soft spot for Wendell Berry's vision for America^1, and it leads me to appreciate John Dutton in a way I could never appreciate Logan Roy. I'm not saying Wendell Berry would approve of John Dutton, but it wouldn't surprise me if a character like John Dutton (or his creator Taylor Sheridan) has read and approves of Wendell Berry. What thinker might Logan Roy approve of--anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard or the goddess of the market, Ayn Rand?

So the difference between the shows lies in the difference between what the two families care or don’t care about. The principal characters in Yellowstone are bad people by any standard of decency, but the 'good' is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. The principal characters in Yellowstone --particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie--are cruel, terrible people when we first meet them. But we gradually learn their backstories, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption. At least I do. Maybe not Jamie. Jamie would be a better fit in the Roy family. 

I don't find myself hoping anything for the characters in Succession. These characters are written as soulless appetites. Repentance and redemption are never a question for any of them--it would never occur to any of them that they are in need of it2. For the people in the Roys' world, there is no possibility for choosing the "good"--there are only winners and losers, and so there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices. They live in an morally flat world absent any ambiguity and so are completely predictable. The writers have fun with the kids' callow idiocy, but that gets old quickly, at least it did for me.

Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but Red America thinks about Blue America’s elites as typified by the the Roy family. Would it be so unbelievable to learn that some in the Roy family are into child trafficking as a sideline? What in their characters would incline them draw a line at that if the opportunity for it came up that would give them a kick or some extra cash? 

Red America tends to see all of America's coastal Liberal elites as very comfortable in the world inhabited by the Roys: “Surely, the Clintons are at home there,” so they think. “It's not ulikely that they committed the crimes that were rumored about them in the 90s. Didn't Bill hang out with Jeffrey Epstein?  They're all birds of a feather.”

From the pov of Red America the Clintons have done much worse than anything that Donald Trump has done. They just got away with it because the elite establishment circled their wagons around them the way they did it for Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick. Trump, at least, hasn't killed anyone. Same now for the Biden crime family. Where’s the evidence, one might ask. “We don’t need evidence,” they reply. “It’s just who they are. Anybody with any sense can see that.”

Now almost all of this is nonsense, but some of it isn't. And it's understandable how Red America, because it is so cynical about America's coastal Blue overclass, might be inclined to believe anything that fits with or reinforces their cynicism. And it's all consistent with what they've been taught to believe about elites from the way they are portrayed in movies and in TV shows like Succession. Red America looks at these elites in the corporate and media worlds and asks, "What deep down do they really believe in? What is their program except to shatter every taboo that decent people have respected from time immemorial? Is there anything wholesome or good that they don't seek to destroy?"

The point is that it's not hard to understand why Red America holds the affluent, well-educated elites in Blue America in contempt. It’s distorted and mostly untrue, but these elites have given the demagogues plenty to work with. 

***

I live among relatively affluent, well-educated folks in Blue America, and almost everyone I know has a worldview shaped by Liberal cosmopolitan presuppositions. They do not recognize themselves in this caricature that Red America has of Blue America. They are all decent people with a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. But as with Red America, their moral code comes from their acculturation, and its interior logic is mostly left unexamined.

As social attitudes change so do theirs without thinking about it too much. They simply adapt. Adapting is what Liberals do. It doesn't cost them anything to do so, and so they can't understand why to do so costs Red Americans so much. It must be because they're all racists and homophobes. 

Blue America is fascinated by the Roy family, but hardly approves of its amorality. If anything, it mistakenly sees the Roys as inhabitants of Red America. Isn't Logan Roy a thinly disguised Rupert Murdoch? But this is what many in Blue America have a hard time understanding: the Roys and the Murdochs, regardless of the content they produce, are part of the cosmopolitan elite that Red America despises. Their commitments are essentially the same as woke corporations like Comcast and Disney, or Amazon and Apple. They just serve a different, anti-woke market.

Red America believes there’s a difference between good and evil; woke American believes only that there’s a difference between the marginalized and the privileged. Not the same thing. The protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents. But in order to prevail against evil, they believe, they have to play on the field where evil sets the rules. There are a lot of people in Israel who find that logic persuasive these days. Are they right? No, but it's at least understandable why they should. 

Folks in Red America often act in vicious, licentious, vulgar, appetitive ways. You know, like Beth Dutton. But they know such behavior is wrong. And while Red America justifies resorting to violence to achieve its goals in ways that Blue America finds horrifying, Red Americans see themselves as defending something sacred. “You've got to be meaner than evil to protect what you love,” says John Dutton. What is sacred for Blue America that it would defend it with the same level of commitment? Abortion?

I’m not here to litigate the abortion issue. I’m just trying to make a point that the issues that incite Liberal passions are more about outrage concerning fanatics on the Right, not about what is otherwise is at best a profound morally ambiguous issue—except for the moralistic fanatics on the Left. Abortion has become a shibboleth issue, not an issue where any kind of serious, nuanced moral conversation is possible.

Other than reproductive rights, what positive thing does Blue America believe about America except some shallow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility? Isn’t that what the Roy family is all about? On what basis can Liberals condemn them? Because they are venal and mean spirited? And yet the whole system is built to give enormous power to the venal and mean spirited. We justify it with some middle school ideas about freedom, but we all know it’s ridiculous that people like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Trump are allowed to have so much power. How is it possible that we give these foolish, shallow human beings the keys to the bus that we’re all taking into the future? It’s astonishing.

I’d prefer to give the keys to Bernie Sanders, but compared to Roy, Musk, Zuckerberg, or Trump, I’d rather give them to John Dutton.

***

I don't know that Yellowstone qualifies as 'prestige' TV in the way that Succession, The Sopranos, or The Wire do. There are too many contrived, plot-driven implausibilities in Yellowstone, but the writing and dialogue (and the music) are often very good, and there are some compelling characters. For instance, Angela Blue Thunder, a Native American warrior princess with a fancy law degree, tells Tribal Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale--

“They [the white elites] make their rules to be broken. The United States has broken every rule it has ever made. From its first treaty with France to every treaty with us, to their last treaty with Iran. They only hold others to their rules. They make war when they want, where they want, they take what they want, and then they make rules to keep you from taking it back. They make rules for the slave and they make rules for the masters.”

Not ideas you expect to hear expressed on a show streaming on Peacock. 

Liberals talk about the "rule of law" as if it has some sacred, numinous glow, but it has no such thing. For most Americans the rule of law lacks any deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect. Even decent people feel little moral obligation to obey laws they think are stupid or wrongheaded. Legislators are perceived as easily corruptible, careerist hacks with no claim even to a minimum of rudimentary competency or decency. What right have they to tell me what's right and wrong? Their laws are just stuff they make up as they go along that mostly suit the interests of those who have the power and money to pay them off. Liberals love Nancy Pelosi, but we saw recently how her instincts are to protect her overclass interests before doing what's obviously, from the non-elite pov, in the public interest.  

That's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals in the media sounds so empty these days, especially in Red America. Everybody understands that legislative policy is a tool the powerful use to sustain their hold on power and to enrich their allies. Trump is just more open about it. And the criminal law has no real purpose except to keep the lower orders in line. That's why it's so rarely used against elites in the power structure. How many of the architects of the 2008 economic collapse went to jail? And now you're going after our guy Trump? Rule of law, my ass. 

Are they wrong? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history, but as such worthy of our aspiration. A democratic republic cannot survive without it, and it's important that we do everything we can to support it. But respect for it would get a huge boost if in fact it was enforced against elites as frequently as it is against poor folks. The behavior or the supreme court lately hasn't helped. If nothing else this attempt to hold Trump accountable for his crimes is forcing us to have a reckoning about how the Liberal Order functions and for whose benefit. 

But in the meanwhile, we need to appreciate better than we do why so many people are so cynical about the rule of law. It's not something Native Americans or Black Americans have reason to take seriously, and neither is it for those in the MAGA world. So for them it's to hell with self-serving Liberal pieties about the rule of law. Law is what those with power say it is, and so we in Red America mean to get it back by any means, legal or extralegal, so that we can enact and enforce laws that benefit us. And besides, God is on our side, and we are the tools of his just retribution. 

The shrewdest folks in MAGA world understand that Trump is a psychopath, but he is an effectively blunt instrument in helping them to achieve their ends. When Trump tells his MAGA followers, "I am your retribution", he understands how it resonates because he's working with this deeply felt desire to turn the tables, to restore the old order, an order most of MAGA believes has been wantonly destroyed by Liberal elites.

And they're not wrong insofar as GOP and Dem elites both supported the Neoliberal policies that are largely responsible for destroying the economic and cultural matrix that supported their local communities, traditions, and customs. Heartland America has been hollowed out in the last 40 plus years because of a project initiated, ironically, by its hero Ronald Reagan.

***

Our feeling about what's "right" largely derives from custom and acculturation, but in a healthy society custom and tradition would be grounded in a vital, evolving connection to the Living Real. This is how it has always worked in societies with living traditions.

Cosmopolitan Liberal Americans have no belief that law is something aligned with a transcendent Real that is the ground for ontonormative justice. Conservatives do, even if their relationship to it has rigidified into something inflexible and lifeless. The problem with the traditionalists on the fanatical religious Right today is that they no longer have a living tradition, but only zombie traditions--there's no vitality or wisdom in them anymore. Fanaticism is a counterfeit version of genuine faith. The traditions they seek to defend maintain the old forms, but are animated by something quite alien to the originary energies that formed the forms. And the result is that most traditionalists can't tell the difference between what's wholesome and what's rotted. At best they discern the traces of what was once vital but no longer is.

We're not a healthy society, and neither the Right nor the Left has a remedy. Both blame the other for impeding what is in effect their respective hoped-for nihilistic vision for an American future. And now because there's no culture anymore that is shared by both elites and non-elites, it comes down to who has the power to impose laws that benefit their team no matter how unfairly they penalize the other. 

Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, we have become default worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand. The invisible Hand has no interest in preserving traditions, customs, and communities. It destroys all that in the name of innovation, growth, and progress, and the Left-leaning, cosmopolitan elite are quite comfortable with that. Aren't patriarchy, homophobia, and racism all woven into those traditions and customs? Good riddance to the whole retrograde ball of wax.

But it's more complicated than that, and it's important that Liberals of good will try to understand that Red America is experiencing domicide--the destruction of their homeland--in a way that's analogous to the domicide that white America inflicted on Native Americans, and it's not too much of a stretch to compare it to the domicide that the Chinese government is inflicting on Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Why are American Liberals outraged at the destruction of those Asian traditional societies but not those of traditionalist Americans? Well the reason is obvious. The people in those traditional cultures over there are not a massive voting block over here. Nevertheless, can American Liberals at least attempt to understand why Red America might think that assimilating into Blue America is about as appealing for them as Native Americans assimilating into White America? Or Palestinians assimilating into Israeli society? 

So Blue Americans--especially the most affluent and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of it. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest moral commitments really all that different from the ambitions of the Roy family? Of course, they're different, they say. The Roys are horrible people, and we're not.

But on what philosophical basis can you criticize their behavior? I would argue that your objection to the Roys is merely aesthetic, like your preferring Picasso to Matisse. And I would go further to argue that the Roys are perfect exemplars of the anything-goes, nihilistic Libertarianism that shapes both the corporate Right and the cultural Left. Tell me why I'm wrong.

----------

Notes

2. Wendell Berry's agrarian vision of America might seem absurdly unrealistic. He seems to be decrying the loss of a world that is just gone, and there's no bringing it back. Too bad, one might think, but we have nothing to learn from him that will enable us to live in the world as it really is. I used to think that.

But I wonder now if Berry might be more relevant in a hundred years than he is now. I can say that because while he is certainly out of tune with the current, late-capitalist reality, he's more deeply in tune with Reality. And sooner or later, because no matter how out of tune with Reality we become, it always reasserts itself. When it does, the broader culture will recognize that Berry had it right all along, and that we need to recover his wisdom about embodiement and the deep interrelationship between culture and agriculture. How many hard lessons we have to learn between now and then remains to be seen. 

Technology is not necessarily the enemy; imbalance is. And while we humans need our tools, they are not going to save us. Indeed they will likely destroy us unless we develop a wisdom and clarity about what true human flourishing is. As a society we have no clue about that  right now, and for that reason we have no idea about how to subordinate tools in the service of human flourishing. But Berry has has a clue, and because he does, he has more wisdom and clarity than anybody, for instance, in Silicon Valley. And yet we give these callow techies unfettered powers to determine the human future? Who's to stop them? 

It's cliche to say it, but that should not distract from its truth--we are not using our technology so much as our technology is using us. And only with the kind of wisdom Berry has will we have the clarity to find ways to subordinate technological developments to serve human ends rather than the ends of techno-capitalism. I assure you the latter is not taking us to a place where human beings will flourish. 

BTW William Morrris’s futuristic utopian novel News from Nowhere is very Wendell Berry-esque. I could live in such a Utopia.

2. I realize that Succession is a satire and that the writers mean to elicit moral repugnance from its secular Liberal audience at the behavior of the Roy family. But by what moral standard? Do they disapprove of the Roys for being venal and ambitious? Why is that wrong? Isn’t the whole Liberal meritocratic system built on the idea that wealth acquisition and career ambition is good? Perhaps its the writers’ intent to use the Roys as a mirror to hold up for meritcratic Liberal elites? The Roys ‘R Us. Maybe. That’s a reading I can get behind.

The only difference between elites on the Pelosi/Schumer Left and the Ryan/ McConnell Right, is that those on the Left feel a some level of guilt about how they’ve benefitted from this system and want to mitigate its most destructive effects on non-elites. Guys like Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan couldn’t care less. Neither Left nor Right Liberalism has a fundamental problem with the Neoliberal infrastructure that has benefitted them so extravagantly.

Advent

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off.

At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin it passes a faint pink light, and almost as flexible as a straight razor. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses, and pokes its chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and earthworms, the sowbugs and beetle grubs deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter of the Brocken over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 255-56.

Why I Was Wrong about Harris Walz

think that I always suspected that my blindspot about the election was likely to come from my not being on social media--at all. I text with a few friends and family, and that's it. This blog hardly counts, at least if its immunity to virality is any measure.

I get most of my information from legacy media, not because I believe they're unbiased--there's no such thing as unbiased journalism. What stories get front-paged or buried, what facts get selected or filtered out, and then how those facts get interpreted are all deeply shaped by the biases, mostly unconscious, that derive from cultural presuppositions of the people who get hired for positions in the MSM. Those are presuppositions that I mostly do not share.

So there's no avoiding bias, but you can adjust for it. And I trust in the good-faith efforts of most journalists to respect journalistic standards for fact checking and fairness. No matter how imperfectly realized those standards are, they are in the information business, not the misinformation business. And If I'm particularly interested in something and want to go deeper, I read books by authors I have good reasons to trust.

Bottom line: I've got far more interesting things to do with my time than to waste it on social media, and that’s not gonna change. But I am just belatedly realizing how that makes it difficult for me to understand how deeply things have changed and are changing.

In a previous post I mentioned that the election results forced me to recognize that we were more far gone than I thought and hoped. By 'far gone' I meant many things that the phrase connotes, but mostly how far gone into our respective information and misinformation silos. I had not truly understood the degree to which social media has intensified this siloing.

I've read about it. Lots of people have been warning about it, but I just couldn't bring myself to believe that most Americans' annoyance with the Liberal Establishment could be so severe as to warrant restoring a guy to the Oval Office who is so obviously unfit. First time--ok, understandable. Protest vote. We hate the establishment. Let's teach it a lesson. Second time--after J6, after so many of his appointees who saw him up close reported how nuts he was, after all the courtroom losses? Surely, some of that will have broken through, right? Anybody but this guy, right? Well, clearly, I was wrong.

Does all that just no longer matter? I think it does, but I still believe that many (most?) Trump voters have no real understanding of it because of their having been siloed in information bubbles which prevented them from either finding out about it or just dismissing it as Liberal propaganda.

***

It's already a cliche how social media has made running a democracy almost impossible, but this quote from Jonathan Haidt's 2022 article "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid" helpful sums it up nicely: 

Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation....

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.

In other words, it's not that the Biden administration did such a terrible job. It can be argued that his administration was among the most effective in American history in achieving what it did in such a polarized environment. And in such an environment, only the negative stories get legs. The Biden Administration made mistakes, as all administrations do, and those mistakes were consequential, but they got magnified by social media in ways that its accomplishments simply could not be. 

But it goes deeper than that. It has to do with basic trust in institutions at a moment when the Liberal Order is in a slo-mo collapse. It's chief symptom is our lack of any shared, coherent understanding of or sense of shared values, shared history, or any shared picture regarding what it means to be American.  How can a democracy survive if that's the case? Haidt goes on--

When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.

There's no underlying shared mythos; there's nothing that binds us anymore as a people. Whoever tells the most compelling story wins, and in this moment, the stories told on social media that magnify the negativity, that rage on about the establishment's mistakes and that play to fantasies that stoke fear and grievance crowd out the stories about its accomplishments and competence.

And let's face it, the Liberal story, whatever its virtues, no longer works. It has become self-immolating. Haidt again--

Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding. This story easily supports liberal patriotism, and it was the animating narrative of Barack Obama’s presidency. It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.

But when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders. Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.

Most Democrat politicians, especially those accountable to constituencies back home, are not woke culture warriors. Most of them--at least in comparison to their GOP counterparts--are pragmatic problem solvers. This goes to what I was saying about Bernie in the post last week. Harris and Walz seemed to have understood this and were bending over backward to avoid enflaming culture war themes and to present themselves as pragmatic problem solvers, but that's not what got through. The Trump campaign found enough evidence to use in viral ads of Harris being a culture warrior to define her as one, and that's what stuck. It wasn't where she wanted to go that sank her, but where she came from. 

I think this explains a big part of why voters in swing states that elected Democrats in statewide senatorial and gubernatorial races didn't vote for Harris. In many ways local politics have become nationalized, but not as much as advertised. As in the last two cycles, purple-state voters generally rejected crazy on the statewide ballots, even though they voted for it this time on the national ballot. Local elections are still about local candidates who understand local problems, while the national elections have become largely symbolic exercises that express the state of the American soul. Trump is simply a symptom of the country's soul sickness. He certainly isn't a cure for it.

It seems pretty clear that the Democrats as presently constituted are in their own way symptomatic of the disease. And as such neither do they offer a a cure. Something genuinely new has to emerge as an alternative. I believe it will. I'm just not sure when. Probably not in my lifetime. 

The Tao of Charles Taylor

From Chapter 15 of Cosmic Connections:

The biggest error is to think of the history of ethical growth as linear: on this understanding, we would just have to keep moving ahead, bringing more and more people to Enlightenment, liberalism, and freedom. Rather, the whole process should be seen more “dialectically,” in a sense that even Hegel couldn’t conceive, as I stated above.

Our greater grasp of the human good has unleashed a lot of hostility and violence; or, to think of another dialectic at work: we have won through in certain societies to some important insights, but these have bred egregious self-images of superiority over other peoples and civilizations, which have in turn legitimized much injustice. And then there is the “populist” backlash in many democracies where the demands to overcome certain historical discriminations have been pressed most urgently (see Section XI).

The road ahead is not just more of the same. It requires that we respond to these hostilities and injustices and resistances with measures of reparation and mutual recognition which can bring about reconciliation.

In the light of all this, the above account of the steadily advancing application of the principle of self-determination, while descriptively true, turns out to be highly misleading. What it leaves out is, for example, the way in which highly “progressive” figures in the nineteenth century, like John Stuart Mill and Marx, could justify British rule in India, on the grounds that it was bringing the fruits of advanced civilization to a backward society. What is the balance sheet of positive versus negative in this two-centuries-old movement?

We have ethical advances in both standards and real action (the latter rather spotty, but real), to be weighed against legacies of violence, hatreds, resentments, and stances of unmerited superiority. But through all this is a measure of perhaps irreversible advance: it is not likely, short of a civilizational collapse (but this is becoming a real possibility in the wake of our failure to act against climate change), that we revert to justifying political power by immemorial tradition (of which there are still vestiges in our world, like Russky mir!).

Dialectic, not linear, advance is virtually inevitable, because the measures which realize steps upward provoke resistance, and moreover involve methods which intensify this resistance, while the resultant conflict can easily give space for the all-too-human fascination with transgressive violence.

The crucial insight here is that advances in justice have to be accompanied by forward steps in reconciliation. A vital part of the ethical growth in the twentieth century has been a perception of this truth and the growth of insight into paths of reconciliation and healing, which we see with Gandhi, King, Desmond Tutu, and many others.

Taylor,. Cosmic Connections, pp. 572-73.

He’s saying the same thing as Andrew Huang,¹ but in a different idiom. Moral progress is possible--the arc of history is long and it does bend toward justice-- but stable moral progress cannot achieved by ramming it down the’throats of the benighted. Being technically right on the issues isn't enough.  Moral progress requires real moral leadership, and the Left just doesn't produce Gandhis, Kings, or Tutus anymore. Politics as usual isn't going to get it done because politics as usual always seems to come down to the price of eggs and grievance.

Taylor goes on to talk about how democracy and self rule cannot work unless there is fundamental solidarity around core values. But there is no force in the history of the world that has been more fissiparous, more atomizing, more destructive of a sense of the common good and shared values than classical 19th-century Liberalism and its revival in late-20th-century Neoliberalism. Their rugged-individualist-bootstraps sanctimony, their Social-Darwinist, Mitt Romney/Paul Ryanesque, Ayn Randian, intellectually sophomoric ideological justification is poison for any polity. It's all but killed ours.

Taylor goes on--

This slide is a catastrophe for various reasons. It’s a catastrophe because it deeply divides, hampers, and paralyzes the democratic society, dividing us into first- and second-class citizens. But it is also a catastrophe in another way because it builds on the deprivations imposed on nonelites by the spread of a Romney-type moralistic outlook among the rich and powerful. In many Western democracies, this has brought about a frustration caused by a Great Downgrade in the living standards of workers, who, as a result, feel that the system is stacked against them, that they can’t affect it, and that their citizen efficacy is virtually nonexistent. They are ready for a program which would liberate the demos or give the demos power again, against the elites. Only the demos has now been redescribed—either in a moralist, or ethnic, or historical-precedence way that excludes many people—which has the double disadvantage that it deeply divides the society, and this second disadvantage, that it does not at all meet the actual problems and challenges of the Downgrade. (p. 577).

It makes the problems worse.

MAGA cannot solve the problems Neoliberalism has created; it can only magnify and exaggerate them because MAGA is Neoliberalism's reductio ad absurdum, its extremity from which--hopefully, sooner rather than later--we flip from it into its dialectical opposite. So, if a few years of Trump's cranks, cronies, and crooks is the price we have to pay, it might well be worth it in the long run. MAGA isn’t the problem; it’s just a symptom of a much deeper disease. If we cannot find a remedy for that, then we’re cooked. NY Times Editorial Board Liberalism is not it.

And so, in the meanwhile, we keep our eyes peeled for the emergence of a different kind of politics, one that is truly inspiring and morally serious , something that breaks new ground.

1. "The Tao of I also discloses that when situations proceed beyond their extremes, they alternate to their opposites. It is a reminder to accept necessary change and be ready to transform, warning that one should adjust one’s efforts according to changes in time and situation. The Tao of I also says: In a favorable time and situation, never neglect the unfavorable potential. In an unfavorable time and situation, never act abruptly and blindly. And in adverse circumstances, never become depressed and despair."

Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November

There are signs that the Democratic Party not only has adopted left orthodoxy on social and cultural issues but also is still not prepared to tolerate debate over these choices. This is reflected in the hostility expressed toward Democratic leaders who suggest moderating the party stance on transgender rights — a seemingly peripheral issue, as far as the country as a whole goes, that Trump and other Republicans used to portray Democrats as more concerned with special interests than the public interest.

“You have a choice as a party,” Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, commented in an interview on Nov. 6 with a Texas public radio station — after turnout for the former president helped Texas Republicans win big. “You can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support.”

Hinojosa then added, “If you are going to ignore the political consequences of these kinds of things, then you’re asking to lose these elections in the manner that we did.”

By the end of the day, Hinojosa reversed himself, posting on X:

I extend my sincerest apologies to those I hurt with my comments today. I recognize the pain and frustration my words have caused. In frustration over the G.O.P.’s lies to incite hate for trans communities, I failed to communicate my thoughts with care and clarity.

Two days later, Hinojosa announced his retirement, ending 12 years’ service as chairman.

Thomas Edsall's column today in the NYT

Those Texas Liberals really know how to read the room.

The first moment I really began to understand the gaping chasm between the cultural and economic left was during Bernie Sanders' campaign in '16. I was amazed when Bernie came under attack from Black Lives Matter for not being woke enough. (And, if you recall, Hillary went after Bernie for not being anti-gun enough.)

I remember thinking, "Are these BLM kids crazy? Do they have any idea how stellar Sanders' Civil Rights record is?" My expressing those thoughts then was shot down by Liberal friends who said that Bernie had a Black voters problem, and he can't win without them. You can't expect BLM to adapt to Bernie; Bernie must adapt to BLM. BLM by definition knows better, no matter how young and politically inexperiened they are, because by the hip Frantz-Fanon logic, if you are an oppressed minority, you cannot be wrong. That's what Gilberto Hinojosa didn't seem to understand, and so good riddance to bad rubbish. 

What's my point? In the media, it's assumed that Bernie represents the far Left, but he wasn't far enough left on cultural issues for a lot of Dems--including, ironically, the Queen of Dem Neoliberalism, HRC. It wasn't Bernie's record on civil rights that was in question; rather it was his credentials as a Left cultural warrior. His attempt to push cultural issues to the back of the stove didn't align with where the party wanted to go. Hillary, of all people, was more in alignment with this cultural left agenda.  

Bernie didn't want to be a culture warrior because he understood how the culture wars divide and conquer the American electorate, how they focus on what we don't share rather than what we do. He just wanted to focus one really important thing: a more economically just society. That wasn't enough to win the Democratic nomination. Besides, he couldn't possibly win in the general--he was too far Left.

If BLM didn't love Bernie, many populists did, and, while we'll never know how it would have turned out, a Trump/Sanders general in '16 would have been an interesting test. If Bernie went on to win the White House, he'd probably get as much trouble from establishment Dems and media as he would have had from establishment Republicans. He's too far left, right? But he would not have been as outrageous a choice as Trump proved to be. We've learned twice now that being outrageous or extreme isn't an obstacle to getting elected. Being too embedded in the establishment is. 

Was '16 the last opportunity for the Dems to capture the demos? I don't know. Maybe. Biden won in '20 because he was the normie candidate, at least compared to Trump then, and it's why I thought he was the safer bet in '24. (I'm not saying that he would have won, but there's a case to be made.) His shift in policy toward the Bernie "Left" wasn't on cultural issues, but economic ones, and, alas, the benefits of Bidenomics were not yet felt by enough voters. And Harris, fairly or unfarily, was too easily caricatured as a Left cultural warrior. 

But here's the bottom line. Bernie isn't really that "left" on economic issues. He's a New Deal Democrat who plays a socialist on TV. Poll after poll shows that most Americans like the kinds of policies that Bernie supports, they just don't trust the Democratic establishment to deliver it. Bernie's so-called "Left" politics would be effective politics if it was supported by the Democratic brand. It's the politics that I saw Harris/Walz trying to sell. But the Democratic brand did not align with their message, and that sank their campaign. That may not be the whole story, but it's big part of it. 

For what it's worth, here's where I think the problem lies for the Democrats. It has adopted the emancipatory cultural program of the more extreme Left culture warriors because that program feels righteous, and it's what the young people in the activist base say they want. It's about being on the right side of history. But for a lot of people, me included, that program has always felt like one was being hectored into compliance rather than being persuaded or inspired. There was no debate. There was no giving people with more conservative cultural views any legitimacy. They were all racists and homophobes or religious kooks on the wrong side of history. Get on the bus, or get run over by it. 

Well that hectoring pissed a lot of people off, and Trump was their club to hit back. The American electorate gave the bus keys to a guy who has every intention of turning it around and running over every advance the cultural Left thought it had made over the last thirty years. There are real victories and there are Pyrrhic victories. It's important to know how you get the first and not the second. 

I, for one, do believe that the arc of history is long, and that it does bend toward Justice. But the Taoist part of me looks at change as something that has to conform to the Tao of I,¹ the law of change. That law is not found in a book anywhere. It is not explicitly prescribed in a code. It is a basic orientation toward historical change. It's about doing what's right, but what's right has to be discerned in the moment by the wise, the people we should be electing to positions of authority. 

Reading what's right in the moment, at least since the 1500s, is something most Westerners have no concept of. They get an idea; they believe it's right; and then they jam it down your throat. You know, like Calvin's Geneva, Christianity in Latin America, Robespierre's Paris, or democracy in Iraq. My point is that the cultural Left is just as much an heir to that kind of hamfisted, hubristic foolishness as those on the Right. The inherent Calvinism that suffuses both Left and Right American politics makes everything black and white; it's either absolutely right or absolutely wrong. We are the elect; our opponents are reprobate devil spawn, and they are predestined from all eternity for damnation--or whatever the secular Liberal equivalent of that is. 

The problem is not with Christianity or with democracy--or with what is just, compassionate, and emancipatory in the programs promoted on the cultural Left. The problem lies instead with the arrogance with which both Right and Left want to force their ideas on anyone who shows the least sign of resistance or unorthodoxy. Ask Gilberto Hinojosa. On the Left, there is nothing but contempt for local traditions and customs, so they must be thrown out--baby and bathwater. Again, Lefties--read Gramsci.

This year's 5th of November very likely--we'll see--marks the end of the old Liberal order. If so, it's still an open question what the new order will entail. Our best hope as Americans now is that Trump and the folks at Project 2025 do not represent that new order. Our best hope is that the new Trump administration's incompetence and foolishness will be dramatic enough this time to bring Americans to reject it and give the Dems another shot. It's too early to tell whether they will in fact get another shot, but if they do, will America's establishment elites have learned the lesson of this 5th of November, or will they just stupidly react to the reactionaries? Will they be ready to read the moment, or will they have learned nothing? 

1. Taoist scholar Alfred Huang:

"The Tao of I also discloses that when situations proceed beyond their extremes, they alternate to their opposites. It is a reminder to accept necessary change and be ready to transform, warning that one should adjust one’s efforts according to changes in time and situation. The Tao of I also says: In a favorable time and situation, never neglect the unfavorable potential. In an unfavorable time and situation, never act abruptly and blindly. And in adverse circumstances, never become depressed and despair."

The Failure of Democracy is the Failure of Elites

In a very blunt sense, Qanon, insane as its specific assertions are, isn't wrong. Elite culture may not be dominated by Satan-worshipping pedophiles with space lasers made by Jews, but there is a kind of nihilism in which ego, greed, and will to power are simply accepted as normative as the main motivating driving forces in politics, business, and media. Mythologizing that nihilism by way of demonizing it in conspiracy theories takes what is kinda true and twists it into something that isn't, but that doesn't mean that the kinda true part of it can be dismissed because of the crazy way it's being distorted. 

Read full post.

Worst Case Scenario?

We've truly turned a corner. And why? Because people were annoyed about of the cost of eggs? No.There's much more to it than that. I fear we've become the capitalist version of the Soviet Union in '91. What happened there then and what is happening here now was the result of a profound loss of confidence in the governing establishment. We're at the beginning of a Post-Liberal Order. 

What follows? Well, first chaos, and then the emergence of oligarchic warlords jockeying for power--guys like Musk and Bezos. Trump is clearly the perfect figure to have in the White House to facilitate America's becoming a a Russian-style oligarchic kleptocracy. He's no Putin, but somebody will emerge in the next ten years who will be.

It was not unforeseeable. Here's an excerpt from a piece I wrote in November 2021:

America in 2025

The historical irony is rich. Democracy has a better than even chance of being permanently subverted by those who in their delusions believe it already has been. They aim to turn the country in fact into a far worse version of what in their fevered imaginations they already believe it has become. ...

The Right has every reason to expect that there will be little to no resistance to their coup if it succeeds because Liberal resistance to authoritarianism is mostly abstract and procedural. Once they lose the procedural battles, there will be nothing for the Left to fight with except to take to the streets, which will happen, but with little effect.

There will be a few Catos who will speak out in Congress, but they'll be censured, mocked, or otherwise made irrelevant. The Liberal talking heads on cable will squawk for a while, but pressure will be put on their corporate bosses to replace them. (Remember what happened to Phil Donahue?) A few harmless, token Liberals will be kept on TV--remember Alan Colmes, the stereotypical, weak-kneed liberal prop placed on set to make Hannity look strong and principled. Some will sue to protect their first amendment rights, but It won't matter if even in the short run the supreme court supports them because the Justice Department won't enforce anything except that which supports the administration's authoritarian agenda. 

A few famous Liberals will emerge who find clever ways to justify the new authoritarianism: he or she will say that it was inevitable, that the old system proved itself incapable of dealing with complex problems, that this was the only way forward. But she or he will defend all the iconic liberal cultural causes, not that doing so will change anything. Even Putin allows for token opposition to provide the simulacra of democracy. The business world will applaud the new stability. The Churches will applaud the new emphasis on "Christian values". 

It will be a soft authoritarianism at first. The nasty racialist stuff and anti-LGBTQ stuff will come later. But life will go on for most people as it does now in other authoritarian regimes. Not that much will change in day-to-day life. Most people will keep their heads down and just go about their business. A few brave voices will speak out, and they will disappear. Most people, even those who consider themselves political junkies now, will lose interest in politics. What would be the point? It's one thing to have an opinion; it's another to get fired or thrown into jail for having it.

A new social hierarchy will emerge. Party members, collaborators, and then everybody else. Ambitious young people will join the party saying they don't care about politics, but joining provides the only path for a decent career. They have to think about their families. The universities will fire notorious Liberals and require a loyalty oath from everyone else. Classroom surveillance cameras will insure that nothing "subversive" be taught. 

Read full post here.

Will it get that bad? Despite what I wrote above, I believed that as a people we had more common sense and more common decency than to put this sad little man back in the oval. I think my blindspot was my not appreciating  how media consumption has so profoundly changed things, how deeply everyone has become sunk in their respective information or misinformation silos. If Trump prevails in the next few years, we'll soon live in a country where misinformation is pretty much all we'll get, at least in the MSM. The Rachel Maddows of the world will go underground or broadcast from New Zealand.

But the hard fact is that, no matter what the reasons, we did put him back, and now the world is changed in a way that most Americans, even most Trump voters, won't like very much when it becomes clear what's happened. We're not grieving yet, most of us, because we're still in a state of denial. We can't believe that it's come to this.

If it's to be stopped, where will resistance come from? The military and Deep State? That would be as ironic as it is improbable. Perhaps the House after the '26 midterms? I assume that in the next two years Trump, despite his announcement that even his own supporters won't have to worry about voting again, won't be able to prevent those elections. We'll see. And there's hope that the coastal blue states can be a site of resistance. But perhaps the best hope is in the hubris and incompetence of the people who are trying to engineer this coup. Again, we'll see.

But who knows? There are variables at play here that nobody, me especially, understands. But I think we should assume that the next two years are going to be bad as you could imagine in Washington and in the MAGA states. There is always hope, but for now it's very hard to be optimistic. 

Secession?

Back in November 2020—after Biden’s victory but before J6, and before French was a columnist for the NYT— I wrote a piece reflecting on David French’s book released that year entitled Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How We Restore Our Nation. It didn’t get much attention at the time. After all Biden won, right? Normalcy had been restored, right? Well, as we learned last week, it depends on whose normal we’re talking about.

So perhaps his book needs another look.

Here’s the first part of the essay, if you want to read the full text, click the title below or the link that follows this excerpt.

David French’s America

In the end, the souls animating both the red hats and the honking cars want a restoration—they want things to go back to normal. In the end, they will all be disappointed. There’s no saving America’s soul. There's no restoring the soul. There's no fighting for the soul of America. There’s no uniting the souls of America. There is only fighting off the other soul of America.

Ibram Kendi, "America's Two Souls"

In the last week or so I've mentioned that I've been reading David French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How We Restore Our Nation. French is a thoughtful religious conservative and a Never Trumper.

So while French's book offers a vigorous defense of the culture and values of Red America, he has no illusions about how Red America is being poisoned by Trumpism. Some might argue that principled conservatives like French have been delusional to think that most conservatives think and feel the way he does, and that the contemporary Red American values that he defends were, contrary to what a proud Southerner like him wants to believe, always proto-fascist. I have always believed that the Southern Order isn’t primarily about racism, but that it’s a caste system, i.e., a premodern imagination of social order: everyone has his or her place, and nobody should get any uppity ideas about movin’ up—not just Blacks , but the White Redneck class, too. Nobody in the lower orders should ever think they could ever be gentry. And women and children, whether in the upper orders or lower, know that the patriarch has absolute power. That's how God wants it.

I have argued here over the years that the New South deep down isn't that different from the Old South, which has more in common with Latin American autocracies than the democracies of North Atlantic societies. That's what defines America's two souls. But I don't want this post to be about why I think French is wrong about Red America, but rather to take seriously his proposal for restoration, because otherwise we are headed for secession--either Blue leaving the Red U.S. or the Red leaving the Blue. 

To read on, go to “David French’s America”.

 

The Battle for Normal

“When the dust settled, Donald Trump had bested Kamala Harris in the battle for normal. But Trump’s victory didn’t come down to a simple case of the right defending “traditional values” from progressives. There was some of that, to be sure, not least Trump’s opposition to transgender athletes participating in women’s sports and his vow to protect “merry Christmas from supposed leftist plans to “ban” the holiday greeting.

More often, though, it was Democrats who came across as the party of respectable normativity, the ones upholding a set of taboos and ways of talking and living. Meanwhile, Republicans, the ostensible party of order, reveled in shattering those taboos. This approach reached its zenith (or nadir) with a Madison Square Garden Trump rally late in the campaign at which edgy podcasters flung racial insults and pooh-poohed the gravity of the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol. A majority of voters didn’t seem to mind. 

As one young voter told The New York Times: “I was so impressed by JD Vance, the way he carried himself and how normal he appeared. I think I became radicalized on the men and women’s sports issue. The ad that said, ‘Kamala represents they/them—Trump represents you,’ that was so compelling. While Trump is deranged, he represented normalcy somehow to me.”

Sohrab Ahmari

In one of my posts over the summer I said that the campaign that won the election would be the one that won the battle to appear the more normal. That’s why Biden won in ’20, and it’s why I thought Harris/Walz would win this time. I’m still gobsmacked that Trump appears to have won the normalcy battle. But it’s now clear to me, at least, that he did it not by being himself normal, but by being outrageous in his revolt against the norms as defined by Liberal elites.

Ahmari's article traces the evolution of the concept normal, which culminates in Foucault's trenchant critique of normalcy and power. I thought these paragraphs were particularly good--

[Foucault's] critique had a lot going for it. Normal wasn’t, in fact, a neutral or objective category. It was warped by the interests and ideological beliefs of the scientific and managerial authorities who mobilized it. “Relations of power,” as Foucault observed in 1976, “are not in a position of exteriority with other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter.” Put another way: Power is always doing its thing, however invisibly, within the ways we come to know each other—or graph our characteristics.

But in a twist that Foucault himself couldn’t have anticipated, the anti-normative discourses inspired by his philosophy became … normal, and took on a disciplinary function just as earlier versions had. For an influential cohort of college-educated Americans, it became quasi-mandatory to declare their pronouns, to acknowledge the indigenous lands upon which they stood, and so on. It was the polite, conventional, and, well, normal thing to do.

These discourses—the normal of anti-normativity—peaked in the febrile years 2020 and 2021. Beginning in 2022, some of these institutions feared that anti-normative norms were alienating, ahem, normal people. The then-ruling Democrats, too, dialed back some elements of the new normal, with Kamala Harris notably declining to foreground her gender and racial background in her campaign.

But it was too little, too late. Weird J. D. Vance gets the last laugh. 

I think David Brooks is right when he says--

But the fact is that every human society throughout history has been hierarchical. (If anything, that’s been especially true for those societies, such as Soviet Russia and Maoist China, that professed to be free of class hierarchy.) What determines a society’s health is not the existence of an elite, but the effectiveness of the elite, and whether the relationship between the elites and everybody else is mutually respectful.

The problem of course is that both American elite and non-elite culture is vulgar and materialistic. It's not as if the one has anything to learn or to teach the other about what true human flourishing means. And this is the problem with Brooks's recommendations for fixing the meritocracy that he condemns: It retains all the basic utilitarian values presuppositions that prop up the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Brooks is just rearranging the furniture on a sinking ship. 

Everybody knows that something is terribly wrong. It's that almost everybody is trying to come up with a solution working within the values framework that created the crisis in the first place. Any kind of real solution must come from outside that framework, at least that's the argument I'm trying to make on this blog. 

The Voice of Echo

Given that I am, like most of you, preoccupied with the horrifying consequences of the American people having chosen Caligula to be their president, I feel the need to get back to the positive, constructive things that I can do something about, which is to make the attempt to frame in thought and imagination where, if we are given the chance, we need to go if a human future still remains a possibility.

There are two books that have come out in the past year, which if I were creating a new course to teach, would be the central texts, along with a third, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and the Emissary. The first I’ve spoken about before—Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, and the second is David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of the Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life. I’ve been reading both, and I am still absorbing their significance.

All three books are published by either Harvard or Yale University Press, which is at least one indicator that their anti-materialist arguments, i.e., their insistence that Mind, not Matter, is primary, are not as intellectually marginal as they were, say, even twenty years ago. There’s a shift in the intelligentsia, and that’s not nothing, but it remains to be seen whether these ideas get any traction, and if they do, whether it’s too little too late to effect the cultural shift that we so desperately need. Trump’s election will certainly force a reassessment among the culture’s elite regarding the obtuseness of their politics, but perhaps it will force a reassessment of the obtuseness of their metaphysics as well. The two are interdependent.

Hart’s book is serious philosophy that seeks to make the case that I’ve also in my more modest way been making that the Baconian Project has been a human disaster. He sets it up as a dialogue among four of the Greek deities, the goddess Psyche playing the role of Socrates and the “Baconian” Hephaistos as her interlocutor. Eros and Hermes play secondary roles, but are clearly allies of Psyche. They meet together over six days in the “Intermundia” where the three attempt to persuade Hephaistos, the materialist who thinks the world and everything in it is a machine, that he is profoundly wrong. Hart does a good job of representing the best arguments of both sides of the Mind/Matter debate, but it’s fair to say that they make mincemeat of Hephaistos’s reductive materialism.

This is a book that needs to be read, but it’s six hundred pages of fairly subtle philosophical argument, so it won’t be. Nevertheless, I think it’s important for readers to know that while it doesn’t impinge very much on their day-to-day lives, there’s an important re-evaluation going on that could be culturally consequential.

I’m probably taking some liberties with copyright law to paste below the short, very readable, final chapter of the book, which sums up nicely what the stakes are for the argument the book is making, which on a parallel track is the argument I was making in the Cathedral Lectures. Consider it a ‘trailer’ to entice you to read the rest of the book.

The Voice of Echo

PSYCHE: When I warned against that particular fallacy, I should perhaps have elaborated on what I find so dangerous about it; I left out, after all, some of the most crucial details. We all know the tale of Narcissus, of course, though I have no idea how much of it’s true. If it is, it all happened before my time, and you three claim never to have heard much of the story before the poets began to write about it, and our dear Nemesis now claims that, though it’s undoubtedly true, it all happened so long ago that she’s forgotten the details. So I choose to follow Ovid’s version, since it’s the loveliest, most wistful, and most touchingly droll.

He says that the poor young Boeotian hunter suffered the fate he did specifically because he had spurned the love of the nymph Echo, and so Nemesis punished him by condemning him to lose his heart to someone as incapable of returning his devotion as he had been of returning Echo’s. His own nature, moreover, conspired with the curse: he was at once so beautiful, so epicene, and so stupid that, on catching sight of his own gorgeous reflection in a secluded forest pool, he mistook it for someone else and at once fell hopelessly in love. There he remained, bent over the water in an amorous daze, until he wasted away and—as used to happen in those days—was transformed into the white and golden flower that bears his name.

I suppose Ovid would have his readers take it as an admonition against vanity, or a warning regarding how easily beauty can bewitch the mind, or a reminder of the lovely illusions men and women are so prone to pursue in place of real life. But for me it remains a particularly apt allegory for modern humanity’s relation to its computers, and of the particularly grim perils this entails: the danger not merely of the absurd misprision of computer operations for mental agency, but of the catastrophic misprision of mental agency for mere computational functions.

The former error is, I grant, quite understandable. The world’s human population at present exceeds eight billion souls—more than enough, one would think, to assure that human beings need never want for company. And yet, as a species, they’ve a remarkable gift for loneliness. So deep is their natural longing for communion with the world about them that nothing can entirely satisfy it, or even quell it for very long, so long as they suspect any dimension of reality might be indifferent to their overtures or incapable of addressing them in turn.

Until relatively recently, of course—a mere four or five centuries, I would say—it scarcely occurred to them that such a thing was even possible. For most of their history, they had naturally viewed all of cosmic nature as the residence of mysterious and vital intelligences—gods and nymphs, daemons and elves, phantoms and goblins, and every other kind of nature spirit or preternatural agency, even when they couldn’t directly perceive . . . well, I suppose, perceive us in our manifest aspects—not because they were victims of the “pathetic fallacy,” and not because their evolutionarily engineered “intentional stance” had populated the landscape with personable mirages, but because their nature dictates that they can never be at home in a world that doesn’t speak. This is largely why it is that even now, in their disenchanted age, they delight in fables about talking animals, and in stories that infuse inanimate objects with consciousness and personality, and in any other kind of tale that tells them there’s a subjective depth in all things that knows them as they would wish to be known.

The proper habitat of a living soul is an enchanted world, charged with mana or filled with fairies or kami, where one believes one can always find places of encounter with immortal—or, at least, longaevous—powers; and in the absence of those numinous or genial presences human beings feel abandoned, and very much alone. The history of modern disenchantment is the history of humankind’s long, ever deepening self-exile. So, naturally, no longer believing that the world hears or speaks to them, they find themselves looking elsewhere for those presences. They call out to the stars and scan the skies with enormous radio telescopes, searching for the faintest whisper of a response. They convince themselves that their machines might become sentient. They dream of creating a virtual reality responsive to their needs in a way that the now spiritually evacuated world around them no longer seems to be.

And that brings me back to the story of Narcissus. I failed earlier to note that, according to Ovid, Echo perished too, also as a result of the young fool’s imperviousness to her appeals. She was so lovelorn after he had rejected her advances that, in the end, she vanished away, her bones petrified and her voice attenuated to a dying reverberation in desert places. That part of the story only improves my allegory. Human beings turn for companionship to the thin, pathetic, vapid reflection of their own intelligence in their technology only because they first sealed their ears against the living voice of the natural world, to the point that now nothing more than its fading echo is still audible to them.

HEPHAISTOS: [With a wry smile:] I grant the elegance of the metaphor, at least.

PSYCHE: As you should. Mind you, I admit that not everyone finds that situation as terrible as it truly is. There are some who would even like to deepen that loneliness. We’ve discussed a few of them over the past several days. And I suppose this is only to be expected. In a sense, silencing the voice of nature has always been very much the great project of modernity. For a certain number of persons, what’s most truly enchanting about that phantom they fancy they see haunting their technology isn’t that it might possibly possess real consciousness, but that it might help them to discover that they do not—that they too are only machines, and their souls only the shadows cast by machines. Perhaps they long to be delivered from the invasions of a real world outside themselves, or from the importunities of a world calling out to a real self inside each of them. They long for the silence to be made complete. They long even to become inaudible to themselves, and to prove to themselves that there’s nowhere at all where consciousness is real and where communion with real presences is possible. For them, that nihilistic terminus of the modern project that I so dread is a thing devoutly to be wished.

Whatever the case, after four centuries of mechanistic dogma, the inability to view the natural order as a realm of invisible sympathies and vital spiritual intelligences is very much the essence of the late modern human condition. To me, it seems not only a folly—a ridiculous way of seeing a world that’s manifestly filled with mind and life and communion—but a disastrous condition, which can have only ever more dreadful consequences if not corrected by some saner view. I wish I knew how to remind those poor souls down there that there was a time when the world did speak, and when they believed that it spoke, and when—because they believed—it did in fact have a meaning of its own for them, already there resident within it before any they might choose to impose upon it. The natural order once appeared to them as a system of intelligible signs, a language declaring more than merely itself, the overwhelming eloquence of some intelligent and expressive agency behind the visible aspect of things. Throughout human history, most peoples have assumed that, when they gazed out upon the natural world, something looked back and met their gaze with its own, and that between them and that numinous other there was a real—if infinitely incomprehensible—communion in a realm of spiritual experience. Only very recently has so large a part of humanity—mostly in the benighted “developed” world—succumbed so credulously to the mythology of mechanism, and reconciled itself so willingly to the machine.

Then again, that surrender is only a compromise struck to assure a much larger victory . . . of sorts. Having rendered the world mute—or, at least, having deafened themselves to its entreaties and admonitions—modern human beings by and large have reached a condition as a culture in which they feel no hesitation in forcing the world to serve whatever ends they will for it. Along the way to that condition, in order to preserve that vision of a dead, morally neutral world generating illusory meaning and beauty, they’ve had to extinguish the occasional counterrevolution—Romanticism, principally, and then each of its ever fainter, dying echoes—but now, in this late modern moment, they’ve largely achieved an unspoken cultural consensus, principally because their ubiquitously “technologized” form of life and the market economy it serves have exceeded their powers of resistance, except of the most trivially local and elective kind.

For them, the machine is the real as such. So, yes, modernity is to a great extent nihilism, in the simplest, most exact sense: a way of seeing the world that acknowledges no truth other than what the human will can impose upon things. And, for the most part, the reality the modern world chooses to impose is a “rationality” of the narrowest kind, obsessed with what things are and how they might be used rather than struck with wonder by the inexplicable truth that things are. It’s a rationality that no longer knows how to stand before that gaze that looks back from the natural order, or even to see that it’s there. The world’s no longer the home in which humanity dwells or a presence to which humanity feels the need to respond; it’s merely mechanism and a great reserve of material resources awaiting exploitation by the projects of the will. As the mystery of the world isn’t a thing their markets or their wills can manipulate, they’ve simply forgotten it, and this obtuseness is certainly part of what continues to drive them toward ecological destruction.

Perhaps it can yet be undone. Perhaps an escape from the machine is still possible. Perhaps the worst future can yet be averted and they may yet find a way to make their technology—which is, after all, very much a part of their essence—a benign and healing presence within nature. Perhaps they may even discover a path of return to the living world, once again attentive to its voice. They might yet learn to know themselves in a new way as spiritual beings immersed in a world of spirit, rather than machines of consumption inhabiting a machine of production, and remember that which lies deepest within themselves: living mind, the divine ground of consciousness and life, participating in an infinite act of thought and communication, dwelling in a universe full of gods and full of God. If not . . . well, as I say, I dread what’s to come. And I’m not very hopeful.

HEPHAISTOS: [Once again shaking his head, but fondly now:] Nothing’s forever, you know—not even the order of nature. I can’t allay your fears, and I certainly don’t dismiss them. We may not be able to agree on matters metaphysical, but I know we both love the tormented, beautiful world we left behind when we came here. [With a sad smile:] So, then, let’s leave the matter there, where at least our hearts are in accord, if not our beliefs. Perhaps we can now at last adjourn and drown our disagreements in nectar and ambrosia.

HERMES: That seems the best course.

EROS: And the most delightful one.

HEPHAISTOS: And I’ll think on the things we’ve discussed over these past six days, I promise. I owe you that much simply from the love I bear for you.

PSYCHE: Do, I pray you, Phaesty. Try to get out of your workshop more often, too. Devote more time to the contemplation of living things and less to the fabrication of machines. It might change your perspective somewhat over time. If not, it would still be good for your . . . your soul.

HEPHAISTOS: [Contemplating the rose:] Perhaps I shall. [Turning his eyes to Psyche and smiling at her:] I may even take up gardening. [Exeunt omnes . . . .

…. And on the seventh day they rest.]

David Bentley Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (pp. 555-561). Yale University Press, 2024.

Darkest before the Dawn?

You know the cliche—that It’s always darkest just before the dawn. I can attest to its truth—at least in the Caribbean Sea. After I finished college, I took the best part of the next year to work as a deckhand on a charter boat in the Caribbean. We island-hopped all the way down to Grenada, later made famous by Reagan’s absurd invasion of it. Sounds like a wonderful trip, right? But it wasn’t. I was low man on the totem pole working for mean-spirited people who made my life very unpleasant.

Since I was low man, I had the hardest watch when we were underway, from 4 am to 8 am. Hard because almost impossible to stay awake doing noting except looking out onto a dark, empty sea. So I spent many a predawn morning with nothing more to do than to await the rising of the sun as we traveled east and south down the chain of the Windward Islands. Whether it was factually, scientifically true or just a reflection or my state of mind, I can attest to the weird effect that it did seem to get more intensely dark just before there were signs of the sun coming up. And when it came up, drumroll—Is that an angelic orchestra playing Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zaruthustra”^?1

BTW, this was in 1972-73 when in the background Nixon wiped the floor with George McGovern—talk about depressing and dark. And then later as I was reentering America in the Spring, it was when the Watergate scandal was beginning to unfold. Just sayin’. There’s something in the DNA of Republicans that causes them to overreach in ways that lead to their inevitable crashing and burning. Trump seems immune, I know. The fear that we all have is that the only way he will crash is by his bringing the whole system crashing down with him. It may come to that. But however bad it gets, sane, morally serious Americans need to be clear about what they must do to never let this happen again.

So for most of my adult life, I have wondered about Republican political success. Why does the American demos so consistently send foolish, incompetent people to manage a governmental system they despise, people who can't manage hurricane or public health crises, who invade Grenada or Iraq for no good reason except hubris and revenge, who cannot take climate change seriously, who recklessly deregulated the banks and hired mercenaries to fight our wars in the mideast, who want to privatize social security and fought tooth and rail against sensible reform of an irrational, dysfunctional, and absurdly expensive healthcare system? Why do they elect people who time and time again show that the have no good-faith interest in solving problems, who appoint incompetent, corrupt, cronies who feel no compunction about breaking the law whether it’s Watergate, Iran Contra, Abu Ghraib, J6, or just to line their pockets? Why?  Why do Americans keep giving these fools the keys to the bus?

Because they have a better story, and whoever has the best story wins. Their story might not align with reality, but it resonates with an American mythos that Democrats can’t match because in large part because they don’t even try to match it. Democrats are only good for coming in to clean up the mess that the Republican crackpottery inevitably makes. And then they’re unceremoniously shown the door when it’s time again to return to the politics of delusion. Democrat competency and problem solving doesn't sell. It's too utilitarian. The demos wants its politics to fit its mythos, they want their politics to be meaningful and to be an expression of their deepest beliefs--beliefs that the cosmopolitan elites that run the Liberal establishment largely hold in contempt. But in their contempt for the GOP mythos, they fail to offer anything better.

The Democrats' brand has become associated with a secular mythos of disruptive emancipation from all the traditional attitudes that oppress the marginalized. What this amounts to for most Liberals is to try to be a good person by being nice and tolerant and respectful, especially of the needs of those groups who have historically suffered oppression. The problem is that “being nice” as a mythos is pretty weak tea, and being disruptively emancipatory pisses a lot of people off. It’s a hard sell on Main Street. Try reading a little Antonio Gramsci, Lefties.

Most Liberals I know are like most Americans—decent, sensible people who just want to do the right thing. Liberal niceness and concern for the marginalized can be formulaic and priggishly performative, but it speaks to a basic decency that they try in good faith to live out, and is very often genuinely motivated by a desire to be kind. But what's the mythic narrative that inspires Liberals? What is the story that they tell themselves that gives their politics meaning and coherence, richness and scope? What's their vision for the future besides go to a good college, get a high-paying job, but try to be nice to the marginalized? Does that inspire?

Look, Liberals are kind and competent, and and Republicans are mean and incompetent--that's why I vote Democratic. But I am utterly uninspired by the Democrat story, and they have to do better if they ever hope to win back the demos. Clearly their message that we must say No to a senile, crackpot, wannabe dictator was not enough. 

My most serious criticism of Liberal Democrats is that most have too easily adapted to life in the TCM. They have come to accept its materialist, utilitarian values and presuppositions as reality in a way that those on the Right have not. The GOP since forever, and the MAGA version of it now, tell a story that is utterly inadequate to living sanely in the 21st century, and yet it meets one profound human need—the need for meaning. The problem is that Democrats don’t think making meaning is the business of politics, and so they are at a continuous disadvantage to the Republicans who do.

Liberals did not create the meaning crisis; the Techno-Capitalist Matrix did insofar as it flattens life and squeezes the soul out of everything and seeks to replace it with a simulacra of life and soul. The problem for Democrats is that they appear to live very comfortably in this nihilistic milieu, and for that reason have not felt a need to develop an adequate response to the meaning crisis so many Americans so deeply feel. They think that passing an infrastructure bill or the Chips act is their job, and that should be enough. It just isn’t.

Secular Democrats think of themselves as grownups who are doing just fine, thank you. They don't need any high-falutin’, made-up, Spaghetti-monster meaning narratives. They're content to live in the small, flat world that the TCM delivers to them. They don't need anything that is any more meaningful than the choices and commitments that they make to live as best they can in a world that they accept that makes no sense except the sense they give it.

And I respect that as the individual choices that secular liberals make. It’s honest and honorable, but it cannot be the ethos for the Democratic Party if we depend on the Democrats to bring competency and moral seriousness to our politics. The world cannot sustain much more of the 19th-century Republican frontier, rugged individualist mythos because it is so deeply misaligned with 21st-century reality. Democrats’ competence and niceness isn’t enough; they need to develop a story that crowds out and de-legitimates the GOP mythos once and for all.

So, yes, it’s dark right now, and it’s going to get darker. The Republicans, with each succeeding decade since Nixon, have been choosing ever more incompetent fabulists. The Democrats will be called in again to clean up the mess they make this time—at least I hope so. It’s an open question as to how far MAGA will go to insure they stay in power. But if we are to have a morning in America that endures for more than about five minutes, we need the Dems to develop a story, a mythos, that meaningfully resonates with all decent Americans, that is coherent and aligned with reality, that is rich with meaning and promise for the future, that is adaptable to the unexpected. They must come up with something that can replace for good the nonsense story told by Republican crackpots, crooks, and conmen.

Note

1. I observed the opposite effect in Honduras at sunset—at 6 pm, it was as if someone flipped a switch, and it went from bright to pitch black in what seemed a matter of seconds. Kind of like what it felt like last Wednesday.