After the Future

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12/8/23. I've started a (free) Substack Newsletter whose primary purpose will be to send out a few times a week posts some more current but many from the past twenty years. Here at After the Future."1" you get the raw ATF; at the Substack After the Future."2",  the posts will be curated, more thoughtful, and, I hope, more polished. 

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Why Trump Will Lose

The dissociated feeling some of us have gotten watching politics play out in 2024 came in part from watching conventional media and sensibilities fail to process this brutish, multilayered, densely referential, meme-drenched idiom. When Mr. Trump promises that he will be a dictator but only on “Day 1,” is it a joke or a terrifying threat? Possibly both, but in muddying the distinctions, he makes liberal warnings about constitutional norms seem like ninnyish Karening. Traditional discourse looks for stage directions, for mainstream media, which once had the power to define reality, to referee, and judge. Big-R Reality values are judgment-free, however: Attention is attention is attention.

But if there’s one thing that’s true for all TV genres, it’s that the medium is always looking for the next new thing. Mr. Trump dominated TV during a time when the shouty, humorless alpha white guy was a dominant cable archetype. In recent years, the freshest and most popular reality shows have been more ironic, more infused with queer sensibility, more, dare one say, joyful. The light-on-their-feet “FBoy Island,” “Below Deck,” “Summer House,” and “Too Hot to Handle” have paved the way for Alan Cumming’s charming “The Traitors” and Joel McHale’s “House of Villains” (which has returned Omarosa to the spotlight). “The Mole,” rebooted and airing on Netflix, is hosted by NPR’s Ari Shapiro doing a deadpan camp turn for the ages.

Mr. Trump’s recently cast political opponent seems to have grasped the vibe shift. The playfully self-deprecating memes and the repeated invocation of joy: She’s reality lite. If Mr. Trump is still doing Gordon Ramsay, Kamala Harris is giving us Lisa Vanderpump.

Michael Hirschorn

So why's he gonna lose? Because his act is old. People are sick of it. It simply comes down to that.

If you are puzzled why Trump's popularity has been so persistent, but now seems to be ebbing, I think there is no more robust explanation.Too many people don't see Trump as a human being who inhabits the real world; they see him as TV personality in a show where they love rooting for the anti-hero, the rules breaker, the one who understands better than anyone how to beat the system that they feel oppresses them. What impact he actually has in their real, day-to-day world doesn't matter. They don’t expect what happens on the screen or in a rally to make a difference in their humdrum lives. Trump’s appeal lies almost wholly in his ability to provide an escape from that.

This is not a new idea especially for those who know their McLuhan and Postman. Many before have pointed out that Trump sees the presidency as an extension of his stint on his Apprentice shows. But I've been sending posts about politics recently not just to be another bloviator using an online soapbox to spew his political opinions, but to connect what's happening in politics to the themes presented in the Cathedral Lectures. The point of these posts is to strive to see what's happening in real time through the lens of the ideas developed there. 

One of the primary themes I developed in those lectures was how we are all slowly moving into what Baudrillard called the "hyper-real", where what we experience on screens is more real than the real world we live in. For many, perhaps most, Trump voters, the only important thing is what happens in the hyper-real world. Most of the rest of us, I hope, are in the in-between. We  still have a foot in what until recently was broadly understood to be the real world, but we feel the pull of the hyper-real, and we spend quite a bit of time in it, and the younger we are the more so. 1

But most of us still know the difference. Most viewers of the debate were not persuaded that Trump's explanation of his Haitians-eating-pets story was legitimated by his insisting it had to be true because it was on TV. I think Trump himself sincerely believes its being on TV makes it true. But the problem is that he’s not alone. With each passing decade more people are becoming more like Trump—increasingly incapable of discerning the difference, and is there any reason to believe that without some kind of significant intervention that this trend will abate?

So I excerpted the paragraphs from Hisrschorn's article above not primarily to make an optimistic case for Trump's demise. I never thought he could win this election no matter who ran against him because the logic of his success is now the logic of his failure. Many people were dazzled for a while by his showmanship, but the illusion has been burst. The debate with Harris the other night made that clear to those who hadn't understood it yet. She was Dorothy pulling back the curtain to expose the naked wizard before nearly 70 million people. The debate was more important for that reason than I first thought. And Harris did it in a way that Biden could not have.

And I guess it's a good thing that Harris seems to be the right person for this shift in the hyper-real, where, to use Hirschorn's words, "the freshest and most popular reality shows have been more ironic, more infused with queer sensibility, more, dare one say, joyful." I am not saying that Harris is just the new act replacing Trump's old one, just another showperson who understands better than he what the audience wants now. She's a politician, and to succeed as one these days means that you need to know how to navigate in the hyper-real. There are good indicators to suggest that she is also a person with genuine warmth and authenticity and that she has her feet firmly set in the real world. I do not see her as Hirschorn does as just "reality lite", but we won't know that for sure until we see how she governs. 

But here's the point I want to make here, and it's the theme that every post I send in one way or the other seeks to develop. What we see in MAGA is a warning of what is to come. Trump is just a crude, clownish beta version of more slick demagogues who are now taking notes backstage as they watch Trump fail. It's shocking that even at this early stage of the hyper-real someone so ignorant and so obviously inept could be so successful by his understanding a few basic rules about how to operate in it.

As technologies become more sophisticated in the coming decades, the hyper-real will become more the reality that will define people's lives, their values, their use of time, their sense of being embodied, their aspirations and fears, and just basically their sense of who they are and what makes them most real. People of good will, people who truly care about genuine human flourishing and not some hyper-real parody of it, need to resist the seductions of the hyper-real. And the argument I've been making here is that the only way to do that is for us to set our feet in what is most deeply real. Otherwise we won't have a foothold firm enough to prevent us from being swept away by the coming flood. 

Note 1. For those who did not attend the lectures or who would like to revisit them, I have their transcription available now in a single document that you can find here.

Note 2. This, btw, is why young people need to pay attention to old farts like me. I still remember what it was like to live in a world that was still mostly real, or to put it another way, in a symbol system that still did some important work to mediate the Deep Real. This is a world that on or about 1963 became really, really different, and we’re not the better for it. So I am unimpressed when young people tell me my ideas are outdated and unrelatable. To me that’s just a symptom of how badly such people have been captured the hyper-reality that the TCM is on hyperdrive to produce.

The Debate

I really hate these debates. I find them unwatchable. They have become important for all the wrong reasons. They function more along the lines of a sporting event or a cage match. Who wins or loses has more to do with body language and vocal tone, punches that landed and punches that missed, and we learn very little about how either candidate would actually govern. Way too much was made of Trump's debate with Biden in June, and too much is being made of the debate last night.

And I find ridiculous the pundits who complain that the candidates were not substantive or detailed enough in their plans. This is not how American politics has ever worked. We vote for the less bad choice based on general party orientation and values. Republican voters have shown time and again that they generally favor most of the policies that Democrats propose when presented in the abstract, but they won't vote for Democrats because they don't think about the party in policy terms but in terms of general orientation and values.

So the more important political task is not to obsess about policy details but rather to change the general orientation and values of the Democratic Party from Neoliberalism toward something more populist friendly. This is the only way they will have a chance to become a stable majority that will be able to stave off threats from the extremist Right, with or without Trump, that has taken over the GOP. The policy flows from that, and the details get hammered out though the legislative process, not in some inane debate format.

So hoo-ray for Harris; she won the arm wrestling contest with a senile misogynist who can barely complete a sentence. Whether this matters at all to undecided voters I have no idea. 

A Little Help for the Undecided Voter

Sometimes it helps to make lists of pros and cons when you have a tough decision to make. So if you're an Independent or moderate Republican who is still undecided about whether to vote for Trump or not, here's are two checklists that can help you to sort things out. Sometimes it's good to make a list to get a feel for the big picture. 

First the 'pros', the reasons to vote for Trump. Put a check next to the statements that resonate with you. 

• He's not the typical, boring GOP or Dem politician. He's bigger than life  and he's often quite entertaining and funny.

• I like that he's so outrageously anti-establishment in everything he says and does.

• He's a winner. He always seems to comes out on top. I know that his own people, Bill Barr and Chris Krebs, say he lost the election in ‘20. I also know over sixty challenges to the legitimacy of the election failed in court, but, sorry, that makes no sense to me. It makes more sense that the election was rigged by the Deep State because it hates him.

• Trump is rich, but he understands the ordinary, working person. He speaks my language. 

• I think he's a strong, virile man who will keep me safe. Democrats are wimps. 

• I don't consider myself a racist, but I feel that ordinary white people like me are not getting a fair shake, and that Trump has my back. 

• I love how he breaks all the rules and gets away with it. I like the way he shakes things up. 

• I don't want to see him go to jail. 

• I like that he makes me feel ok about my having politically incorrect opinions and attitudes. 

• I love the way he freaks out smug, annoying, know-it-all Libs.

• All my friends and family are voting for him, and I don't want to disappoint them.

• I always root for my homies on the Red Team no matter how awful they might be this season.

• I'm really, really rich, and he'll keep my taxes low.

• I know that Trump is a morally degenerate crackpot, but I hope that once he’s elected J D Vance will be the shadow president who will implement Project 2025 and support the appointment to the supreme court justices that will enforce it so that we can restore moral order to Godless America. The country needs to be saved from itself, and moral order is more important to me than democratic process. 

Now do the same with the  'cons'. Put a check next to the statements below about why not to vote for Trump that may resonate with you:

• It bothers me that he was the first president in history who attempted to subvert the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021. It bothers me that he knowingly lied to his supporters that the election had been stolen from him. It bothers me that he sought to overturn the results of the election in GA by pressuring its secretary of state to "find" 11,780 votes somewhere. 

• It bothers me that he tells people to do illegal things but not to worry because he'll pardon them. 

• It bothers me that he told his chief of staff, former Marine Corp General, and gold-star parent, John Kelly that those who serve in the military are suckers and losers. He thinks that his giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a billionaire donor from Las Vegas is better than the Medal of Honor given to heroes in the military. 

• It bothers me that he is a national security threat because he feels that he doesn't have to follow norms, procedures, or well established precedent. He's the president--so why should such things constrain him?  He shared secret docs about Israel with the Russians. He shared secret docs about Iran with random visitors at Bedminster. He left boxes of secret documents in easily accessible places all around Mara Lago. And that's just what we know about. He makes it impossible for our allies to trust him with their secret information. 

• It bothers me that he trusts Vladimir Putin more than he does his own intelligence people, and it bothers me that Trump doesn't really care about NATO, or that his running mate doesn't care about who wins in Ukraine. 

• It bothers me that he has been condemned as unfit by many people who served in his administration. 

• I bothers me that Uber-Republican Dick Cheney thinks Trump is unfit, and that he should never be trusted with power again. 

• It bothers me that he's so easy to manipulate. Foreign leaders and his aides know that if you flatter him, he'll do anything you want. 

• It bothers me that he is pathological liar whose word is worth nothing, that he will say anything that he thinks his audience wants him to hear. One day he's against abortion, the next day he's not. 

• It bothers me that he's not someone you can negotiate with in good faith because he will change his mind on a whim and blow up deals you thought were settled.

• It bothers me that he surrounds himself with sycophants and yes men who only tell him what he wants to hear. It bothers me that he fires the people who tell him the truth.

• It bothers me that he doesn't really care about policy or solving problems. He made it clear he doesn't really care about the border except as is is useful as a political club to hit his opponents. It bothers me that he put the keebosh on a strong, bipartisan conservtive-friendly border deal because he didn't want Biden to get credit for it.

• It bothers me that he admires autocrats more than he admires elected heads of state, and there's good reason to believe that should he be elected again he will never leave regardless of the results of future elections. 

• It bothers me that Trump promised to drain the swamp, but he's just made it swampier:

  • He has used his office for personal enrichment of himself and his family. (See also.) 

  • His company has been found guilty of years of fraud in his taxes and real estate business, and he must pay nearly a half billion in penalties. 

  • Many people associated with Trump or his administration are convicted felons, Steve Bannon (twice), Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Peter Navarro, Allen Weisselberg, and Michael Cohen. Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI but got pardoned by Trump. Many more are under indictment, Several have taken plea deals, and there will be many more to come if Trump loses the election.

• It bothers me that he will have at least four or more years to appoint supreme court justices who seem committed to an autocratic vision of the president as a unitary executive. 

• It bothers me that white nationalists and extremist fascist militias see Trump as their ally. 

• It bothers me that he will use the Justice Department and IRS to retaliate against his political enemies. He's already done it with James Comey and Andy McCabe, with Pete Strzok and Lisa Page, and Michael Cohen.

• It bothers me that the Supreme Court's immunity decision has removed any guardrails that will impede him from retaliatory acts once he is again in position to use the official powers of presidency. 

• It bothers me that he uses social media and his personal appearances to spread any unproven crackpot story that he thinks helps him politically.

• While I think of myself as a principled conservative, it bothers me that the Republican Party has become an unprincipled personality cult full of spineless sycophants like Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, and Ted Cruz; with performance artists like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Kari Lake; with religious zealots like the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, Mark Robinson in NC, Doug Mastriano in PA, with crackpots like Paul Gosar, and ignoramuses like Tommy Tuberville. I've got serious problems with the Democrats, but the GOP has become a national embarrassment. 

• It bothers me that when I listen to Trump speak, his answers are an incoherent word salad that make no sense. 

• I want the GOP to be normal and Reagan-ish again, and the fastest way to make that happen is to push Trump off the political stage once and for all. McConnell and other relatively sane Republicans in the Senate had their chance in the second impeachment, and they blew it. So now it’s up to voters like me.

• I used to think Trump was entertaining, and I thought he would shake things up for the better, but now his act is tired, repetitive, and boring, and we need to turn the page. 

Hope you found this exercise helpful! Share with your undecided friends and relatives, and remember to get out there and vote! …Or don't…. I don't know…. I can't decide. 

Whither the Dems

Ours is a surreal moment in US politics. In a matter of weeks, the Democratic Party has engineered a near-seamless transfer of political power from President Biden to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, thereby reviving the party’s prospects in all seven of the swing states that will determine the 2024 presidential election. Anxious but hopeful Democrats now believe the contest with Donald Trump is Harris’s to lose. Barring an unforeseen economic shock or a new foreign-policy crisis, she is now poised to ride what all political insurgents covet: the sheer momentum that comes with swiftly defying low expectations.

This is a remarkable feat, regardless of one’s partisan leanings. Harris has turned her apparent weakness—being perpetually discounted since her humbling 2020 primary flop—into an asset. Indeed, fresh off the awards-show theatrics of the Democratic National Convention—an overwhelming display of how much progressive politics has fused with popular culture in the last 20 years—the Harris campaign is at once brimming with the confidence of a popular incumbent and the spiritedness of an underdog.

Justin Vassallo in Compact

This Compact article lines up exactly with my take on where Harris and the Dems are in this moment. If you read the whole thing, you’ll see how it provides a template by which to evaluate where the party is going and the crosspressures that Harris will have to navigate. The Dems are a big tent with many constituencies, but one or the other of them plays a dominant role. Until recently it’s been the Aspen Institute/Neoliberal crowd, with the Bernie/AOC/Jayapal populist wing playing a more influential role since ’20. Harris seems to be on board with Biden’s populist shift and wants to continue it. Will she?

I’m assuming she’s going to win, so the most interesting question for me is how she’ll manage all the competing pressures on her about how to position the party both on policy and in public perception going forward. As I’ve been writing in previous posts here, what’s at stake is whether the Dems will see this moment as an opportunity to build a dominant, populist-oriented, ruling majority going forward. I think it’s possible, and the signs so far are that Harris seems to get this.

Or am I just being too optimistic to even consider this as a possibility? Maybe. Should I just look at the Dems the way I do my woebegone Seattle Mariners? Are the Dems, like the Ms, just interesting enough to keep you hopeful and engaged, but then will disappoint you in the end?1

I think it’s better for the soul to hope for the best no matter how often you’ve been disappointed. Being street smart and cynical is tiresome, and all it means is that you accept the conventional wisdom, which isn’t smart at all—it’s worth about twenty-five cents.

Being street smart is simply a projection of the past onto the future, which, imo, is a fundamental, rear-view-mirror misreading of how history plays out. The smart money was on Lincoln losing in 1864, and nobody expected him to get shot a few weeks after Appomattox. What’s important are the discontinuities and surprises, the unpredictable qualitative shifts, not the quantitative projections based on statistical probabilities. Nate Silver isn’t at all interesting to me; he’s tediously predictable.

So I believe that, as in 1864, it is not hyperbole to say that we are now at a similar inflection point in our history. And I believe that Americans’ better angels usually win the day in such moments, even if they only show up at the last possible moment.

Note 1. For those of you who are not Seattleites or baseball fans, the Seattle Mariners are the only team in Major League Baseball never to have appeared in the World Series.

Re-Defining What it Means to be a "Real American"

When the books come out telling the inside story of the 2024 campaign, I will be very interested to learn who was the mastermind behind constructing the last four days of the Democratic Convention. I would not have thought the Democrats capable of it, but they seem finally to have left Identitarian Politics behind, and moved forward to embrace and celebrate an expansive new definition of what it means to be a proud, patriotic, "real American".

Clearly Kamala Harris played a significant role in it, and that alone signifies that she understands the moment and will be a shrewd, formidable president. I think she could very well be the reconfiguring President that I hoped Obama would be--and that we now truly need her to be. A lot depends on what happens down ballot. 

The old Democrats seemed happy to celebrate diversity for the sake of diversity and to look down their noses at any flag waving as a form of crude jingoism. This week we saw a lot of flag waving, but it was a different kind. It was all about a renewed pride in what America could be at its best--not despite its diversity, but because of it. This was not diversity presented in a sanctimonious, ideological DEI idiom, but in a truly patriotic, proud-to-be-American idiom.

Hopefully some time in the future we can look at Trump and MAGA as the moment in our history that forced most Americans to realize that they have something that is really pretty good, and that they were in significant danger of losing it. The problem was that divided Democrats were united only in their saying No to MAGA without defining an alternative to which Americans could say Yes. This week Democrats finally figured out a way to show Americans a way to say Yes. Let's hope enough Americans were watching.

The new Democratic Party is perfectly embodied by the two people at the top of the ticket--a coastal, bi-racial daughter of immigrants and a white, gun-toting football coach from the heartland who both clearly like one another. That's the best thing about both of them--they are likable, normal, down-to-earth people--not their ideologies or their identities. They presented themselves as competent, level-headed normies who want to work together to solve real problems. And the convention did a remarkable job of stressing the humanity, the relatableness, the decency of the broad range of diverse Democrats who were on display these past four days. They stressed how our humanity unites us, not how our identities divide us.

That's maybe the greatest accomplishment of the last week. Because by comparison the Trump/Vance ticket seems deeply un-American, mean-spirited, and yes, just plain weird. The Democrats have in effect taken the American flag away from the Republicans, and left them either to fly one upside down or to choose the Stars and Bars as an alternative. And in taking hold of the flag in the way they did, Democrats pose the question to America: Whose side are you on?

It was really quite deft. 

I didn't watch every moment of the the last four days of convention programming, but I watched a lot of it, and I was quite frankly gobsmacked by how interesting so much of it was. The writing in most speeches was very good. There were extremely few speakers who made me roll my eyes, cringe, or who annoyed me. There was little to no grandstanding or, with the exception of an overly long ramble by Bill Clinton, self-absorbed monologues. There were so many good moments, like the Steve Kerr and Raphael Warnock speeches.

The background videos were well written and well produced. The everyday American profiles and interviews of the wide range of diverse Americans were interesting and often quite moving. But clearly the two best moments were the build up to and delivery of Walz's speech on Wednesday and Harris's last night. What a contrast to the Vance and Trump speeches a month earlier. The whole week was so well put together, and so much of it felt organic and real. Sure, there were the predictable formulaic platitudes and talking points you expect to see while watching a political convention, but that was not where the main thrust of the week lay. 

As others have pointed out, the GOP convention was more of a coronation than an attempt to persuade undecideds. One of the reasons I thought that the Republicans could not possibly win this cycle was because their convention was as delusional as their nominee. The Republicans participating in it genuinely believed that they were going to win in a landslide after putting on one of the strangest, most alienating displays of everything that makes Republicans so unlikable and unrelatable to Americans who have not joined the MAGA personality cult. It was clear that Republicans felt no need to persuade anybody, that they believed that most Americans were on board with their bizarre vision for what the country should be, and that the righteousness of their cause was so self-evident that all normal Americans would get in line and vote for their ticket. Really? And so many Liberals were afraid of these guys? And still are? 

To win, all the Democrats have to do is present a positive alternative vision of American future possibility to contrast with the dark, cramped, mean-spirited insanity that Trump/Vance represents. I believed a Biden/Harris ticket would have found a way to do that, but from what I've seen this past week, if a Harris/Walz ticket doesn't beat them, I truly understand nothing about this country and should probably move to New Zealand. 

The Obamas' Speeches

I remember asking some Trump supporters back in '16 if they thought that Obama was a citizen, and they mostly said Yes. Then I asked how they could possibly vote for Trump who was the most vicious spreader of the lie that he wasn't. Wasn’t that a litmus test that should be automatically disqualifying for any sane, decent American? For me to pose such a question wasn't persuasive for such Trump supporters, and at the time I didn't care because it never occurred to me that Trump could win. And neither did the Trump supporters I spoke with think he could win, which gave them permission to vote for him as a protest vote. 

I could accept a protest vote motivation. But what were they protesting? I think they were protesting in '16 the same thing that led me to vote for Nader in ‘96, which was to reject the triangulating Clinton's--and the broader Democratic Party's--cooptation by Neoliberalism. I understand that now, even if I didn't in '16. I'm not saying these Trump voters would understand their motivation in these terms, but I'd argue that's really at the root of it. 

So I've come to understand that to argue that Trump's birtherism was automatically disqualifying was a function of how little I understood about what Trump's appeal was at that time.  I've learned a lot since then, but after listening to the Obamas last night, I have to wonder if they have. Barack's speech was a rerun of his 2004 convention, a speech I loved when I heard it. Michelle's was a heartfelt plea to respect the wisdom of mothers. Both speeches were tours de force. Both got in some really juicy, well-deserved digs at Trump. Both are celebrity superstars, and the crowd went understandably ape. Both were great convention speeches, but did they accomplish anything more than to be a thoughtful, eloquent preaching to the Liberal Establishment choir? 

Like most Americans I admired Barack the campaigner, but I thought he mostly failed to meet the moment as president. He talked a good game on the campaign trail about re-alignment and reconfiguring American politics, but he fell right into line as a good Neoliberal once in office. He got the ACA passed on terms acceptable to the Neoliberal consensus rather than taking a Medicare-for-all approach. He promoted an idiotic Neoliberal education reform program cluelessly named ‘Race to the Top’. He continued the absurdity in Afghanistan, but worst of all, he turned to the Neoliberals who created the crisis of 2008 to solve the crisis, and they did what you might expect--promoted their own interests rather than the interests of the ordinary Americans who suffered because of their hubris, greed, and folly. If there are people who think that Obama's going along with the Beltway consensus on all these issues did not contribute significantly to the rise of Trump, they really don't understand what's been going on for the last forty years.

So while both speeches were impressive for their inimitable rhetorical flair, I was unimpressed. What would have impressed me would have been a full-throated apology for the stupidity and political malpractice committed by Democrats since the 90s, and a call to reject the influence of donors and lobbyists going forward. That would have impressed me. We got such a plea from Bernie last night, even if not in words so eloquent.

Both Michelle and Barack Obama are impressive human beings, but they've become elite celebrities, and they strike me as figures who have become more comfortable in the Aspen Institute wing of the Liberal establishment than with the Tim and Gwen Walz wing. Yes, they have proved that hardworking, intelligent, ambitious Black people can be elites too. They are winners in their 'race to the top'. Two cheers. But as such they've come to represent what most everyday Americans hate about what the Democratic Party has become, and they don't seem to get that. It's not (mostly) about the racism, it's about the elitism.

So despite the "no-red-or-blue-America" trope and the plea for us all to just get along in a multi-racial Shangri-la, it all falls flat for me. Not that I don't want that--what decent human being doesn't? It's just that Democrats like the Obamas still think that meritocracy is what makes America great, and that's just plain tone deaf for the populist moment we're in. 

Dems Route to a Stable Governing Majority

The Harris team has gotten off to a strong start in the messaging wars. The vibes, for the first time in a long time, are great. But Republicans live to kill Democratic vibes, and they have a tested strategy for doing it — which, in this case, means turning Ms. Harris into a San Francisco liberal who will open the border, defund the police, cackle while prices go through the roof and only got the job because of … well, you know.

If Ms. Harris wants to persuade skeptical voters that she will turn the page, she needs to prove it with policies that address the problems they care about most. And if Democrats want to convince Americans that Republicans are weird, they can’t just count on Tim Walz being adorable on TikTok. They need to show they’re the normal ones — a party for working families that’s filled with people who love this country so much that they know it can be even better.

“We have a solemn responsibility to honor the values and promote the interests of the people who elected us,” Mr. Clinton said in his first weeks as a presidential candidate. He didn’t hold up his side of the bargain, and Democrats are still living with the consequences. But these goals — honoring values and promoting interests — should be watchwords for Democrats trying to win back lost ground with the working class.

Tim Shenk in today's NY Times

This guy gets it about how the Dems can move toward a stable winning majority for decades to come. Key is to move to the Left on economic issues and toward the center on cultural issues. When people say a candidate is too far left usually that means on cultural issues. Abortion, regardless of how I feel about it personally,¹ is a centrist issue because of the fanatic way the religious right has framed it.

Most Americans support Bernie Sanders pro-family, pro-worker policies. And Sanders has been assiduous throughout his career about avoiding appearing too Left on cultural issues. When BLM attacked him in ’16, it was because he didn’t have the Woke vibe regardless of the substance of his stellar record on civil rights.

That’s the reality of being a successful politician in a rural state like Vermont. Same with Tim Walz. You stress the benefits of the policies you espouse and do everything you can to avoid appearing ideological. The problem with Woke is not that there is no basis for the causes it espouses, but because it comes across as too aggressively ideological, which in turn provokes ideological backlash. You don't force changes in cultural attitudes, you inspire them. 

Note 1: I see abortion as a symptom of late modern alienation from the body and its constraints that is one of many symptoms that are directly connected to the dehumanizing impacts of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Changes in attitudes toward abortion in the post WWII period cannot be understood without seeing them as related to a huge shift in the culture that has normalized a transhumanist ethos in which there's a mechanical or technological solution for every deeply human problem--even death.

I reject that ethos completely. That doesn't make me a Luddite, but I do insist that technological advances serve human needs, and the problem lies in that we are too passively allowing technology to define what it means to be human and what those human needs are. In doing so we are becoming slave of technology and technological solutions when we should be searching out more deeply liberating human ones. But we have no idea what it means to be human, and so no way of resisting the way the TCM, with each passing decade, has come to define us more and more as machines for whom mechanical solutions have come to seem "natural". 

I don't think that abortion should be made illegal, but ours would be a healthier society if we looked at abortion as a sometimes necessary last resort when other possibilities have been eliminated for good reasons. Defining what 'good reasons' are is tricky in a materialistic, technology-obsessed society like ours, and so until the culture changes, the rule of thumb, within the basic constraints defined by Roe, that the decision should be left to the conscience of a woman in consultation with her doctor seems the only feasible governing principle in the political/legal sphere. Maybe someday abortion, rather than being the ideological shibboleth issue it is now, will be instead an issue around which morally serious people can have a morally serious conversation. 

A Metaphysics of Joy

There are few figures in life or literature that we encounter that we could describe as truly full-spectrum human beings. In English literature surely Shakespeare and Dickens qualify, but there's something about the Russians, and preeminent among them are Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, but especially Dostoyevski. I read somewhere that Tolstoy at first found Dostoyevski repellent because his writing was so rough around the edges, but in the end came to see him as the more profound writer. 

When we think of Dostoyevski, we usually think about the guy who is searching out the darker corners of the human soul as in Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, The Idiot, Devils, but his great masterpiece is The Brothers Karamazovwhere the full spectrum is explored from the highest heights to the lowest depths.

So I've been reading Charles Taylor's new book, Cosmic Connections, for the last week--side by side with Julius Evola, but more on that another time--and around page 180 Taylor has a reflective interlude in which he talks about a passage in The Brother Karamazov that I had forgotten. Here's what he says about it-

Take for example the experience described in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazovwhich Staretz Zossima ascribes to his deceased brother Markel: “All around me there has been such divine glory: birds, trees, meadows, sky, and I alone have lived in disgrace, I alone have dishonoured it all, completely ignoring its beauty and glory.” Here the sense of the larger world doesn’t really have the characteristics of a cosmic order, but rather an overpowering sense of its central meaning; here, joy. And at the same time, its revelation is not something which the agent as poet brings about. Of course, the description the author gives helps define the experience, but it breaks in on him/herunbidden.

Taylor talks about such experiences as introducing those who have it into a wider space, a space where our desires and fears are not central, a space in which we experience a disorienting, de-centering shift that demands that we understand our place in the world and our relationship to it in a completely different way. He goes on--

At the same time, this wider space requires something of us. It asks that we respond to it with joy. So Markel reproaches himself for his past blindness, which ignored and disvalued this glory. “Birds of God, birds of joy, you must forgive me too, for against you too I have sinned.”

When his mother remonstrates with him, “You take too many sins on yourself,” he replies: “But dear mother, … I am crying from joy, not from grief; I want to be guilty before them, only I cannot explain it to you, for I do not know how to love them. Let me be culpable before all, and then all will forgive me, and that will be paradise. Am I not in paradise now? (pp. 185-86).

Dostoyevski is so great because so richly human. The joy reveals both the grandeur at the heart of things and our sense of our smallness--sinfullness?--in the face of it. And it's ok. It's a grandeur that both enlarges us and diminishes us. We see our smallness in this larger space, and so with it the diminishment of all the things that seem otherwise so important to us. But it's ok because in such experiences you feel the deep connectedness of it all, that you are what you are and it's enough, we’re no big deal, and it's perfect that that’s the way it is. In the end, it's the sense of connection and joy in communion that's the only thing that matters. That's why I tell my students that King Lear isn't really a tragedy. It’s a story of deep alienation overcome in the achievement of deep communion.

And so it's ok that this direct knowledge of such grandeur and joy cannot last, and that we will return to our blindness and stupidity, and that we will likely forget the significance of such moments as they recede in memory. And that's ok too. Because it's important to know that because we are humans we have the  capacity to be gifted with such moments. And even if one isn't feeling particularly connected, we have good reason to hope that such a connection is possible. 

I don't know about you, but when I read the Psalms or hear them sung, I often wondered what all the thanking is about. I’ve heard all the platitudes, and they don’t stick. I have gone through periods in my life when I felt that when you stack up all the stuff to be thankful about next to all things not to be, the latter makes the much bigger pile. So what are they so friggin' thankful about, and how does that relate to me? The very question is a symptom of the problem--which is to be stuck in the question 'how is this about me?'

Because the people who are most deeply thankful are those who have had such 'de-centering' experiences and realize that it isn't about me, none of it, and yet it's ok, deeply, deeply ok. And all the thanking in the Psalms as they are sung through the centuries is, if nothing else, a way to stay faithful to the memory of such decentering experiences. That's why we have ritual. It's a way to remember and to reenact, i.e., to keep alive in memory a truth that we dare not dishonor or forget.

So the metaphysics part--what do I mean by that? Well, let me ask you: : What moments in your experience have been most powerful in informing your sense about what’s most deeply real? Are they the sometimes seemingly endless days and weeks and years of strife, anxiety, overwork, and boredom? Or are they these rare epiphanies? Is it the quantity of our experience that counts or the quality moments we experience far less frequently? Do such rare moments of joy, clarity, and light balance out all the years of pain, confusion, and murk? Each has to answer in his or her own way, but my guess is that if you're still reading here, you would say that quality matters more than quantity. We'd all like a larger quantities of the otherwise scarce quality, but, again, it's ok.

Taylor rejects interpreting such epiphanic experiences in a reductively subjective and psychological way. He insists they tell us something about the nature of things because the decentering of the experience itself insists that something more than our subjectivity is involved here. But the problem lies in that there is no compelling underlying story, i.e., no metaphysics, to help us understand the significance of such experiences, and too often no ritual that works that would help us to honor and remember them. And so too often over time such experiences fade in experience and wane in the significance they should have in shaping our lives.

So the task in his book is to ask whether a metaphysics in a postmodern key can be extrapolated from such experiences . I think it can be. That was essentially the argument I was making in the Cathedral Talks. It's not about coming up with a new doctrine or argument, but rather, in following the great Romantic poets, it’s about enacting a shift in the way that we interpret our experience. This leads eventually to the development of a story that makes sense in a way that does not contradict what we know from science but at the same time offers explanations that are adequate to what these epiphanies demand. I think this happens all the time for individuals, but could it happen in a way that has broader, solidarity-building, cultural significance?

Here's how Taylor describes what he wants to do:

One of the threads I am trying to follow in this book is the evolution of the human longing for reconnection, first to cosmic orders, traditionally conceived, and later, to the order of Nature which modern science has helped define for us; along with this, I want to trace the media in which reconnection has been sought in literature, starting with the Romantic poetry of the nineteenth century, and turning toward hybrid forms of writing, informed by science.

All the while, spiritual traditions nourished by different visions of transcendence have been continued, modified, and added to. These two histories have been related in complex ways; but it would not help to lose sight of the difference between them. Hence the present note.

This is the more important for me because I nourish another perhaps impossible ambition: I would like to cast light on the continuities and differences between the different modes and conceptions of cosmic connection throughout human history, including the special forms that we find in early tribal religions, which are so hard to understand for those immersed in contemporary global civilization. (p. 190). 

After writing an important book about the disenchantment of the world, at the end of his life now, he's written one about how we might re-enchant it. 

***

See also my piece on Adam Gopnik’s review of Taylor’s book in The New Yorker here.

Also Matt Schmitz, the co-founder of Compact Magazine with Sohrab Ahmari, has a piece in the NY Times today about J.D. Vance and these pesky reactionary Catholics about whom I’ve been writing for a few weeks now. BTW, that’s what led me to start reading Julius Evola (1898-1974). He’s the guy who laid the philosophical foundation for these guys, and largely the inspiration for the revolution that they see themselves engaged in.