After the Future

Edsall on White Identity

In this morning’s NYT.  Key grafs:

In a 2005 paper, Cara Wong, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, and Grace E. Cho, a psychology professor at St. Olaf College, found that many whites identified with their race, but “white racial identity is not politically salient.”

Wong and Cho went on, however, to make what turned out to be a crucially important point: that since

white identity is indeed unstable but easily triggered, the danger is that a demagogue could influence the salience of these identities to promote negative outgroup attitudes, link racial identification more strongly to policy preferences, and exacerbate group conflict.

 

The rest of the article goes on to talk about how that’s exactly what happened during the Trump campaign, and continues now. It’s not about the extremists; it’s about ordinary folks who know Trump is an awful person, but who voted for him anyway because he’s the only one articulating their fears and resentments. This is what Bannon understands, and why he’s so gleeful when Liberals get sanctimonious about racial identity politics. He recognizes that it provokes these fears and resentments and pushes more and more of these people into the Trump white nationalist camp.

 

It’s hard for me to see how the Trump presidency survives into next year, but no matter how the establishment arranges for his removal, you can bet he’ll be seen as a martyred hero among these people. Getting rid of Trump does not solve the problem. A smarter Trump will come along who will take the monster he has let out of the cage and he might succeed in riding it where Trump appears so far to have failed. I don’t know who it will be, but there’s power there, and it’s too tempting for some bad actor not to find a way to channel it for his/her political ambitions.

 

The question is not whether White resentment is historically justified—that’s a rational question whose answer is irrelevant to people whose passions do not submit to rational critique.The question is what it will take to assuage the fears and resentments that fuel these political passions. 

 

In other words. what will it take to get this beast back in the cage? I don’t know that getting all huffy and condemning it is going to do the job. I wonder if the reconciliation process in South Africa after the fall of apartheid provides a model that should be considered. Something like that should have been done in the South during Reconstruction, but it wasn’t, so the old resentments still fester, and now are spreading to the upper Midwest and and elsewhere. The solution would require imagination and moral authority that is woefully missing from within our political class. 

Down The Breitbart Hole

From the NYT 'Magazine article "Down the Breitbart Hole", which profiles Breitbart's editor in chief Alex Marlow:

To the extent that there is a coherent ideology behind Breitbart, we’ve also done a crummy job of figuring out what it is. A good place to begin is with Andrew Breitbart, whose foundational philosophy is pretty thoroughly detailed in his autobiography, ‘‘Righteous Indignation.’’ A lot of the book is your run-of-the-mill memoir, with stories from his childhood in suburban California, but the conceptual core of the book comes in Chapter 6, in which he argues that America was permanently transformed by the arrival of a handful of German philosophers in the 1930s.

I won’t delve into all the twists and turns in this theory, but the underlying contention is that a few refugee intellectuals from the Frankfurt School — Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse — were lucky enough to escape the Nazis for sunny California, and being constitutionally incapable of happiness, promptly began complaining. Their grousing and moaning and general sourpuss disposition soon filtered into academia, Hollywood and the media, then into the upper echelons of American snobbery, a.k.a. the Democratic Party. So today you have, per Breitbart, a ‘‘Democrat-Media Complex’’ whose principal aim is to disparage everything quintessentially American, by which he really means Americana — think Norman Rockwell archetypes and whatever social conventions they imply. This is extraordinarily reactionary stuff, but not especially political in the sense of electioneering. Andrew Breitbart was never as interested in backing candidates as he was in attacking the media and entertainment industries for corroding American traditions. When people asked Breitbart why he wasn’t more involved in electoral politics, he liked to say that if you could reorient news and entertainment, the rest would follow. ‘‘Politics,’’ he often said, ‘‘is downstream from culture.’’

I think that Breitbart is right that politics is downstream from culture, and that politics is now largely a function of the tribal rifts that are currently rending American society. Norman Rockwell's was not everybody's America, but for a while it functioned to define a kind of center that shaped the American social imaginary. That social imaginary of America produced iconic TV shows in the fifties and early sixties like The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver, but also shows in the 2000s like The Gilmore Girls. The Gilmore Girls might be a little edgier, but it plays from that same basic archetype, and its popularity is linked to a nostalgic fantasy for the kind of American neighborliness and eccentric characters that are right out of Rockwell. The kind of thing that "real Americans" hate is the kind of proto-nihilism of Quentin Tarantino, or snarky, debunking of SNL or shows like 30 Rock.

The Rockwell archetype in GG to provides a kind of infrastructure that allows for a variety of different behaviors that would have been considered transgressive in the fifties and sixties, but it still defines a center that most middle Americans recognize and can feel comfortable with. My guess is that Breitbart would see The Gilmore Girls as norm-affirming rather than norm-destroying. What they resist is the attitude among cultural elites that debunks or mocks the role the Rockwell archetype has played in American society. That's why critical theory and the Frankfurt School is seen as the enemy. It has played, in the minds of people like Breitbart, this norm-destroying, debunking role that has infected higher education. So let's defund higher education. 

Every society goes through periods when the norms change, and it's disruptive and painful for many people to have to go through that. But no healthy society is set in amber, and this is really what the Breitbart fantasy will not accept. Nevertheless for people to accept something new, they have to understand how it's a net positive for them. And that's the problem, because for the people who are attracted to Breitbart, the changing of the norms in American society in the sixties and seventies feels like a zero sum game in which changes that benefit some people have come at a cost to them. And it's just human nature to resent that and the forces that effected that.To expect people who feel that they are paying this price not to resent it is patronizing and naive.

But an aggravating factor that came with the changes in he sixties and seventies was the debunking and de-legitimizing of institutions that might have helped people make the transition. The center disappeared, and people started migrating toward groups that were considered extreme when Norman Rockwell center prevailed. And now we have an American society where there are no clearly understood commonly shared norms that define the center, and the result is the fiasco we see unfolding before us in the White House. 

All the French nonsense of about how all metanarratives are illegitimate is counterproductive. There has to be a legitimating narrative, but it has to work for most people. The Norman Rockwell narrative didn't do that, and it can't do that now. A new narrative that defines the center has to be developed, or, I would argue, our open, democratic society will not survive. If the cultural Left doesn't accept the possibility of a grand narrative that works for the whole country rather than just for the top twenty percent, the people at Breitbart and elsewhere will develop a narrative for the bottom eighty percent that will win by default. 

This is importatnt to understand, because the next several decades are going to be a fight to determine who defines the central, norm-defining American narrative. The idea that we should celebrate diversity is important but secondary to defining some kind of basic norms that everybody agrees on, because we are now witnessing what happens when there are no norms that define a center that everybody agrees are 'normative'.

Oprah for president in '20? She probably comes the closest to anyone I can think of who defines a possible American healing center. She's not qualified, clearly, but if Trump, Bush 2, and Reagan have proved anything, being qualified is not as important as symbolizing something that Americans feel comfortable with. 

Outrage Begets Outrage

And on and on it goes. Anytime one side sees itself as unambiguously on the side of light and righteousness, it calls up something dark and unrighteous. It's not in the people that the outrage is directed toward, but rather in the social system that binds the two in a kind of dyad. 

From the NYT this morning: 

From Ms. Hicks’s perspective, the president simply pointed out a fact: Leftists bore some responsibility for the violence, too. Of course, Nazis and white supremacists are bad, she said. But she does not believe Mr. Trump has any affinity for them. He said so himself. But she is exasperated that a significant part of the country seems to think otherwise. The week’s frenzied headlines read to her like bulletins from another planet.

“I feel like I am in a bizarro universe where no one but me is thinking logically,” she said. “We have gone so off the rails of what this conversation is about.”

Ms. Hicks, who is black and grew up in Charlotte, N.C., welcomes the public soul-searching on the meaning of Confederate monuments. She believes that the statues were erected to intimidate black people and that they should be taken down. But instead of focusing on that, she sees opponents of Mr. Trump focusing on Mr. Trump.

“This is not about me as a black person, and my history,” she said. “This is about this president and wanting to take him down because you don’t like him.”

Mr. Bannon’s departure was more noise that didn’t mean much, she said. “The show is going to go on.”

Much of what powers the love for Mr. Trump among his core supporters is his boxer’s approach to the political class in Washington and to the news media, a group that in their eyes has approached them with a double standard and a sneering sense of superiority for years.

Larry Laughlin, a retired businessman from a Minneapolis suburb, compares Mr. Trump to a high school senior who could “walk up to the table with the jocks and the cheerleaders and put them in their place.” That is something that the “nerds and the losers, whose dads are unemployed and moms are working in the cafeteria,” could never do. Mr. Trump may be rich, he said, but actually belonged at the nerd table. 

“The guys who wouldn’t like me wouldn’t like Trump,” he said. “The guys who were condescending to him were condescending to me.

“I feel like I’m watching my uncle up there. Where me and Chuck Schumer — that’s like going to the dentist,” he added, referring to the Democratic leader in the Senate.

Gregory Kline, 46, a lawyer in Severna Park, Md., who is a Republican, said he did not vote for Mr. Trump but understands that part of the president’s support comes from fury at the left, particularly the media. When there is an attack by Muslim terrorists, for example, the media reaches for pundits who say most Muslims are good. But when it is a white supremacist, “every conservative is lumped in with him,” he said.

The whole article is worth reading.

Look, I think that Trump is crazy and unfit to be president. I hope someone figures a way to get him out by the end of the year. The country (and the world) cannot live another four years with this kind of chaos and instability. But I see his presidency as an extreme symptom of what is really sick in the country right now, and Liberals are delusional if they think they are uninfected. The symptoms just manifest differently in them.

If you want to know whether or not you're infected, that anger and resentment you feel when you get morally outraged--that's it, that's the sickness. It's there in all of us, even if only in remission. And it flares up to the degree that you find your anger so intense that you can only see the people who have provoked this anger as morally inferior to you--yes, even Neo-Nazis. I know this from my own experience because I struggle with it every day. I'm sure you could find many posts on this blog where its symptoms are quite evident.

There is no side in any conflict where the bad are unambiguously bad and the good unambiguously good. Nazi Germany cannot be blamed only on the Germans; its blame should be lain on a sickness that infected all of Europe, with an etiology that can be trace back to late 19th century imperialism and nationalism and beyond, but flared into a virulent manifestation in WWI. And then rather than finding a way to heal after it, Britain and France let the disease get hold of them at Versailles, and the infection deepened, and then erupted again with an unprecedented virulence in Germany that contaminated the whole world. 

When these symptoms break out, they must be contained. Virulent race hatred and white resentment must be contained by people who are level headed and relatively sane. But moral outrage is not an effective containment strategy; it just makes things worse. It just fights the crazy with more crazy. 

HyperNormalisation: Fake Truth and Political Reality

In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it's indefinable.— Peter Pomerantsev, in "Putin's Rasputin", London Review of Books, October 2011

But none of the liberals could possibly imagine that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination. But underneath the liberal disdain, both Donald Trump in America, and Vladislav Surkov in Russia had realised the same thing--that the version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable, that the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense. And in the face of that, you could play with reality, constantly shifting and changing, and in the process, further undermine and weaken the old forms of power. --Adam Curtis, HyperNormalisation

If you haven't seen Adam Curtis's most recent documentary, HyperNormalisation, it's available on YouTube here. It's a must if you want to understand the big picture about what's happening to us. It came out in October 2016 perfectly timed to an event that its underlying argument predicts. Take notes as you watch it because there's a lot there, and his argument can get lost in all the details. It's long (2.5 hours) and complex, but it's very well put together.

Curtis is arguing that since the 1970s developments in both the West and the Middle East have crossed a line so that things are no longer manageable by politics, if by politics we mean governments enacting policies that are in any real way responsive to and accountable to the people they govern. Instead we have is politicians who essentially know that they can only implement the policies that favor the interests of a power elite who operate mostly offstage. Politicians find that they are limited to preserving some level of stability by using various methods of "perception management". Politicians enact various political dramas that keep the media and the rest of us distracted, and the power elite do what they want out of sight.

And stability correlates with the so-called Washington Consensus, which is by and large shaped by the financial sector and its Neoliberal ideology. Neoliberal theory supports this diminution of politics by essentially telling us that there is no longer any such thing as a 'citizen'; there is only the  'consumer'. The citizen has no agency; the consumer can at least vote with his pocketbook. Freedom equals the freedom to buy a Ford or a Toyota, to get health insurance or not, and any idea of freedom as the capacity for citizens to shape a better, more equitable society through the political process is dismissed as incoherent, left-wing nonsense. Don't worry about what's going on in Iraq, folks--just go shopping. This leaves the field open to the power elites to do as they please out of sight and unaccountable.

This has been going on for years now, but it seems to be moving to a whole other level with the ascension of Trump and Bannon. It' s not clear to me yet whether they are complicit with the power elite, or whether they are being played by the power elite. For in the short run it looks like the power elite is just fine with what Trump is doing because all the chaos that he's creating just gives them a smokescreen behind which they can maneuver without anyone noticing.

Before Trump's election the attempts some "citizens" made to reassert some control through politics have failed, the most famous being the Arab Spring in the Middle East and Occupy Wall Street here in the U.S. Both failed because they were about "process" and not about actually imagining a positive future society and developing a concrete plan to realize it. Naive thinking in both camps assumed that if the process is virtuous, a virtuous society will arise spontaneously from it.

But the chaos that such "process" revolutions produce creates power vacuums that allow groups to move in who are clear about what they want. The military is stronger in Egypt than it was before the goings on in Tahrir Square, and does anyone think that Wall Street is less powerful after OWS? More powerful is more like it. Saying No to the bad guy isn't enough unless you have a Good guy who is ready to move in and consolidate power for the benefit of the broader common good. As long as there is no unifying consensus about what that broader common good is, the bad guys win by default.

Curtis argues that chaos and confusion are tools that work in entrenched power's favor. Who is benefitting from Trump's election most now? The economically stressed heartlanders who elected him? Of course not. Look at the billionaires and Wall Street types he's put in his cabinet. Where are the interests of heartland Americans represented in those appointments? The GOP establishment might have preferred someone who was less of a loose cannon, but they are nevertheless in a better position to take advantage of the disruptions that Trump/Bannon will create.

The model here is one already developed in Putin's Russia. From the Script of HyperNormalisation around the 2 hour, 17 minute mark:

But in Russia, there was a group of men who had seen how this very lack of belief in politics, and dark uncertainty about the  future could work to their advantage. What they had done was turn politics into a strange theatre where nobody knew what was true or what was fake any longer. They were called political technologists and they were the key figures behind President Putin. They had kept him in power, unchallenged, for 15 years. Some of them had been dissidents back in the 1970s and had been powerfully influenced by the science fiction writings of the Strugatsky brothers. Twenty years later, when Russia fell apart after the end of communism, they rose up and took control of the media. And they used it to manipulate the electorate on a vast scale. For them, reality was just something that could be manipulated and shaped into anything you wanted it to be.

But then a technologist emerged who went much further. And his ideas would become central to Putin's grip on power. He was called Vladislav Surkov. Surkov came originally from the theatre world and those who have studied his career say that what he did was take avant-garde ideas from the theatre and bring them into the heart of politics. Surkov's aim was not just to manipulate people but to go deeper and play with, and undermine their very perception of the world so they are never sure what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theatre. He used Kremlin money to sponsor all kinds of groups--from mass anti-fascist youth organisations, to the very opposite--neo-Nazi skinheads. And liberal human rights groups who then attacked the government. Surkov even backed whole political parties that were opposed to President Putin. But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing. Which meant that no-one was sure what was real or what was fake in modern Russia. As one journalist put it, "It's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition "constantly confused"--a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable "because it is indefinable."

Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere--hidden away behind the stage, exercised without anyone seeing it. And then the same thing seemed to start happening in the West. By now it was becoming ever more clear that the system had deep flaws. Every month there were new revelations, of most of the banks' involvement in global corruption, of massive tax avoidance by all the major corporations, of the secret surveillance of everyone's e-mails by the National Security Agency. Yet no-one was prosecuted, except for a few people at the lowest levels. And behind it all, the massive inequality kept on growing. Yet the structure of power remained the same. Nothing ever changed, because nothing could be allowed to destabilise the system. But then the shape-shifting began.

The shape shifting is a theatrical illusion. The underlying stability of the backstage Neoliberal power structure remains constant. That is, as I understand it, Curtis's argument. Whether there is a direct parallel between what's happening in Russia and what's happening in the U.S. right now, I don't know. Nobody does because confusion is the basic program. But Bannon quite possibly is playing for Trump the role that Surkov is playing for Putin.

It's something to pay attention to as we go forward. But here's the larger point. If there is no organized, motivated, clear-sighted opposition with a clear vision of a humane, realizable political future, the bad guys win. The OWS and Arab Spring models don't work; they play into the chaos narrative that benefits entrenched power.

It's too early to tell whether the kind of opposition that has arisen in response to Trump's executive orders in the last two weeks can be sustained and disciplined. I don't know what's going to happen. But my guess is that it's motivated mostly by saying No, and that motivation diminishes as soon as there's a win. But then something new will emerge to which the opposition must say No, and then something else, and on and on until the opposition becomes exhausted playing this kind of wack-a-mole. This is a losing game unless some positive alternative can be presented and around which a plurality of Americans can unite. Until it does Trump's undermining of the old politics of accountability becomes the new hyper normal.

(First posted in 2/17)

Understanding Breitbart

If we're going to fight the political Right effectively, you need to understand it. It's not a monolith. Most Liberals stereotype Breitbart as a platform for populist demagoguery. It is party that, but it cannot be dismissed so easily as only that. It's certainly not how they see themselves. This New York Time profile of Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow breaks the stereotype, and so does this very interesting interview by MSNBC host Ali Velshi with editor at large Joel Pollack: 

 

Bannon Out, Allies with Mercers to go to War

 

According to Axios.

We'll see how this plays out, but it looks like Bannon will not go quietly as Priebus and Scaramucci did. 

A look at the Breitbart website this afternoon makes it appear that the bond between it and Bannon is as strong as ever:

This article about Ann Coulter's tweets points to the reason why Trump kept Bannon on. To fire him would be to give the Beltway elites the scalp that they demanded, and in doing so to alienate him from the most energetic element that make up his bas

It looks like this is another win for John Kelly, but this is a pretty fluid, dynamic situation.  And it looks like now that Bannon is gone, the establishment types pretty much have isolated Trump in the building, but what about his phone lines?  

Any sane person, and I believe Kelly, as conservative as he might be, is sane, knows how dangerous a loose cannon Trump is, and if I were Kelly, I would think that the only hope for the survival of the  Trump presidency is essentially to contain him, and hope that some kind of governing structure can be developed with Trump's having minimum impact on it.

This could work because Trump doesn't seem to have real any interest in governing, but it's not likely to succeed because Trump really is crazy,  and it's more likely that more stories are going to come out about Trump's stability, which will lead eventually to his removal by the 25th Amendment if all else fails. I don't know what the timing will be; it might have to wait for indictments to come down from the Mueller probe, but I don't see how Trump survives. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elites vs. Bannon/Trump

If Bannon goes, then the elites will have won. If he stays, then it will be interesting to see if Kelly and others stay. It might come down to some variation on some key establishment type saying either Bannon  leaves, or I do.

If Bannon stays, it will be because Trump realizes that he cannot sever his relationship from his base of aggrieved whites who elected him. Trump fears, rightly, that if Bannon goes then he, Trump, will be perceived as having caved to the Washington establishment elite and pressure form its media. And he has no desire to ingratiate himself to either. And Trump has got to be thinking that you stay at the dance with him who brought you, and that more than anybody else is Bannon and the white nationalist constituency Bannon represents. If Trump loses the white nationalist base, he will be complete isolated.

Nevertheless, the pressure might just be too great to keep Bannon on. I think Trump will resist the pressure to get rid of Bannon as long as he can, but it's hard to see how much longer he can do it. The best solution for Trump would be if Bannon would realize that his role in the administration is hurting more than it's helping his cause, and so then volunteers to leave with the promise to keep supporting Trump through Breitbart, assuming he still will have influence there. I'm sure that when Trump says "We'll see what happens" regarding Bannon it's a signal that he hoping that Bannon will voluntarily resign. Trump fears being perceived as the guy who forced him out. So a lot depends on whether Bannon is going to dig in for the long run, or retreat to fight another day. 

In the somewhat longer run, I don't know that it matters. It's just hard to imagine that this presidency can survive much longer, regardless whether Bannon stays or goes. There are larger forces at work here that make a sustainable Trump presidency unlikely. And the more embattled Trump feels, the more likely he will be to hold on to Bannon who is a street fighter like him. The establishment, sooner or later, is going to win one way or the other. Trump is just too deeply a flawed person to prevail. And while an establishment win will restore stability in the short run, the establishment will do little to ameliorate the actual underlying causes of populist rage that will continue to destabilize American society and politics. 

 

Some Thoughts on the Events in Charlottesville

On the morning of the Charlottesville riot Saturday, I just finished reading Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the American Presidency, by Josh Green. It’s essential reading if you want to understand the crossroads we’re at in this moment of our history. If you think the influence of the Right wing on this country is a temporary aberration and is mostly about old people who are aging out and will be replaced by liberal millennials, you really don’t understand what’s going on, and reading this book will help you to understand. Steve Bannon is intelligent and he's a little crazy, but he understands the energy that's in the crazy. 

I think that Liberals don’t understand how powerful Liberal Hatred is, and they better understand the causes of it if there is even the remotest chance of arresting increasing right-wing extremism. Liberals can understand why people might disagree with them. Some can understand why some people find Liberal sanctimony annoying. But does that make them hateful? That seems incomprehensible to them. Most liberals just want to live and let live. Why is there such hateful intensity directed toward them for having such an easy-going attitude?

Bannon is a Liberal Hater, and he is an aficionado of white identity politics. For him that means asserting a traditionalist Christian definition of white identity against its enemies. For Bannon the threat to that identity comes from two primary camps--cosmopolitan elites and radical Islam, but by extension his enemy is anybody who seeks to diminish what he feels is essential for the survival of his vision for America.

Bannon's hatred for Liberals, and the hatred that the alt right has for Liberals, can be understood only if you see it as they experience it, which is as a noble, romantic fantasy. And noble fantasies like this are very attractive to people, especially young people, who are in groups who feel anxious, aggrieved, and marginalized by the tradition-destroying forces of Western Liberalism. So, similarly, the Muslim kids who are secretly leaving their families for Syria to join ISIS are not at first motivated by hate, even if they become vicious haters later. They are romantics who long for an identity-affirming sense of purpose to their lives by fighting for their "noble cause".  

There is nothing more identity affirming than to have an enemy and to go on a romantic crusade against it. Attack, Attack, Attack. That’s Bannon’s mantra—and Trumps’s—and it’s a mantra that invigorates and takes all the fear and anxiety one is feeling and channels them into a noble project. You must believe that your enemy seeks your destruction, even if it doesn't, because if it didn’t then not enough would be at stake, and it wouldn’t have the drama a true. romantic crusade requires. Demonization of the enemy follows from this.

Not seeing the enemy in these terms would require instead dealing with complexity. In other words it would require boring politics as usual, and Bannon is the enemy of boring politics as usual. So boring, process-oriented Liberals are more interesting as more easily demonize when they are depicted as aggressive enemies, and so their worst characteristics are exaggerated by people like Bannon--and the whole right-wing media--to justify their crusade. I think this is a key to understanding why the Right demonizes what any objective person sees in Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, which is two rather boring, formulaic, clueless, banal, and often feckless Liberals. (Half a cheer for a "better deal". That's a mantra that will galvanize the masses at this critical moment in our history.)

I'm not trying to justify right-wing violent extremism; I'm trying to understand why especially young people are attracted to it. It's easy to condemn extremism--and it must be condemned--but it's harder to understand its underlying causes. Nevertheless, unless an we make the effort to understand those causes, I fear the country will continue to separate out into factions not unlike those that faced off in the Civil War.  And, while it matters who was right and who was wrong on the issues--clearly the South was wrong, and clearly the central issue was slavery--there's something horribly wrong when things get to the point where the only way to settle things is to send 600,000 men to their deaths. Was it worth it considering that it took another hundred years for black Americans to get any real rights in this country? Was it worth it if we still have huge swaths of the the South who still live in a kind of bitter resentment of the LIberal machine that defeated them and who seek in every way possible to thwart and subvert it?

We have to find a way of preventing this kind of extreme factionalism from spinning out of control now as it did then. That means preventing things from polarizing to such an extent that people find that they have to choose sides. There are a lot of people who reluctantly chose Trump last year because they could not bring themselves to choose a Liberal icon. Liberals are foolish if they assume that in the long run most people, even most young people, will choose their side. Many Liberals are living in their own delusional, self-ennobling fantasy. 

I'm not concerned about understanding the psychology of the vicious psychopaths who rise to leadership in organizations like ISIS or the Neo Nazi organizations that planned the events in Charlottesville. I'm trying to understand why so many young people are attracted to these organizations, and why I fear this trend will become worse. Just condemning and shaming participation in these organizations is not enough, and it is counterproductive if  it just fuels the polarization. This is exactly what Bannon hopes for. We need to understand the social forces that are creating the conditions for the growth of these movements, and we need to understand how the smug cluelessness of many establishment Liberals plays a significant role in making things worse. 

White Natonalists in Charlottesville were chanting “You will not replace us. You will not replace us”. What does that even mean? But clearly this chant expresses their deepest fear, which is extinction. Is this paranoid? Yes, but this feeling of being under siege is very like the one that motivates Muslim kids to join ISIS. There are a lot of traditionalist conservatives who would never adopt these extremist views and behaviors, but they do not see Liberals as easy-going live-and-let live types. They see Liberals as having a very aggressive agenda to eliminate their traditionalist way of life.

Liberals don’t understand the sense of deep threat that traditionalists feel, and it’s no longer productive to dismiss those feelings as illegitimate. People feel what they feel, and when huge numbers of people feel the same way and get organized around those feelings, very bad things will happen. And so there has to be some attempt to understand it empathically. Progressives who understand the history of the Middle East have less trouble understanding the motivations of Muslims extremists. They understand that you would be paranoid too if your society was invaded and abused the way theirs was at the hands of Western Liberal imperialists. You’d be paranoid and outraged if people with a completely alien worldview came into your society and started changing the rules in ways that you were taught growing up are an abomination. Well something similar is going on with so many Americans who feel that Liberalism is changing the rules in America. 

Conservatives, not just alt-right extremists, experience liberal sanctimony and its politically correct code as a form of aggressive contempt for them and their values, and they believe that Liberals are not just people with whom they disagree, but people who are an existential threat to themselves and everything that they hold dear. Most Liberals I know would say,  “Really? That’s not what I want. Conservatives can do or say what they want so long as they don’t make me do it. We Liberals don’t impose our values on them. Why should they think they can impose theirs on us?”

But conservatives believe that’s disingenuous. They believe that Liberals have sought to do everything they can to eliminate their values and customs. They are right and wrong in thinking so. They are wrong insofar as they think that this is something the Liberals consciously intend; they are right insofar as Liberalism as an ideology has been hostile to traditional values and customs. For the last three hundred years the Enlightenment rationalist project has sought to debunk the traditional beliefs and customs as irrational and regressive. Liberals essentially saw tradition as the chief impediment to the realization of the Liberal progress fantasy. If custom could just be replaced by reason, Utopia would be achievable.

But even more powerful in its destructive effects on tradition and customary culture has been the force that Liberal ideology unleashed on the world, which is free-market capitalism. There is no force in the history of the world that has been more destructive of traditional values and customary ways of life. Liberals are simply people who are comfortable with the world that free-market capitalism and Enlightenment rationality produced, especially if they are among the better educated and affluent that have benefitted most from it.

The situation of Muslims is not unlike that of American Indians when faced with 19^th–Europeans who were classical Liberals. These Liberals were able to put the American Indian on reservations, and many would like to do the same to Muslims. Ask Sam Harris and Bill Maher who are classic Liberals in this sense. Most decent Americans feel ashamed about what our ancestors did to the American Indian. And future generations I hope will feel equally ashamed about what Europeans and Americans did to Muslim societies.

But what happened to the American Indian, to Muslim societies in the Middle East, and to traditional communities here in the U.S. follows inevitably from the creative-destructive logic of Western Liberalism: Change, innovation, growth are all that matter. When traditions and customary ways of life get in the way, they will be destroyed. Resistance is futile. Either get on the bus or get run over by it.  Well Geronimo, bin Laden, and Robert E. Lee had one thing in common. They all chose to resist the great Liberal machine. This was their ennobling fantasy and Liberals are deluded to the degree that they demonize the resisters and to the degree that they see their own cause as unambiguously morally superior.

That there is no moral equivalency between white nationalists and those who oppose them is both right and wrong. It is right in the sense that at this historical moment the kind of psychopathy that leads so many people into these extreme hate groups must be called what it is, a hateful psychopathy. It is wrong in the sense that Liberalism as an historical cultural force is perceived as having had no role in producing the psychopathy. 

We romanticize the great Native American freedom fighters Geronimo, Chief Joseph, and Sitting Bull for their resistance to the Liberal expansionist machine, but they were considered terrorists by most 19^th Century Americans. Most Americans then didn’t sympathize with the plight of Native Americans or even remotely or condemn the near genocidal policies of Americans toward them, and they don’t now understand or sympathize with how modern Liberal/capitalist forces have impacted Muslim societies, either. But when we have some distance from it, we can understand how the psychopathy of violent extremism becomes an option when any group feels that it is facing an asymmetrically powerful enemy that seeks its destruction. I'm Irish enough that in my younger days I felt some sympathy for the IRA and could rationalize its psychopathic tactics.

One man's psychopath is another's hero. But does anybody who knows anything about the cruel history of English treatment of the Irish dating back to Cromwell believe that the English had no role in producing the violent resistance against it? Is it so hard to understand how any strategy or tactic, no matter how reprehensible, is justified in the thinking of the perpetrator because there are no rules when one is fighting for one’s life. The hard thing to do is to see how this survival mentality is what shapes the psychology and thinking of so many white nationalists. We're too close to it to see the similarities; we're too sympathetic to the abuses suffered by African Americans, who even now are abused by this kind of thinking. But from 3000 feet up, it's not so hard to see the basic pattern is the same. It's about resistance to the ineluctable Liberal machine. 

Now there’s an historic irony in that the White Americans who are the inheritors of these annihilating attitudes toward Black and Native Americans and who now have similarly hateful attitudes toward Muslims, Mexicans, and other non-whites, feel that their survival is now in question. I'm sure there are many morally outraged Liberals who even wish for their annihilation. But the point is that the moral outrage just feeds the sick system and perpetuates it. It's the kind of thing that leads to 600,000 dead. It's crazy on both sides because without one the other would not have fuel enough to keeps its outrage burning.

That's what Steve Bannon and Donald Trump understand that the talking heads on TV don't. They want to feed the Liberal outrage because they know it's something that can work in their favor. And Liberal moral outrage is something they believe they can work to their advantage in the long run. I'm not sure they are right about that, and certainly I don't think that either of them is competent to effectively work these energies to their advantage, but this isn't over even if they fail. There is enormous energy born of fear of survival and identity loss that they are tapping into, and if the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party doesn't figure out a way to channel those energies in a constructive way, these energies will be coopted by the Right by default. If not by Bannon and Trump, then by someone else. 

So here's the problem as I see it if Liberal Democrats don't get a clue. Violent, heavily armed, identity-constituting gangs using terrorist tactics will be our future because there is no vital center in American society. Certainly Liberalism does not define it, and it never will because it is largely a spent historical cultural force. So we have a society in which everybody is out for himself. That's what the Neoliberal ethos embraced by the global Liberal elite has fostered in the developed world, but to a more extreme degree in the U.S.

And so all kinds of young people, no matter what their race or ethnicity, as they increasingly come to feel that the larger society is hostile or indifferent toward them, will become the domestic terrorists of the future. People like Milo Yiannopolis are showing these kids that it can be very hip, and edgy to be right wing. The infrastructure for a fascistic politics is already laid out in the gangs and drug cartels. They can be politicized, and where it's possible for them, they will infiltrate governments as they did in American cities and state governments in the twenties and thirties. For this reason, in twenty years we might look a lot more like the gangster-run Russia or some other authoritarian kleptocracy.  

Free-market capitalism is sowing the seeds that will destroy what we now cherish as an open society governed by the rule of law, i.e., what we understand to be the best thing about the Liberal society.  But this destruction will not be effected in the way Marx predicted it. In America no galvanizing a workers' movement on the Left is likely to emerge. It's more likely that the current Neoliberal ethos embraced by American and other global elites will generate tribal militias who will destroy Liberal society from the Right. Trump is the first of many thugs like him to come. 

That’s why conservatives, whom normally we think of as stuffy types who honor norms and traditions, no longer have a party. It's certainly not the GOP. It has become a force for destroying all norms and traditions in the political sphere. The Republican Party now has more the structure of a gang or cult. Its leaders don’t care about solving problems, they only seek to rig things and break any norm or law they can get away with if doing so will enable them to dominate the system. For some, its leaders, it's pure will to power, but their power base is nourished by the fear of white traditionalist group extinction and the need of these fearful people to align with the strong man who will protect them.

This is why Liberals lose time and time again in the political sphere. They think they are having a reasonable debate about ideas and practical solutions, about what works or doesn’t to solve real problems, and they don’t understand that they are in a knife fight with people who don’t care about solving problems but only about destroying you before you destroy them.

(Revised for clarity and to improve thematic emphasis 8/18)

Kelly and the 25th Amendment

Everybody is asking whether Kelly will be able to control Trump, and the answer is simply that he won't be able to do so, at least not over the long haul. It's abundantly clear that Trump is mentally unfit. He's Caligula in a suit. and it's hard for me to believe that a guy like Kelly has any genuine admiration or respect for the man.

And so it occurred to me when he was announced as chief of staff that he could be a pivotal player if it ever comes to a point, and I think it will, when the grownups decide that Trump has to go. It wouldn't surprise me if we learn some day that Kelly took the job with the encouragement of many D.C. insiders, especially people in the defense and intelligence communities, to be in a position to play this role when the time time comes. Impeachment is a possibility, but it might be more likely that the cabinet, whose members see him up close and personal will come to a point where they just see his mental instability as a threat to the country, but they need a tough guy to take the lead in organizing them to invoke Constitutional Amendment 25, section 4. Pence and the others will go along because he and they are tools and will do as they are told if it's a guy like Kelly who is giving the orders.