After the Future

Ontological Dizziness and Fear of the Future

Their portrayal of what the country would look like if the Democrats win big in November is indeed a frightening one to Trump supporters: a White House with Senator Bernie Sanders as the shadow socialist president; a Democratic House of Representatives where Representative Ilhan Omar calls the shots; a society in which mask mandates are the first step in a government experiment with social control; a political arena where conservatives are badgered into silence....

“There are a lot of conservatives reading ‘1984’ right now,” said Allie Beth Stuckey, who hosts a podcast, “Relatable” and is the author of a forthcoming book on self-esteem, “You’re Not Enough (And That’s OK).” ...

“There’s fear. It’s real fear. And I understand if you’re not a conservative it’s hard to be empathetic and it seems like an exaggeration,” Ms. Stuckey said. “But like the same kind of fear on the left that Trump is a unique threat to the country, there’s a real fear on the right, especially I would say from Christians, of what the country would look like under a Democratic president.” (Source)

I have some friends and family who feel this way, and It has simply become something we cannot talk about. I have come to understand it as a symptom of ontological dizziness. People suffer this malady when they experience the values and meaning foundation beneath their feet shaking so violently that they feel the need to grasp anything that might steady them, even a crackpot, wannabe authoritarian like Donald Trump. If I try to gently suggest that as good Christians they should have more faith and hope, that they should find the kingdom within rather than in cultural forms that have outlived their usefulness, they think I just don't get it. They see me as someone who has defected to the other side, as someone who does not understand that we're facing Armageddon, that Liberals want to erase them, to destroy everything they hold sacred. And I see them as I'd see a friend or family member who just moved to Jonestown, but with even greater alarm because they want to move the whole country to Jonestown with them.

They don't seem to understand that their fear of (or is it a suppressed desire for?) Armageddon is exactly what is bringing it on, that they are projecting onto Liberals a kind of malice that just isn't there in the way they fear it is. Their fear that Liberals want to erase them leads them to an irrational compulsion to take control of power by any means necessary to prevent it. That they are destroying what's left of our democracy is not as important as their felt need to save themselves. Better to live in a prison that follows rules that feel safe and familiar than to live in a society in which a frightening level of existential freedom is a possibility. Conservatives talk all the time about preserving their liberty, but it is precisely fear of real freedom that leads them to illiberality.

Does ontological dizziness affect Liberals? Yes, of course. Much of cosmopolitan identity politics and so-called cancel culture is a symptom of the underlying identity fragility that is the root cause of ontological dizziness. But it isn't as widespread or intense, and it isn't threatening to move us all to Jonestown. Could it get worse for Liberals? Yes, especially if things stay on the current track. Liberals until recently have had a hard time understanding the intensity of the terror that Conservatives feel. I say 'until recently' because the prospect of Trump winning another four years terrified Liberals in a way they had not experienced before, and if he had won, the Liberals would be feeling their foundations quaking as Conservatives have been feeling it. So I think it's fair to say that more severe symptoms of ontological dizziness are in all our futures--Conservatives and Liberals alike--to the degree that we primarily depend on external sources of authority to provide some personal sense of stability and peace. 

I've come to understand what's going on here as the same basic social psychology that drove the ante-bellum South to keep pushing for more and more control of national politics by any means necessary. Although Southerners feared that the North wanted to destroy them, the truth was that most Yankees, with the exception of few abolitionists, were willing to leave them alone. But the South kept pushing and pushing for more control, not just within the south, but throughout the entire country. The Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision were bridges too far.

Northerners correctly saw this as the Slave Power wanting to dominate the rest of the country with their politics and social institutions. Even if Southerners justified to themselves that they only wanted to preserve their own freedom, they felt that they could achieve that only by dominating the North. It was eat or be eaten. In a paranoidal society in which white people felt that black people would cut their throats if given the chance, they assumed that Northerners would do it as well.

So the same kind of control exerted in the South had to be extended to control the North. They had to make the entire country into a slave state. If the founders believed that slavery was an evil that would eventually fade away, the Southerners later came to believe that it was a good that had to be imposed from south to north and east to west. And so in their compulsive, incessant, paranoia-driven pushing, they finally poked the hornets' nest one time too many, and the North became the enemy it didn't want to be.

The psychology if not the circumstances are similar today. People who feel culturally insecure, the ontologically dizzy who feel that their society has fragile foundations, feel a desperate need to reinforce them by any means necessary. That the fragility of their foundations might be caused by their being out of alignment with reality is simply an idea that they cannot entertain. To do so would risk the complete shattering of what already feels so fragile, and the dread of what lies on the other side of that is too much to bear. That there is the possibility for people with so little self knowledge to find the true foundation of their being within themselves is too theoretical, too abstract to assuage the existential terror that they feel. If the Churches had any real sense of their deepest mission, they would find a way to ease a broader transition from such collective delusion to reality, but except in some rare instances, they reinforce the delusion and fear rather than help those who experience it so intensely to work through it. 

The sufferers of ontological dizziness can find real peace only if they allow the little, fragile world in which they live to shatter, which is a prerequisite for entering into richer, freer, larger world. But their terror prevents them from choosing it. It's like the fear so many long-term prisoners experience about having to live as a free person outside--in the Real World, a world they have no familiarity with. If it's to happen at all, they need an intervention. It must be forced on them from without, and while that would bring relief if they would let it, the fear is greater than the hope of something better. But they cannot believe in a better future, and resistance to it becomes in their minds a noble cause. They see themselves as defending their liberty, i.e., their traditional way of life, even if at the same time they have abdicated their freedom by choosing to live in a prison structured by delusional, cultish groupthink. 

In the 1850s their noble cause was to resist the Yankees and the abolitionists. in the 2010s, it's about resisting Liberals and anarchists who want to defund the police. I'm not arguing here that the abolitionists or those advocating radical police reform are wrong. I'm only saying that Lincoln and Biden and most of their supporters were not the extremists that their political opponents saw or see them to be. In the 1850s, most Yankees were not abolitionists, and in 2010s, most Liberals don't want to defund the police. But when you are in a state of existential terror brought on by a severe case of ontological dizziness, you project your deepest fears onto your political opponents. They are no longer people who have different opinions and are willing to work things out; they are people who want to destroy you and everything you hold sacred.

But they really don't--the typical Liberal just doesn't care that much. Conservatives suffering from ontological dizziness mistake indifference for malice. Liberals are willing to let conservatives do or believe whatever they want, so long as they don't impose it on them. But like the ante-bellum southerners, movement conservatives can't let well enough alone. It's one thing to argue their case for infringements on their religious liberty here and there that Liberals should take more seriously, but it's another thing to demand, as Christian Nationalists do, that the whole country should be subjected to some sharia-like biblical rule.

Like the ante-bellum Southerners, such Christians believe they have to control the entire system to insure that their otherwise fragile world founded in delusion not be toppled by outside forces, i.e., the forces of Reality. Their enemy is Reality, not Liberalism, but since Reality has become for them associated with Liberalism, they must resist Reality. This accounts for the truly bizarre behavior we are all witnessing in Red America--the fervid embrace of denialism regarding the Coronavirus, the fervid embrace of an authoritarian madman, the fervid embrace of any crackpot nonsense they pick up in conservative media that reinforces and thickens the walls of their self-constructed prison. 

But now the question is whether the nation as a whole can recover from the damage this ontological dizziness pandemic has caused. It's hard to see how the country can be governed if half of it sees the other half as crazy and that half sees the other as evil. There's no longer any point to arguing  about who's right or wrong; it's simply a matter of raw power now, and that means that American democracy as we've known it can no longer survive. Because when one half is in power, it will be seen as illegitimate by the other, and no form of government can survive for long such a profound legitimacy crisis.

I've been writing that this was where we were headed since the Bush years. Some readers here thought I was exaggerating and overly alarmist. That I was demonizing conservatives. And I have tried to clarify that I'm not judging individuals so much as I'm diagnosing a pathological mindset that has captured them. The collective delusion--the pathological mindset--that led to the invasion of Iraq and the the financial crisis of 2007/8 captured leaders of both parties. But only the Democrats have shown some capability to adjust to the lessons Reality was trying to teach us through those disasters. If anything the Republicans have just dug deeper into their un-Reality bunker.

It remains to be seen whether it's too late to find a way to recover, but, as suggested in my repost yesterday, the solution requires the emergence of an inspiring archetype. It can happen, but how and when I have no idea. 

Fear of the Future

The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence so terrifying that it’s often easier not to think about it at all.

But it’s not just climate change. In his forthcoming book, “The Decadent Society,” my colleague Ross Douthat mourns the death of the “technological sublime,” writing that our era “for all its digital wonders has lost the experience of awe-inspiring technological progress that prior modern generations came to take for granted.” This is true, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Our problem is not just that new technologies regularly fail to thrill. It’s that, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering to mass surveillance, they are frequently sources of horror.   --Michelle Goldberg

Our fears make us stupid, and it's our stupidity that makes our fears become unintentionally, i.e., stupidly, self-fulfilling prophecies. 

Is there a fearless way to think about or imagine the future at this time? It's more difficult because we seem to be in a fear-energized death spiral where common sense solutions seem impossible to come by. But if we are to find another way, I think we have to develop a positive, transformative understanding of what the nature and destiny of humanity is, and our understanding must transcend the limiting presuppositions currently held by both conservatives and liberals. Fearlessness is not an option, because there is too much genuinely to be feared. But courage is. 

Perhaps the biggest test of courage for the contemporary intellectual is to risk appearing naive. But that's what's called for now in the coming years. We need people to be courageous in the naïveté of their convictions. But naïveté is useless if it's not working hand and hand with a certain shrewdness. I think this is essentially why Matthew's gospel entreats us to be as children, but to be "as" or "like" children is not the same as to be childish. It points to what Paul Ricoeur calls 'second naïveté', which I understand in the light of the same gospel's admonition that when we are out among the wolves, we must be shrewd as serpents and guileless as doves. The guileless dove part is the childlike part, but its being balanced by the shrewd/serpent part keeps guilelessness from being childish. 

I think that an excellent example of this kind of thinking is found in Gary Lachman's Caretaker's of the Cosmos. It's both shrewd and naive, and it assumes a certain sophisticated naïveté it its readers. It points to the kind of imagination of what it means to be human that might actually get us out of the death spiral.

So I want here to assert something again that I've been saying for years, but maybe not as explicitly as I want to do now and in future posts. The challenge is to activate a dormant archetype that lies slumbering in each of us. The Jungians call it the Anthropos or the Self archetype. Christians call it the Christ within. The awakening of this archetype in the broader culture must happen if we're ever to find a positive, humanly enriching way forward.

This blog, named 'After the Future' since its inception in 2003, has been dedicated to discerning the emergence of this archetype from a Christian pov, but I believe the power of this archetype is transcultural and no religion has complete ownership of it. Different spiritual traditions illuminate different aspects of it. I do, however, believe that Christianity in a Neoplatonic key provides the fullest possibilities for its realization in earth history. (See comment 1)  

Now most people don't believe in archetypes, whether of the Platonic or the Jungian kind. Second naïveté is prerequisite, and that's in short supply. I think that Jungian archetypes need to be understood in Platonic or Neoplatonic ontological terms, and Platonic archetypes in Jungian psychological terms, but explaining what I mean by that is a post for another day. The important thing about archetypes is that it's not a matter of "believing" in them, it's about feeling their energy and working with it.

When an archetype is activated in individuals or societies, its power is transformative both of our experience of the world and in our thinking about it. What seems impossible to take seriously when under the influence of one archetype becomes obvious when under the sway of another. People are overtaken by the energies of the archetypes in a way similar to how the gods overtook the personalities of the Greek heroes in the Iliad. Some individuals are larger than life not because of their personal qualities or talents, but because they are more than others in touch with the energy of an archetype. This is the meaning of 'genius' for the Renaissance artists or of the 'daemon' for Socrates. 

[I talk more about this in a review of Kelly and Dreyfus's Book, All Things Shining.]

So for instance, I would assert that there is an archetype for justice, and you can't understand someone like Martin Luther King if you don't see how his entire life was energized and ultimately sacrificed to it. His daemon was justice, and he channeled that to the broader culture in a way that evoked and inspired the justice archetype in each of us if we were open to it. Justice shone through him. If you are not moved and inspired by his story, then you are probably insensible to whatever I have to say about archetypes. Whenever anyone is larger than life, whenever he or she speaks in such a way that it resonates with people in ways they only quasi-consciously understand, that's a sign that there's an archetype at work. But here's the point I want to make. Unless an archetype becomes activated on the collective level, nothing truly new and transformative can be accomplished within a particular society.

What I mean by archetype here might be more understandable in relation to the term zeitgeist. The zeitgeist is the way that an archetype takes hold of a culture's most creative people and then has a ripple effect throughout the entire society. Our problem now as late moderns is that we have a zeitgeist that has no positive archetype to shape it. This is essentially why our current era feels so decadent in such a way that Douthat feels compelled to write about it. But I think it's wrong to think about decadence in the moralistic terms of a scold. Decadence, as Jacques Barzun pointed out in From Dawn to Decadence, is not a morally pejorative term; it's a descriptive one. It describes what happens to a society when it has lost any robust sense of collective future possibility. I'm arguing that this sense of future possibility comes from the energy of an active, transformative archetype. 

Archetypes provide the underlying cultural matrix that shapes a historical cultural era. So just to look at the cultural history of the West over the last thousand years, we see the Age of Faith zeitgeist and its archetype giving way to the zeitgeist of the Age of Reason giving way to where we are now, the Age of Whatever. The energies that shape the Age of Whatever zeitgeist derive from the chaos archetype. Anything goes because there is no energizing, positive collective archetype that shapes the collective consciousness.

The Age of Whatever, as I see it, is the age of whatever-comes-next, because we must be vigilant in our awaiting the dawn of a new transformative archetype--hopefully some aspect of the anthropos archetype. In this interim, all the energy derives from the chaos archetype, weakly counterbalanced by the inertia of all-but-dead western cultural forms. The only power that can counter the dehumanizing, chaotic energies of Baconism run amok in consumer technocapitalism that leads inevitably from trans humanism to post humanism is the awakening of the anthropos archetype referred to above. 

So, a decadent zeitgeist emerges when a society is between positive, transformative archetypes. It's when chaos rules by default. Chaos is not evil; it's essential. Evil comes from any kind of imbalance, and when chaos is unbalanced by some intelligence that seeks to shape it, things get pretty evil. Otherwise, chaos is the raw stuff out of which the future is to be shaped. Nietzsche called it the Dionysian, and it is always there counterpressuring, challenging, keeping honest whatever cultural forms the zeitgeist produces.

During a positive transformative period the chaos archetype is a source of creative energy, but during decadent periods it threatens to destroy everything that lacks transformative vitality. There is a lot of energy in chaos, and it's hard to resist when there isn't an equally powerful positive, or transformative, shaping archetype to work with its energies. When there is no positive archetype energizing a society, such a society is likely to be governed by the unbalanced Dionysian--will to power, greed, and joyless pleasures. In such moments the Dove in us needs to defend what it knows about transformative truth, even when there are few social supports in the culture to validate it.  

In someone like Donald Trump we have the apotheosis of the unbalanced chaos archetype in the Age of Whatever. Trump is larger than life because he is energized by the chaos archetype. How else to explain the way Trump infects everyone around him with bad faith, lies, greed, infidelity, and why else would they be willing to go to the mat for someone they know is so awful? They are themselves ciphers who are seduced by the numinous energy that radiates from the chaos archetype. They are in a state of hypnosis, as if under a bad spell cast by a master magician

Barzun's book traces the power of the transformative archetype that shaped western history from the late 1400s to the mid 1900s. We'll call it the Enlightenment archetype because it reached its full development in the period between 1650 and 1750 more or less. I think the Enlightenment archetype was a positive aspect of the larger Anthropos archetype. That's where I differ from most conservative traditionalists with whom I agree on other matters. The energy in this archetype didn't come out of nowhere, but it emerged with a splash during the Renaissance starting in Italy, 1450-1550, developed dramatically and violently during the Wars of Religion from 1550-1650 in northern Europe, and came to its peak during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution between 1650-1750. Then decline.

Decline ensues when the chaos archetype is ascendant, when the more positive, transformative archetype starts to lose its generative energy The French Revolution, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinian cosmology are all more about the Anthropos archetype in its Enlightenment aspect in decline. The second Thirty years war from 1914 to 1945 marked its extinction as a force with any positive transformative Anthropic energy. Since then we've been living with mostly chaos mixed with parodic, reductive or stilted forms of the Anthropos archetype. We have the forms without the life that gave them their shape. Or the forms are filled with some kind of undead, wraithlike, destructive energy--which is what we see on the cultural right. 

The strong emergence of any archetype tends to unbalance or hypertrophy certain aspects of the human psyche, and in doing so leads to the inevitable self-destruction of the social forms these archetypes create. This is what Hegel and Marx mean by 'contradictions'.  The hypertrophied parts of the psyche--aka, the repressed--always return, whether in healthy or unhealthy ways. McGilchrist is good in laying out what this hypertrophying entailed during the Enlightenment zeitgeist, which is what he calls the values of the left-brain hemisphere. (Charles Taylor uses the term "buffered self" to describe the same syndrome.) As suggested above, I think this hypertrophying of left-brain-hemispheric values was important for human development insofar as it awakened parts of the larger 'anthropos' archetype--the centrality of freedom and the importance of the autonomous individual human being, but the price paid was dear.

So Romanticism is largely a return of the repressed. Its cultural energy, often suffused with nostalgia, sought to push back against the kind of unbalanced, alienated rationality that the radical aspects of the Enlightenment zeitgeist promoted.  Romanticism's characterization as "spilt religion" is instructive. It was so insofar as it was an unbalanced celebration of the Dionysian. Goethe, a paradigm of the balanced psyche, someone who held the Dionysian and Apollonian in a creative tension, for this reason rejected his being characterized as a Romantic. 

So Romanticism points to something essential for life, but it is destructive when it manifests in unlawful ways. Historically, Romaticism sets the stage for the chaos archetype to play a more dominant role in North Atlantic societies, and lays the foundation for a mood in the West that's ready for the cosmic randomness affirmed by Darwin and celebrated by Industrial Capitalism--and Nietzsche. [FN's uebermensch, like Ayn Rand's  Galt and Roark, are, imo, perversely imagined forms inspired by the Anthropos archetype in the Age of Matter.] And so in the century between 1850 to 1950 we have the Age of Matter, the last, most decadent phase of the Enlightenment archetype. During this period, Enlightenment ideals about human progress become parodied in technological and materialistic advancements effected through industrial and later a soul-deadening techno-consumerist capitalism.

Nevertheless, Romanticism and German Idealism from Fichte through Hegel were the last, dying gasp of an older spiritual understanding of human destiny. It was steamrolled by the soul-flattening, dehumanizing effects and ideology of capitalism that commodifies the human, one-dimensionaizes it, makes of the human an abstraction. Industrial capitalism and its anarchic, libertarian ideology destroyed the old personalist, face-to-face customs and traditions and sets the stage for the crematoriums in central Europe and the annihilation of millions in total wars around the world. As Europe's first Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648 destroyed whatever was left of the Age of Faith, Europe's second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945 utterly destroyed whatever was positive and transformative in the Enlightenment archetype and the Age of Reason. 

And that's where we are now, in the Age of Whatever, not knowing what comes next. Chaos reigns by default. The historical irony, of course, is that those on the extreme Trumpian Right, supposedly the champions of good social order, are the principal zombified agents through which the chaos archetype is destroying the Liberal social order, which, rickety and inadequate though it might be, is the only order that we have. 

Lev Parnas is right: Trump is the center of cult, but it's a cult 'organized' around the numinous power of the chaos archetype. The Trump cult has very little to do with him personally; it has everything to do with the chaos archetype that shines through him. Trump is a cipher, but is as such an empty vessel and a channel for chaos that fits perfectly the chaos zeitgeist. That's what makes this deeply foolish man, this sad, little human being, larger than life. And he or someone like him will continue to command the zeitgeist until some other, positive transformative archetype emerges. Until it does, the rest of us, because we have no energy to affirm something positive, can only say No. But while No isn't enough to solve the problem, it might create enough space for a real, positive solution to emerge. Political Liberalism is the shaky residue of the Enlightenment archetype performing a role like little Dutch boy with his finger plugging the hole in the dyke. 

It is very difficult to persuade the many guileless, if not particularly shrewd, people who support Trump not to support him if you can't give them something that is clearly better. Something better requires that it has to fit with their innate, dovelike sense of what's 'right'. Because the sources of positive Liberal energy died with the Enlightenment archetype in the "second" Thirty Years War, Liberalism no longer provides any real moral authority. A moralistic, politically correct fussiness is not the same thing as moral authority; it is a parody of it.  

Nevertheless, Liberalism has a role to play because it's the only positive way to say No to chaos in the political sphere. If its No fails, order will be imposed by regressive, fascistic political forms because chaos rules by default. Liberalism has now as much archetypal energy in the political sphere as Monarchy did in the 19th century--close to zero. Sure, it's there in the collective subconscious, and like 'monarchy' it can be activated nostalgically as by a royal wedding, but it has no future-shaping power. Liberals are ruled by nostalgia for the good old days when the Enlightenment archetype had life in the same way that traditionalist conservatives are nostalgic for the premodern hierarchical order that mapped to the Great Chain of Being. But while nostalgia has energy, there's no future in it. I call it Lot's Wife Syndrome--paralysis by the fear of the future. McLuhan called it looking at the future through the rear-view mirror. 

For example, I think someone like Bernie Sanders activates a nostalgia for the old Enlightenment Liberal archetype, more concretely, a nostalgia for FDR and the New Deal. And it's fitting that such an elderly, physically frail person should be its most robust champion--especially among young people. But neither FDR nor Bernie isn't the answer; they were in  their different contexts just a way to say No to the ugliness meanness of the Social Darwinian Right. They were a stopgap at best. Traditionalist conservatives I think rightly understand the inadequacy of Liberal solutions, but are naive if they think that there is any other way to preserve some basic sense of order in this historical moment. Nostalgic Conservative solutions are far more out of touch with the historical moment than Nostalgic Liberalism. The only sane politics now is to embrace Liberalism and to find a way to transcend it in the longer term. 

This is the chief source of my anxiety at the moment. Things just might be too far gone. Democrats are all but divided and conquered. While Democrats might have the numbers, they have no energizing, unifying center in the way that the Right has the zombie destructive energy of the chaos archetype. The Left is energized only in its No to the forces of chaos and regression. That No is a sign of health, but the energy of No is not enough for the long run. Even if Liberals find enough energy to get rid of Trump, it isn't enough to prevent the larger horror--which Michelle Goldberg points to in the epigraph. The chaos archetype can be held in check only so long. You can't destroy an archetype, you can only counterbalance and assimilate it, and that counterbalance has to come from the emergence into the collective consciousness of a positive, transformative aspect of the Anthropos archetype that might energize us and thus enable us collectively to embrace a sense of positive future human possibility.

I feel certain that a new aspect of the anthropos archetype will emerge--I think Lachman's book, if only in a preliminary way, is one of many signals of what it might look like. But I'm not at all certain that humans today will be attuned to its emergence if it does. We might be too buffered, too far gone in our alienation from the Real. In the Age of Whatever, machines and screens have sealed off so many humans from the Deep Real from where the archetypes arise. Will there be human beings enough open enough, awake enough, naive or guileless enough, to notice and be energized by such an archetype when it arises?

[This essay was first posted on 1/27/20]

Obamanation

Many Americans who had welcomed Obama concluded that the game was rigged for the rich and well connected. While he sat through agonizing meetings in his first 100 days, outside the White House the Tea Party rose up like a vicious storm. Democratic Party suffered a massive defeat in the 2010 midterm elections, resulting in Republican obstruction for the rest of his presidency and a decade of gerrymandered statehouses, I was quick to fault Obama and his technocrats for failing to grasp the moment.

Ten years later, I’m more forgiving....

If our condition is a kind of democratic collapse—an erosion of institutions, an implosion of civic trust, an explosion of lies—then there isn’t a politician who has stood against it more wholeheartedly and eloquently than Obama. With every year, the faults of his presidency fade and his stature rises. When he was young and tempted by cynicism, he clung to “the American idea: what the country was, and what it could become.” He still clings to it today. He’ll be the last of us to let it go.

George Packer

I agree with everything Packer says here in this insightful review of Obama's new memoir. Packer writes --

These early dilemmas in Obama’s presidency echo his youthful conflict between, in Michelle Obama’s words, “the world as it is, and the world as it should be.” His taking pride in “good process” and settling on politically thankless policies that dissatisfied even his ardent supporters while winning over none of his opponents could be seen as an idealist’s learning to govern in the world as it is, acquiring wisdom the hard way....

“I was a reformer, conservative in temperament if not in vision,” he writes. But perhaps those early months actually reflected an inexperienced young politician confronted with unprecedented difficulties—not so much the world as it was, but the president as he was.

I, like many others, thought that this kind of "conservative reform" was not what the moment called for, but rather a radical departure from the ethos defined by the Neoliberal "Washington Consensus". If Ronald Reagan could change the rules so radically in 1980, Obama could have at least tried to do it in 2008. But it became clear very quickly from Obama's appointments that he had no stomach to redefine the rules. He got behind efforts to reform healthcare. What he came up with was better than nothing, but did it in a way that only a Neoliberal technocrat could approve, and its flaws provided abundant low-hanging fruit for Obama's political opponents to pick and throw at him. Nevertheless, would it have been better had McCain or Clinton won in '08 instead? Hardly. Was there anybody on the scene at the time who could have done better? Who?

But rewriting the rules was what was called for, and the financial crisis presented the opportunity. Obama as a campaigner showed that he understood that, but once in the Oval Office, he was understandably overwhelmed. And so, alas, he leaned on the people who wrote the old rules and were therefore most responsible for creating the mess in the first place. It was the safer, more conservative thing to do.

It was disappointing, but to have realistically expected more of him is unfair. Nevertheless, whether fair or possible or not, his inability to do more has had consequences. Obama is refreshingly honest and intelligent enough to recognize the truth of this. Excerpts that I've read from the book make this abundantly clear. He wonders if he could have done more, but takes solace in that he ran a good process. But running a good process is not what the moment called for. 

Obama was handed a hot mess from the Bush administration, whose mistakes were far more egregious and far more responsible for the rise of Trump. But even if we don't have enough perspective yet to know to what degree the Obama years played their role in bringing on the Trump years, it's clear that his focus on "good process" did little to impede forces already growing in destructive power. Perhaps that should be his gravestone epitaph--"A thoughtful, complex man who ran a good process". That being said, Obama is a remarkably astute public figure, and I have hopes that he might have a more consequential post-presidency than his presidency. 

We'll see if Biden can do what Obama failed to do. But even if he is a far more talented politician than I give him credit for,  I fear it's too late, that we are truly in democratic collapse. There are days, and today is one of them, when I think the situation Biden faces is not unlike that of Gorbachev faced in the 80s before the break up of the USSR. Like the USSR then, the structure in the U.S. is so rickety now after Trump that there's little that can be done to prop it up. All the king's horses, and all the king's men, etc.

Perhaps people like Barr, McConnell, and Graham understand this better than most--that since we are in democratic collapse and there's no saving democracy, why pretend that democratic norms and practices matter? The only thing that really matters is who emerges on top when the whole thing finally collapses. If it's the Christian nationalists who come out on top, expect a secession crisis.

But I'm with Packer when it comes to Obama's vision for America's better possibilities even when I'm most pessimistic about what is in fact possible.  It's an America that's worth fighting for, but it's hard to see how that can succeed so long as it is joined at the hip to a Red America that has truly lost its mind. 

Republics vs Democracies

Some of the earliest contrasts between “democracy” and “republic” in Lee’s sense, according to Cornell historian Lawrence Glickman, came from conservative opponents of the New Deal. At the time, President Roosevelt sold his policies — both domestic and foreign — as a means of defending and enhancing American democracy. Some of his opponents, who saw the president’s redistributive agenda as a kind of incipient authoritarianism, used the “republic versus democracy” distinction as a counter.

“There is no surer way to destroy our government than to champion legislation under the guise of democracy, which piece by piece undermines the checks and balances of our republic,” anti-New Dealer H.W. Prentis Jr. wrote in 1939.

The John Birch Society, a radical faction in the postwar conservative movement, helped popularize the “republic versus democracy” distinction in the 1950s and ’60s. According to Nicole Hemmer, a historian of the conservative movement at Columbia University, the idea really took off on the right during the conservative fight against civil rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings expanding the franchise.

Vox Explainer

If you need a little poly sci brushing up of the distinction between democracy and republics, read the entire Vox explainer by Zack Beauchamp. It puts these civics-book abstractions into much important historical context. The explainer is written to explain Senator Mike Lee's tweet last week that  “democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are.” He, as someone in the minority, fears democracy as a threat to his liberty, peace, and prosperity, and so this apparently justifies in his mind minority rule to insure that people like him remain free, peaceful, and prosperous.

That this might impinge on the liberty and prosperity of others isn't apparently a concern. That this is an ideology to legitimate oligarchy is either something at best he is unaware of or doesn't care about, or at worst is something that he actually desires, so long as he's one of the oligarchs.

Oligarchs are terrified of the power of majorities, because they assume, whether consciously or unconsciously, that those majorities envy and resent them for what they have "achieved", and would deal as cruelly with them as they have dealt with their adversaries in their climb to the top. You don't have to be much of a psychologist to appreciate how so much of what conservatives say about Liberals is flagrant projection of their own repressed fears and desires.

White supremacy is nothing more than the fear among many Whites that the way Whites have treated Blacks is exactly how Blacks would treat Whites if they lose supreme power. Black Lives Matter triggers dark memories of Nat Turner's Rebellion. This makes no rational sense, but that's the way fear works in the souls of those who haven't much self-knowledge. And from what I've seen of Mike Lee, Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, et al., self-knowledge is something that they have no interest in at all. 

There is a kind of Social Darwinist logic that undergirds the mindset of oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs. It's as primitive as the bull moose who wins by brute force exclusive access to the cows by beating off all competitors. It's a game king of the hill where the stakes are higher than bragging rights as a kid but control of the whole system and everybody in it. Putin is exemplary here, but it's a mentality that flourishes wherever brute force is the basic measure of prestige and authority.

Donald Trump is a wannabe authoritarian, but he's hasn't the competency or attention span to pull it off except in the abusive way he treats the sycophants in his immediate vicinity. He's also too lazy to do the actual work that's involved. It's much more fun to play at it, which is essentially all he has ever done and is doing now. 

Americans who see brute force as the basic measure of prestige and authority are Trump's greatest admirers. And Trump, though buffoonish in the exercise of his brutishness, has normalized behaviors that have had a profoundly fragilizing effect on our democratic republic. Mike Lee seems oblivious of that. He would appear not to have the bandwidth to understand that the difference between the republican form of government that preserves liberties by everyone's consenting to the rule of law is not the same thing as minorities protecting their liberties by use of force, blatant lying, and rigging the system in their favor. The Vox explainer goes on--

One of the most difficult questions in political philosophy, endlessly debated in academic journals, is how societies should navigate between the democratic principle that majorities rule and the liberal principle that certain rights may never be permissibly violated.

But the tradition Lee is operating out of goes further than that. It casts doubt on the most basic democratic principle: that the people who win the public’s support should rightly govern. It takes such an extreme position on what should be out of bounds that it can be used to argue that Democrats being able to implement their policy agenda is itself a form of tyranny.

In other words, if wannabe tyrants don't like it, it's tyranny. 

Christian Nationalism

If you're not aware of this bizarre exercise in religious delusion, this article in the NY Times does a good job of laying it out, and of identifying who benefits. It's pretty much what I've been writing about over the last month--how billionaires use culture war issues and credulous Christians to insure the entrenchment of their power and wealth.

While many outsiders continue to think of Christian nationalism as a social movement that arises from the ground up, it in fact a political movement that operates mostly from the top down. The rank-and-file of the movement is diverse and comes to its churches with an infinite variety of motivations and concerns, but the leaders are far more unified.

They collaborate in a densely interconnected network of think-tanks, policy groups, activist organizations, legal advocacy groups and conservative pastoral networks. What holds them together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world. Partisan politics is the lifeblood of their movement.

If one considers the movement from the perspective of its leaders, it is easier to see why it is unlikely to change in the new political circumstances we find ourselves in. The power of the leadership is the function of at least three underlying structural realities in America’s political and economic life, and those realities are not going to change anytime soon.

The first is the growing economic inequality that has produced spectacular fortunes for the few, while too many ordinary families struggle to get by. Leaders of the movement get much of the support for their well-funded operations from a cadre of super-wealthy individuals and extended families who are as committed to free-market fundamentalism as they are to reactionary religion. The donors in turn need the so-called values voters in order to lock down their economic agenda of low taxation for the wealthy and minimal regulation. These donors include, among many others, the Prince-DeVos family, the fracking billionaire Wilks brothers, and members of the Green family, whose Hobby Lobby fortune helped build the Museum of the Bible. The movement gets another big chunk of its funding from the large mass of people who are often in the middle rungs of the economic spectrum and whose arduously cultivated resentments toward those below them have been turned into a fund-raising bonanza.

These are the crazy, cargo-cult Christians who give Christianity a bad name. They'd be harmless enough if they weren't providing the base for illiberal autocrats. Read the whole article by Katherine Stewart. It's very good. 

This would also be the starting point for an argument that I'd like to have with David French, who is not a crazy theocratic nationalist, but who is clearly  captured by elements of this ideology by combining his Christian faith with Libertarianism. The idea that traditional values and free-market capitalism work together is intellectually incoherent and proved false by the historical record. Other principled Conservatives like Patrick Deneen and Oren Cass understand this.

I should point out that Charles Koch has apparently had a come-to-Jesus moment--in a good way. He has recently admitted that his role in promoting the the insane partisanship since the Tea Party has gone too far.  I'm not aware of Koch as having any strong religious affiliation. Perhaps that's what saved him. 

Quote of the Day: Eliot Cohen

Other thoughtful Republicans (or former Republicans) are mulling over their own complicity in a party that was compromising its values for power. But equally, or more so, there has not been a full reckoning on the left.

Particularly given the impending release of what is sure to be a gracefully written and elegiac memoir by Barack Obama, one could easily elide the mistakes made not only by that administration but by the elites who were so enthusiastic about it. Those mistakes gave Trump his opening—in particular, the lack of empathy, let alone sympathy, for Americans who were whipsawed by changing social norms, who felt their faith to be under attack, or who believed their livelihood endangered by the flight of manufacturing to China. A clash of cultures gave Trump his chance, and it is not clear that the culture warriors on one side have processed adequately why they lost so soundly in 2016, and only barely eked out a victory in 2020. (Source)

As I said in a post last week, Trump supporters are grownups who are ultimately responsible for their egregiously bad judgment. Knowing who this man is and what a threat he is to democracy and decency norms, people in Red American who voted for Trump have not excuse.  None. Nevertheless, Cosmopolitan Liberal America must understand better its role in creating the conditions for Trump'a rising.

If nothing else, it's just a matter of prudence. There is no winning a culture war. Northern Liberals didn't win it after the Civil War in the 1860s, and they won't win it now even if they prevail politically in the short run. And so it is in the interests of Blue America to moderate their culture war animus if they have any hope of moving forward on issues like climate change, health care, income inequality, and infrastructure restoration. I don't think Democrats should compromise at all with Republican leadership, but if they have any hope of actually governing, they have to find a way of winning back more of Red America, the parts of it, at least, that haven't completely lost their minds. 

Not that I think such moderation is likely to happen, of course. Culture war issues are where all the heat is for both Left and Right. The other practical issues are too boring and technical.  We can't really get into a blue rage about them the way we can about abortion or guns. And we all love to feel so enraged because of the way it parodies normal, healthy feeling of being alive when so much else about contemporary life is otherwise so deadening, anesthetizing, dehumanizing. 

But that points to the real underlying problem--those who are actually normal, healthy people have better, more productive things to do with their time than to get riled up about politics. And so very few get involved, which leaves the field open to those who are crazy enough to want to.

 

Quote of the Day: Barack Obama

I recognize that there are those who believe that it’s time to discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start. And I confess that there have been times during the course of writing my book, as I’ve reflected on my presidency and all that’s happened since, when I’ve had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it, too cautious in either word or deed, convinced as I was that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we’ve been promised.

I don’t know. What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. (Source)

What part of the American soul will prevail in the end, the one represented by John Quincy Adams or Andrew Jackson? It's clear which part Obama represents.

Or do we just split up and go our separate ways?

David French's America

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

Ibram Kendi, "America's Two Souls"

In the last week or so I've mentioned that I've been reading David French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How We Restore Our Nation. French is a thoughtful religious conservative and a Never Trumper. In a recent post at The Dispatch he wrote about what he sees happening to the GOP:

As both a member of the media and an American who lives in the middle of Trump country, I have a distinct view of the inputs and outputs of the conservative media-entertainment complex. While there are many notable and valuable exceptions, the industry is now overrun with proponents of propaganda and vindictive rage. We are watching it corrupt the GOP and poison the GOP base step by painful step. 

One of the core characteristics of Trump media is the conviction that Trump’s beliefs, desires, and actions deserve a vigorous defense, no matter their underlying merit. A corresponding characteristic is the commitment to naming, shaming, and punishing Trump’s enemies. The goal is clear—intimidate opponents into silence or compliance.

So while French's book offers a vigorous defense of the culture and values of Red America, he has no illusions about how Red America is being poisoned by Trumpism. Some might argue that principled conservatives like French have been delusional to think that most conservatives think and feel the way he does, and that the contemporary Red American values that he defends were, contrary to what a proud Southerner like him wants to believe, always proto-fascist. It's not primarily about racism, but about a premodern imagination of social order. I have argued here over the years that the New South deep down isn't that different from the Old South, which has more in common with Latin American autocracies than the democracies of North Atlantic societies. That's what defines America's two souls. But I don't want this post to be about why I think French is wrong about Red America, but rather to take seriously his proposal for restoration, because otherwise we are headed for secession--either Blue leaving the Red U.S. or the Red leaving the Blue. 

French could read the quote I excerpted above by Ibram Kendi, and he would sorrowfully agree that he points to a likely possibility--that the culture war will likely will become a full-blown Civil War that leads to a secession crisis. In his book he has two chapters that provide an imaginative exercise in how that might play out: the first scenario involves Progressives in California seceding after Conservatives have seized control in Washington. This leads to Oregon, Washington and states in the northeast also seceding. The second scenario imagines a situation in which Texas secedes when Progressives hold power in Washington, which leads to most of middle America following its lead. One can question how believable or likely either of these scenarios might be, but I believe that something like them is plausible if things continue on the current trajectory. 

There's a part of me that would be ok with breaking the country up. Very often the human beings in a bad marriage deal with one another more civilly and productively after a divorce. When all the anger has abated it's easier to deal with the practical issues relating to problems of mutual concern--like the welfare of their kids. There's a part of me that thinks the Civil War in the 1860s was a mistake, that it didn't resolve anything, and that it held the North back from developing along the lines that other North Atlantic societies were able to do. The South would probably have developed along the lines closer to Latin American societies. 

So there's a part of me that thinks the South should have been left to go its own way so that it might work out for itself the consequences of its delusion and collective sociopathy. Instead in defeat it continued in its delusional thinking much the way Donald Trump is doing now, and much of its politics after the failure of reconstruction has been about avenging its loss and finding creative ways to continue its cruelty and injustice regarding Black Americans. The Northerners for the most part shrugged and looked the other way. 

The identity of the South has always been defined more by its opposition to the North than vice versa. I think Southerners are mistaken to assume that Northerners hate them as much as they hate Northerners. The North never hated white Southerners after reconstruction. In so many ways Northerners went to extremes to accommodate them or to just leave them alone. David Blight lays this out very compellingly in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

Northerners just went about their business and never thought much about the South or took it very seriously on its own terms. Perhaps that's more galling to southern vanity--to be not taken seriously, to be dismissed as a third-world, primitive backwater. I don't know for sure. But I think that had secession been allowed in 1861, in the long run the South would have had more to gain from its relationship with the North than vice versa, and that would have incentivized the moderates to emerge in political leadership positions.

The runup to the war and its aftermath allowed the crazy fringe in the South to dominate its politics. Perhaps if it was just allowed to secede, the saner more moderate southerners could have risen into political leadership--impossible while adrenaline was running high. But bottom line--the North won a military victory, but not a cultural one. It did not win hearts and minds, and the South's defeat legitimized the grievances articulated by the craziest fringe of Southern society. 

So a similar logic might also apply now. The crazy fringe is clearly dominating the politics of the South--and by extension the rest of Red America. Whatever is valid in French's defense of Red America's values is now overshadowed by its having become infected by Trumpism. French is making a plea that Progressives need to understand their role in provoking Southern extremism and grievance--and there's some validity to what he says. But in the end people are responsible for their actions, and history will rightly condemn Red America's embrace of a racist, authoritarian demagogue. To say that the Liberals made them do it is the argument of a five-year-old.

***

So I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that nearly half the country has lost its mind, and the question now is how the other slightly larger, saner half needs to deal with it. There are three possibilities--the first, as Kendi points to in the article referenced in the epigraph, is all-out culture war where one or the other American soul wins decisively. But even if one side comes to dominate politically, is there ever a decisive victory in a culture war? And so the second possibility is a secession crisis. If Conservatives win the political fight decisively in Washington, the Progressive states might very well look for a way to secede, and if Progressives come to dominate in Washington, then Conservatives will look to do the same. This is the value of French's thought experiment: it makes what has always seemed an implausibility seem very plausible. So secession could happen, and it would be very messy--divorces always are--but like many divorces it could be for the better. 

But, according to French, there is a third possibility--a trial separation, perhaps? It would be a way of staying together while each side gives the other space. It would require agreeing to disagree by restoring a commitment to federalism. A principled commitment to federalism would mean to let California be California, and to let Tennessee be Tennessee. It would requires that Americans refuse to insist that what people want in one is what people should accept in the other. 

Federalism, French argues, is simply what the founders envisioned. Well, yes and no. There was from the beginning a tension between Hamilton and Jefferson, and the party of Jefferson became the party of Jacksonian localist thugs while the party of Hamilton became the party of national development led by Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. But I think that federalism as French imagines it through his Libertarian lens is embraceable if understood more through what I would describe as a subsidiarist lens.

Years ago, when I ran for the local school board, I ran as a subsidiarist, which meant at the time that I thought parents and teachers should have control over their schools' curricula rather than district and state bureaucrats who wanted to standardize everything. This was a fight in which Diane Ravitch and Finland were the good guys and the bad guys were exponents of Neoliberal, technocratic education reform promoted by the  Gates and Broad foundations. We were against top-downism, particularly the federal top-down programs like Bush's No Child Left behind and Obama's and Duncan's Race to the Top. The anger and resentment among local communitarian progressives was very real toward those whom they perceived as out-of-touch billionaire technocrats who insisted that they knew better.  

Now French is careful to point out that principled federalism limits local control as defined by the constitution and the bill of rights. Yes, the default is to respect local decision making--people who who are most directly impacted by policy choices should decide rather than those in far-off capitals. But local communities need the resources that come from those far-off capitals when they don't have the means to solve local problems, or if they are abusing the civil rights of minorities. And subsidiarists like me respect the value of markets, but we are not laissez-faire Libertarians. There is a role for government to play where markets work against public interest. Health care is a prime example. 

In public education, that means the schools that serve the poorest populations need to be provided more resources to fund wrap-around programs that compensate for what other more affluent districts can provide for their kids. I don't want to get to in the weeds here about all this, but Liberals tend to get very nervous when anybody talks about states' rights because it has been code for racial segregation There is plenty of historical precedent to justify their fears. Local government for much of the history of the south, and in many places in the North as well, was a one-party, white-supremacist oligarchy. But federalism and subsidiarity, if there is a principled commitment to them, require top-down intervention when the civil rights of minorities are being abused by local majorities.

Now I am a Bernie Sanders progressive. I think that the current healthcare system in the U.S. is a dysfunctional disaster, and a single-payer healthcare delivery system provides the best practical solution. It's not about promoting socialism, but about solving a problem. A libertarian conservative like David French would strongly disagree. Is there a way for blue states to move forward on this without the Red states impeding them. What if it were possible, however, to develop reforms to our healthcare system that would allow states to opt in or opt out of a single payer approach? I personally believe that over time, the states who opt out would eventually opt in, but I also understand why they don't want it forced on them in the same way I didn't want misguided education reform forced on my kid's school. 

Then there's abortion. While I'm a progressive in most things, I think that abortion is wrong. I'm not for criminalizing it because I think that in morally complex matters the individual's conscience should be given latitude to choose rather than be compelled by law. Nevertheless, it turns my stomach how an ethos of liberalized abortion has become hygienized and normalized as a consumer choice by ideologues. Abortion is a technocratic, mechanical solution for a deeply complex human problem. I want to live in a society that bends over backward to protect the most vulnerable, and there is nothing more vulnerable than the human fetus. 

So it won't surprise me if in the near future Roe v. Wade is overturned, and it will trigger a culture-war freak out. Conservatives will exult, and Liberals will think it's the end of the world as they know it. But would losing Roe be the catastrophe that Liberals believe it will be?

I get irritated when Liberal friends say that it means that abortion will be outlawed. No. It means that the states will be allowed to decide. Blue states will continue allow liberalized abortion, and Liberals might be surprised to learn that a lot of red states might restrict abortion, but not completely outlaw it. Why not let local communities decide where there is a strong consensus that it's wrong. If abortion is a women's issue, women in red states get as much say as men in whether their state liberalizes or restricts abortion, and it's not up to Blue-state women to tell Red-state women what they ought to think or believe. 

In other words, let's agree to disagree rather than going to war. In a democracy people should be allowed to decide, and Roe led to an anti-democratic, top-down imposition of a law that an awful lot of morally serious men and women find repugnant. So whether or not we find other people's decisions appalling, let them enact the laws they want so long as they don't infringe on fundamental, constitutionally defined rights. It astonishes me that compromise on this so impossible for most Liberals to entertain.

So I applaud and support French in his project to retrieve a deeper understanding of the meaning of 'tolerance'. In the book he writes how a pseudonymous researcher, Scott Alexander, uncovered how Liberals who think they are tolerant don't understand what tolerance means:

He cleverly outlines how tolerance has simply come to mean “I like historically marginalized groups” and nothing more. In other words, he describes how a person on the left might advertise their tolerance by broadcasting their regard for “gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews.”

But Alexander next posits one question to liberals that cuts to the heart of the matter and demonstrates why they don’t truly understand what tolerance means: “Well, what do you think is wrong with gay people?”

Their answer would be immediate: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people.”

If that’s the case, then progressives are not tolerating anything. The word “tolerance,” of course, implies that there is something to tolerate. True tolerance, according to Alexander, is “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”—not respect and kindness toward members of what others would define as an outgroup, but rather respect and kindness toward people who are out of your group. When there’s nothing to forgive, nothing to overlook, and no patience required, there’s no tolerance. (French, pp. 185-86.)

Liberals and Conservatives have to do a much better job at tolerating what they find intolerable. The retrieval of true tolerance would be essential for an embrace of pluralism that might vitiate the culture-war rancor that otherwise will lead to the breaking apart of the country and continuing dysfunction that follows from gridlock. A retrieval of federalism/subsidiarity as a principle rather than as a tactic (French is good on explaining the difference) might provide a way for us to work together on the things we share common ground about and agree to disagree on those we don't.  

I don't know if Kendi is right--perhaps there is no saving America's split soul and one or the other must come to dominate--but I'm willing to explore every other possibility before we reach that inevitability. Liberals have to take very seriously that they might lose this war, and so finding a way to compromise on irresolvable culture war issues might be the most prudent path to getting other important problems solved that affect the material well being of both Red and Blue America--like the Coronavirus. 

Trump Doesn't Worry Me; Republican Leadership Does

If Republican leadership won't stand up to this buffoon playing at il duce, why should we expect them to stand up to a truly dangerous, ruthless one?

This is another problem of commonplaces and how they work with ideas that everybody grew up thinking. The commonplace about the Republican Party is that it's pro-business, pro-military, anti-crime. That's their brand. In recent years they've also become the party of religious conservatives in a way they were not until the post-Voting Rights Act realignment through Nixon's southern strategy. Since then the Republicans have become the party shaped by the political imagination of the South, which is to be a one-party oligarchy.

But hardly anybody thinks of Republicans that way. Most people continue to think Republicans care about democracy as much as Democrats do. It's just that they prefer more conservative policies. That commonplace no longer reflects the truth about the Republican Party, but it works to keep their central political objectives out of view for most Americans, particularly rank-and-file Republicans like conservative suburban housewives. Next cycle they will have no problem voting for any Republic presidential candidate who presents himself as something other than a preening, misogynistic crackpot. 

Michael Lind makes the case for the southern takeover of American politics in his Made in Texas, and more recently Heather Richardson makes a similar argument in How the South Won the Civil War. Southern politics has always been anti-democratic. It's always been a one-party dominant system designed to defend the rights of its "aristos" against the "demos". It has achieved that by a divide-and-conquer strategy that pits poor whites against poor blacks.

The same divide-and-conquer strategy is being used now on a national scale by enflaming the culture war, which is a proxy for the old racial strategy. The culture-war strategy is broader than the racialist strategy of the South, but, like Nixon's southern strategy and Reagan's invocation of welfare queens, much of its power depends on 'vestigial', coded racism. It's just vestigial enough that Republicans can persuade themselves that they are not racists, but rather just people with traditional values who are pro-business and anti-crime. 

Traditional southern politics has more in common with Latin American oligarchies than with the politics of North Atlantic societies.  I think this in part explains why Democrats are deluded if they think the Hispanic vote is like the Black vote because of traditional conservative hatred for wetbacks. Latin Americans, like southern Americans, are used to one-party rule masquerading as democracy. 

The thing to understand about oligarchs is that as a group they are ruthless predators who believe that it's eat or be eaten. They got to be oligarchs because they ate rather than got eaten. They assume that the demos will eat them alive unless they have complete control of the system. That's why the New Deal freaked them out. It was popular. It worked. They don't care about making life better for the demos, life's "losers". They can't give them an inch, because to give an inch is to give a mile, and if they don't keep their foot on their throats, sooner or later they're going to come for them in their beds and cut their throats. So they have to do everything they can to insure that they maintain complete control of the system that keeps them protected from people who they believe are just as much predators as they themselves are.

Oligarchy, in other words, is a mentality that promotes sociopathy. And the Republican Party is run by people who have the mindset of paranoidal sociopaths. Does Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, or Ted Cruz strike you as just normal guys who you might have a friendly disagreement with? These people are deeply creepy. Any normal, relatively healthy human being, Democrat or Republican, should be creeped out by them.

There are creepy Democrats, too, but they don't play the outsized role in their party that these Republican leaders do. Diane Feinstein creep me out, but she and others at least respect the conventions of democracy in a way that Republicans no longer do. The Republicans are no longer the party of Norman Rockwell and Hallmark cards, but the party of Charlottesville and MAGA hatefests. And Republican leaders are ok with that because Trump is so popular, and their support of his flouting democratic conventions is becoming increasingly normalized for all Americans who lean conservative. That's what's so disturbing.

So this goes a long way to explaining why Republican leadership supports Trump. He's the predator-in-chief, and they admire that. He's willing to say out loud and do in full sight what they all believed should be done in secret, and they are amazed and delighted that he's gotten away with it. He might have lost the election, but eight million more people voted for him this time than last. They are as astonished by his popularity as the rest of us. He doesn't even give lip service to democratic traditions and practices, and yet almost half the country still voted for him. There is far less cost to that than anyone would have imagined even four years ago. He has re-written the rule book for future predators who will be bolder and more strategic than the impulsive, clumsy Trump.

And so all the Democrats have their shorts in a knot because hardly any Republican leaders will acknowledge that Biden has won the election. Democrats seem to think that most Republicans still care about democracy and secretly despise Trump. This is true of a fringe of Republicans, but it's no longer true at the core. Democrats accuse Republican leaders of sycophancy, of lacking courage because they believe that they wouldn't behave the way they do unless they were so afraid of Trump. They still keep hoping that Republicans will once again be the party they grew up with, a party that they might have some disagreements with about taxes, regulation, crime, and foreign policy, but a party that stood with them to depose Nixon.

Not gonna happen. Trump has emboldened them to give their inner autocrat full rein. We should expect more and worse in the future. 

Democratic party leaders, along with most Americans, don't want to face up to the fact that Republicans are a party that is an organized form of sociopathy committed to obtain and retain power at all costs, and if that means good bye democracy, so be it. They don't fear Trump so much as they genuinely admire him. He has become what they want to be.

 

Trump: Jedi Mind Trick Master

Like any competent quack, Trump focuses on a winning vibe, not a factual case. He positions himself as an alternative to “the scientists” and “the doctors” such that followers have to choose between trusting them or him. This process, in extreme forms, leads to what some psychologists refer to as identity fusion. William Swann, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, coined the term in 2009 while studying theories of individual identity. Once fused with a group or leader, he noticed, followers seem tied to them in such a way that things are true because the leader said them. Dystopian as that may seem, it can be a coping mechanism: Orienting your sense of truth around a person can be more comforting than doing so around a nebulous, uncertain, or otherwise threatening reality. Fusion is not appealing because it makes sense; it is appealing because it alleviates the cognitive and emotional burden of thinking....

When Americans are polled about individual elements of the Affordable Care Act, the health-care law put in place by President Barack Obama, for example, they approve of them. Medicare, which the law slightly expanded, is one of the most highly favorable programs among people of both parties. Yet Trump campaigned on repealing the ACA.

The freedom from scrutiny Trump now enjoys from many of his followers is reflected in an ignorance even of where he stands on the pandemic. In the survey of 4,000 Americans, 81 percent of Trump voters who believed that masks should be required also believed that Trump agrees. He has not supported a mask mandate, and has barely even endorsed their voluntary use. (Source)

Sane Americans need to understand what they are fighting. It's not about policy; it's about mind control. Not just Trump, but Republican leadership and the conservative media have almost half the country hypnotized. If Dems don't find a way to snap the spell, then at best stasis and gridlock continues, but at worst the oligarchs win. And the worst is more likely because stasis favors the oligarchs. 

Dueling Commonplaces

Eight million more people voted for Trump this year than in '16. He increased his support in exurban and and rural areas, with Latino voters, and slightly with black voters compared to '16. The only area it would appear that he lost support was in heretofore Republican leaning suburbs. 

That is really, really disturbing.

It's obviously too early to understand completely what's going on here, but it's safe to say that what matters to most educated, affluent urban voters is very different than what matters to most everyone else. This is a divide that is not about policy, which hardly anyone, educated or uneducated, really understands or cares about except as it fits into pre-existing values narratives that voters have. Republicans have understood this better than Democrats at least since the Reagan years, and while Democrats have gotten better at story telling, they have fewer powerful commonplaces to work with. 'Facts matter' is rather weak when it goes up against 'Live free or die'.

I mean 'commonplace' in the rhetorical sense of an idea that is accepted as true without thinking about it. It's what everybody believes. Commonplaces are often codified in adages like "the early bird gets the worm" which may or may not be supported by ornithological evidence (I have no idea), but everybody recognizes the truism it expresses. Commonplaces come to us from our acculturation, it's what everybody you know growing up thinks and believes. It's common sense.  

Even if some ornithologist were to prove that birds who hunt for worms at 10am rather than 6am are more successful, it would not change the underlying truth of the commonplace. The problem for Democrats lies in that they are rather like the ornithologist that wants to prove that the commonplace is wrong by making data-based arguments. Highly educated voters are more receptive to be persuaded than those less educated because the commonplace 'facts matter' resonates with them in a way it doesn't for the less educated. But even if the more educated are persuaded, they will continue to live their lives as if the data didn't matter. Old habits of thought die hard. 

This goes a long way toward explaining why Al Gore and his An Inconvenient Truth were so easily mockable by conservative media. He's the ornithologist telling conservatives that early birds don't get the worm. Anthony Fauci is playing a similar role on conservative media now. Polls say that 64% of Americans approve of him, but does anybody, even Liberals, believe polling data anymore? Fauci, like Gore, is up against a powerful commonplace in the areas that voted for Trump, including areas in the country that have been hardest hit by the Coronavirus: "We don't need pointy-headed, Nanny-State Liberals telling us what to think or do."  The power of that commonplace far exceeds the threat of serious illness and death. It's amplified by 'Live free or die'.

Affluent suburbanites are a rational, utilitarian lot by and large, and the the choice between living free and dying is for them no brainer. They will choose safety and security every time. They watch these men and women gathering with their guns and their MAGA hats, and they ask quite understandably, "What are they playing at? Can they be serious?" But these gun-toters are dead serious because of the power of their commonplaces. And they take pride in how shocking this behavior is to urban and suburban utilitarians whom they see as lacking their good sense and virtue.

They see these urban, Liberal types as mewling cowards afraid of their own shadows. This in part explains why the Coronavirus increased Trump's support despite how anybody who respects data and science was appalled by Trump's handling of it. Liberals saw Trump's posturing at the White House after coming back from the hospital as absurdist grandiosity; Red America saw it as exactly as Trump framed it--"Don't be a mewling coward. Don't let the Coronavirus dominate your lives. Live free or die."

And this in turn explains, at least in part, why Trump increased his support in rural and exurban areas--especially those hardest hit by the virus--while losing it in the suburbs. He made suburbanites, especially educated suburban women who would otherwise vote Republican, feel unsafe. Trump understood this and tried to win them back by painting a picture of Black rioters invading their enclaves in suburbia, but it didn't work because it was too crude and because, at least for these suburban voters, the Coronavirus was the greater threat to them and their families.

This is really what American politics boils down to. The candidate wins who makes more Americans feel more comfortable or to feel less comfortable with his or her opponent. Nobody really cares about policy except as it feels right, which is almost always determined by how politicians frame it in well-worn commonplaces. And in this the commonplaces abound for Republicans in ways that they just don't for Democrats. Republicans have welfare queens, angry black men, nanny state, live free or die, Hispanics are indolent rapists and thieves, they're coming for your guns. 

"Biden is a socialist" was all Trump had to tell the Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida. Democrats are urban elites who indulge in all kinds of sexual depravity is a commonplace that has gained traction through Qanon. This stuff works because it fits with what god-fearing people in Red America are already inclined to believe about educated, affluent urban elites whom they have no acquaintance with except as they are depicted on TV and in conservative media.

That Trump is a living exemplar of much of that depravity does not matter because his supporters feel comfortable with him because he knows how to work their commonplaces. He just talks common sense. He played a tough, shrewd businessman on TV. He's a straight shooter. The facts about Trump don't matter; it only matter that he triggers commonplaces so many Americans feel familiar with and so comfortable with. 

What commonplaces do Democrats have besides "facts matter"? I'm hard pressed to think of any that have broad appeal. 'Black Lives Matter' has real power, but it's coinage is too recent--it's not something people have grown up with--and so I'm not sure how broadly it resonates. It used to be a commonplace that the Democrats were the party of the blue-collar worker, but Bill Clinton and his Neoliberal fellow travelers pretty much destroyed any evocative power that had. Biden is trying to revive it, but he's actually got to do something to prove it, and McConnell will make sure that won't happen. 

But while the truth does matter, and facts do matter, stories built on commonplace foundations matter more because that's where the meaning lies. Facts have value to the degree that they are woven into a meaningful narrative.  A fact-free story that evokes commonplaces is going to beat a factual story that doesn't every time.

That's just the way it works, and so while the Democrats have the truth and the facts on their side in a way that Republicans just don't, it doesn't matter because the Democrats don't have a story that broadly resonates--even among most people who vote Democratic. I vote Democratic, but I don't identify with Democrats the way most Republicans identify with their party. What gives my life meaning has hardly anything to do with Democratic or Liberal ideology. I support Democrats because I see them--as most educated, urban voters do--as being in a better position to understand and solve urgent problems like, for instance, the Coronavirus pandemic. 

So this is why, despite Biden's win, I'm not feeling the jubilation. The most pressing problem is to break the gridlock, and the Democrats as they are currently constituted don't have the resources to do that. They have the facts and the science, but they don't have the commonplaces.

Biden won this time not because more Americans favor Democratic policies but because Trump scared the hell out of white women in the suburbs. That's the difference, and they'll vote for Cotton or Cruz or any pro-oligarchy, proto-fascist candidate the Republicans put up next time. The idea that our democracy is at stake is an abstraction that maybe 10% of us really believe with any sense of urgency. Such a possibility doesn't resonate with most Americans because it doesn't fit with their commonplaces, "That could never happen to us." "You're exaggerating."  

You have to know something about history to understand the real threat that Trump poses, and history's a bore. Trump is a typical American in this sense. He knows as much, or probably less, about history as the average guy you could meet in a bar in Tuscaloosa. He, as most Americans, has no sense of how destructive of a truly comfortable commonplace America his short-sighted, absurd presidency has been.

As I suggested in my post yesterday, I think that Biden and the Democrats biggest job is to disentangle culture war issues from urgent practical concerns that demand solutions in short order. In order to tack left on economic issues, you have to push cultural issues to the back burner. This is a an extraordinarily heavy lift, but a big part of it is a communications or rhetorical challenge that lies in activating commonplaces that will support their cause.

More on this as we go along.  

 

 

 

 

Two Cliches

The first cliche being repeated ad nauseam by the incoming Biden people is "We've got a lot of work to do." The second is "What unites is far stronger than what divides us," or words to that effect. 

So regarding the first, assuming that the Dems don't get at least 50 in the senate, what work can they really do? There are the executive orders that Biden can make to reverse some of the more bizarre Trump orders. But what can he actually get done in the legislatures? 

And the second cliche just isn't true. What divides us is far greater than what unites us. If we were all in our right minds, yes, there's a case to be made that we can find common ground, agree to disagree about irresolvable differences, and work things of mutual importance out. But there are two fundamental reasons that is not likely to happen.

First, Republican leadership has no incentive to compromise. Their policy agenda is to dismantle all domestic governmental programs that benefit ordinary people. It's only real political challenge is to maintain its base despite the party's promoting policies that work against its base's interests. It accomplishes this in two ways, first, by persuading its base that government isn't the solution but the problem, and, second, by hiding the party's central policy objectives behind culture-war conflicts.

And its most successful tactic in making the case that government is the problem rather than the solution is by aggressive obstruction. By obstructing the good faith efforts of Democrats to actually solve problems, they prove that government can get nothing effective done, and this in turn supports their narrative that government can't be trusted. This explains the freakout after passing the Affordable Care Act, a program that bent over backwards to accommodate corporate interests that ordinarily Republicans support.

Republican leadership adamantly opposed the ACA not because they thought it wouldn't work but because they feared it would, that it would become popular, and if it did would undermine their narrative that government is never the solution but always the problem. These are people who want to get rid of effective, popular programs like Social Security and Medicare because they fear that the more government succeeds in solving problems, the more they will come after the rich to make them pay for them.

All Republican leadership cares about is protecting the freedom of the most powerful, and the only way to do that is to diminish the power of the government--the only entity powerful enough to rein them in. This was Paul Ryan's life mission. The government must be emasculated and proven ineffective at all costs. The idea of adding the ACA as another successful government program was a deeply significant defeat in their longer term goal of getting rid of all such programs. It could not be tolerated, it had to be sabotaged, and so arose the Tea Party.

What was truly remarkable about the Tea Party was the way that culture war issues and Tea Party participant self-interest were in direct conflict. The people who were most virulently anti Obamacare saw it not as a well-motivated attempt to solve a significant problem, but a socialist plot by Libtards to destroy America. The Tea Party was never about solving a serious problem but about pushing back against a government they had been brainwashed into thinking they could not trust because it was run by the godless communists, aka, the Democrats.

Obamacare was a deeply flawed program, but it was never what its opponents made it out to be. I understand why the pro-oligarch Republicans wanted to repeal it, but it's truly astonishing that they were able to muster such grass-roots/astro-turf resistance to it. The Tea Party fury was real at the time and it led to the midterm electoral disaster and its redistricting repercussions after the census in 2010, but  I wonder how many of the people who were so apoplectic at those congressional town halls in 2009 and 2010 feel the same way about Obamacare now. It was a really astonishing moment of extreme political irrationality. 

The Tea Party fury was real, but misplaced. It should have been directed at the Republicans, but it wasn't because the Republicans have developed an effective way to deflect perception of the real implications of their policy by making it instead about cultural identity. This was made far worse during the Trump years, and that's why Republican politicians didn't disavow him. Republican leadership whose political imaginations have been shaped by Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich in the 90s don't think they need a competent president. They just need someone who is capable of signing bills that lower taxes and deregulate business. With Trump they got that and more--someone who excited the base in a way stiffs like Romney could never do. He might be an incompetent ignoramus, but in the end, he did everything they wanted, at least domestically. His most prodigious accomplishment was to further destroy the legitimacy and efficacy of the federal government.

And it's for this reason that it's hard to see how Biden has a way forward, no matter how hard 'he works to overcome what divides us'. It will be hard enough even if he has 50 in the Senate with the VP tiebreaker. No matter how good Dem policies are in solving the very real problems that rank-and-file Republicans share with rank-and-file Democrats, conservative media will make sure that they see Democrats as making things worse rather than better. People in Red America will never trust Democrat proposals because they've become brainwashed into thinking that these policies are driven by godless, communist, gay-loving, radical feminist baby killers and child molesters. They are not going to be fooled by Joe Biden's moderating rhetoric. He's a Trojan Horse.

I don't blame the people in Red America for believing this. I blame the Republican Party and its cynical, divisive dishonest propaganda to do whatever it takes to keep entrenched wealth and power entrenched.

How do Biden and the Democrats overcome that? 

Over 70 million people voted for Trump. It really turns my stomach to realize that so many Americans hate Democrats so virulently that they will vote for this madman instead of a moderate like Biden. The people at the MAGA rallies are sad souls on the fringe--and the fringe we shall have always with us--it's everyone else who voted for him that is truly disturbing. These are people who should know better but who have become convinced by conservative media that Democrats are out to destroy everything they hold sacred. It's nonsense, and it's just not possible, even if Democrats wanted to. But a clear, level-headed assessment of what is likely to happen is almost always eclipsed what people fear might happen. Trump and Republican leadership know how to enflame those fears. 

Nevertheless, I blame Bill Clinton and the other Neoliberal Democrats--and Biden was complicit in all that in the 90s. And I blame the way the Democrats have become knee-jerk capitulators to the more extreme elements in the politically correct cultural Left. (Defund the police? Really?) It doesn't matter that Biden disavowed that nonsense. He's a Trojan Horse for it. And so here we are in a situation where Clinton's Neoliberalism lost the rust belt so that for most of middle America all the Democrats stand for now is a priggish, politically correct silliness. It's not a fair picture, but Democrats' behavior has given Republican propagandists plenty to work with.

But now the question is who will step up to help us meet the future that is rushing toward us. Biden is all we got, but while the Democrats are far better equipped to solve problems, they can't if half the country is unable to trust them. 

I'm almost done reading David French's Divide We Fall, and I'll have more to say about it in future posts. As I mentioned in an earlier post, French is a very conservative, fair-minded evangelical Christian who understands how people think and feel on both sides of the cultural divide. He's a principled conservative rather than a tool of cynical Republican politicos, and he's interested in laying out a path to restore the nation by embracing pluralism. This is precisely what Republican leadership doesn't want. (I have many criticisms of French and one is it's not clear to me that French understands that. More on that when I finish the book and have more time to digest it.) But French's point is that Liberals might think that they're all for pluralism and diversity, but they're not when it comes to respecting traditional religious values. Liberal Democrats have to grok this.

So, French points out, we have a choice: All-out culture war where one side wins and the other loses or finding a way to live together. Liberals know what they want Red America to concede, but what are they willing to concede? Would most Democrats be able to live with allowing local communities to determine abortion laws If it would allow Democrats to move ahead with policies designed to solve problems around income inequality, clean energy and the environment, healthcare, and infrastructure?

Abortion really is as crazy a symbolic issue for the cultural Left as Gun control is for the Right. Any issue that is so radioactive as to prevent a civil conversation on the merits means that craziness is at the heart of it. And on some irresolvable issues we just need a way to agree to disagree about these intractable divisive issues so that work can get done in other areas where a consensus is more likely to be built.

Hatred, anger, and fear arise when one side tries to force its values on the other at the national level. Certainly a part of the solution is to find a way to live and let live on the local level. That means that Liberals have to give a little on allowing conservative regions of the country be conservative by opting out of the Liberal cultural agenda so long as Liberal areas of the country can pursue it. That's how democracy is supposed to work, right? Can Liberals get off their sanctimonious high horse long enough to just give a little on some of these intensely divisive cultural issues. Why must they force their cultural views on those who simply cannot accept them? They might find that if they lose the culture war, they might have conservative cultural views imposed on them. 

So is a truce in the culture war possible? The devil is in the details, I know. But some gestures would be a good start. So if I were president, the work that I would see before me would be on two levels. First, do whatever I could to defuse the culture wars--that means reaching out to conservative religious and cultural leaders, make them feel heard and understood, help them to see that Democrats are not completely captured by the secular cultural left. Biden is well positioned to do that. And second, build a consensus around opposing the agenda of entrenched wealth and power, which is the only thing the Republicans stand for on a policy level.

You can't do the second without first laying a foundation for the first. Although it's unlikely that most Democrats will agree with me, I think that the winning formula for a vibrant future Democratic party is for it to be neutral on cultural issues and progressive on economy, environment, healthcare, and other issues that only a small group of Libertarian oligarchs oppose. 

If it comes to all-out culture war, there's a good chance that Liberal Democrats will not win. I laid out that scenario in yesterday's post "When the Temporary Stay Is Removed". Democrats are feeling great now because they won, but it's likely to be a Pyrrhic victory if they can't defuse the culture war. The Republican Party is committed to oligarchy, and it only uses democratic institutions and practices so long as it serves its oligarchic agenda. As soon as it doesn't, they will leave them behind.

The Republican Party and its propaganda are in the  conservative media are the enemy, not the conservative Americans who have been seduced by them. Yes, many in the Republican base are white supremacists and proto-fascists, but most are not. Nevertheless, those who are not white supremacists will align with those who are unless the Democrats give them a reason not to. That's what we saw in the last week. 

The GOP leadership during the Trump years has shown that it has no compunction about caving to the caprices of an authoritarian mad man, and it will have less of a problem supporting an authoritarian who is slicker and more strategic. And they will do it unless more of middle American can be won back by the Democrats. Democrats who put their hopes into the so-called demographics of an emerging black brown majority are indulging in a pipe dream. 

70 Million Americans voted for Trump. More will vote for the slicker demagogue who is sure to arise in the near future if the culture war keeps raging. That's the real danger we face, and then all the arguments we are having now about abortion and gay rights will be resolved permanently when a victorious right wing authoritarian reverses the cultural Left's gains in those areas throughout the country rather than in just some areas of it.

So Liberal Democrats have a choice. Do they really want to fight an all-out culture war that risks losing everything, or are they willing to compromise in the short run on culture issues so they can work on deeper structural issues that relate to power and wealth distribution?

The biggest obstacle for sane Americans who want to preserve democracy in this country is the divisiveness that comes from both sides being absolutist about cultural values. I'm not saying these values are unimportant, but I am saying that because they are irresolvable except by a complete victory by one side or the other, the saner path for Democrats is to put them to the side so that serious people from both sides of the cultural divide can work together in good faith on other pressing issues that are resolvable. The enemy is not religious conservatives, but oligarchy. 

When the Temporary Stay is Removed

The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn’t already like him, and someone whose wife looks at him adoringly instead of slapping his hand away too many times in public. Someone who isn’t on tape boasting about assaulting women, and who says the right things about military veterans. Someone who can send appropriate condolences about senators who die, instead of angering their state’s voters, as Trump did, perhaps to his detriment, in Arizona. A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections.  

Make no mistake: The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming. And it won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president. He will not be so clumsy or vulnerable. He will get into office less by luck than by skill. Perhaps it will be Senator Josh Hawley, who is writing a book against Big Tech because he knows that will be the next chapter in the culture wars, with social-media companies joining “fake news” as the enemy. Perhaps it will be Senator Tom Cotton, running as a law-and-order leader with a populist bent. Maybe it will be another media figure: Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan, both men with talent and followings. Perhaps it will be another Sarah Palin—she was a prototype—with the charisma and appeal but without the baggage and the need for a presidential candidate to pluck her out of the blue. Perhaps someone like the QAnon-supporting Representative-elect Lauren Boebert of Colorado...Indeed, a self-made charismatic person coming out of nowhere probably has a better chance than many establishment figures in the party. (Source)

Sorry to rain on the Biden parade, but the 70 million people--an astonishing number--who voted for this corrupt, insane, ignoramus are not going away. It is truly sobering that so many could support someone so awful. And so it should be clear that far more people will vote for a slicker, more disciplined version of Trump, that is, someone who knows how to be a real authoritarian demagogue, not just play one on TV. 

Stay of Execution

Nobody feels a greater sense of relief than I do that Biden has won this thing, but as I pointed out in my post yesterday, the madman might be gone, but the madness remains. And that's why all the happy talk about Biden being the man to unite the country is nonsense. He will be no more able to deal with Conservative media's fanning the culture war flames or Mitch McConnell's obstructionism than Obama was. 

Don't get me wrong. It's hugely important that the country has voted Trump out, but a path to resolving the underlying economic and cultural structures that gave rise to Trump are still firmly entrenched, and Biden's famous empathy and schmoozing ability isn't going to change that. 

I've been reading David French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, and I recommend it and Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right for anybody who wants a fair, sympathetic representation of why Red America is so fearful and angry. Both books go a long way toward explaining why so many Americans are so ripe to be demagogued by a cynical con man like Trump. But, as much understanding and sympathy as you might find for Red America by reading these books, the bottom line remains that Red America is so ripe to be demagogued. As George Packer said in the quote I excerpted yesterday:

Even as “freedom-loving people” came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government.

Had that number been 35% of the electorate, it could be managed, but not when it is 48%. 

So Biden's election warrants a sigh of relief, not jubilation. It feels rather like a temporary stay of execution to me rather than a pardon. Perhaps it buys us some time to find a solution. I hope so, but such a solution is not visible to me at so long as the Republicans hold the Senate. There is going to be a lot of talk about healing the partisan divide and bridging the nations's fissures, but none of that is possible unless there are significant changes on a deep structural level. And those changes are not possible so long entrenched power in this country uses culture-war issues to keep the body politic gridlocked by arguing about issues that simply cannot be resolved in the political sphere. 

There is nothing so stupidly self-destructive as indulging in identity politics and culture wars that flow from them. And I'll agree with French to this extent--the stupidity is just as much a problem for the Left as for the Right. But the Left is better equipped to deal with the underlying structural issues that can be and must be faced and resolved in the political sphere. 

I've been arguing for years that we need to agree to disagree about culture war issues so that the 99% can actually solve practical problems that are politically solvable as opposed to metaphysical problems that just are not. Maybe Biden has the ability to persuade most Americans to put culture-war issues aside, but I doubt it. Nothing benefits the interests of the 1% more than to keep us divided and conquered, and the 1% has conservative media and the McConnell-minted "originalist" courts to insure that the stasis of our divisions remains firmly in place. Stasis and gridlock serves powerful entrenched interests, not the rest of us.

Quote of the Day: George Packer

Tens of millions of Americans love MAGA more than they love democracy. After four years of lawbreaking and norm-busting, there can be no illusions about President Donald Trump. His first term culminated in an open effort to sabotage the legitimacy of the election and prevent Americans from voting. His rallies in the final week of the campaign were red-drenched festivals of mass hate, autocratic self-absorption, and boredom, without a glimmer of a better future on offer—and they might have put Trump over the top in Florida and elsewhere. Even as “freedom-loving people” came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government. There is no obvious way to reverse this decline, which shows signs of infecting elements of the other side as well. (Source)

It looks like we're going to get rid of the madman, but not the madness.