In Part I, I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans continue to associate the Democratic Party with what is for them the unrelatable ethos of the secular, cultural Left, i.e., the ethos of top 15-20% of educated, economic elite Americans who live in urban areas and university towns throughout the country.
Main Street's discomfort with Dems is not primarily about their whiteness and racism, it's about a mindset that Main Street finds strange because it's not what the people there grew up with. But for that reason, they ally with racists and white nationalists because while most on Main Street might superficially reject any kind of overt racism, they still feel more comfortable with the ethos of the party that shelters them than the secularist Liberalism the Democrats have become identified with. On the votes of these decent, but conventionally conservative, denizens of Main Street does the future of American democracy depend.
So the Democrats, if they are to save democracy, have the extraordinarily difficult challenge of maintaining their secular progressive base while winning enough Main Streeters to overcome all the structural advantages the Republicans have rigged the system to obtain. The Democrats have programs that will benefit most Main Streeters, but Main Street still doesn't like the Dems and their programs because they "feel" socialist and un-American.
The Republicans' job is so much easier. They're like Lee defending Richmond. All they have to do to win is stoke the flames of anxiety and resentment in Main Streeteres about Liberals seeking to destroy everything they holds sacred. And once elected, Republicans feel no need govern competently, no need to even try to solve urgent problems. Just obstruct, obstruct, obstruct to defend the interests of the 1%, which is really all they truly care about.
Lee eventually lost, because his was always a lost cause. The problem for us now is that if Republicans aren't defeated decisively and soon, we will remain impotent and paralyzed as a society to deal with the real threat that comes from techno-capitalism. It's become clear to me that the Republican elite have come to assume that democracy is no longer viable, and so they are jockeying now for their place in the autocracy to come. They don't care about where techno-capitalism is taking us or what happens to the rest of us so long as they're in control, and the 1% remain unmolested.
In Part II, I go more metahistorical, more big picture. I try to explain why I believe that this is more than a temporary political crisis, but a civilizational one, a crisis of the spirit. The country is reeling from what I call ontological dizziness, which follows from the disruptive, quasi-nihilistic, materialist ontology that consumer, techno capitalist society that has substituted for the originary mythos that grounded Western societies since at least the first millennium BCE until the mid-19th century. This originary mythos fused Greek transcendental philosophy with Jewish revelation, and while the reason/faith polar tension in this fusion has always been fraught, those leaning more toward the reason pole still embraced its transcendental foundations. That ended in the mid-19th century, and if one hadn't realized it already, Nietzsche spelled it out for him.
I argue that while faith is still a possibility for individuals and small groups whose ontology still draws on the originary mythos, it is completely at odds with the materialist, Positivist ontology that has become hegemonic in defining the contemporary American imaginary. There are some people of faith, like me, who can live with that and adapt, but I also understand why people of faith who don't have the time to think things through feel that things are profoundly out of joint when they try to hold two opposing ontologies together--the one they believe is true and the one that shapes almost every aspect of the world they live in. To use a fancy word like 'ontology' does not mean that the feeling of out-of-jointness isn't felt and experienced by ordinary Americans as deeply disorienting.
They believe that the materialist ontology is wrong, and I agree with them. And when people tell them that they are free to believe whatever they want to believe, it doesn't change the fact that whatever they believe as individuals or small communities is contradicted and dwarfed by the mammoth materialist energies of techno-capitalism; a vulgar, materialist, violence-celebrating entertainment media; and a snarky Liberal elite who see them as antediluvian morons. They have come to feel that they are strangers in their own land.
Ok--so maybe we could sort all that out in time, but there is no time. I'm arguing that this usurping materialist ontology has come to shape the presuppositions of the cosmopolitan Left and its institutions in such a way that it has enervated Liberal resistance to the greatest proximal threat humanity faces, which is posed by techno-capitalism.
The real villain here is not the radical Right, but techno-capitalism and its materialist ontology. Liberals have got to come to terms how they've bought into it and how their continued acquiescence is a large part of why we're in such trouble.
And so here we are in a society riven by a culture war in which both sides need what's best in the other, but cancel one another out as techno-capitalism continues to drag us all toward disaster. What is best in each is buried under what is worst, so it's easy to understand why each side sees the other at its worst--that's mostly how they present themselves to one another.
But the curious thing is the way each is in its own way living in a delusional bubble. The cultural right lives divorced from reality as the materialist social imaginary has come to shape it in North Atlantic societies, and so in the dizziness their feeling of dislocation causes, they embrace all kinds of bizarre ideas that give them the illusion of stability or the hope of a return to it.
The Liberal ethos defines the hegemonic imaginary with its rationalistic materialistic presuppositions, and so feels it's grounded in reality in a way that the Right does not. But it's precisely because their world view is so hegemonic, they are blind to how ontologically ungrounded and unbalanced is the world they have come to take for granted as the only possibility.
Techno-capitalism has created a society in which most Liberals are mostly comfortable--it's a construct that flows from their basic ontological presuppositions. But from my pov, this Liberal, techno-capitalist society is now or soon will be in a predicament rather like that of Wile E Coyote. Bamboozled by the trickster spirit Roadrunner, it has run off a cliff, and there, hovering in midair for a few moments, it runs in place until gravity does its thing. Well, techno-capitalism is the trickster spirit, and the radical Right is gravity. The Right is basically saying that if you want to take society off the cliff, you're forcing us to do our thing--it's the law--we'll crash it. Since Liberals believe that laws are just stuff we make up, they have no capacity to comprehend what's happening. In their minds they should be able to go wherever they want unless a Democratic congress passes a law against it.
So I argue in Part II that if we're not off the cliff yet, we're on our way. And if we're not off yet, maybe there's a chance we can change course, or even if we're already off it, maybe--maybe--it's not too late to turn back to get a handhold on some root or branch that's extending out to us.
If what I'm saying here is that the radical right is unwittingly performing meta-historical Hegelian negation or a Taoist rebalancing is too far-fetched or too much of a stretch for the secular Liberal imagination to take seriously, let me suggest another analogy--what we're seeing is a collective return of the repressed. What's been repressed is the spiritually transforming vitality of the originary mythos, and as with all powerful repressed energies, the more persistent and rigid the resistance to them, the more violent and crude its return. 19th Century capitalism and its vulgar materialistic/Positivistic mythos crudely replaced what at its best was profound and sublime. So, for want of anything better, it makes sense that something even cruder must come to replace what is already so crude. If there is a more robust explanation for the emergence Donald Trump and what we've gone through the last five years, I've not heard it. And it's not over.
The solution from my pov is clear but unlikely because it would be extraordinarily difficult even if there were broad receptivity to it, which clearly, there is not. But even if we crash in the short run the same solution remains for the future (unless the machines take over): For any society to truly thrive and provide a trellis on which its citizens might grow to realize their best human possibilities, there must be a constant, vigilant effort in the cultural sphere to balance mythos and logos. A society that has one without the other might survive for a while, but it does not serve the people in it well while it does, and sooner or later the repressed polarity will return guns ablazin'. And when it gets to that point, there's little chance of reconciliation, and that, I fear, is where we are.
But maybe not. Maybe it's not too late to avert disaster. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic.
P.S. In 2010, I wrote a long piece on the TV Series Lost a few weeks before its finale in which I used it to riff about its allusions to Dante and to what a post modern imagination--a post secular, post-Positivist imaginary--that integrates mythos and logos might look like. Near the end I say:
Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension [maya], so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere [awakened] kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern [post-secular] consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.
What does it mean to have postmodern [post-secular] consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern [post-secular] consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack.