I've pleaded here for years that the political sphere should not be the place to arbitrate cultural issues. In a pluralistic society, the political should focus on practical policy concerns, things like healthcare, energy and transportation infrastructure, and wealth distribution. In the cultural sphere, the rule should be simply to live and let live--as much as that's possible. I realize there's some overlap.
But if it's not clear by now, it should be: The most politically engaged voters on the political Left and Right care much more about cultural and identity issues than boring, practical, policy issues. Policy issues only get traction when they get culturized, as we saw with Obamacare over the last decade. By 'culturized' I mean that if I'm on the Red Team, I'm against it if it's a win for the Blue Team, no matter how positively the policy might benefit me. The more politics becomes culturized, the more it become a zero/sum game, and it's hard to see how democracy survives if this is the only political game we're playing going forward.
And so our politics has become riven by issues of the spirit that cannot be satisfactorily adjudicated in the practical sphere of politics. Nevertheless, the cultural sphere is where the future of democracy is being put to the test, so Liberals better start learning how to play this game more effectively. If, as I think it does, the future of Democracy depends on the future political success of the Democrats, Democrats need to understand why so many people are not buying what Liberalism is selling. But I fear that the Liberals who are most politically engaged haven't the spiritual imagination to do it in a way that will work effectively enough to save our democracy.
Despite its having a devout Catholic president who wears his heart on his sleeve, the Democrats are Identified by broad swaths of the electorate as the party of godless atheists and heartless bureaucrats. It is not, more often than not, an inaccurate picture of what most Democrats are really like, but it's true enough for it to stick. For many everyday low-information voters, i.e., people who are not riveted every night to cable news, which is most people, it's what the word 'Democrat' signifies.
Today I was on line at Costco behind a sweet older couple, you know the kind who pay their $300+ bill all in cash. Ok--I'm projecting here--but my guess is that this is the kind of couple that knows enough about Trump to feel uncomfortable about him, so voted for Biden instead in 2020, but in 2022 they probably voted Republican. These are not the kind of folks who religiously watch Fox or spend hours on social media. They just feel more comfortable with politicians who talk Conservative than with those who talk Liberal. They're scared. They think that things are getting out of control, and so that inclines them to look for a strong man, someone who can get things back under control. Trump's bluster looks strong; Biden's physical frailty looks weak.
Conservative is their native tongue; it's what they grew up with. That's how the people they go to church with and their friends at the coffee shop talk. It used to be that talking Conservative wasn't an impediment to voting Democratic in places like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, but now it is. It's not mainly about race; it's about the larger cultural frame, and yes, that frame is vestigially racist. But that doesn't make people who speak Conservative frothing racists. But race makes them nervous.
The future of democracy depends on who captures those non-frothing Conservative votes. This couple should be on the Blue Team if it were only about policy, but they're not because it's about culture. They're not culture warriors; they're just ordinary folks from Main Street who vote for normalcy, which is what feels 'right' to them, and what feels right is what they grew up with, and what they're seeing in the movies and on TV, and what they hear their smart-ass grandkids home from college spouting at Thanksgiving dinner makes them think that the world has been turned upside down.
What the Democratic establishment doesn't seem to realize is that this is a cultural not an economic concern. Every Democrat I hear being interviewed on TV is clearly speaking as if the only fundamental political truth is that "it's the economy stupid". Well, however true that might have been in the past, now "it's the culture, stupid". Of course, they're not ignorant that culture is political factor; it's that they think they can overcome their cultural negatives with what they see as policy positives. And maybe they could if people were paying attention to policy debates, but they're not. They just vote Red unless there's a really compelling reason not to.
Few on Main Street care about spending and taxes or extending the safety net, but they fear racial disorder and Big Brother. They fear all the stuff that feels un-American to them because it's not what they grew up with. These are not evil people; they're just scared by change. They are not frothing white nationalists, but they'll vote for the party that provides safe harbor for white nationalists because they can't bring themselves to vote blue because it just doesn't feel "right". And on what they feel is "right" the future of democracy depends. Steve Bannon understands the the future of American politics depends on who wins this decent middle on Main Street, but Liberals seem oblivious.
Liberal Democrats have to recognize that their biggest asset is their progressive policy agenda, but it's complicated because their biggest liability is how their secularity merges with their advocacy for big-state solutions. That scares people. Working-Class Americans, even many who vote Democratic, don't identify anymore with the Democratic Party. Black and Brown voters are largely culturally conservative, and they vote Democratic because the Red Team is so bad on race. They do not, however, look to Democrat establishment types as "their" people because the Democrats represent the worldview and interests of the educated, affluent top 20%, which is not them. The bond of loyalty there is far weaker than many Liberals think.
Secular Liberals also mostly don't understand that the imaginal worlds in which people live are more important than facts, and that facts get filtered and interpreted though a cultural lens that is shaped by the world they grew up in. Ideas matter, but ideas feel true or untrue depending on how they align or don't with how their cultural imaginary structures their sense of the real. Activists on the cultural Right understand the importance of winning the ideas war no matter what because they live in an imaginal world that they believe faces extinction. Fear of extinction is very politically motivating.
Whether or not their imaginal deserves to go extinct or whether such fears of extinction are just a paranoid fantasy is not at issue here. It is what it is, and the only way to convert people who have bad ideas is to present them with better, more compelling ones. And that's where secular liberalism has nothing to offer. Liberals need to find a vision that actually sells a positive culture message that has broader appeal, something that is more than a No to the boorish, racist, homophobic Right, something that gives people who speak Conservative a robust sense of positive future possibility. Liberals think their progressive policies are enough, but they just aren't. They need to win over the decent, low-information voters on Main Street with hope. It's important to expand the safety net to ease the stress that so many feel, but the despair and anxiety so many Main Street Americans feel won't be cured by that. It might buy a little time at best.
***
So here's the bigger issue that has become a political issue whether we like it or not: People want a cure for their existential anxiety and despair, and Liberalism doesn't offer it. Rather Liberalism feels like the cause of it for too many Americans. The radical Right in this country is offering a cure, which, of course, is no cure. But for many it feels like a cure because it draws on a memory that precedes the death of God.
That "God is dead" is simply to say that the word 'God' no longer signifies in a living way in our cultural life. It signifies something, but the signified is not living; it's rather a zombified parody of what the great Jewish prophets and rabbis, Muslim sages, and Christian saints understood by the word.
'God' still 'signifies' in the old, living way for individuals and some small groups here and there, but not for the culture at large. But so much of what passes for religion today on the cultural Right is an attempt to exhume the dead and to animate it with energies that have nothing to do with a Living God and everything to do with tribal identity. The god the cultural right worships is an idol, a totem, and has nothing to do with the unconditioned boundlessness that the great traditions when they were a living force in culture understood as God.
And from where I sit, that's at the core of the Crisis of the Liberal Order. A society that is no longer nourished from a living connection to its transcendental roots is a culture that is living on borrowed time. Neither the Right nor the Left has a solution for this problem, and the Left doesn't see it as a problem. And for that reason they don't appreciate how rickety the superstructure they take for granted is, and how easily it will topple from its own dead weight when the next strong storm blows, and that storm she's a-brewin' on the radical Right. America has an infrastructure problem, but it's not just about bridges and the grid.
When I hear secular Liberals say I don't need religion, it's as if they see it as an an option on a menu of possible consumer choices, and one that only the vulgar would choose. It's understandable if the word "religion" only signifies for them what I would describe as zombie parodies of it. But often when I hear them say it, it sounds to me as foolish as someone saying I don't need love, or I don't need beauty or nature, or I don't need music and poetry. It's true, many people live without these, but such people are not healthy, full-spectrum human beings. They don't feel what they lack, and in that sense they are in the despair that Kierkegaard described as being unaware of itself. But it's one thing for an individual to be in despair; it's quite another for an entire society to be in it. Democracy is not a priority for people who are in despair. Getting out of despair is, and they'll swallow whatever Ivermectin for the soul demagogues and conmen will pitch to them if they think it will provide a cure.
The Crisis of Liberalism is a crisis of the spirit, which is a crisis of imagined future human possibility. And this is why so many are not interested in buying the kind of human future that Liberals are selling. Classic secular Liberals like Musk and Bezos see the human future somewhere off-planet, because they've all but given up on this one. But earth is where the rest of us are going to live it. The Liberal vision for life on-planet is too impoverished, too flat-souled, too glib--too lacking in wisdom. And so it's too incapable of meeting this crisis of the spirit in a way that resonates, that speaks to the deepest human aspirations. It offers no cure for the people who think Ivermectin might be one. It offers no cure for existential despair.
As I said in the opening paragraph, this shouldn't be a problem for politics to solve, but it is now if we have any hope for saving democracy. At the very least, it's become an aspect of politics that Liberals have to contend with better than they have been.
Liberals need to develop and embrace a meta-narrative (or mythos) that cures despair, and I believe that the development of such a thing is possible, even in a pluralistic society. But it doesn't matter what I think or some others like me think. It's about how a shift or expansion in the Liberal imaginary might actually be effected so that it might inspire people and give them real hope in an American human future. It's not a head problem; it's a soul problem, so the solution has to be a soul solution.
So the question is not whether or not we need religion, i.e., a plausible mythos that gives us hope--we do. (Faith, btw, is not religion or mythos. See Part II.) But it's not just that individuals need religion, healthy societies need it too. And the question is whether our culture will be able to find its way to a healthy form of it, a living form of it, one that opens us up to the deepest possibilities for becoming human beings, rather than closing us off to them, which is what bad religion--or none--does.
This ought not to be a problem for politics, but the destructive forces of techno-capitalism have created a spiritual vacuum, and there's a huge swath of Americans on the political Right in this country that thinks its politics can fill it. So Liberals better understand if they have no answer for that, they are playing a losing game.
In the long run, the only solution is to replace bad religion with good religion. The culture has the resources to do that. We used to believe that we humans were created in the image and likeness of the Living God. Such an idea is retrievable in a postmodern (i.e., post-Liberal) key. And I fear that if something like an idea of the Living God isn't retrieved, even if only in some diminished Feuerbachian sense, then any future possibility dies for the Living Human, and with it any reason to resist becoming machines or letting them takeover.
Already our diminished imagination of what it means to be human is so far advanced that I wonder if we're too far gone. I wonder if we have become too cut off in a hyper-real, simulacral dream, and so sealed off from the Living Real that if tomorrow Jesus himself were to arrive on clouds of glory, any but a few would notice. That couple on the line at Costco probably would. But most everybody else would be too preoccupied with what's on their screens. What they find there is so much more interesting.