And I think this is why it is now the case that the Right finds it easier to move left on economic issues than the Left finds it to move right on social issues. And this is why, whether you like it or not — and this is not going to result from our conversation, but whether you like it or not, the Republican Party is becoming the working class party, and the Democratic Party is becoming the party of high tech managerial elite, the college educated, and so forth.
So the question to you is not that you should convince me that I should be a supporter of the Democratic Party. My question would be, why is this party that you’re trying to convince me I should be supporting — why is it no longer supported by the people that once, a generation ago, would have supported your party?
--Patrick Deneen
Good question.
Ezra Klein is trying to understand the far Right. His recent interviews with Matt Continetti and Patrick Deneen have been interesting, and an interview on his show in October conducted by Ross Douthat with Sohrab Ahmari is also very instructive. I'm particularly interested in Deneen and Ahmari because of their recent public profile as intellectuals who have become radicalized Rightists. Why? How can they justify such a move? And so it's interesting to learn that when push comes to shove about actual policy, they are both, in effect, Bernie-Sanders social democrats who differ from him primarily only in that they want the government to support their conservative social values.
Both Douthat and Klein push their interlocutors to explain why they are not Sanders/Warren-wing Democrats, and they never really answer the question satisfactorily. In the end, imo, it comes down to this: Despite the ample room there might be to become coalition allies with folks on the Left in helping to ease the economic strains on ordinary Americans and their families, they cannot agree to disagree about cultural issues. In the end, what matters most for them is not policy, but which tribe's values dominate in the political sphere, and they cannot stomach allying themselves the party whose values presuppositions they see as having become inimical to theirs even if they share policy solutions in the political sphere. I can assure you that the Left would welcome them as allies.
I understand and sympathize with the conservative critique concerning the limitations of the Liberal Order. I lay out why here in the first post in the Genealogy of our Current Insanity series. But given the current political landscape, the Democratic Party is the only vehicle for achieving their goals on the political-economic front. The values influence of the meritocratic managerial elite is strong in the Democratic Party, but do they really think that a nihilistic DeSantis/McConnell/McCarthy government that at best gives lip service to conservative social values would deliver anything more than a few crumbs here and there? The only thing that such a government deeply cares about is retaining power and serving the interests not of the meritocratic 20%, but of the plutocratic 1%. Do Deneen and Ahmari they really believe that Bannonite/Trump populist rabble-rousing is anything more than a cynical con? (Deneen is far less Trumpy than Ahmari.)
You can work with the Democrats because most of them are interested in solving problems, whereas most Republicans are only interested in trolling. Klein goes down a list of things that both Obama and Biden have done to help families that Deneen acknowledges as constructive, but that doesn't matter because at the root of the problem for him are the sexual politics. It was interesting to me that in the Ahmari interview with Douthat, he starts out well and ends badly. At first Ahmari presents himself as thoughtful, incisive critic of Neoliberalism, and only toward the end gets unhinged in his animus toward Liberal hypocrisy and then goes on to defend Orban in Hungary. In the Deneen interview, the opposite happens: he starts with stereotypical conservative grievances about how the sexual politics of the last thirty years has upended traditional ideas of sexuality, but by the end of the interview he sounds like Sanders, Warren, or John Fetterman. Deneen is a Wendell Berry, small-is-beautiful localist, not a wild-eyed, proto-fascist Bannonite. In the interview he says--
I’ve taught at some pretty elite universities. And the presumption is that the students who go to those universities will all enter the economic order at its point of greatest economic opportunity and reward, which in some ways, you could say they also have limited choice once they accept those set of presuppositions.
Right, they’re all going to end up working in New York City, or Washington D.C., or Chicago, or what you will. So once you set up the defaults in that way, the presumption of many choices actually turns out to be, which city am I going to end up living in? Which consulting agency will I end up working for — whereas a different set of defaults is, in what way will I be a contributor to this or that community?
And it might be the one that you came from. And in many ways, of course, that was the default. That would be turning the clock back. Whatever the town, the hamlet, the city, wherever it was that you grew up, that’s where the kind of person who today goes off to Harvard or Princeton or Yale and ends up living in New York City or London, that’s the kind of person that once lived in that town and became the trustees of that town, the major contributors of that town.
These are the George Baileys from Bedford Falls, right, who don’t get out of the town, but end up making the town a much better place. And so the question, to my mind, is not how do we force those people to stay, but how do we rethink a world, if it’s possible — I don’t know, but it seems to me a question worth asking — but how do we think about a world in which we don’t just funnel off all of the talent to like six cities in the world, where they’ll end up contributing to an economy that I think we would both agree is not a very just or good economy right now.
And unless we’re asking that question, then we’re really not going to be addressing this vast, gaping divide in those two features that you just described, of those weakening institutions that are harming especially those who are left behind, and the benefits that are enjoyed by an elite class that have actually, today, a vested interest in having those institutions remain weakened, in sort of securing their places as members of the ruling class.
So it seems to me, just a basic old fashioned class analysis, but what do we do to begin to make the ruling class more responsible to, and more in touch with, and frankly, living among the people whom today they largely seek to escape from?
This is a position antipathetic to the communitarian Left?! The real enemies for both Deneen and Ahmari are not Liberals, but global technocapitalism and the Neoliberal presuppositions that dominate political and economic elites who support its unhindered expansion and domination of the political economy. They are absolutely right that their values are hegemonic in the halls of power whether in Congress or in corporate C-suites. They are absolutely right that technocapitalism is destructive of the social and economic infrastructure that is essential for the flourishing of ordinary Americans in local communities. Both want to break up monopolies, they want to impose limits on the greed of corporate Saurons to shape American values and political policies.
Both are absolutely right about all that, and while those Neoliberal elites are attracted to the Democratic Party, they are educable in a way that Republican elites are not. AOC is most emphatically not the Left-wing mirror image of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Pramila Jayapal, my congresswoman and the Progressive caucus leader, is a deeply intelligent, thoughtful, and decent woman. She's not a hair-on-fire ideologue. She wants for families what Deneen wants. And there are lots of other people on the Left who agree with them that you will not find on the Right, at least the Right whose story Continetti tells in his book. So again, why don't they hook up with Jayapal/Sanders/Warren Democrats? Why could someone as smart as Ahmari support Donald Trump and Victor Urban? It makes him impossible to take seriously no matter how cleverly tortured his rationale. In the end, I think it's all about who you hang out with. Who are the people you feel most at home with? And for them it's not Liberals. [See Note 1.]
The discussion with Deneen didn't get that specific about the politicians he supports. But even a non-Trumpy GOP moderate like Will Hurd is all about the meritocracy and letting capitalism do its thing without government interference. But I think that's the problem with Deneen that Klein exposed. He's more about first principles and less about implementation, which should never be left to people like him or Ahmari.
Conservatives don't pay attention to the reality that's right in front of their noses; it's only the underlying "philosophy" that matters. I remember having a conversation with one of my Clinton-despising Republican brothers in the 90s. I agreed with him that Clinton was a sleaze and I couldn't vote for him (I voted Nader), but I was amazed at how he saw Clinton as a socialist. I remember being astonished by the Republicans' anti-Clinton mania. It was my first inkling that the GOP had clearly gone off the rails. I told my brother that as ugly as I thought Clinton's personal behavior had been, I disliked him even more for implementing the Reaganite Neoliberal agenda that Republicans had been championing.
The Republicans had a president in Clinton who wanted to give them what they wanted, but they couldn't say yes. Even then it was never about policy. He was on the other team. He was a "Liberal". And for that reason, people like my brother saw Clinton as the embodiment of everything that they hated, and it therefore made it impossible that they could actually agree on policy. Deneen and Ahmari, it would seem, are cut from the same cloth.
It's a shame, because the culture war is a waste of time and energy, and it cannot be resolved in the political sphere. And even if one side succeeds, the fundamentally destabilizing rancor won't go away at a time when we need to have sane people in the middle dealing pragmatically with pressing problems that need to be addressed. Deneen and Ahmari correctly identify the Neoliberal elites as the real enemy, but nobody is more pleased than these elites that the culture war continue unabated because it insures that those on the cultural Left or Right keep fighting one another rather than fighting them.
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Note 1: Klein addresses this in his subsequent interview with Anne Appelbaum concerniung the ways a deep feeling of alienation causes people to seek out groups with whom they can identify and feel at home:
"I was thinking while I read all this that some of the older people in my life who have drifted right, or when I go and report with right wing thinkers who have become much more radicalized in recent years — something I hear again and again is that sense of non belonging, this feeling the world has changed too much for them to find a place in it, or that its mores have changed in a way where they feel like people are hostile to them and what they think."
People want more than anything to belong, and they will say stupid things if they think it will enhance their good standing in the group they identify with and refuse to say other things if doing so will undermine their good standing. It's as true on the Left as the Right, but more pronounced on the Right because many on the Right think their views used to be mainstream and see no good reason why they still shouldn't be.