In the past week the subtext of my posts about Reaganism and the ideological capture of the Supreme Court has been the ineffectiveness of Liberals to frame a robust meaning story. This was a theme in Ezra Klein's conversation with Larry Kramer about about why Liberals lose so many political and legal battles. They get caught up in technical and process issues rather than motivating meaning issues. My post yesterday attempts to explain why this is challenging for Democrats in a way that it isn't for Republicans. Democrats are pluralistic in a way the Republicans are not. A meaning story that works for lots of different groups is harder to frame than one that works for a relatively homogeneous one. Nevertheless, such a story must be developed.
In 2014 I wrote an essay about Mythos and Logos in which I outline the basic problem:
A worldview that embraces competency, a logos mythos, so to say, cancels itself out and loses to a worldview that embraces ultimate purposes almost every time. Marxism succeeded to the degree that it did because it affirmed ultimate purposes, even if its ultimate purposes were misguided or delusional. Reality has a feedback mechanism that sooner or later lets you know if your ideas are delusional, but as we've seen in this country, the disasters of the Iraq War and the 2007 economic meltdown didn't provide evidence enough that the mythos that guides the GOP or neoliberal Democrats is delusional, so Americans keep sending Republicans to Washington.
I think they do this for reasons somewhat different from Tom Frank's explanation: they do it because Republicans give the appearance of standing for something and Democrats just don't. Republican policies might be toxic and delusional, but Republicans present themselves as being committed to "ultimate" values that Americans care deeply about. Democrats look more like our worst stereotype of what a politician is: the weak-kneed hypocrites who stand for nothing but the advancement of their own careers. I believe that the country would back progressive politicians who stand for core American values. That's why Jim Webb's candidacy intrigues me.
So that's a part of it: When a particular mythos has captured the collective imagination of a group, it is virtually impossible to argue against it on a logos level. This is what people mean when they talk about cognitive divides or conservatives and liberals working with different epistemologies--one's epistemology follows from one's metaphysics, and one's metaphysics follows from one's Mythos, whether that mythos is consciously or unconsciously affecting one's thinking. One's mythos will not be given up until disaster proves conclusively that it is misaligned with the Real. Or it can be given up when an alternative mythos that shares its foundations with the reality-misaligned mythos emerges that proves itself better adapted to the Real.
The latter is to be preferred to the former. When the old mythos collapses as it did in the Soviet Union in the 80s or Germany after WWI, it's usually replaced with an even more primitive and regressive mythos that has to run its course toward yet other disasters. These primitive myths have more in common with the primordial flood that pushes us from behind than with grace and freedom that call us forward into the future.
More Americans have chosen Republicans in congressional elections (Presidential elections are different) because Democrats don't offer a robust enough alternative mythos that would motivate people to care enough to vote for them. So I'm arguing that secular progressives will continue to fail in the political and economic spheres, no matter how competent or practical their policy prescriptions, so long as their mythos is grounded in a soft nihilistic metaphysics/mythos no matter how humanistic and well intentioned. The Weimar Republic was humanistic and well intentioned in that Liberal sense.
So the answer for progressives does not lie in adopting an expedient Noble Lie that competes with the mythos of cultural Right. Such a contrived mythos will have as much staying power as the reality-misaligned mythos of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. A mythos that works has to be grounded in the Real--the spiritual Real, the Real that comes to us from the Absolute Future, and that's why secular progressives will never be able to give us what the country and world needs if they are to move forward into a truly progressive future. But such a mythos cannot be developed out of thin air--that't the Jacobin fallacy--it has to grow out of the tradition, and in the Western world that means the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
I might change a few things in that rendering today. I think that instead of Judaeo-Christian tradition being the foundation, I would say that a prisca theologia along the lines first outlined by the Renaissance Neoplatonists would work. Within that framework, many different schools or tradition could co-exist and cross-fertilize one another. But however it emerges, it has to be fundamentally post-secular and global and small 'c' catholic in its imagination of what's most important. American Calvinism is an obstacle to be overcome rather than a framework within which such a solution might be framed. I think that something along these lines will emerge by the end of the century. The task now is simply to clear the ground to create a space in which it might emerge.