From "Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism", 7/3
As Jackson's defeat of Adams was a fork in the road in 1828, so was Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980. Both roads led to disaster. Both Jackson and Reagan were popular, larger-than-life characters, and both left toxic legacies. After Reagan in the 80s, morally deformed figures like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Ailes were given the space to emerge into the mainstream to do their destructively polarizing thing in the 90s. I'd argue there are similar paths taken from Jackson to Jefferson Davis as from Reagan to Donald Trump. ...
So since Reagan and the GOP, with the acquiescence of Neoliberal New Democrats, have not only impeded the country's social and material progress, but have led us to a condition where it's not enough for the worst tendencies in American society to be tolerated, but rather for those worst tendencies to become the norm. The Reagan-promoted fantasy of America created the space for the most regressive and shameful elements in the American psyche to emerge. It shouldn't be that difficult to understand how it created the shame-denying, resentment-driven, reality-averse habits of mind that inevitably led so many conservatives to embrace Trump.
From "Toward a Normie Progressive Politics", 7/9
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The problem here is that this so-called utopian project on the Cultural Left is one that can only be imagined in a society where people believe that humans are only what they are culturally conditioned to be. It's an historicist, anti-essentialist view of humanity, so to be human means whatever people want it to mean. So in the future, since there's no basis for understanding what a human is or what the human good is, whoever has the most power gets to define it. And so at some point, assuming the Cultural Left is running the government, it can decree that all children be acculturated in an AI-powered Skinner's Box where they will be molded into a society that has transcended the gender binary and whatever else the government thinks will make them happy, good citizens.
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And why would anyone resist? Everybody will be happily liberated from the constraints of gender. So in such an ideal world we'll all live happily in a transhuman polity where everyone is polymorphously perverse, and no one identifies as male or female, and babies are made in Skinner labs where they are cultivated to fit in a world where everyone is programmed to be like everyone else--happy, happy, happy.
Nobody wants this--not even the people on the cultural Left--but it's what the consequences of their unbalanced equality program lead to. Equality must always be held in tension with freedom, and freedom requires a metaphysical imaginary that is open to possibilities that transcend any particular social arrangement, no matter how utopian its proponents think it. All spirited human beings aspire to something more, something that requires risk and moral courage. The irony of the Cultural Left's project lies in that the "more" that it aspires to leads ultimately to less because its presuppositions shut out other, deeper human possibilities.
Real moral progress cannot come from a behavioral modification regime but by awakening dormant but expansive moral dimensions within people's souls. Such an idea has no resonance within the secular Cultural Left.
From "Toward a More Perfect Union", 7/14
I've used this phrase a few times in the last couple of weeks. It's from the Constitution's preamble, and famously echoed in Lincoln's first inaugural, and eloquently elaborated in Obama's famous campaign speech in 2008. It struck me as I was thinking about it that both the Right and the Left want a more perfect union, but they have two completely different visions about how to achieve it.
The Left accepts, even celebrates, the richness of American pluralism and seeks to find rules for living together that focus on how we can all get along--that the more perfect union is e pluribus unum. A more perfect union for the Left means an integrated society where everyone is treated equally and with respect. The only taboo for the Left is for one faction to force its worldview on the other factions.
And yet to transgress this taboo is at the heart of the American Right's program to achieve its idea of a more perfect union. It wants to force its 19th-Century, pre-Industrial-Revolution fantasy of America on everyone. The goal is not to develop unity from diversity, but rather to suppress diversity in the name of a simplistic, obsoletized imagination of American identity.
For the Right, America can only be united under one overarching meaning story, a story that combines the rugged individualism and pioneering spirit of the 19th-Century frontiersman with the entrepreneurial spirit of the Robber Barons in a vague penumbra of Calvinist religiosity. This meaning story has no future in a diverse society where most of the work is going to be done by machines. One's sense of identity, meaning, and purpose will have to come from other, deeper sources.
From "How Neoliberalism Caputured the Left 1", 7/16
I would add that in the same way that traditionalist conservatives who are also free-market capitalists are intellectually incoherent, so are those on the postmodern cultural Left who are anti-capitalist. Both are captured by an eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too logic that tries to assert values that are contradicted by the nihilism of their presuppositions. They are like the person who says that he does not believe in human freedom, but chooses to live as if he were free. Or they're like the jewel thief who justifies his larcenies as his personal social justice program to redistribute wealth. "Laws against theft reinforce the existing power dominance of the wealthy elite," argues the thief, "and so they must be transgressed. Ecrasez l'infame." These arguments might have a superficial cleverness, but they are fundamentally silly. And while eople might make such assertions in perfect sincerity, they are incoherent and intellectually dishonest.
It's quite possible to believe your own propaganda. Look how many did on J6. But there can be no society that moves toward true Justice unless a majority of the people in it are inspired by Justice as a transcendental. I think most normal people have experienced Justice in this transcendent sense, even if they wouldn't call it a transcendental. That's why the interpretive frame is so important--it determines the limits of what can be believed which in turn determines the limits of what one imagines as possible to be positively achieved.
From "Why Don't Biden's Achievements Matter?", 7/28
Republicans understand in a way that Dems don't that policies almost always have no political importance. Posture is what matters, and you have to have the right actor to play the role to enhance the illusion. What matters are stereotypes that are deeply embedded in the American collective psyche, and these stereotypes are like a string dipped in a chemical solution that draws certain facts and quasi-facts to crystalize on it while other facts can find no place to adhere.
The formula that has worked so powerfully for Republicans is captured in their self representation as fiscally conservative grownups who are strong on national defense while representing Democrats as irresponsible spendthrifts who are weak on crime and yet want a huge, intrusive nanny state to micromanage your lives. It works to their advantage in three ways--
It repels all the facts about Republican fiscal irresponsibility that led to the 2008 disaster and attracts all the facts that blame Democrats for inflation, unemployment, huge deficits.
It repels facts concerning GOP responsibility for the disaster in Iraq and its lack of support for veterans and attracts any ideas that Republicans would have done a much better job with getting out of Afghanistan.
It attracts facts that Dems are the party of racial unrest and social disorder in the tradition of the Watts riots, the anti-WTO riots, Occupy Wall Street and other examples of leftist unrest since the '60s, and it repels the idea that any upstanding Republican would ever be among the rioters on J6. It must have been Antifa, or just a few bad apples.
Many facts, no matter how credible and well founded, find no place to crystalize and to adhere on their string. The Democrats get blamed for every crazy Left thing that happens not because the vast majority of Democrats support them but because they are not perceived as strongly against them as the Republicans are. Republicans can win with terrible candidates when they use this formula effectively. Americans will vote for Glenn Youngkin but not Doug Mastriano. They will not vote again for Donald Trump. It remains to be seen whether Ron Desantis can work this formula while holding the MAGA base. ...
What do the Democrats have to fight back against the way they are negatively stereotyped by the Republicans? The most powerful positive stereotype Democrats had through most of the last century was in their plausibly representing themselves as the party that fought for and cared about the little guy. That stereotype lingers, but since the Clinton administration has grown gradually less plausible as the party became increasingly dominated by Neoliberal elites.
So what's the Dem brand now? It's become the party of facts and evidence, process and legislative good order. Hey, we don't get much done, but we do it in a sane, responsible way. Wonkish intellectuals love us, and so you should, too. And even if we do get something done, you won't notice, because it won't affect your lives in a way that you will ever associate with us. You'll probably give the credit to your local GOP pol who voted against it. So choose us because we're boring and sane and the other guys are wild and crazy.
If the Dems have a better story than this, what is it? What story do they have that is the string to which their accomplishments can cluster?
From "Stop Saying the Republicans Are the Party of Law and Order" 8/10
Law and Order is not the same as the Rule of Law. Laws are only legitimate for law-and-order Conservatives if they align with and support their traditionalist social order. Any laws that undermine that order or are out of alignment with it have for them no real legitimacy. Law-and-Order conservatives in the past have often approved lynchings, or the kind of thievery and dirty tricks that led to Watergate, or the defiance of the Bolland Amendment that led to Iran Contra, or the contravention of international law that led to the invasion of Iraq, or now the egregious, flagrant, out-in-the-open lawlessness of Donald Trump.
Conservatives feel no need to take the law seriously except when they get to use it as a club to punish their enemies. What matters is the conservative sense of order, and any illegal actions Conservatives commit need not be punished so long as they either promote the traditionalist social order or transgress it in minor ways that don't destabilize it. Shoplifting is a far more serious crime than tax fraud.
Russia used to be an enemy of these law-and-order conservatives when it was ruled by the godless communists, but now that it is a nominally Christian, traditional-order autocracy, they see it as an ally. They are very happy to accept its help in keeping Trump in power. They are gleeful that Brennan, Comey, Yates, and all the national security types who appear on CNN and MSNBC are in such a snit about Trump's dismantling of the government and institutions they have devoted their careers to defend.
From "How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left 2" 8/15
The inevitable result is that a Progressive politics without a narrative loses to a politics that has one. The folks on the Right haven't heard the news yet about the unbelievability of grand narratives. Maybe they should take a course on it. In the meanwhile, the people on the Right, whose desire is primarily grounded in wanting to destroy the cultural Left and its capture of American cultural institutions makes it very easy for them to get organized in movements designed to do just that.
What does the Left have to offer as a counter--anarchic, evanescent, happenings like Occupy or quixotic, unpopular riots like the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle? But except for a few of the most hardcore on the Left, as soon as Left politics stops being fun or entertaining, there is no 'desire' for it. And besides, the politics of the Left can't compete with the politics on the Right for being fun. Those folks on January 6 were having a ball. Owning the Libs is great sport. Watching Libs get apoplectic about Trump is a hoot.
Liberals just don't understand how boring and uninspiring is their sanctimony, how ridiculous their woke fetishes, how easy they are to mock and to dislike. Their political naïveté and rhetorical ineptness bred in university seminar rooms is truly breathtaking, and yet all the youngsters these days in the media who went to prestigious universities and liberal arts colleges are its acolytes. The Right scares them, as it should, but this generation simply hasn't the ability to push back because it has no place to set its feet. The cultural Left has become the new "establishment", but theirs is an establishment without a foundation except for old habits that grew out of beliefs they no longer hold.
From "How Neoliberalism Captured the Left 3", 8/27
Liberation, yes. But liberation from what? I would say from delusion and obsession, i.e., from objects of desire that are unworthy of our deepest aspirations. But in the godless, postmodern "theology" that pervades the cultural left, Liberation is framed as delivery from the Oedipus Complex and its repressive traditional social norms. The goal for this kind of "progressivism" is to live in an anti-Oedipal, normless society. Such a society might produce admirable postmodern cultural icons like Madonna and Lady Gaga, but it also has no ground to condemn figures like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein who are the other side of the 'desire' coin.
By what moral standard within this postmodern liberation theology can we judge the first two admirable and the second two not? It just comes down to aesthetic preference. You can call Trump and Weinstein predators, but when they retort that "We're just following our transgressive desires; we don't believe in conventional, alienating, life-sapping norms. Who are you to judge us? Well, what's your retort? It just comes down to your not agreeing, but by what standard can you claim that you're right and they're wrong? Why should anybody take you seriously? It just comes down to aribitrary opinions about what constitutes naughty or nice behaviors.
The better solution is to accept that norms are necessary, and they must be continuously but gradually improved. And the standard by which we measure such improvement is Justice understood as an inspiring transcendental ideal. You can't force better norms on a society because that only leads to backlash. You have to awaken dormant parts of the human soul. You have to inspire people to want not just to behave well but to become good, and you can't do that if you don't believe it's in most people to become that, or you believe that Goodness and Justice are just arbitrary social constructions.
And the bottom line is that a majority of Americans are never going to accept your program because hardly anybody wants a Skinner's Box society, which is ultimately the only kind of society that would enable you to achieve your behaviorally correct goals.
By all means, let there be an avant-garde that explores reality beyond the fringes of what is conventionally acceptable, but let them remain on the fringes. The challenge for society inside the fringe is to develop norms that align with the Tao of things, that is, with Justice understood as a transcendental ideal. You have to believe that there is such a thing if there's any hope of bending the long arc of history toward it. And then you have to have the will to do the work that's necessary to achieve it.
From "Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien's Quest Saga", 9/12
Aragorn, like Parzival, has blood nobility that is hidden from the world, and both spend years wandering in obscurity before finally reaching the symbolic culmination of their quests in their respective coronations where their inner, now fully achieved nobility is finally recognized. Having nobility in the blood is not what makes you noble; rather it's a potential (in all of us) that is achieved only after a lifetime of wandering, learning, and having been tested. How many people today imagine the trajectory of their lives in that way? I think they should, and maybe that requires taking fairy stories more seriously.
These are old-fashioned virtues only rarely celebrated in contemporary film and fiction. The noblest contemporary protagonists are motivated by a willingness to sacrifice themselves out of loyalty to friends, family, a cause, but there is rarely a character that is motivated by a feeling for this quest to realize his or her inner nobility. The contemporary aesthetic requires that interesting characters be driven by unconscious compulsions of one kind or another, and the character arc focuses on a deconstruction of what might appear at first glance noble in the protagonists but revealed in fact to be Daddy or Mommy issues or insecurities, need for control, vengeance, or just garden-variety egoism.
That's fine so far as it goes because it's generally true about all of us--it's like Parzival's awakening encounter with Cundrie, but it is a wasted moment unless it becomes the first step on the quest. So while there's an implied sense in modern storytelling that there is a right and a wrong choice that confronts the protagonist, there's very little sense about what the stakes are for advancing or regressing the larger story arc of a human life. There's little sense that choices have consequences, not just in the immediate context, but in the larger one that is one's life quest story. There's little sense that making the right or the wrong decision is a test, a step in a much longer quest story that has a goal or telos.
From "Moral Parity", 9/15
The whole premise of MAGA is that Democrats are so corrupt, so evil, so beyond the moral pale that whatever wild accusations are made about Democrats' crimes only scratches the surface of the dark horror that lies below. Just wait--it will all come out. It's just a matter of time before it all comes to light.
"Sure," those on the religious right argue, "Trump might have crossed the line here and there, but whatever he's done is nothing compared to what these demon-possessed Democrats have done." That the evidence supports the opposite, that more corrupt Republicans get caught than Democrats by a fairly wide margin does not matter because, they think, the Dems are just cleverer in avoiding getting caught or the Liberal Media in collusion with the Deep State insures that they don't.
The first step toward moral maturity is owning your projections, or as the gospel puts it, "Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?" That's really at the heart of the problem for those on the religious right in this country. They think they are morally righteous when in fact they haven't even taken most basic steps toward achieving it. Matthew goes on: "You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."
From "Sincerely Bad Religion", 9/24
Tolkienism, as I'm sure Tolkien would be the first to tell you, is bad religion. But this speaks to what I've been writing about here for quite some time now, which is that people are inherently religious, and that in a secular society they will adopt bad religion rather than none. Cosmopolitan Liberalism represents None, and in the U.S. the Democrats have become dominated by the mindset of cosmopolitan Liberalism, and so in public perception they are the party of None. And so since the traditional churches have worked so hard to undermine their spiritual authority and offer no robust healthy alternative, bad religions proliferate like weeds. I belong to the party of None because I don't think politics should be about metaphysics, but about solving practical problems to achieve the common good. But I recognize that in a time when the churches have largely failed to deliver good religion, people will grab onto any kind of bad religion. And politics--whether on the Right or the Left--is always bad religion when it become an arena for achieving one's metaphysical fantasies.