After the Future

The Oliver Anthony Dilemma

Good piece in the Atlantic about Chris Murphy and Oliver Anthony. Anthony's song, "Rich Men North of Richmond"...

... which became an unlikely national hit, also took jabs at “obese” welfare recipients and high taxes. The right applauded and that turned off the left. Vox christened Anthony a right-wing breakout star; Variety floated accusations that he was an “industry plant”; The Washington Post divined in his song the “mainstreaming” of conspiracy culture. The press coverage of Anthony, and the dismissive tone on the left, would change only on Friday, when the singer released a video in which he disowned the right’s championing of his song.

So if right-wingers like the song, then cultural Lefties have to hate it, right? Those are the rules of engagement in this absurd culture war that the Left plays so obtusely. But really, what does it tell you that the Right immediately identified with this song and Left rejected it? Well, maybe there's good reason for ordinary Americans to see the Dems, the party of the cultural Left,  as the party of rich men north of Richmond. 

But Murphy had the compassion to see the song--without the culture-war lens--for what it really is, a scream of pain...

 Progressives who want to fix a broken economy, Murphy argues, better find a way to hear out people like Anthony. It was with that in mind that a few weeks ago Murphy typed out a post on X (formerly known as Twitter):

a. I think progressives should listen to this. In part, bc it’s just a good tune.

b. But also bc it shows the path of realignment. Anthony sings about the soullessness of work, shit wages and the power of the elites. All problems the left has better solutions to than the right.

Murphy’s comment did not please his tribe. Some social-media liberals—skeptical that ties between Democrats and the rural working class can be repaired—decried Murphy’s apostasy and wondered archly if he had hit his head. Others muttered that the 50-year-old second-term senator deserved a primary challenge.

Is this negative response to Murphy's common sense compassion typical of Democrats? Certainly not typical of rank-and-file Democrats, but among the Dems' cultural elite? Alas--

Murphy is a repeat provocateur. In July, he tweeted that “there are a lot of social conservatives who believe in populist economic policies, and it would be a good idea to have those people a part of a Democratic/left coalition and accept a bit more intra-movement friction on culture issues as a consequence.” That post included a thoroughly unscientific but still revealing poll that found that 77 percent of those who responded disagreed with him.

Good for Murphy.

Whatever happens in the general election next year, the future of the country depends on whether the Dems or the GOP win the broad blue-collar vote, a vote comprising white, black, and brown voters--all of whom lean conservative in their cultural values. Most ordinary Americans are not ideologically driven, but they have no interest in the preoccupations of Neoliberal tribalists in media and the universities. Ordinary Americans have good reason to be completely turned off by those preoccupations, and insofar as those preoccupations become associated with the Democrat Party's brand, it gives them good reason not to vote for Democrats. 

So what will be  the post-Biden future for Democrats? Will it be the party the Clintons, i.e., the party of rich men and women north or Richmond,  or the party that Sanders and Murphy, the party that sticks up for ordinary Americans? 

Freddie de Boer on Class-First Politics (Updated)

I myself am a class-first leftist, and indeed the penultimate chapter of my new book is titled “Why is Class First?” And the answer is that class comes first because class approaches to politics are the best approach to combating injustice, including racial injustice. Being class-first is an instrumental position, not a moral one; it’s an approach to means and not a definition of ends. My basic gloss on racial inequality has been the same for forever: it’s futile to try and get everyone to not be interpersonally racist, but we can economically empower Black people and other people of color such that interpersonal racism no longer has the power to hurt them. A lot of people hate rich people, hate them reflexively and passionately. It doesn’t matter because rich people have money and money gives them power, which means the hate that’s directed towards them is impotent. Interpersonal racism, the state of some people hating other people because of their race, is unlike any other form of human hatred. But the same basic logic applies - if we dismantled Black people’s economic disadvantage, the structures that make up structural inequality, then the interpersonal hatred just won’t matter to anything like the degree it matters today. Of course I want people not to walk around with personal racial animus, but politics is about what can be achieved materially, not about manipulating people’s emotional attitudes.

You could contrast this with, say, Robin Diangelo and her obsession with ending micro-aggressions. Even if you could eliminate all of those little vestiges of social racism (you can’t), doing so would not put a dent in the Black-white wealth gap or eliminate mass incarceration of Black men or anything of that nature. That kind of focus does, however, fit comfortably with the social expectations of the kind of educated white liberals who buy her books. (

--Freddie De Boer

De Boer is a curiosity--a throwback, class-first Leftist. Not many of those around today. Too bad because he's mostly right. But his Left is not what passes for the Left these days. Class analysis and organizing requires real work and comes off as dry and abstract, while woke cultural politics costs little and is emotionally energizing--no matter how stupid, politically ineffectual, and downright counterproductive it is.

Woke Politics just feels so morally right, right? And that's what matters, feeling good about yourself and then everybody you know feeling god about you too, no matter how self-delusional in any deeply true moral sense such feelings are. This is not a Left that grownups can or ought to take seriously.

And then these members of the establishment Left in the universities and media wonder why so many young intellectuals are attracted to the Right. Why? Because it's what's you do these days if you want to be a rebel bad boy. It's not that hard to understand why some spirited young people feel a need to say No to a suffocating Niceness that passes these days for moral seriousness. That they do so is reactive, delusional, and predictable. 

I want to live in a world where people are kinder to one another, but most grownups resist being treated like kindergartners who must learn to play nice by the unctuously patronizing politically correct. Maybe this explains why DEI trainings don't work. I understand the good intentions, but this is a counterproductive strategy that gives Liberals a feeling that they are doing something constructive. But isn't such a program only asking people to behave with kindness to other human beings? Do people who have a good measure of kindness in them need to be taught to act? Can such a program work with people who are bigoted? Or Can mandating a DEI training create kindness where there's little of it to work with? And isn't such a mandate more likely to make the bigoted more angry and resentful when they are forced to take such trainings? 

8/16/ Update: From Edsall's column quoting former AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer:

The idea that the Democrat Party is a pro-business party, Podhorzer wrote, “is hardly a bulletin. It’s been pro-business since Carter. Deregulation (including Glass-Steagall, holding companies, communications, etc.) as well as trade agreements (NAFTA, China WTO, proposed TPP, etc.) are all Democratic Party ‘accomplishments.’”

Podhorzer, however, took sharp issue with Hersh, Shah and Teixeira. “I find Teixeira’s constant harping on Democratic ‘elites,’ as well as Hersh’s and others’ use of the term to be playing with fire at this moment,” he told me.

The focus on cultural elitism, in Podhorzer’s view, masks billionaires’ collective influence over the political process or the ways in which their success is responsible for immiseration and what we call “inequality.” This enables fascist politicians to shift the blame to intellectual and cultural “elites,” like liberals or people with college degrees, redirecting the inevitable resentments of the losers in the winner-take-all economy.

For that reason, Podhorzer continued, "Centrist commentators and Democratic strategists who have aggressively and continuously diagnosed the party’s capture by a woke 'elite' unwittingly — and without justification — affirm the fascist worldview in which 'cultural,' rather than economic or political, elites are the source of their disappointments."

I don't understand Podhorzer's problem with what Teixeira is saying. Doe he not think that the Democratic Party's capture by cosmopolitan elites and their values is a problem? Does he not understand that if they don't shift their branding strategy along the lines Teixera is suggesting that they will lose not just white blue collar voters, but black and and brown blue collars as well? These working class folks don't need Teixera to tell them that Democrat elites don't share their cultural values. They just need to watch the Dems who show up on mainstream media or to attend a typical local Democratic district meeting.

The educated White, Black, and Brown elites who are running the Democratic Party do not, of course, think of themselves as serving billionaires' interests, but they do serve their interests to the degree that they (1) promote Neoliberal policies, and (2) promote extreme woke cultural values that drive culturally conservative blue collars into the party of Trump and DeSantis.

They do less of the first thanks to the influence of Bernie, but they are doing more of the second. Does Podhorzer not get that what Teixera calls Brahmins are making the Democratic Party a hard place for non-college-educated, culturally conservative working class people of any skin color to feel at home? 

BTW, this is what Teixera says to Edsall--

Democrats continue to be weighed down by those whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curriculums and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy, and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue. With this baggage, rebranding the party — making it more working class oriented and less Brahmin — is very difficult, since decisive action that might lead to such a rebranding is immediately undercut by a torrent of criticism.

[Edsall] asked Teixeira whether the changing Democratic Party has reached a point of no return on this front, and he emailed back:

A good and big question. In the short run it looks very difficult for them to shed much of their cultural radicalism and generally make the party more attractive to normal working class voters. Over the medium to long term, though, I certainly think it’s possible, if there’s an internal movement and external pressures/market signals consistent with the need for a broader coalition. That is, if enough of the party becomes convinced their coalition is too narrow and therefore some compromises and different approaches are necessary. That may take some time.

That just seems to be common sense. Nobody's talking about restoring a politics of Meanness toward historically marginalized constituencies. The GOP has a monopoly on that. Rather it's a question of pushing a class-first strategy that is designed to support the welfare of everyday American working families. Who's not for that?

A sane politics is not a moral crusade to force everybody to think and behave and you do, but rather a very practical project to find common ground with people who have shared interests. Everybody, except GOP Libertarian cranks, wants to support working families, and that should be the Democratic Party's brand. Warren, Sanders, and even Biden seem to get this. It's not that others Dems are against it; it's just that other identitarian issues are for them more salient. The Robin DiAngelos should be listened to and treated with respect, but they should not be allowed in any way to become the face of the party.  

It's more complicated than that, of course. The  meaning crisis that flows from the slow-motion crackup of the Liberal Order still looms in the background. For there to be genuine relief, there has to be a shift in the zeitgeist that addresses these deep meaning needs. But in the meanwhile, we need to support a politics that mitigates the most negative consequences of the Neoliberal social order on the lives of ordinary working Americans. 

Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories

I understand the impulse to believe conspiracy theories. It comes from a largely correct view that most people are living in a consensus trance. It comes from that feeling that Neo had before he took the red pill: Something is deeply wrong. Why does everyone around me seem to accept these attitudes and behaviors that feel so off? And so when someone comes up with an explanation for what's going on, there's a strong temptation to go with it because now we don't have to be alone in our suspicions. There are others, too,  who "get it". We're not the crazy ones. Everyone else in the consensus trance is crazy. They're asleep. We're awake. Whether or not this alternative explanation is itself just another illusion--well, there aren't many incentives to consider that as a possibility, are there? (See Note 1)

Nevertheless, the feeling that one's life is mostly shaped by one's participation in a consensus trance is real, because we are. The feeling is innate in all of us because It's born of the same sense of falsity that compelled Socrates to challenge the Athenian consensus reality in his time and as Buddha did in the India of his time. Socrates' and Buddha's critique of what is false consensus reality was not purely a negative debunking, but rather part of an effort to open people up to the the really Real. 

Our consensus reality is largely delusional. But that's not to say it's something completely made up--it does indeed have a relationship to what's really there. That was true in Scorates' day and it is in ours. Our modern social imaginary--our current consensus reality--has a pretty clear picture about the surface reality of things, but it's the spiritual part that it filters out that is problematic. It's as if we see the notes on a musical score but are incapable of hearing the music. And it's this inability to hear the music that induces us into a materialistic trance that cuts off from the deep Real, which is where the music in its fullnness originates.  

Are we near deaf, or is it that there's just so much noise now that makes that music so much harder to hear? Either way, we live in a consensus reality that makes it extraordinarly difficult to hear the music. But it's the world we live in, and we have to navigate in it in our day-to-day lives as best we can. And a part of doing what we can is to make a serious effort to listen. The trick is to discern what's signal from what's noise, and then to find a way to filter out the noise. So conspiracy theorists are correct to be skeptical that the consensus reality is mostly noise that's filtering out the signal. But they should be even more skeptical that the alternatives their conspiracy theories point to aren't just more noise.

So we must live in the world in such a way that we accept the consensus reality for what it is--a provisional working model of reality that makes it possible for us all to live together. As we need a common language, we need a consensus reality to get along, and disrupting it for the sake of disruption because you think you're so smart as to see through it is just egotistical and often mean-spirited. Smartass intellectuals do it with their sophistical debunking, but so do redneck red-pillers who think they know better than everyone else about elites who are working behind the scenes with a plan to destroy the America they love.

They think they've had the BIG INSIGHT, and maybe there's kernel of truth in what they've learned, but they are always mistaken when they think that this kernel is bigger than it is, and when they think it is the key to explaining everything. It never is. All they're doing is creating more noise by insisting that their delusional thinking is better than the conventional delusional thinking. The challenge in the long run is to develop a consensus reality that is more deeply aligned with and so disclosive of the Deep Real, i.e., a consensus reality that is attuned to the Deep Music. 

Jumping from one collective trance into another is not a solution, and so the challenge for us individually is to do what we can to live in such a way that we grow in wisdom, which means that we progressively break with our innate tendency to be entranced by gradually getting  a better grip on Reality. We do this by becoming like Socrates. We start from a position of learned ignorance--we assume we know nothing and that we are inclined toward delusional thinking--and we gradually learn to overcome our tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. This is a life-long process. 

How do you know if you are becoming wiser? You see yourself slipping into and out of the trance, and knowing the difference. You find that your prudential judgments prove sound with increasing frequency. And you find that the perceptions and intuitions you have that depart from "consensus reality" stand up over time as more right than wrong. You learn better to distinguish between what's music and what's noise. Or to shift metaphors, you learn to distinguish the difference between going down a rabbit hole, which leads to delusion, from finding a trail of breadcrumbs, which leads toward a better grip on the Real. 

This is what I mean by the term 'self-transcendence' as I've been using it lately. Self-transcendence is the gradual process by which we come into a deeper, truer relationship with Reality. While we can use language to make an attempt, to essay so to say, what we have learned in this ongoing developing relationship, nobody knows the truth. Some people do, however, have a deeper relationship with it.

None of us is Wise, but some are wiser. And as a society we need to develop broadly accepted cultural practices that make it easier for people to become wiser, i.e., to hear the music, or to see the bread crumbs. We need a sapiential tradition that will help people--everyone from ordinary folks to elites--to overcome their tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. We lost our sapiential tradition in the West in the late medieval period, and we need to restore it now in a postmodern key. 

So if there are any conspiracy theorists out there reading this post, I commend you for your skepticism regarding the consensus reality, but your theory about what's really going on is probably wrong too. It's ok to play with alternative theories as a heuristic tool, but you must never take them too seriously or become fundamentalistic or dogmatic about them. Stay away from true believers. None of us understands what's really going on, and alternative theories to the consensus reality are just as prone to deceive us as the deceptions provided by the consensus reality. 

And yet we must always make the effort to get a stronger, deeper grip on Reality. That requires that we start from the consensus reality as a baseline, that we develop a healthy skepticism about it--which is the whole point of Socratic aporia. This creates a space for the breadcrumbs to appear, so we must keep an eye peeled looking for those breadcrumbs, and when they show up, we follow them where they lead us. And if they lead us down blind alleys, then we must have the humility and intellectual honesty to recognize it, learn from the mistake, and move on. It's ok. Making mistakes is part of the process of self-transcendence. Digging in when proven wrong is moronically self-destructive. 

But also to remember even when you have significant insights, i.e., when you make deeper connections with aspects of the Real, they never tell the whole story. They are just the next step on the breadcrumb trail. 

And a final bit of advice:  If you encounter a conspiracy theorist who is making a living from it, don't believe him even if there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying. He might even be sincere, but he has too much invested in digging in rather than admitting he's wrong when the evidence proves him so. Say No to moronically self-destructive beliefs and behaviors. 

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Note 1: I think that this rejection of the consensus reality in part explains why intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Mircea Eliade, and others were seduced by the alternative fantasies that Nazism or Fascism offered. It's not that far from what pushes so many American conservative intellectuals to embrace Trump now. Anything, they have come to believe, is better than the Liberal materialist consensus reality.

Liberals who feel comfortable in the materialist Liberal Order that is crumbling around them need to understand that rightist Traditionalist critique of modernity better than they do because they underestimate its power. I believe that we only move out of the current crisis with a progressive mindset, but it has to have different presuppositions than those that now shape Liberal progressive thinking. A new progressive mindset must not reject Liberalism so much as go beyond it, i.e., absorb its gifts and transcend it. Such a mindset, while it must be optimistic about the human future, cannot succeed unless it finds a way to retrieve and embrace the wisdom traditions these men of the Right drew from. They were more wrong than they were right, but it's the part that they got right that we need to learn from. 

The problem is that what is valid--even profound--in what they write is tainted by what seems to have been their often bizarre political commitments. Really they did that or wrote that? YIkes. They thought there was a political solution, whereas a political solutions was simply impossible for all the reasons they wanted one, which was that there was no spiritual-cultural foundation for it. Any political solution was doomed to be barbaric precisely because those on the hard Right in the 1930s trying to effect a political solution were spiritual cretins.There is no political solution unless there is first a profound spiritual-cultural transformation.

My political commitments lie mainly on the Left because the Left is more future oriented, less fanatic, and more oriented toward practical problem solving. It has its fanatics, but they are more annoying than they are dangerous when compared to the fanatics on the Right, at least in the U.S. context. The ethos on the Left is that of good intentions, while that on the Right is shot through with resentment-driven malice. But I do not expect a political solution to resolve our crisis because the Left offers close to zero when it comes to matters of the spirit. At best support of the Left in American society buys us time for something new to emerge. But the new thing, if it is to provide a true resolution, must come from outside of politics. 

Thoughts on the Yesterday's Indictment

From Charlie Syke's Morning Shots--

Jack Smith and other prosecutors have flooded the zone with Trump’s criminality. The rapidly filling legal calendar means that 2024 will be dominated by:

• Trump the fraudster

• Trump the rapist

• Trump’s hush money payments to a porn star

• Trump’s violation of the Espionage Act

and

• Trump, the conspiracist, who tried to overthrow the government

“Each of these conspiracies — which built on the widespread mistrust the defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud — targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

If only Republicans had been warned. But they bought this ticket; and this is the ride they are about to take.

I've been avoiding talking about politics on the ground if I don't have anything to say that isn't being said over and over and that doesn't fit into already established ideological bins, there's no point in writing about it. But his indictment yesterday on charges that relate to his failed coup attempt on J6 demand some acknowledgement.

I accept that American society is broken, and that it's main fissure line is defined by whether you voted for Trump even once. If you are a principled Conservative, the only option for you was to have become a Never Trumper. That so few Conservatives made that choice spoke, and continues to speak, to the deep trouble that we are in. Too many Americans see Trump as a legitimaage politician, and in doing so have defined down legitimacy and shattered any ideas of norm-al politics for years to come. Chaos 'R Us and will continue to be until there's a shift in the zeitgeist. Trump's indictments will not decrease the chaos; rather they are a harbinger of a more intense experience of chaos to come next year. 

Those of us who were appalled by Trump, who thought he was a grifter, a bull-shitting fabulist, and a demagogue, also thought that a sensible majority of Americans, both Liberal and Conservative, would see through his con. We were like Lincoln and many of the otherwise astute Northerners in 1860 who thought that saner minds would prevail and that the South would never provoke a Civil War. They were wrong then, and we were wrong in 2016. Chaos ensued, and it's not over for us yet in this recent iteration of this old American story. It's an open question as to how violent things will get. No reason for optimism because, 'Violence 'R Us'. 

A major theme in this blog since its inception provoked by the fabulism among Neoliberal elites that led to our invading Iraq in 2003 has been why are Americans are so prone to delusional thinking that seeks a violent outlet? The short answer is that without a vertical pole in our metaphysical imaginary, American society spins but without a center, and the consequent erratic,meaningless spinning leads to mass ontological dizziness. The consequences of the amputation of vertical pole began to be felt acutely by the Western cultural elite around 1850, and since then we've experienced a gradual development toward a broadening intensification of the experience of ontological dizziness. What affected mostly educated elites in the 20th century is affecting everyvbody now. 

It was aggravated by Neoliberal ideology and policies that became normative for elites since 1980 and who in their callow hubris after the collapse of the USSR thought that they should impose it on the world. And even now, despite its magnificent failures, the only class of people--mostly educated elites--who are not feeling particularly dizzy are those whose identities are in some degree still enmeshed in Neoliberal ideology and its nihilism. Why? Because of all the ways they benefit from it. (But how are their hyper-anxieety-prone children doing?)

But Neoliberalism and the cultural 'whateverism' it promotes is unsustainable for any society, and a society suffering from ontological dizziness will find a center one way or the other. And the question is whether or not it will find a true center--or whether it will just invent one around a cult of personality or some of other form of delusional thinking. 

And so as we "look forward" to what will be certainly one of the most chaotic and unpredictable election years in American history. As I've written in a series of posts earlier this year, while a Trump nomination by the Republicans looks extremely likely, it's unlikely that he will be elected in the general. Nevertheless, it's scary because, who knows--he could be elected. Those of us who thought it was impossible in '16 could very well be wrong again because we underestimate the degree to which American society suffers from ontological dizziness. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree with those who think that the combined effect of Trump running for President while under indictment or while appealing his convictions--there is no way he'll be running from jail-- is very bad politics, and not a good thing for the Republican Party up and down the ballot. And whatever is bad for Republicans is good for America, at least in the short term. 

So better Trump than a Republican who has a better chance of winning. The MAGA wing of the GOP must be completely an utterly discredited, and the best chance of that is letting them run and watching them lose. The best possible outcome for America as 2024 will come to a close will be for Democrats to win resoundingly everywhere. Why? Not because Democrats offer any real solutions but because Democrats are the true conservatives now. Whatever you might think about their views on cultural issues, they are the political force that stands for conserving norms and traditions in the political sphere. Republicans just don't care about them anymore, and no decent Republicans can get elected if they don't not cater to their ontologically dizzy base that wants to tear the whole system down.  

But if Democrats prevail in '24, as we should all hope they will, that is at best a short-term fix unless important voices from within the American soul emerge who articulate what ontological dizziness is and why it is such a profoundly destabilizing force in American--or any-- society. And then they must also develop an imagination of an American future where there is a cure for it. If this could happen in America, it would be truly a light shining on a hill. But maybe it will happen first elsewhere. It doesn't matter so long as it happens and it is broadly recognized as the next step forward. 

As I've been writing here for years, cultural problems and conflicts cannot be resolved in the political sphere. The American Civil War is a classic example: The North won in the power politics sphere, but not in the cultural sphere. Forcing people to change their values hardly ever works. The resentments fester and swell, and it's only a matter of time before they burst out in ways that debilitate the entire system. But because almost all politics lies downstream from culture, cultural warfare in the political sphere is extraordinarily hard to avoid. 

So if the real problem is ontological dizziness, what's the cure? As I argued last month, I don't think there is one until we experience a profound shift in the zeitgeist. Until then we're all like the ancient Hebrews wandering in the wilderness. There are those among us--mostly on the religious right--who long to return to the fleshpots of Egypt (aka the 1950s--and for some the 1850s). But there are also many Americans of goodwill, whether they lean conservative or liberal, who in their quiet, everyday lives provide ballast for the larger society. They put one foot in front of the other, do what must be done as conscience indicates, and they live lives of quiet integrity and hope. They do not suffer from ontological dizziness, and hopefully from out of their ranks a thoughtful, new leadership will emerge in the cultural sphere, and so consequently in the political sphere. Such leadership will succeed to the degree that it inspires most Americans to move toward a saner, ontologically less vertiginous place by the end of the century.

There can be no endlessly muddling through. Dome significant shift needs to happen. Better that it not be effected by the forces of darkness on whose behalf a guy like Trump works.