After the Future

Chinatown

Ronald Brownstein's article, "The 1970s Movie that Explains 2020s America" in The Atlantic looks back at Polankski's Chinatown, which came out fifty years ago this week. It is worth reading.

If you asked me when I was in my twenties or thirties what I thought the best movie ever made was, I’d say Chinatown. There are few movies that had a more powerful effect on me, but I never want to rewatch it. Reading Brownstein's article prompted me to think about why that might be. Brownstein writes--

In Towne’s script, Chinatown was more a state of mind than a place. It symbolized the enigmatic nature of evil and the inability of even well-intentioned people (such as Nicholson’s Gittes) to pierce the hidden layers of power, the wheels within wheels turning far from view and understanding. Like America itself in the age of Vietnam and Watergate, Nicholson’s character knew less than he thought as he excavated the secrets of Dunaway’s Mulwray and her monstrous father, and he understood even less than he knew.

This film rounds out Polanski's trilogy of metaphysical evil, the first being Rosemary's Baby in '68 and his interpretation of Macbeth in '71. But Chinatown is the most powerful of the three because the most realistically relevant for the ethos of the dawning of, not the Age of Aquarius, but of the Age of Whatever. Rosemary's Baby could be dismissed as horror porn, and since Macbeth is Shakespeare's, there's always something deeply good and true at the heart of it. But with Chinatown, it was evil, corruption, and despair all the way down. I suppose there are other movies before it that make the same point about how at bottom, beneath all the social niceties and norms, rages a dark, repressed monster who wins in the end. But not so powerfully, at least for me. Polanski has a real feel for the uncanny reality of evil that makes other realistic treatments of it seem banal. 

When I first saw Chinatown it felt like a personal revelation, an awakening through which my young idealistic self was confronted with the reality of the world around me that I kinda sorta knew, but didn't want to believe was so powerful. I remember that the insight watching the movie afforded me was this sense that civilization and its norms, values, taboos were all flimsy, superficial conventions that were but a thin membrane under which lay a roiling chaos of dark, chthonic, monstrous energies looking for ways to erupt. These energies were in me as they were in the world, and everything else was superficial nonsense, a futile attempt to constrain the unconstrainable. It was for me a dizzying gaze into the abyss. It had a very powerful effect on me that lasted for days. 

I was a child of the 60s and hadn't given up yet on the possibility of the 'making of a counterculture'. I thought that mostly sane, decent people were running things, and the bad guys were anomalous and could be managed if good people would just step up. It was just common sense, right? Well I don't believe that anymore, and my watching Chinatown was the beginning of my conversion. As I said, It woke me up, or it was an event that triggered a gradual reckoning that I hadn't made until then. But I also understood that the insight it afforded was not the whole truth. I was too solidly grounded in something else.

If you're under fifty and reading this, you must think I was a naive idiot. Maybe, but perhaps that's because the fundamental nihilistic vision of Chinatown has become since then so normalized. And kids growing up since the 70s haven't a moment of real innocence or real idealism anymore. That wasn't true for me growing up, and I'm glad of it. Kids today get instead a bland, conventional, let's-all-get-along goody-goodiness in the schools, but the reality they confront on the streets and online belies that and is very much consonant with Chinatown. That's reality for kids, and any attempt to paper over it in school is usually pointless. It's the "futility of good intentions" that Brownstein quotes Towne as describing the theme of the movie.

I don't believe that good intentions are futile, but I do believe that the guilelessness of one's good intentions must be matched by a shrewdness that understands the limits of what's possible in any given situation. I don't believe in tilting at windmills. (But I'm glad that some people still do it. We need our holy fools.) 

What kids need today is the opposite of the conversion I had in my twenties. If I needed then to awaken to the deep reality of evil, kids today need to awaken to the deep reality of goodness. Evil is profoundly true; so is goodness. But evil is the only profundity that our cultural elite seems to believe in. It is, at least, the only profundity that they know how to write well about. Goodness is mostly portrayed as a kind of affable, good-natured niceness, or as loyalty and generosity to friends and family--and that's fine. But that's not the goodness I'm talking about. It has be at least the equal of the evil that's at the heart of Chinatown, and who these days in the mainstream exemplifies that or even attempts to write about it?

So if Chinatown is such a great movie, why don't I ever rewatch it? Because it has served its purpose, and because so many movies, novels, and TV shows say the same thing over and over again. We all live in Chinatown now, so there's no need to watch a movie about it.  

The Limits of the Scientific Clerisy

Though [the adherents of the New Atheism} built an identity around being rational, they often based their unbelief on dogmatic appeals to institutional authority, rather than careful skepticism. We saw this in the way Dawkins and others claimed that science had achieved an absolute, unquestionable truth with the theory of evolution. Rather than engage with critics like Meyer and Behe, they simply treated them as heretics to be cast out of polite society; science thus became an authoritarian enterprise committed to rooting out doubt. 

In the years since, it has become increasingly obvious that science functions as much as an ideology as it does as a method of inquiry. The “scientific consensus” is now frequently invoked to settle not just scientific questions, but public-policy ones as well. Call this scientism. One of its most striking features is just how vacuous it is. Contemporary scientism doesn’t necessarily entail anything beyond uncritical deference to experts. This became clear enough over the course of the Covid pandemic. Within a month in early 2020, all right-thinking people went from ridiculing the idea that masks could stop the spread of a respiratory virus to believing it was of paramount importance to wear a mask at all times. This reversal wasn’t due to people weighing new evidence, but the empty assurance of the “scientific consensus.” 

Other examples come from the debates around gender and trans medicine. Evolutionary biologist and New Atheism alumnus Colin Wright has argued that gender ideology contradicts the material reality of sex. In Wright’s telling, this irrational doctrine then leads to acts of medical abuse, such as the chemical castration of minors. No doubt this is true, but unlike the creationists Wright might have been confronting a generation ago, proponents of “gender-affirming care” don’t appeal to sources of authority other than science. On the contrary, they point to the fact that major US medical institutions have endorsed these practices. The “scientific consensus,” then, has proved capable of giving public legitimacy to even the most outré belief systems. 

As a teenager, I had no way of foreseeing these developments. All I knew was that I didn’t want to live in a society controlled by Christian fundamentalists. To this day, I believe in the fragile ideal of a secular, pluralistic society. I used to think that scientific expertise could help sustain this ideal by combating religious dogma. However, it’s clear by now that those who purport to speak in the name of science aren’t as neutral and objective as I once assumed. Often, science’s would-be spokesmen are bent on imposing their own dogmas. In hindsight, I should have been more concerned about scientism becoming an official state ideology. Science has many impressive discoveries to its credit, but we shouldn’t let it think and make political decisions on our behalf. Nor ought we to uncritically adopt the metaphysical views of the majority of scientists as our own. The question of God’s existence, for instance, remains as open today as at any other time in human history.  

David Moulton

Science is a methodology, and it produces no dogmas. It is simply a way of testing theories about the mechanics of the material world. It gets beyond its skis when it tries to explain more. Philosophy and Theology are not science; they are both attempts to make sense of human experience, and they have their own methodologies. And those methodologies, if they are to have any intellectual integrity, must take what science has learned about how the mechanical world works seriously, if not dogmatically.

What is scientific knowledge today often becomes obsolete tomorrow. That doesn't mean science is done in bad faith or has no legitimacy. In fact it's legitimacy lies in its ability to admit when it's wrong and to self correct. It was accepted science, for instance, in the 19th century that women were on average less intelligent than men because women's average brain size was smaller.

So the most important thing about science is that it is open to revision. The best scientists are those who know that they don't know, that what they know is dwarfed by what they don't. Does anybody believe that five hundred years from now that what is accepted today as the scientific consensus will be essentially the same? There will be continuity, but I think the discontinuities will be far more significant. 

I admire Anthony Fauci. I think he is a scientist in the best sense, and that he played an indispensable, good-faith role during the pandemic. He'd be the first to admit that he doesn't know everything, that he wasn't right about everything because decisions in a crisis are based on sometimes incorrect and always incomplete information, but I'd argue that when the smoke cleared he was proved more often right than wrong.  

I think that those on the political Right have made fools of themselves in trying to make him into some deep-state bogeyman. Their attacks on him personally are unfair, unwarranted, and unjustified. But Liberals need to understand that there is a lot of justifiable skepticism about the Scientific Clerisy, which, unfairly, Fauci has come to symbolize.

This skepticism is true for those on both the Right and the Left. RFK's campaign tends to attract the latter. Hardly anybody trusts the "system", and for good reason. But most of the people who work in it, especially those who are unelected like Fauci, perform an essential good-faith effort to make life in an enormously complex society sustainable. 

Nevertheless, sane people have good reason to suspect that this clerisy and its reductive worldview needs to get some pushback from time to time. And they have good reason to mock those who genuflect to every edict it pronounces. When people, even Anthony Fauci, say, "The science tells us...", this does not mean that it is absolute truth. It is in most instances a statistical probability. So it's important enough that it needs to be taken seriously as part of one's deliberations about how to act, but not as a dogmatic pronouncement requiring unwavering obedience. That should be common sense. 

The excerpt above is taken from an article about Intelligent Design and its relationship to Darwin's ideas about natural selection. The author argues that while Darwin's theory is a very powerful explanation for the mechanics of evolution, there are some anomalies that remain unexplained, and there are levels of complexity that are inadequately explained, and that perhaps can never be explained scientifically. That provides openings for philosophical or theological interpretation.

Intelligent design is not science, and it should not be taught as science. It's philosophy, and it's philosophy that, until about 150 years ago, would be consistent with what every philosophically literate person thought for at least the last 2500 years. But nobody knows that philosophy anymore, so philosophers that draw upon it seem unscientific, outlier cranks.

But Intelligent Design takes very seriously what science tells us while drawing on a broader range of human experiences and thinking that are not incompatible with it. But nobody knows that. Most people think that Intelligent design is fake science. But since we don't teach philosophy in our public high schools, we are educating our children to accept that the only legitimate way of knowing is scientific knowing, and this in turn creates a kind of ideological dogmatism that excludes other kinds of knowing that are far more important for the living of our lives. Any attempt to think about the meaning of history and the destiny of the human race is out of bounds--it's religion. But is it any more so than the atheistic scientism of Dawkins or Dennett?    

So my point here is not to be anti-science, but rather to affirm that science explores a limited domain of knowledge, and that we must understand the limited role it should play in what should be the broader, deeper project of our becoming fully human. Science has done more harm than good when it acts as an ideology that colonizes or delegitimates other forms of knowing, especially forms of knowing that until relatively recently were accepted as essential for human flourishing. This reductive ideology, I've been arguing, has been the unintended negative consequence of the Baconian project, and it is core to the OS that runs the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.

Things are out of balance, perhaps fatally, if we don't find a way to rebalance. 

Quote of the Day: Peter Wehner

I have struggled to understand how to view individuals who have not just voted for Trump but who celebrate him, who don’t merely tolerate him but who constantly defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty. How should I think about people who, in other domains of their lives, are admirable human beings and yet provide oxygen to his malicious movement? How complicit are people who live in an epistemic hall of mirrors and have sincerely—or half-sincerely—convinced themselves they are on the side of the angels?

Throughout my career I’ve tried to resist the temptation to make unwarranted judgments about the character of people based on their political views. For one thing, it’s quite possible my views on politics are misguided or distorted, so I exercise a degree of humility in assessing the views of others. For another, I know full well that politics forms only a part of our lives, and not the most important part. People can be personally upstanding and still be wrong on politics.

But something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside.

…

This doesn’t mean those in MAGA world can’t be impressive people in other domains of life, just like critics of Trump may act reprehensibly in their personal lives and at their jobs. I’ve never argued, and I wouldn’t argue today, that politics tells us the most important things about a person’s life. Trump supporters and Trump critics alike can brighten the lives of others, encourage those who are suffering, and demonstrate moments of kindness and grandeur.

I understand, too, if their moral convictions keep them from voting for Joe Biden.

But it would be an affectation for me, at least, to pretend that in this particular circumstance otherwise good people, in joining the MAGA movement, in actively advocating on its behalf, and in planning to cast a vote for Trump, haven’t—given all we know—done something grievously wrong. (Source)

I think that the health of the country requires the good faith participation of principled conservatives in our political discourse because they offer an essential counterbalance to many of the pathologies of the Liberal Order. But MAGA is bereft of either good faith or principles.

And so for this reason, I think that Wehner is pointing to something that doesn't seem to be an issue that it should be for many Trump supporters on the religious right, which is how their political behaviors are putting them into deep moral jeopardy. The moral red line here is not whether one leans left or right, but in whether one becomes actively and enthusiastically involved in promoting something that is so dark and destructive. Whatever its rationalizations, MAGA is at its heart motivated by anger, resentment, and the need for revenge, and those are never moral justifications for any behavior.  So many religious conservatives are so obsessed with pointing out the splinter in the Liberal eye that they don't see the two by four in their own--Discernment of Spirits 101. 

If you listen to a guy like Steve Bannon and buy the anger, resentment, and revenge package that he's selling, it's not a matter of having an opinion that reasonable, decent people can agree or disagree about--it's about the state of your soul and the moral jeopardy you are putting it into. That's the point, I think, that Wehner, himself a conservative evangelical Christian, is making here, and it's an important one. Religious fanatics persuade themselves they are doing God's work when in reality they are serving other masters. 

Hit Man's Postmodernist Tropes

Probably a good idea to watch the movie Hit Man, now streaming on Netflix, before reading this post. 

Glen Powell is something of a thing lately. He's not just a heartthrob actor, but also gets credit for writing the script for, which seems to give him some intellectual chops because the movie is covertly a paean to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. Even though Powell plays the part of a philosophy professor, he never mentions Anti-Oedipus, but it suffuses every moment of the film. Remember what I had to say about Deleuze and Guattari in the Cathedral Lecture Part 3--

[Stuart Jeffries] writes that Anti-Oedipus is a--

“gleefully godless liberation theology for which Deleuze and Guattari had proselytized. The  Gender was fluid, identities exchangeable – perhaps even the biologically determinate constraints of sex could be overcome. Instead of being doomed to be, one could become multiple. Instead of remaining what one was born as, one could become what one wanted – multiple, provisional, fluid. Identities became masks one could pick up in the marketplace, wear, and discard at will. In this way, desire exploded identity.” (pp. 46-47)

The whole idea of ‘reinventing oneself’ becomes a thing. Americans always knew that, of course, read The Great Gatsby, but now it gets the imprimatur of French intellectuals. Reject your acculturation, reject your biology, your gender, whatever it is that you’ve been acculturated to believe that you are because it’s all a jail that’s keeping you imprisoned. Step beyond all that determines you and embrace endless other possibilities. Reject that you are a fixed self and embrace that your identity changes incessantly—or it should. Do you see how this meshes with the Transhumanist project?

I’m spending so much time on this because of the way it has become so normative among cultural elties and fits into exactly Marcuse’s critique of repressive de-sublimation that we talked about last week. Their solution is a form of transgressivity for the sake of transgessivity in the name of liberation, but liberation to what? It has no positive doctrine about what it means to be human except that you now have a responsibility to reinvent yourself by whatever whim catches your fancy. There is only repression on the one hand and de-sublimation on the other. 

They encourage their readers to “de-territorialize”—to stop being sheep and start being birds. Sheep are ‘territorialized. They don’t need fences or walls to keep them in. People, say D&G are the same way. They can be given unrestricted freedom, and they will not exercise it. Why? Because they are habituated, like sheep to remain in their stable, safe identities. Better that we become ‘birds because then we de-territorialize—“rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges.”

A ”flight” for D&G is a kind of delirium—

To be delirious is exactly to go off the rails.… There is something demoniacal in a line of flight. Demons are different from gods, because gods have fixed attributes, properties and functions, territories and codes: they have to do with rails, boundaries and surveys. What demons do is jump across intervals, and from one interval to another. (Dialogues II, p. 40)

This they saw as an anti-capitalist, subversive project. They want to challenge all preconceptions of normality and madness. Madness need not be all breakdown; it may also be breakthrough. Madness is sanity, and sanity is deadening conformity. A conformity enforced by the Oedipus Complex and superego. So to be free humans must slay all forms of superego, all forms of authority, tradition, morality, and restraint. 

This defines the essential arc of Powell's character Gary Johnson. At the beginning of the film, he's awkward and nerdy, at the end he's suave and sexy. The transformation is a thing to behold. At one point one in the middle of the film mid transformation, of the female students asks, "When did our philosophy professor become hot?" In other words, when did he become really interesting as a human being--not the invisible guy who drives a Honda Civic.  We meet him in the beginning as teaching a handful of students in a cinderblock classroom, and at the end we see him teaching a huge class in a large hi-tech auditorium, a symbol of how his walk on the wild side led to his flourishing and how it comports with success in the TCM.  

This is nihilism with a smiley face. Sure it's an entertainment, but it aspires to be more, to be an emancipatory statement. It would be benign enough, but the film's nihilism takes a step beyond that in its last act when it justifies two murders. It's ok, right? After all, the murderers instead of going to prison became solid citizens contributing to their community. Isn't the world better off with two dirtbags dead and these two interesting, attractive, emancipated people brightening the lives of everyone around them?

Dostoyevski's Raskolnikov murdered a dirtbag, too. But he, at least, had the decency to feel guilty about it. Not these two. They're emancipated uebermenschen, no longer constrained by taboo. They have taken flight, and they live happily ever after. Good for them, the film wants us to think. 

I haven't done an exhaustive reading of reviews, but among the ones I've read, there's nothing about the underlying philosophy in a movie that is so self-consciously making a philosophical statement. Maybe it's because Anti-Oedipus is so much the air we breathe these days that's we no longer notice its nihilism, especially when so attractively presented in its two main actors and with such a glimmering patina of philosophical sophistication. 

How far we've come since Leopold and Lowe.

BTW, if this sounds like an old-man rant about how the world is going to hell, then read the comments above in the context of the larger point I'm making in Cathedral Talk 3. I argue there that there's something valid in the idea of de-territorialization, and I think that to become an adult we all need to find a way to transcend the constraints of superego. But there's a wisdom tradition that's not taught anymore that shows us how to do that in a healthy, integrated way that works with the energies of the Anthropos archetype. In the western tradition, it starts with Socrates, goes through Christianity, and comes out into the secular modern world through Rousseau, Kant, and Schiller and in the lecture I make a big deal of Schiller's idea of the "beautiful soul". I don't think the murderers in Hit Man qualify by any stretch of the imagination as models for the beautiful soul, although the movie wants us to think of them that way. 

Another sidenote: I think that Lefebvre's Liberalism as a Way of Life understands itselfto be in this tradition, and that's to be applauded, and I embrace him as an ally. I just don't think he goes far enough, and so his Liberalism just becomes another option on the cultural menu for those.

 

AI Is Eating the World

If you feel your brain start to pretzel up inside your skull, then you are getting the full experience of the generative-AI revolution barging into your industry. This is what disruption actually feels like. It’s chaotic. It’s rushed. You’re told it’s an exhilarating moment, full of opportunity, even if what that means in practice is not quite clear.

Nobody knows what’s coming next. Generative-AI companies have built tools that, although popular and nominally useful in boosting productivity, are but a dim shadow of the ultimate goal of constructing a human-level intelligence. And yet they are exceedingly well funded, aggressive, and capable of leveraging a breathless hype cycle to amass power and charge head-on into any industry they please with the express purpose of making themselves central players….After roughly two years of the most recent wave of AI hype, all that is clear is that these companies do not need to build Skynet to be destructive.

AI is eating the world is meant, by the technology’s champions, as a triumphant, exciting phrase. But that is not the only way to interpret it. One can read it menacingly, as a battle cry of rapid, forceful colonization. Lately, I’ve been hearing it with a tone of resignation, the kind that accompanies shrugged shoulders and forced hands. Left unsaid is what happens to the raw material—the food—after it’s consumed and digested, its nutrients extracted. We don’t say it aloud, but we know what it becomes. Charlie Warzell in the Atlantic.

Luckily we have an effective, highly functional political system run by astute, well-informed grownups that have the vigilance and wisdom to protect the public interest.

Two Books Worth Reading: 'Liberalism as a Way of Life' and 'The Hollow Parties'

I don’t think there’s any question that the Liberal Order is in crisis, but understanding why it’s in crisis isn’t very clear, especially to Liberals who take it for granted. I want to spend the time running up to the election this fall trying to understand this better.

Two new books are useful in thinking this through. The first just released this week entitled Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Lefebvre and The Hollow Parties released in May by Schlozman and Rosenfeld. I strongly recommend both books if you’re interested in understanding who we are as Americans, how we got here, and where we need to go if the Liberal Order survives the election in November.

Liberalism as a Way of Life is very readable. It’s premise is very similar to the one I’ve been arguing that Liberalism and the Techno-Capitalist Matrix is the air we breathe whether we consider ourselves Liberals or not. He makes his case drawing on Rousseau,  Kant, J.S. Mill, but especially John Rawls, that Liberalism has positive content, i.e., it’s more than just laissez-faire. It’s a humanistic doctrine whose primary ethical tenet is to oppose cruelty and to promote a civic-minded, pluralistic conviviality.

I don’t question the positive characteristics of Liberalism. I question, though, its resources to rise to the challenges that face us because of the ways it is so easily coopted by the TCM. Lefebvre recognizes these limitations. But whatever its limitations, Liberalism is where we start. It defines the terrain through which we must pass, so it’s important to understand what’s best about it as well as what are its, imo fatal, flaws.

In any event, Lefebrve’s book is interesting and well worth reading. He has helpful examples from popular culture to illustrate his points. He uses the Amy Poehler character in Parks and Recreation as an exemplary Liberal in her continuous battle with the illiberalism of her townspeople. He also points to The Good Place as a classic piece of positive Liberalism: it’s the story about how selfish, self-absorbed people, i.e., Illiberal people, become generous and community minded, i.e., Liberal people. The core meaning of Liberal, after all, is to be generous and open, and to become a free, self-legislating individual contributing to the good of his or her community. That’s what the “liberal” arts are supposed to cultivate. So no sane person is against Liberalism if that’s what we mean by it. But is that what Liberalism is in fact?

For lack of space, I’m oversimplifying here. I think the importance of what he’s saying lies in his trying to provide a non-religious philosophical foundation for something that most Americans of good will take for granted. It may owe a lot to the Christian tradition, but it is agnostic about Christian metaphysical claims. Indeed it is agnostic about all metaphysical claims, which he believes must be constrained to the private sphere. This is the Rawlsian part of his argument, and it’s a serious argument that someone with my commitments must deal with.

The argument I’m making is very similar to his insofar as he’s drawing from a book that inspired his title, Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life. Hadot was an eminent French scholar of classical philosophy. And he has been enormously important for me in understanding how Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are only secondarily theoreticians. More importantly, they are founders of schools and spiritual communities of learning and soul craft. I had never understood before reading Hadot how much the early Christian monks owed to these schools in providing a model for their way of life.¹ And Lefebvre wants to draw on Hadot’s presentation of these schools as models for defining a Liberal way of life. That’s to be applauded.

I’ll probably have more to say about this later, but the conversation I’d like to have with Lefebvre is about why I think Liberalism fails because of its lack of a metaphysics, and this is why in the long run it cannot withstand the attacks from illiberalism and the TCM that looms ominously behind it. The philosophers and philosophical schools about which Hadot talks all were firmly grounded in a metaphysics and a commitment to the Good, and in the long run I think that ethos must be retrieved in a postmodern key. This was one of the main themes of the Cathedral Lectures. .

Regarding The Hollow Parties, if you don’t have time to read it, I recommend listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with the authors earlier this week on his podcast. I found this book particularly helpful for providing historical context for stuff I knew but didn’t understand the significance of. For years now, I’ve been accusing the Democrats, particularly Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, of political malpractice for embracing the Neoliberalism that lost the Democrats the white working class. It’s clearer to me now that the real problem lies with the hollowing out of the Democratic Party after the McGovern-Fraser reforms made with all the best intentions to democratize the party in the wake of the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

This largely explains why the Democrats became a party dominated by a meritocratic elite that feels no connection to middle America, and why Middle American came increasingly to despise Democrats. But as bad as the results of these reforms were for the Dems, the Republicans copied them, and in their doing so deconstructed the guard rails that made Trump a possibility. There was no party mechanism for the GOP to prevent its extremists from taking over despite what most decent, sane, rank-and-file Republicans cared about. The GOP now is simply an empty bottle that is filled with MAGA crazy juice.

The Hollow Parties is also helpful in identifying six strands in American political party history that in their different combinations constituted the parties since the founding—

1. The Anti-Party Strand—From James Madison and Washington to contemporary technocrats. They hate partisanship and division. They think of themselves, imo naively, as beyond ideology. They want competent elites to run things. Think someone like James Comey and Merrick Garland who in their bending over backwards to avoid the appearance of partisanship ironically created more of it. Overlaps with Policy Reform Strand.

2. The Accomodationist Strand—Party machine politics. Not about policy principles or public interest, but transactional, tit-for-tat politics. Things get done as favors not because there is any overarching public interest. But sometimes the favors are done for people in category 5 who care about the public interest. LBJ understood the accommodationist game and played it effectively in ways that benefited domestic public interest if not particularly well in our foreign affairs interests.

3. The Populist Strand—Us vs. Them politics that focuses its energies through a charismatic leader. Very conflict oriented more than policy oriented. Driven by resentment and grievance. They are “democratic” only in the sense that equality is only recognized by those in their tribal in-group. There was a time when I spoke positively of Populism. No longer.

4. The Capital Strand—Think Wall St. and most corporate CEOs who care about politics only insofar as those elected seek to lower taxes and minimizes regulations. Not averse to having those tax revenues directed toward them in huge government expenditures when it serves their bottom line in govt contracts.

5. The Policy Reform Strand—Seeks to get things done in the public interest. At its worst when manifested in Best and Brightest technocratic arrogance. At its best when it takes what’s best in the accomodationist, radical, and anti-party strands while seeking to ovecome their limitations. Guys like FDR, LBJ, Obama, Bernie Sanders, and even Joe Biden are in their different ways representatives of this strand in its best sense. Is there any question that, whether or not you agree with their particular policy positions, their fundamental commitments are to the broad public interest? It’s hard to think of any recent Republicans who care about the broad public interest in this way. Since the end of Reconstruction, with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower, they almost always served the narrow interests of Capital. They still do, at least so far, with Trump. That’s at least the bet that Capital is making in backing him.

6. The Radical Strand—Single-minded, uncompromising, subversive of existing norms and practices, and usually unsuccessful because of their need for purity that makes it near impossible for them to win majorities. This strand can be successful if it taps into the Populist Strand, however. I think Reagan’s populist appeal largely explains the success of his radical Neoliberal dismantlement of the New Deal Order. But what Reagan started Trump is bringing to a chaotic culmination. In any event, Radicals play an important role in shaking things up when things get stultified. They are not particularly helpful when Chaos is the prevailing zeitgeist. Radicals should never be allowed to have any significant political power, because they always seek to outdo one another in the purity of of their radicality.

I list these out here because they are referred to in the Ezra Klein podcast without providing definition, so it might be helpful in understanding what they’re talking about. And because I’ll probably be using this vocabulary in future posts about the future of the Liberal Order.

The bottom line is that the parties no long longer work, and we need them to work. More on this going forward. Needs to be related to themes I’ve been developing about the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.

Note 1. I write about Hadot in a post entitled “Plato: Habitus as Heuristic”.

Quote of the Day

Ever since the “Stop the Steal” campaign in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the relentless barrage of election lies from Donald Trump and his allies have been like a river carving a gorge out of a mountain, dramatically reshaping the land long after the water itself has passed. Conspiracy after conspiracy appears, roars across social media at top speed, then is exposed and falls apart. But the dissipation of the individual conspiracies—the foundering of the court cases, the recantations from media companies that spread them, the eye-popping defamation settlements—do nothing to rebuild the trust already eroded as they flowed by. Among Republicans, belief that the 2020 election was stolen is more fundamental than ever—carved into the bedrock.

--Andrew Egger

Good metaphor. Egger clearly feels the chaos archetype vibe along the lines I described it a few weeks ago.

The landscape has indeed been dramatically and permanently changed, and it's not over. Question is what will be left to build on in a post-diluvian world. What will have the staying power and what will be washed away forever? And what new thing--for good or ill--might emerge to occupy this flooded-out space?