You know the cliche—that It’s always darkest just before the dawn. I can attest to its truth—at least in the Caribbean Sea. After I finished college, I took the best part of the next year to work as a deckhand on a charter boat in the Caribbean. We island-hopped all the way down to Grenada, later made famous by Reagan’s absurd invasion of it. Sounds like a wonderful trip, right? But it wasn’t. I was low man on the totem pole working for mean-spirited people who made my life very unpleasant.
Since I was low man, I had the hardest watch when we were underway, from 4 am to 8 am. Hard because almost impossible to stay awake doing noting except looking out onto a dark, empty sea. So I spent many a predawn morning with nothing more to do than to await the rising of the sun as we traveled east and south down the chain of the Windward Islands. Whether it was factually, scientifically true or just a reflection or my state of mind, I can attest to the weird effect that it did seem to get more intensely dark just before there were signs of the sun coming up. And when it came up, drumroll—Is that an angelic orchestra playing Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zaruthustra”?1
BTW, this was in 1972-73 when in the background Nixon wiped the floor with George McGovern—talk about depressing and dark. And then later as I was reentering America in the Spring, it was when the Watergate scandal was beginning to unfold. Just sayin’. There’s something in the DNA of Republicans that causes them to overreach in ways that lead to their inevitable crashing and burning. Trump seems immune, I know. The fear that we all have is that the only way he will crash is by his bringing the whole system crashing down with him. It may come to that. But however bad it gets, sane, morally serious Americans need to be clear about what they must do to never let this happen again.
So for most of my adult life, I have wondered about Republican political success. Why does the American demos so consistently send foolish, incompetent people to manage a governmental system they despise, people who can't manage hurricane or public health crises, who invade Grenada or Iraq for no good reason except hubris and revenge, who cannot take climate change seriously, who recklessly deregulated the banks and hired mercenaries to fight our wars in the mideast, who want to privatize social security and fought tooth and rail against sensible reform of an irrational, dysfunctional, and absurdly expensive healthcare system? Why do they elect people who time and time again show that the have no good-faith interest in solving problems, who appoint incompetent, corrupt, cronies who feel no compunction about breaking the law whether it’s Watergate, Iran Contra, Abu Ghraib, J6, or just to line their pockets? Why? Why do Americans keep giving these fools the keys to the bus?
Because they have a better story, and whoever has the best story wins. Their story might not align with reality, but it resonates with an American mythos that Democrats can’t match because in large part because they don’t even try to match it. Democrats are only good for coming in to clean up the mess that the Republican crackpottery inevitably makes. And then they’re unceremoniously shown the door when it’s time again to return to the politics of delusion. Democrat competency and problem solving doesn't sell. It's too utilitarian. The demos wants its politics to fit its mythos, they want their politics to be meaningful and to be an expression of their deepest beliefs--beliefs that the cosmopolitan elites that run the Liberal establishment largely hold in contempt. But in their contempt for the GOP mythos, they fail to offer anything better.
The Democrats' brand has become associated with a secular mythos of disruptive emancipation from all the traditional attitudes that oppress the marginalized. What this amounts to for most Liberals is to try to be a good person by being nice and tolerant and respectful, especially of the needs of those groups who have historically suffered oppression. The problem is that “being nice” as a mythos is pretty weak tea, and being disruptively emancipatory pisses a lot of people off. It’s a hard sell on Main Street. Try reading a little Antonio Gramsci, Lefties.
Most Liberals I know are like most Americans—decent, sensible people who just want to do the right thing. Liberal niceness and concern for the marginalized can be formulaic and priggishly performative, but it speaks to a basic decency that they try in good faith to live out, and is very often genuinely motivated by a desire to be kind. But what's the mythic narrative that inspires Liberals? What is the story that they tell themselves that gives their politics meaning and coherence, richness and scope? What's their vision for the future besides go to a good college, get a high-paying job, but try to be nice to the marginalized? Does that inspire?
Look, Liberals are kind and competent, and and Republicans are mean and incompetent--that's why I vote Democratic. But I am utterly uninspired by the Democrat story, and they have to do better if they ever hope to win back the demos. Clearly their message that we must say No to a senile, crackpot, wannabe dictator was not enough.
My most serious criticism of Liberal Democrats is that most have too easily adapted to life in the TCM. They have come to accept its materialist, utilitarian values and presuppositions as reality in a way that those on the Right have not. The GOP since forever, and the MAGA version of it now, tell a story that is utterly inadequate to living sanely in the 21st century, and yet it meets one profound human need—the need for meaning. The problem is that Democrats don’t think making meaning is the business of politics, and so they are at a continuous disadvantage to the Republicans who do.
Liberals did not create the meaning crisis; the Techno-Capitalist Matrix did insofar as it flattens life and squeezes the soul out of everything and seeks to replace it with a simulacra of life and soul. The problem for Democrats is that they appear to live very comfortably in this nihilistic milieu, and for that reason have not felt a need to develop an adequate response to the meaning crisis so many Americans so deeply feel. They think that passing an infrastructure bill or the Chips act is their job, and that should be enough. It just isn’t.
Secular Democrats think of themselves as grownups who are doing just fine, thank you. They don't need any high-falutin’, made-up, Spaghetti-monster meaning narratives. They're content to live in the small, flat world that the TCM delivers to them. They don't need anything that is any more meaningful than the choices and commitments that they make to live as best they can in a world that they accept that makes no sense except the sense they give it.
And I respect that as the individual choices that secular liberals make. It’s honest and honorable, but it cannot be the ethos for the Democratic Party if we depend on the Democrats to bring competency and moral seriousness to our politics. The world cannot sustain much more of the 19th-century Republican frontier, rugged individualist mythos because it is so deeply misaligned with 21st-century reality. Democrats’ competence and niceness isn’t enough; they need to develop a story that crowds out and de-legitimates the GOP mythos once and for all.
So, yes, it’s dark right now, and it’s going to get darker. The Republicans, with each succeeding decade since Nixon, have been choosing ever more incompetent fabulists. The Democrats will be called in again to clean up the mess they make this time—at least I hope so. It’s an open question as to how far MAGA will go to insure they stay in power. But if we are to have a morning in America that endures for more than about five minutes, we need the Dems to develop a story, a mythos, that meaningfully resonates with all decent Americans, that is coherent and aligned with reality, that is rich with meaning and promise for the future, that is adaptable to the unexpected. They must come up with something that can replace for good the nonsense story told by Republican crackpots, crooks, and conmen.
Note
- I observed the opposite effect in Honduras at sunset—at 6 pm, it was as if someone flipped a switch, and it went from bright to pitch black in what seemed a matter of seconds. Kind of like what it felt like last Wednesday.