When [Christopher] Lasch wrote that the “old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action,” he was expressing something nearly identical to the account of a “crisis of authority” or “crisis of hegemony” put forth by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: a period when “the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously.”
Writing in the 1920s, Gramsci maintained that such crises “were situations of conflict between representatives and represented,” and that when the “ruling class has lost its consensus,” the populace feels that the existing political and public institutions no longer provide a vision of national leadership, but merely dominate and coerce, serving their own narrow self-interest. In such a situation, both politics and the economy take on the aspect of a zero-sum squabble between competing factions and cliques.
The sudden loss of faith and credit in the American system was the acute onset of just such a crisis of hegemony. Gramsci had written that “in every country the process is different, although the content is the same,” with such upheavals occurring when “the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example).”
In this period, that failed political undertaking was the project of Reaganism: the reorganization of the economy for short-term gain and sharp upward redistribution and its unexpected and expensive victory in the Cold War. The electorate believed Reaganism’s promise and sunny optimism, but it left the country battered productively and rudderless ideologically. Gramsci famously remarked that in the “interregnum” when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born … a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Such an interregnum, he believed, would also provide an opening for “violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny.’”
--John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (pp. 18-19)
Before getting back to Hart, I wanted to step back to look at the bigger picture. I think that "Rescuing Aristotle" has two primary components. First, to rescue the transcendental tradition from the reactionaries who are its main public exponent in this moment. And second, to make the case that Rescuing Aristotle, if it is to succeed, is cultural project that must integrate within it the wisdom of the transcendental traditions with the earthier wisdom of the demos. It's project for both cultural elites and the demos.
As to point one:
It should be obvious that I am all in for restoring the transcendental tradition to our collective metaphysical imaginary, what I call the restoration of the northern limb on my diagram of Utopia. But isn’t that what a lot of reactionaries say that they want too? So in case it's not obvious, I don't want what they want. On the contrary, I want to rescue the transcendental tradition from the reactionary perversion of it.
What do I mean by perversion? For purposes of control, some reactionaries fixate on the forms rather than on the vitality, i.e., the originary energies that gave the traditional forms--the customs, beliefs, practices, rituals, music, etc., their shape.1For such reactionaries, a tradition is not a living, growing thing, but rather a cage in which elites can keep the demos in their place. This is not necessarily, and probably most often is not a conscious strategy. These elites believe they are preserving something sacred, but the sacred is for them something dead, something they fossilize in amber, and its forms become rigidly formulaic and fetishized. They take hold of the map and think they possess the living thing it represents. I believe many people are naively sincere in this project, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t perverse.
Other reactionaries do something far worse: they take the forms from the transcendental tradition and animate them with energies that are utterly alien to the energies from the Deep Real that originally shaped them. They take sacred forms and bend them to sacrilegious purposes. They are the devil quoting scripture.
People like Steve Bannon and Alexandr Dugin, for instance, say they are for the restoration of the transcendental tradition, but they clearly betray such a project by their support for nihilists like Trump and Putin. I'm sure they have clever ways to justify this to themselves, but whether they are naively sincere or cynically calculating, they use the transcendental tradition as a tool to advance their grandiose power fantasies. They might say things that seem right, but what matters is the uses to which they bend them.
The biggest monsters in history are those who believe they must use violence or political force to justify some transcendental purpose--the medieval Inquisitors, the Jesuit intriguers after the Reformation, the fanatical Cromwellian Puritans during the English Civil War, the Jacobins, Leninists, Maoists, Islamic terrorists, or any political group that thinks it is bringing justice and righteousness into the world by the use of political violence. They are always wrong. They are always deluded. Their fanaticism and ruthlessness are always evil. Their projects always end in rubble. Always.
And this is our situation now. We are going through a huge transition when“the old is dying and the new cannot be born". It’s awkward and scary. The rickety old Liberal Order is currently being challenged by reactionary ideologues in a way that more and more people, especially sincere young people searching for meaning, find compelling. These reactionary ideologues have captured institutions like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, White Nationalist groups, reactionary Integralist and Opus Dei Catholics, and Dominion Protestants. These reactionaries in their different ways believe they are serving a transcendent ideal, and most, I believe, are sincerely unaware that they are serving a counterfeit version of the transcendent, that they are not acting in the service of the Good, but as servants of fanaticism and delusion. 2
As to point 2:
If democracy is to survive, elites’ fundamental values must align with the fundamental values of the demos. In American society, this requires both elites and demos moving from where they are now. But elites, because of their privilege. should have the magnanimity to make the first move toward reconciliation and realignment.
What does such a step require? A recognition by elites that within the demos there resides a seat of a mostly unconscious wisdom. I say unconscious because it's more instinctive than articulated and theorized. The demos knows in an instinctive, unconscious way when something is just wrong, and the ruling elites need to make the effort to understand and articulate what is right about what the demos knows is wrong. Elites must come to accept that, not always, but in most cases that they are responsible for demos disgruntlement. And elites have to be shrewd enough to understand that the demos's articulation of the reasons, say, justifying why they apparently acted so foolishly, as in their voting for Trump, are not to be taken at face value.
What do I mean by that? The demos leans right now because the reactionaries have articulated what's wrong that makes more sense to them than whatever the Democrats—or just about anybody on the Left—have articulated. So Democrat-voting Liberals listen to this reactionary articulation, and say, "Well, that's pretty repugnant. I can't associate with that." But the reactionary articulation isn't the only possible articulation, but it wins by default because nobody on the Left has even attempted to articulate what’s wrong in a way that makes sense to the demos from a Left perspective.
Instead they browbeat the demos with sanctimony and cliches and insist that they adopt ideas that completely are alien to them, and then tell them they're knuckle-dragging morons when they don't see things the Left’s enlightened way. In doing so the Left pushes the demos toward the reactionary reading. This magnifies rather than reduces the part of them that is, for instance, racist and homophobic. The demos revel in their meanness precisely because it’s the opposite of what the contemptuous kumbaya Left wants. If the Left wants to accomplish something positive, its challenge is to read the demos experience and to develop a truthful interpretation of their situation that makes more sense on their terms than the reactionary reading.
This is Gramsci Studies 101. For an argument to be compelling for the demos, it has to work with its values, symbols, traditions. If you want to move it from point A to point B, it won't move if the demos doesn’t see how point B is implicit in point A, that B is a unrealized potential within A that can be actualized. You must show them, in other words, how B is deduced from A. If you can't do that, then maybe there's something fundamentally wrong with B. By the way, this isn't just Gramsci; it's Aristotle. Read his stuff on enthymemes in the Rhetoric. (Also I’m previewing where Hart is going.)
Is there anybody on the left with the Gramscian/Aristotlean wisdom to understand that the demos cannot just be dismissed as racists and homophobes, that there might actually be something healthy in whatever compels them to say No to what's so deeply cockeyed in Liberal Order? Is there anybody on the Left who is capable of articulating that 'No' and then articulating a healthy, wholesome 'Yes'?3
And so I'm arguing here that if we are serious in our project to imagine a better future for all Americans, we must take seriously the innate wisdom of the demos and its rejection of the innate nihilism that is the logic of the TCM. if we accept that the demos has this wisdom, and that it needs to be respected as a down-to-earth check on the intellectual faddism of an elite that thinks it has no need to be tethered to the earth, then we will understand that the demos’s choosing a nihilist like Trump makes sense as a slap upside the head to bring them back to earth. That’s my reading, for what it’s worth. If the slap works, the Left will start to look for ways to realign their values with the values of the demos.
When I was young this impulse to deliver such a blow to the best and brightest in the establishment elite was found on the Left; now it has migrated to the Right because the so-called Left, reprogrammed by the Postmodernists in the 70s and 80s, for the most part has its head up its ass.4 The intellectual Left has to recover its sense of solidarity with the demos. Its projects remain irrelevant exercises in ballast-less, deeply alienating nonsense until it does.
Liberals make a fetish of freedom as if it were a transcendental ideal, but that's a category error. It's not an ideal; it's a spiritual faculty that empowers us to choose the transcendental ideal—or not. The TCM celebrates the "or not". It rejects the transcendental because if it were embraced, it would subvert its hegemony and its transhumanist dream for the future. The logic of the TCM leads us to believe that the range of our choices is limited to the "or not", that our freedom is circumscribed by a consumerist conception of it as nothing more than making marketplace choices that keep us docile and anesthetized.5
That's why if democracy is to be saved, the change has to come at the level of the OS, not just by introducing a new spirituality app. Any new app that runs well on the TCM's OS will be coopted and perverted by it, and it cannot be trusted. Anybody who is trying to monetize transcendence is by definition someone who is perverting transcendence. Thus Rescuing Aristotle is about a radical change in the OS; it's about restoring the transcendental tradition in a non-reactionary key. Evil we shall have always with us, but the Good doesn't have a chance unless it's something built into the culture's OS as a possibility shaping our collective choices. It just isn’t now. Material expediency is all.
So this is my challenge to the the good-faith Liberal defenders of democracy in this moment. I believe with all my heart that democracy is the best form of government, but it only works if you have citizens, both ordinary folks and elites, who share a joint sense of aspiration toward the transcendent Good. Don't you see, O Liberal defenders of democracy, that otherwise you are fighting for an empty form, for a system that in this moment is almost completely captured by the dehumanizing/transhumanizing logic of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix?
Yes, you have to say No to the reactionary monsters, but in the long run that isn't enough. The democratic forms in the long run are worthy of saving only if what they can contain is worthy, and what they contain right now just isn't. Democracy had become little more than a defense of the lowest, most vulgar concept of hedonic freedom. Ok. Sure, better than living under Sharia Law that the reactionaries want to impose, but freedom isn’t an end, it’s a means to an end, and we have to get clear about what our ends are. We must do better because where the transhumanist monsters are leading us is even worse. A guy like Bannon gets that in a way that most Liberal defenders of democracy don't, but that doesn’t absolve him of the perversity of his reactionary solutions.
A form without a soul is dead and not worth defending. I want to fight for something wholesome and Good that will animate, ensoul, Democracy. And Democracy, if it's to survive, must find its soul in the demos, and that will require non-reactionaries to come up with an articulation, a way of imagining a human future. that is worth living for everybody--not just its transhumanist elites, which is the default future until somebody comes up with something better.
Notes
1. There’s a theme here about the volkgeist that dates back at least to the German Romantic thinker J. G. Herder in the 1700s, and it’s huge theme in German thought culminating in Heidegger. Guys like Alexandr Dugin draw on this idea when they talk about their multi-polar world order in the future, a world divided into Samuel Huntington-esque civilizational blocs, each incommensurate with the other. That’s not what I’m talking about when I talk about the wisdom of the demos, but it’s what a lot of reactionaries are talking about, and it’s key to understanding why they are so adamant about stopping immigration. But all these ideas mush together and they have to be disentangled. This goes to the tension between that defines the universal vs the particular, the homogenized vs the tribal that I addressed in the Cathedral Lectures. The Herderians and Heideggerians reject the universal/transcendent and celebrate the local/immanent. I want both.
2. And so this is where it gets complicated: What I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, whose beating heart is in Silicon Valley, has been so far mostly aligned with the Liberal Order and the Democrats. That's where they saw the future until early last year when they realized the Dems were going to lose. That's the point of recounting the Andreessen conversion story in my post last week. He and the other tech oligarchs are rats jumping off the sinking the Liberal Order’s sinking ship, and Trump seems to be welcoming them with open arms so long as they bend the knee.
These oligarchs are not reactionaries; they are Transhumanists and radical Libertarians. They are anti-populist. They are in every way in ideological conflict with the reactionary populist Right that delivered Trump to the White House. They are everything a guy like Bannon and the other populist reactionaries hate. This was the point of the post last week. And so the question is what happens to the populists if the Trump GOP clearly sides with the oligarchs? In other words, if the Trump/Vance GOP becomes what the GOP has always been, the party of the 1%, are Bannon's populists up for grabs? Is there anybody on the Left with a plan to grab them?
3. If my use of the word "wholesome" causes you to cringe, then the problem lies with you. I am sorry that there's nothing in you that can respond to something that should be basic and valuable in your experience of the world around you. Look, we're way past the celebration of irony as being some signifier of sophistication and knowing better. From my pov, if you are still indulging in playing the hipster ironist, you are still a creature captured by the TCM and need to be liberated from it. The TCM despises the earnest and the wholesome because it points to a subversive experience of the Good that it cannot countenance.
4. Bernie's not perfect, but he's one of the few on the Left who doesn't have his head up his ass. It's the Dems who voted for Hillary who did and still do. Marxist intellectuals have analyses about what ails us that make a lot of sense to me, but they have no solutions, and can't until they find a way of introducing a transcendental dimension. Marx's materialist eschatology was always kind of silly, but at least it gave Marxists a sense that history had meaning and a telos. But postmodernist thought made belief in such eschatological meta-narratives impossible for any self-respecting intellectual to believe. Now everybody is telos-shy. Well, it's time to move beyond postmodern nihilism and skepticism. We need what I would describe as a heuristic eschatology, and that's where Hart comes in. So more on that as we move along more deeply into Hart.
5. Many resist the logic of the TCM in their individual lives, but they are all running their individual apps on an OS that is fundamentally nihilistic, and if those individual apps embrace a transcendent dimension, they cannot work well. They are buggy at best. There is good reason for people to give up on them, and just use the bread and circuses apps the OS is designed to support. The TCM wants us all to be Homer Simpson on the day he stayed home while his family went to church. He watched football and drank beer, and he thought it was the best day of his life. Happiness = the hedonic in the TCM. That's concrete and relatable. Happiness = Eudaemonic? Nonsense in the TCM— too abstract, too premodern, too unrelatable. And yet what if it's the deep truth about what is the human telos for all human beings, not just nerds who read philosophy, but everybody?