Every society needs moral norms and behavioral codes. Without them we would all be in Hobbes's state of nature. The culture war that is tearing the country apart right now is about who gets to define what those codes are. The main combatants are the Left and Right wings of our Calvinist heritage--the priggish Neo Victorians on the Right and the equally priggish Neo Abolitionist Identitarianss on the Left. The Right is wrong because the old social order was unjust in its repressiveness of women and minorities; the Left is wrong because its basis for abolition is not 'justice' but 'desire'. The cultural Left seeks to abolish taboos that impede desire understood in a postmodern Freudian sense, and they find a way to do it that is insufferably moralistic.
The intellectual vanguard on the cultural Left, at least for now, does not believe in transcendentals. For them Truth and Justice are just stuff we make up for the sake of convenience to navigate in a world that at root makes no sense. Justice is just a name for whatever is the cause of the day, which is usually what is trending in elite academic circles. For this faction on the Left, the idea that Justice is a transcendental ideal that calls a society to become its best possibility is an impossibility. But without justice as a grounding principle, it must find something else, and it draws on forms of postmodern Freudian theory like that of Lacan, Zizek, Deleuze, and Guattari to find it--and all they's got is 'desire', which in the American context is conflated with the 'pursuit of happiness' and the freedom to determine for oneself what that happiness might be. Any attempt to argue that some desires are better than others and some may be destructively narcissistic is rejected except when it involves violence.
So to boil the postmodern Freudian doctrine down to essentials, humans are all victims of the Oedipus complex, which is the cultural download we each receive when we are weaned and learn that we are not the center of the universe and must learn to play our role in society. These roles are cultural constructs and are by definition repressive and as such the greatest impediment to our pursuit of happiness, and so they must be deconstructed and abolished when they are obstacles to any individual's pursuit of happiness however that might be construed.
These roles are social constructs and as such are in flux over time, but they trace back to our premodern cultural heritage, so, for instance, the vast majority of children who are born biologically male and female must learn to play the roles of men and women, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, etc. Daddy insists on it, and so does Mommy, perhaps even more vehemently. Those roles for men and women are different in different societies, but one gets assigned a role and one must fit into it whether one likes it or not, and mostly we humans don't like it.
I accept that humans are born polymorphously perverse, and that as a result no matter what the gender or sexual role assigned to us, it's a constraint. And so the Oedipal desire to kill the Father is not personal; it's about the child's resentment at being constrained when she or he loses the Mother as his or her exclusive object of desire. The people who fail to make the Oedipal transition become primal narcissists--people like the fictional King Lear or the all too real Donald Trump--people whose driving force is to become once again the center of the universe as they were in the pre-Oedipal state where their wish was their desire. So what is this desire about except to restore our polymorphous perversity, which means a longing to return to a state of primal narcissism?
So all of us at that early age and continuing through life resent the constraints that were forced on us with our acculturation, some more than others depending on the configuration of the tribal codes and the roles they assign. But the resentment is always there, and so if we have not learned to own and manage these resentments, they lie festering in the soul. And when someone completely unrepressed and infantile like Donald Trump comes along, he gives permission to many for all that unmanaged, festering resentment to express itself in deeply destructive ways. And so here we are wallowing in a culture of narcissists, the Left not being much better than the Right in that regard.
So the resentment is a problem for the powerless post-Oedipal child, and he must repress it and seek the Father's approva--or else. There's a fundamental slavishness to it as the child becomes rather like a dog seeking the approval of his master, and spirited human beings rebel in adolescence in different ways. But its why, especially in more straitlaced, repressive societies, the repressed admire the rebels among us insofar as they seek to break the taboos and assert their individuality over against the regime imposed by the symbolic Father. We all go through this in adolescence, but it's a phase for most of us that we pass through if we become successful adults. Adults understand that there are positive and negative constraints. Negative constraints keep us trapped insofar as they remain unconscious and unexamined; positive constraints become a path to liberation if chosen and worked with.
So, for instance, It's one thing to have a parent who forces his child to play a sport or a musical instrument so he can live through his child vicariously; it's another if the parent imbues a love of the sport or music in his child that inspires him to want to be the best he can be. To become the best you can be requires discipline and constraint. To give your life a shape, you have to constrain desires that if indulged would lead to shapelessness. To become an adult means to have chosen to give a shape to one's life. A man-child is either trapped by his fear of displeasing the Father or trapped in a resentful need to rebel against him. The Right tends toward the first kind of childishness; the Left toward the second.
The adult has become of aware of his resentments and desires, has learned to own and manage them and to integrate them into a bigger, richer, shapelier possibility for becoming a full human being. So you can look at constraints as a problem or you can come to understand them as what gives a good life its shape in a life-long process of auto-poiesis and self-transcendence. In Neoplatonism, the more form a being has, the more densely real it is. So in Neoplatonic terms, true freedom is exercised in a continuous, dynamic trading in one set of constraints for another in an ongoing auto-poetic process of becoming more densely, humanly real. Another word for this intensity of form is 'virtue', and at the end of the process is what Aristotle called eudaemonia, which is the only happiness that is worthy of our desire. This sense of the word 'virtue' must be retrieved. In a society in which Calvinistic moralism is so dominant, we hear the word only in the sense of what Big Daddy wants.
We must have constraints, but we must develop some wisdom about which constraints are healthful and which are not; we are children to the extent that we live passively with the constraints that were imposed on us children. We become adults to the degree that we come to understand those constraints and find ways to transcend them by adopting other constraints that are auto-poetic. This was the Nietzschean project, but as I'll argue below, it was in a deeper way the Socratic project. I respect those among our cultural elites who see Nietzsche as a model of self-transcendence in this mature sense. The argument that I've been making here over the years is that we have to move beyond Nietzsche to retrieve Socrates understood in the right way.
***
Every society has constraints, aka taboos, and every society always will, and the culture war in this country right how is about who gets to define what those taboos are for our children. But the deeper, really important question is how do you decide which constraints are healthy and which are not? And the answer depends on how you define what it means to live a full human life, and about that we clearly have no consensus. And so, as suggested above, an important part of living a full human life is to develop the capacity to transcend the constraints of our acculturation, but not in a way that is completely shapeless.
My critique of the the Cultural Left is that while it's right about transcending oppressive cultural constraints, it's wrong insofar as it leads to social shapelessness and forms of narcissisim. We humans both need constraints and we need to transcend them, but transcendence for the sake of transcendence, the Nietzschean option, is not a foundation on which you can build a healthy society. The Socratic option is to transcend one's cultural constraints but in such a way that one comes into a deeper relationship and alignmnet with Reality. This is not a possibility on the Cultural Left because it cannot believe that there is any such thing as Reality in the Platonic-realist sense of the word.
So instead the Cultural Left, insofar as it is in thrall to the postmodern Freudians, is obsessed with sexual desire. But do we really believe sex and sex drives are what most deeply defines us? Don't we all deep down recognize that the cult of Sex Positivity takes something that's partially true and pushes it into something that's unbalanced and distorting and fundamentally empty?
So, from my pov, the moral program proposed on the Left, insofar as it makes an idol of Desire in the post-Freudian sense, is reductive and as such offers no genuinely 'desirable' alternative to the program of the Right. And quite possibly the Left is endorsing a program that is harmful for people in the throes of ontological dizziness insofar as it endorses metaphysical meaninglessness and shapelessness at a time when we need to feel that there's something firm underfoot upon which we can take a stand.
Using 'desire' as a criterion for defining the 'good life' is not the problem; defining what is most deeply worthy of our desire is. Desire, like the intentionality of consciousness, is always 'about' something. The most important question we need to ask ourselves is what is our desire about? In other words, what is worthy of or deepest aspirations? What kind of society might there be that would help people to shape their lives inspired by such aspirations? To make it so much about sex is shooting too low at best, and at worst promoting a narcissistically regressive infantilizaton.
But if sex is not the main thing, what ought to be the object of our desire--on what ends, individually and as a society, should we focus our attention and energies as worthy of our deepest aspirations? Is it possible that we could come to some consensus about that? I genuinly believe that we can because in the final analysis Socrates was correct--what we all desire is the Good, and if we knew it, we would choose it. (See Note 1) I believe this deep desire for the Good is innate in all human beings, even the worst of us. We just live in a society that has no memory anymore about what that Good is as something to guide our collective cultural aspirations.
But the taboos can only be transcended in a healthy way if there's agreement that such transcendence is in the service of the Good. If there is no mutually shared idea of the Good as a transcendental aspiration, then all you've got is desire, and one man's desire to grab a woman in the genitals because he wants to and can is equal to another's to give up her life to save someone else's. To argue otherwise is implicitly to acknowledge that there's a hierarchy, i.e., some desires are higher and more worthy than others, and that only makes sense if there is some transcendental standard that defines what is more or less worthy, more or less truthful, more or less Good, more or less Just. We all deep down recognize this. None of us are moral relativists. We just don't know how to talk anymore about what it means to be truly a moral agent, which involves the capacity for self-correction and self-transcendence. We perform instead what we think others expect of us as moral behavior--whatever the Daddies and Mommies of the Left or Right demand--rather than to be inspired by what is truly, deeply transformatively Good.
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Note 1. What Socrates means to "know the Good" is another question. We mostly have opinions about what the right thing to do is that derive from our programming by to prevailing cultural conventions, which is quite different from 'knowing' the good. According to Plato/Socrates, it's possible to have right opinion, i.e., when your opinion about what is good happens to correspond with what the Good is, but that is different from knowing the Good. Knowing the Good comes from a deeper kind of disclosure that transcends convention. And because such disclosures are a possibility, convention is always vulnerable to challenge. In the Neoplatonic tradition, there are degrees of knowledge--from inklings to satori-like theophanies. But inklings are where most of us start.
A healthy society has norms that derive from right opinion about the Good. It passes onto its children habits and attitudes that will make it easier for them aspire to the Good and to be open to its disclosures--in other words easier for them to become free adults. The segregated societies in the South clearly did not have norms that were aligned with the Good, and most people of good will recognized that. Clearly, there are other things about southern society and its customary culture that are aligned with the Good, but if it were a healthy society, it would have recognized that slavery and segregation was just wrong, and not looked for all manner of sophistical arguments to justify it.
It's in this sense that southern society has trapped too many of its citizens in such a way as to make it harder for them to become free adults. They are trapped by their resentments and find themselves incapable of transcending them. This, as suggested above, is why they have embraced an infantile nihilist like Trump. He has legitimized their resentments of the Liberal Big Daddy that shames any behaviors that are not P.C or woke, and encourages their acting these resentments out. Before Trump those resentments festered. He blew the lid off whatever contained them, and bizarre, delusional, clownishly ineptly childish events like J6 were the result.
But societies that have mostly right opinion about the Good are not good enough unless they encourage its children to become free adults. In Calvinist societies we think of Virtue as a cage. If we lived in a Neoplatonic society, we would think of it as a trellis. That used to be the goal of a liberal education. All spirited human beings want to overcome illusion and ignorance; they want to develop a deeper and richer relatiohship with Reality. They are not satisfied to live in a shadow realm but want to live in a world where the deep Real lives and shines. And the project for Socrates was to play the role of midwife for his interlocutors, that his he sought to bring their innate capacity for recognizing the living, shining Good into awareness.
Socrates agreed with the Sophists that most people's thinking was shaped by social conventions, and insofar as they were, they were living in a world of shadows. He disagreed with the Sophists that shadow thinking was the the only kind possible.The postmodern Freudians, like the Sophists, would argue that there are only the conventions, and our freedom--if we have any freedom at all--lies primarily in transgressing conventional constraints, i.e., saying No to Big Daddy. Is there really any more to it than that, and is there anything truly morally serious about that for anyone older than 17?
The naivete, if not the absurdity, of the postmodern Freudians, I hope, is apparent to most readers. It's sophisticated nonsense. Their position leads to regression toward Hobbes's state of nature which forces the social contract that creates the Leviathan--which is for Hobbesians, most of our cultural elite, a closed system in which transcendence is an impossibility. To this extent Freud was correct in Civilization and Its Discontents. Being in society creates constraints, and those constraints are the source of our resentment and violence and discontent and we long to break out.
None of us want to live in a closed, repressive system. But we can't live in one that is completely without constraints. We want to live in a system where self-transcendence and auto-poeisis is a real possibility, but transcendence toward what? Making our Selves into what? Anything we want? But is anything we want the Good? I don't think so, and neither can anybody who thinks about it for a minute. We all deep down know there is a "Good". Why are we so afraid to acknowledge it and build a society around a collective aspiration toward it?
In December 2010, at a time when thoughtful readers frequently commented on my posts, I put up an essay entitled "Thanksgiving Encounters". It was about visiting with relatives at a Thanksgiving gathering in North Carolina where my father had retired. I found myself astonished to learn that these thoughtful, well-educated relatives, people I care about, were adamant in their defense of Sarah Palin. I knew these relatives leaned conservative, but I was astonished that they could even for a minute take Palin seriously. It was my first encounter up close with something happening among cultural conservatives that I hadn't yet felt the full import of. And it was the beginning of my not being able to talk politics with these relatives because subsequently the gap had become too wide and too emotionally fraught. Before then, I knew the extremists were out there, but I could not bring myself to believe they were so close as this.
I wrote then—
The basic question they seemed to be asking me was "Why are you siding with those kooks? Why aren't you loyal to your roots?" In other words, "It's either you're with them or you're with us." It wasn't really much more complicated than that. A big part of what I've been writing about since then has been to understand how we got ourselves into this cold civil war and about my fears that it will become a hot one.
Mathe, one of my occasional commenters in those days, saw the possibility of it becoming a hot civil war before I did. She thought I was being too kind to try to understand things from their pov, and that the shift I was describing in the post wrote then was about something much more dangerous than I understood. Her thinking seemed to me then to mirror the kind of paranoia that I was seeing in my relatives, and so while I agreed with much of what she said, I thought then she was too alarmist. Writing now, 12 years later, it's clear she saw a threat then that I didn't take as seriously. She was talking about Middle American Radicalism before it was understood how radical it was becoming. My family is not a natural constituency for MAR, but they were enlisting. Here's the exchange that we had back then. The underlining for emphasis is mine:
mathe said...
The real question is how your Sarah Palin loving relatives react if the economy really goes bad. It seems clear to me that one very real scenario is launch a systematic campaign of persecution and elimination of the "Liberals" much like the campaigns in Yugoslavia or Rwanda. There is more going on here than just a difference of world view or of "common sense" versus the insane liberal formulations. Sectors of Americans, particularly whites who call themselves middle class are being psychologically manipulated into a separate reality that in particular rejects those who have the ability to use the knowledge they have to sort out "the facts of the matter" apart from what is spooned out to them-- regardless of their politics.
They reject would be servants of the public interest like Russ Feingold , or the recent Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, or countless others. This is NOT just a liberal vs. conservative modality, but goes much deeper than that. Whatever arguments one could make for traditionalism, localism , small government or other small c conservative shibboleths have been made irrelevant by the global political crisis which alas, is just in its infancy.
As Chris Hedges argues, leftists have got to get into the conversation and present the case in forceful and courageous terms. In particular that means a clear and unblinking attack of the so-called conservatism of the last 50 years.
Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 03:00 PM
Jack Whelan said...
Mathe--
I guess my point is that not everybody who admires SP is a fanatic, and a lot of them see her for what she is, but nevertheless enjoy how she rankles liberal types. I guess I've been arguing here for a while that because the most visible Right Populists are extremists, not every one is. In fact most are not, and I still believe some common ground can be found between moderates who are attracted to the Tea Party and the economic Left who are able to bracket culture war issues.
If the economy really seriously self-destructs--which some in my family believe is inevitable--then who knows what's going to happen. Is there the possibility of a "Seven Days in May" scenario?--sure there is. Do I think it will happen? No. It really depends on how bad it gets of course.
I understand where Hedges is coming from, but I think he would agree with me that Left Liberalism is a spent force--it offers no robust alternative to Right Populism. I believe the alternative has to come from sane "believers", people who can talk to Main Street on terms they understand using biblical language and metaphors where appropriate, but which also seeks to invite people who are deeply sequestered in their right wing ideological silos into a larger, more complex world.
Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 12:35 AM
mathe said...
Jack,
Admirers, followers, people who agree with SP do not need to be extremist. By definition most people aren't. Nevertheless, whole populations are capable of being manipulated (or manipulating themselves) into terrible acts. The instinct to attack apparently vulnerable and unpopular minorities is present with or without a rationale. People may or may not be amenable to the "right sort of argument". There is a wide spread understanding of the fact that much of the present crisis is caused by the business and economic elite. Yet I am not convinced that a populist argument couched in the kind of moral terms you describe would be all that effective in and of itself. There has to be as you suggest some sort of common meeting ground where the conversation and possible argument can take place. Sara Robinson and others have talked about the kind of world view that people in right wing silos occupy. Events that effect them personally and over time have more weight than argument.
Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 05:25 PM
Jack Whelan said...
Mathe--I'm not convinced that a cross-left/right-cultural populist movement is possible either. And it certainly isn't possible with the Libertarian wing of right-wing populism, which really wants the Federal government out of everything. They may hate Wall Street, but they hate the Feds more.
I'm thinking more of the traditional New Deal constituencies--ethnic Catholics and other white blue collars, including many in the south, and white collar Main Streeters who are conventionally conservative in their thinking and tend to sway one way or the other depending on the national mood. Along with the strength that would come from enfranchised Blacks and Hispanics, who aren't particularly culturally liberal in their values either.
I think a political movement capable of taking on the power of Wall Street and other powerful moneyed interests can only come if Blue Collars of whatever tribe are at the center of it, not educated liberal elites.
Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 07:50 PM
mathe said...
The problem with the group of white conservatives or conservative sympathizers is that their desire to rule the roost unchallenged in power or worldview is that it is far stronger than their desire to challenge the economic overlords responsible for their worsening condition. I think the understanding of the class war going on now is deeper than you suggest. I think middle and working class whites understand what is really happening in that regard but they cannot confront the implication; namely that they are now just like as African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans. In fact, the cultural destruction and dislocation they sense is not unlike that experienced by these groups. It is their turn to be left behind. You say many of these people are like the Southern planters on the eve of the Civil War and that is precisely why I am very uneasy. There is a restless, violent rule or ruin emotional current that was somewhat moderated by two centuries of almost constant but largely successful warfare. Now that time is done but they and the nation they largely dominate is heavily armed.
As malleable as they are and given what we know historically and recently what will stop them from turning their rage on the groups they hate?
Let's take one group that you mentioned-- ethnic Catholics. Your argument is that many are angry about the damage modernism has brought to traditional values.The fact of the matter is much of the damage to traditional values comes not only from untrammeled and immoral capitalism which the Catholic Church occasionally criticizes but results as well from war, the preparation for war and the worship of war and the unquestioning brutal authoritarianism of the military. Many of these ethnic Catholics would reject Catholic heroes like the Berrigans and the still active anti-war, anti-torture communities they founded, or Father L.Bourgeois and other campaigners against the School of the Americas.
In his speech at Riverside Church in 1967, Martin Luther King got the nature of our problem as a nation exactly right. It was three fold, Racism, Materialism and Militarism. Yes, white working class and middle class conservatives are a little unhappy with Materialism right now because it's not working for them all that well at present-- and your argument is that this creates some kind of opening. I am telling you that it doesn't because of Racism and Militarism. The new coalition has to be one with radically different ethos than what I see in any American subgroup or ethnic group on the right. Many of the values of the new coalition--if it ever comes to fruition will be a spiritual re-imagining of democratic American values. I say spiritual but not religious. How do we engage with these people or more exactly how do you engage them without feeding their prejudices about "liberals". It's simply wrong to paint everyone on the left with the same "secular liberal" brush. It is not enough to just act as if believing in God were the issue when it is so obviously not.
Thursday, December 02, 2010 at 09:03 PM
Jack Whelan said...
Mathe--
I agree with much of what you say, particularly in the first half of your comment.
I resist, however, the idea that blue collar catholics are typified by the attitudes of cranks like Bill Donahue. I think they are more down to earth, and have none of his fanaticism. Those that do are a very small minority. But you're right when you say that they would perceive the Berrigans as kooks, but that doesn't mean that they are not on the whole decent and sane. They work with Black blue collars day in and day out, and they are no longer Other. Most were George Wallace supporters back in the sixties, but not now. I think there's more common ground and mutual respect between the blue collar ethnics and the blue collar blacks than there is between either of them and culturally left educated elites.
Southern whites, mostly Scots Irish, are another kettle of fish, and I think most of your worries about racism and military are much more a factor. But they were very much a part of the New Deal coalition, and not all of them are frightened idiots.
I don't know how long it's going to take to happen, but sooner or later it must. Real change in this country isn't going to come without blue collar Americans, whether white, ethnic, black or hispanic. Sooner or later, they will see where their mutual interests lie. They'll get organized, and cultural liberals will join their parade; these blue collars are never going to join the parade organized by the cultural left.
Thursday, December 02, 2010 at 11:14 PM
mathe said...
Jack,
I truly and fervently hope you are right about blue collar America. As a member of the "cultural left", I've participated in enough marches, spent hours in enough phone banks, where blue collar people are neither seen nor heard to see they have little interest in "us" even if we are fighting in their interests.
Nevertheless, I do experience them as busy (distracted), ill-informed and thus easily manipulated. When they finally do rise, what will be their issues aside from anger and revenge? What is to prevent new demagogues riding the emotions of the moment to power? People who have been lucky enough to have the leisure to study, think and analyze our situation need to be involved, really in educating and publicizing in ways that appeal to the mass of people. It may be that there are such people for example among the veterans groups, particularly veterans of the Iraq wars. Many of these people are working and middle class folks who could not afford to go to college and chose the military. Their years inside opened their eyes to what is going on. They have a certain credibility that "intellectuals" (that is largely what the cultural left is) lack.
However it happens, a real left, like the one that existed before the incredibly damaging McCarthy era. If the world doesn't blow up in war or blow away in a global warming catastrophe I am quite certain it will arise- it has to. Countries like Germany, and the Scandinavian countries (which by the way are increasingly multi-cultural) show that mixed economies can work. What I am less certain about is whether the US can remain one country or not as the inevitable transition mixed economies comes about.
Saturday, December 04, 2010 at 04:56 PM
Now over 12 years later, here's what I would say in response:
What strikes me is that Mathe's sense of doom was prescient, and my hope for a political Left winning over ethnic blue collars in an anti-Neoliberal coalition has proved, so far, to be disappointed. I wonder, though, what would have happened had Bernie Sanders won the Dem nomination in '16. That's a counterfactual that cannot be tested because Hillary and her Neoliberalism won, and because she did, most of what Mathe predicted proved correct in four years of Trump. But I remember arguing in '16 that unless Bernie won, then it would likely be the last chance for the economic Left, as contrasted with the cultural Left, to win the white working class. Bernie might have failed had he been elected rather than Trump, but he was our last best chance for assembling a multi-racial, working-class Democratic coalition that excited anti-Neoliberal young people, and would have broad appeal among the bottom 80%. Not everybody, but I think a majority. The Libertarian wing of the conservative movement would resist Sanders with all it has got.
The problem that too many influencers on the Left don't see now, though, is not that parts of white working class are so horrible--they are--but the degree to which Neoliberal values have infected the Cultural Left, which in turn has captured the Democratic Party and in so doing has made the Democratic Party broadly perceived in Main Street America as the party of 'kooks'. If anything that perception is worse now than it was in 2010. The cultural Left does not offer a remotely realizable political future in the American political sphere because non-elite Americans will continue to resist what seems to be its assault on normalcy. So long as Democrats’ continue to be perceived as captured by elite ideology, it will continue to push normie Americans--most Americans, including Blacks and Latinos--toward the Right.
I assume that Mathe was a Bernie supporter for all the reasons I was, and I assume that she would share with me the perception of the Democratic Party as complicit in the rise of Trump because of its surrender to Neoliberalism, not just in the economic sphere but in the cultural sphere as well. For the white working class, politics has become a culture war for all the reasons described in the post. The mistake the Left makes is being drawn into the culture wars on the terms the Right frames--normies vs kooks. That's why Youngkin and DeSantis have won in what used to be competitive states for the Dems.
Look, the cultural Left is right insofar as it promotes a policy of compassion and justice for Americans who have been marginalized for whatever historical-cultural reasons; they are wrong to the degree that they frame that support in the language of poststructural theorists they learned about at university and then get all sanctimonious about it. The Democrats have moved away from the Clinton/Obama embrace of Neoliberalism in the economic sphere, thanks to Bernie, but their Neoliberalism has gotten stronger in the cultural sphere.
As I've argued here, the justice project of the great 20th Century social justice figures like Gandhi, King, Mandela, has been replaced by a liberation project theorized by Foucault, Guatarri and Deleuze. Whatever the merits of discussing the latter in the university seminar room, any attempt to bring their theory into the American political sphere is suicidal. The problem for many on the cultural Left who aren't philosophically literate is that they have been captured by 'theory' whose deep presuppositions most don't share, but most who lean left adopt it because it feels more "compassionate".
But is genuine compassion what drives its hegemony among cultural elites? It can't be insofar as it shapes one side in a zero/sum culture war. So the debate becomes not about what is truly just and compassionate, but about whose value frame--that of the cultural right or the cultural left-- shall be hegemonic. The vast majority of Americans don't comfortably fit within the value frames of either the extreme cultural Right or Left, but they feel more antipathy for one or the other, and that defines their politics. And so Left and Right gridlock the system over cultural issues that have little to do with the real existential threats that face us. Not to mention that the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer.
From my pov, the value frames of both the Right and Left are deeply flawed--the Right because its values are a form of zombie traditionalism--form without life; the Left because its values are based on incoherent, nihilistic set of ideas that have almost nothing to do with deep, genuine human flourishing. The Right, at least, understands we're in a profound meaning crisis; the Left has no idea how it has become a cultural force that exacerbates it. The cultural Right whether its rank and file realize it or not has become captured by the aforementioned loathsome, racist ideology of the Middle American Radicalism articulated by Sam Francis, popularized by Rush Limbaugh, and normalized by Donald Trump; the rank and file on the cultural Left, whether it realizes it or not, has become captured by theory that too often leads it into becoming a self-parodying woke joke. They are two sides of the same coin. Some other currency is called for.