After the Future

Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism

The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.

One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights. (Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)

Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.

The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980. That progress, though, stopped after 1980, and the gap remained roughly unchanged for the next three decades. Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.

...The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.)

Ronald Brownstein, "America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good"

Until Reagan, even in the South, we were making real progress, and then it all stopped. 

I know it's more complicated, but I trace the acuteness of the current crisis of American democracy back to Reagan. Morning in America was really the beginning of a journey into the heart of darkness, a journey that led us to Trump. With him the sorting and the polarizing tribalism begins. He opened up the space for the more cretinous, resentment-driven and hateful characteristics of the American character to emerge and to be legitimated. Because at the root of the current crisis is a fundamental inability of great swaths of the American populace to distinguish truth from fantasy.

Reagan's was always an American-greatness fantasy that had little to do with the complex realities of living in America. It gave Main Street Americans a meaning story when they intensely felt the need for one, but while it might have seemed benign and Norman Rockwell-y enough at first, Morning in America was the beginning of a longer story that has led so many Americans into a blindness that has led them to see Trump as the savior of American idea rather than its destroyer. 

Conservatism, traditionally, has never really had a program; it was always primarily about protecting the interests of the the wealthy and resistance to change. They thought of change as destabilizing and driven by naive, do-goody Liberals, who, even with all the best intentions, promoted a project that was bent on destroying the social and cultural infrastructure that makes civilization possible.

There's a partial truth buried in all that, but the deeper reality is that Liberals simply adapted to the dynamically changing world that post-WWII consumer capitalism created. Capitalism's consumer driven choice ethos was the acid that slowly dissolved whatever feeling Americans had for the public interest. It was an ethos embraced by Conservatives and Liberals alike, and it has eroded the civic foundations and republican virtues upon which a healthy democracy depends. We live in a sick society right now, and while Liberals are not the cause of this illness, they live a little too complacently within the rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary and its utilitarian moral framing that philosophically justifies it. 

So conservatives don't like the way America has changed starting, and they want to roll things back to the America as their grandparents remember it from the 30s, 40s, 50s and early 60s. But while that America started to unravel in the late 60s and 70s, it was not the fault of Liberals but of the kind of mass society that consumer capitalism created. Reagan couldn't bring himself to blame capitalism, so he blamed government: His laugh line--“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."--became gospel for Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats went along with it.

The enemy became the administrative state, the state that in its New Deal and Great Society programs provided the infrastructure for the progress described in the Brownstein excerpt above. Conservatives blame Liberals for getting in the way of their restoring the America they love and that they believe was taken from them, but it's rather like blaming Liberals for hurricanes and tornadoes--and then doing everything possible to prevent them from taking steps to mitigate their most destructive effects because they don't want them to get the credit.

Not all change is good, of course, but in order to resist what's bad in it you have to have a model of history that has some working relationship with the dynamic forces that are shaping it. In other words, you need a philosophy or a theology of history to make sense of it, but it has to be plausible and intellectually honest, which requires that it never present itself as the absolute truth, but rather a working model to help us navigate history in the most humanly productive way.

Americans have no such philosophy. They believe, if anything, in the Invisible Hand, the market deity that makes everything turn out right if we just don't get in its way. But the Invisible Hand doesn't care about traditional values. It's a rapacious deity that is fed only by human greed and a compulsive need for growth. And it is greed and growth that have destroyed what Red America feels so deeply the loss of. They blame Liberals, but they should blame the Invisible Hand. And if they're honest, they will recognize that they, too, are worshippers in its cult

So resisting change can never mean stopping change, but only directing change that promotes broad human flourishing, on the one hand, and constraining change that works against human flourishing as best one can, on the other. This is almost impossible to do when there is no consensus about what constitutes human flourishing. We live in a culture dominated by an Invisible-Hand worshipping Libertarian ethos, which means all choices are equal, so we are constrained from making judgments about the choices people make. Who are we to judge? So this in turn leads us to a least-common-denominator imagination of human possibility, human possibility as Judd Apatow or Mark Zuckerberg might imagine it. I sympathize with Red Americans who are sickened by their vulgarity and callow superificiality, but it's not Apatow's or Zuckerberg's fault. They are simply in their different ways acolytes in the amoral cult of the Invisible Hand. 

But most normal humans want to think better of themselves than that, and so they are likely to grab onto anyone or anything that tells them they can be better. One very powerful and broadly popular way for Americans to do that is to buy into the 19th-century American mythos to which Reagan gave new life--a mythos of rugged individualism, never-stand-down toughness, and loyalty to god and country.

I understand the appeal. It's a way to push back against the anything-goes nihilism, but it has become a force for nihilism insofar as it feeds a fantasy of real America that does not map to the complex world given to us by the hurricane of consumer capitalism after WWII and accelerated by the tornado of technocapitalism more recently. It was an ethos that mapped to pre-Industrial-revolution America, but not to the complex, globalizing world late capitalism has created. 

But what do Liberals have to offer them that's better--career advancement in a meritocratic technocracy? Jobs in a cubby in some soulless high rise in Oklahoma City? For many of the people whose customary culture has been destroyed in the decades since WWII, to pursue such a life feels to them like surrender to the enemy that has taken everything from them that they and their ancestors held sacred. 

But Democrats and Liberals in general seem incapable of understanding this simple idea: It's the meaning, stupid. They keep thinking that the solutions to the crisis are primarily economic, and of course there must be an economic dimension to any solution that might work. But such a solution can only be advanced within a larger meaning story, a story that Liberals haven't the resources to tell. They see religion as a consumer choice, like preferring Thai food to Chinese. They don't feel a need for its comforts, they say, as if that's all religion is, a teddy bear to cling to at night. Liberals don't feel a need for such a meaning story because for the most part their lives feel meaningful enough. They are mostly educated and prosperous, and so have the financial and cultural resources to live decent, interesting lives. Why can't everybody be like us?

Blue America can't understand why Red America hates them so much and why they won't. become more like them. And because they don't, Blue America thinks its contempt for Red America is justified. It's rather like the way white settlers came to see Native American drunken layabouts and obstreperous fools for their unwillingness to assimilate. Of course, it never occurred to them that the fact that they just destroyed their thousands-year old culture might be a factor causing them to resist. Is Rust-Belt and rural resentment toward educated elites essentially different? Aren't their resentments cognate with the resentments of Native Americans toward the whites who held them in contempt for similar reasons? 

That's why Liberals are so obsessed with education. Education is always the solution for Liberals because it was the key to their own success. But their getting educated has come to mean for Red America their becoming brainwashed in institutions dominated by the ideology of the enemy, the enemy that destroyed everything they and their ancestors held sacred. The brouhaha about CRT has nothing to do with CRT; it's all about the fear that traditionalist Red Americans have about losing their kids to the enemy. 

Now I say I blame Reagan, but you might retort that if it wasn't Reagan it would have been someone else. Maybe. But what if the someone else would have have been someone with the stature and charism Lincoln or FDR, someone who could have faced down the dark side of the American character and led the nation out of the confusion of the 60s and 70s toward "greater convergence", i.e, toward a more perfect union. Is that so hard to imagine?

Carter, as admirable as he was in so many ways, was just not the man for the moment.  He was a morally serious guy who wanted us to eat our spinach, but people won't eat it if there's someone offering them ice cream instead. And that's what Reagan's Morning in America was--junk food. What Americans needed in 1980 was someone to inspire them in a way Carter was incapable of, and so his failure cleared the way for Reagan who was indeed inspiring, but he was selling the sugar high, and it made the country sick. 

Reagan was charismatic, but he was no Lincoln; he was more in the mold of Andrew Jackson. As Jackson's defeat of Adams was a fork in the road in 1828, so was Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980. Both Jackson and Reagan were larger-than-life characters, and both left toxic legacies. After Reagan in the 80s, morally deformed figures like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Ailes were given the space to emerge into the mainstream to do their destructively polarizing thing in the 90s. There are similar paths taken from Jackson to Jefferson Davis and from Reagan to Donald Trump. 

So yes, I blame Reagan. I don't think America had to go the way he diverted it, but arguing counterfactuals isn't useful unless it can help our understanding the problem we're trying to solve. If 1980 was a fork in the road in American history that led us to this moment, what would the road untaken look like, and is that a route that is open to us now?

***

The argument that I've been making here over the years is that fundamental to the crisis in our political order is a deeper crisis of meaning in our cultural order. This dimension of the crisis is something most Liberals in Blue America don't feel acutely for reasons alluded to above. And so their ideas about progress have always been about material progress and their program limited to economic policies designed to mitigate the destructive effects of capitalism on those most vulnerable to be hurt by them. That's fine so far as it goes, but...it's the meaning, not the economy, stupid.

The Liberalism that gave us all the progress that Brownstein describes above was incapable of dealing effectively with the crisis of meaning that Main Street Americans experienced in the wake of the disruptions of the 60s and 70s. All Democrats had to offer were programs that never addressed the underlying causes of the crisis, which was Traditional America's losing its customary culture, which was accelerated by Reagan's program to dismantle the New Deal and unfetter the nihilistic forces of corporate capitalism.

Reagan's program was abetted and advanced by Neoliberal Democrats in the 90s. The Washington consensus for deregulation and free trade endorsed by both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats insisted that lower prices were good for everyone, and if in order to get them some people needed to lose their jobs, well that's unfortunate, but they can be retrained to do something else.

Was it ever a consideration how such policies atomize American society and have destructive effects on families and the communities that support them? Conservatives are right that government programs are no substitute for healthy families and communities, but conservatives, guys like Romney and Paul Ryan, never understood the forces that worked so mercilessly to destroy them. (Oren Cass is an interesting exception.) They thought liberal programs were to blame, when all the liberal programs were trying to do is respond--often inadequately and hamfistedly--to capitalism's destructive effects. No, say these conservatives, Don't interfere with the work of the Invisible Hand. 

So I would argue that most Liberals don't understand that there's double whammy here for Red America in its feeling that Liberals are the cause of thei having become both culturally and economically marginalized. While Republicans are more to blame for their economic losses, they blame Democrats instead because Republicans at least respect their need to cling to their religion, their guns, and their whiteness. Obama was right--what else does Red America have once the destructive effects of capitalism have taken everything else away from them?

So Red America is stewing in a deep resentment toward Liberals whom they blame for their losses. While some of that loss might be their share of the national wealth as well-paying jobs were offshored, what they felt more acutely was the loss of meaning. The framework that gave these folks their sense of identity, dignity, and purpose slowly dissolved in the 90s and 00s. Capitalism is a fundamentally nihilistic force whose inner logic is simply greed and growth, and it is no respecter of local communities and their  traditions when they get in the way of what the logic of capitalism requires.

That's not the fault of Liberals, but Liberals are at fault for not understanding why they are being blamed by Red America, and their cluelessness leads them to endorse attitudes and policies that make things worse. It's astonishing to me to think that Democrats could ever think that nominating Hillary Clinton was good idea. It only makes sense from within a particular kind of technocratic/meritocratic cluelessness that has no sense of the causes that have led the broader society into this crisis.

But as bad as the Clintons were, they were simply adapting to the world that Reagan created. His Morning in America was a celebration of both unfettered, deregulated capitalism and traditional American values. And so follows the irony that in the name of traditional American values he unleashed the forces that in subsequent decades destroyed the social infrastructure that supported them. In doing so, Reagan began the process of creating a deracinated, anomic mass that was ripe for exploitation by the first demagogue to come along, which turned out to be Donald Trump. That such an absurdly ridiculous figure should be so successful in not a testament to his talent, so much as it is a testament to the social psychological damage done to the country by Reaganism. His unfettering of the nihilistic forces of capitalism, dressed up in a 19th century rugged individualist fantasy, thrust Red America into a ferocious ontological vertigo.  

That's what explains MAGA and J6. Red America's culture was stripped from it by the disruptions of capitalism, but they blame Liberals and their government programs because that's who Reagan and the right wing demagogues who emerged after him told them to blame. Even smart people who should know better believe that small government and deregulation is the answer to all America's woes. They believe it not because it's true, not because it gives a plausible explanation for what is ailing us, but because that's what their tribe has come to believe, and they can't be bothered to think un-tribal thoughts. It's more important to blame the Libs. 

Since Reagan, the GOP, with the acquiescence of Neoliberal Democrats, has not only impeded the country's social and material progress, but has led us to a condition where it's not enough for the worst tendencies in American society to be tolerated, but rather for those worst tendencies to become the norm. The Reagan fantasy of America created the space for the most regressive and shameful elements in the American psyche to emerge. It shouldn't be that difficult to understand how it created the shame-denying, resentment-driven, reality-averse habits of mind that inevitably led so many conservatives to embrace Trump.

So rather than admit that they were wrong, they must do whatever is necessary to shut out the truth and the shame of their having enabled such madman and in doing so smashed basic norms and impediments without which a healthy democracy can survive. Their repressed shame requires that they double down in their hatred of the morally smug Libs who they can never acknowledge were right. So they must do whatever it takes, whether legal or illegal, to shut Blue America out of power because that's the only way to shut them up. This was true of the slaveholders in the 1850s, and it's true now of any conservative who is not a Never-Trumper. Brownstein reinforces the point:

The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart. History, in my view, offers two models.

During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.

By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially, to the point of overriding the prohibitions against slavery in the free states.

It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”

The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.

And as in the 1850s, the forces of resentment and reaction are aggressively overreaching today. Conservatives are justifying their support for Trump because he gave them the court that overturned Roe, but more consequential is that he gave them the court that seems bent in its overreaching project to dismantle the administrative state. Reagan's Morning in America will thus be fulfilled in Bannon's "Leninist" dark fantasies to destroy the Liberal Order and the open society that it protected. And to replace it with what? Some Putinesque, synarchist-theocratic nightmare?

Will such a project or something like it succeed? There's a good chance of it. Reactionary Red America has short-term structural advantages--the courts, the electoral college, the Senate, a majority of state legislatures, the obliviousness of a center-right-leaning electorate. But Progressive Blue America has cultural, economic, and intellectual energies that Red America simply can't constrain indefinitely.

It's possible we'll have a decade like Cromwell's parliamentary dictatorship in the 1650s, but that will prove so unattractive that it cannot last. Maybe we will need Red America to do its worst before a backlash will develop that will empower a broad consensus to push back against it. Perhaps that's the only thing that can galvanize the political will to push for a Progressive Restoration that picks up where it left off in 1980. Perhaps only then can we get the constitutional changes that will free the country from the 18th/19th century thinking and institutions that prevent it from dealing with 21st century challenges. That's as much optimism as I can muster at the moment. 

See also "How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name", a reflection Rick Perlstein's Nixonland shortly after it came out.

Also "Growth Idolatry" about the tradeoffs between fairer wealth redistribution and rates of economic growth.

 

I was Wrong about Trump--and Some Thoughts about Cassidy Hutchinson

On January 7, 2020, I wrote a post entitled "Trump the Coward". Here's an excerpt: 

If I knew anybody who was part of the riot yesterday, the first thing I'd ask him is why wasn't Trump with you when you made your assault? He said that he would parade with you the capitol, but instead he went back to the safety of the White House to watch the event on TV. It was great entertainment until his lawyers started to scare him that he might be legally liable for inciting a riot. 

Think how much more successful your insurrection would have been if he marched into the capitol with you. But that would require that he take a risk that he simply wasn't willing to make. He wanted you all to take the risk, and if you succeeded in "stealing back the election", so to say, that would be great for him, but you failed, and it didn't take long for him to  back away from you as fast as possible.

If he's so worthy of your devotion, why did he condemn the violence and say that everybody who broke the law should be prosecuted?

That's how it looked then. I assumed that Trump never intended to go to the Capitol with the mob because it was too risky. But now it's clear that he really, really wanted to go, that his going was a part of the plan all along. And it's clear that the only reason that he didn't go was because his secret service detail wasn't read in on the plan, so it didn't know that all those people with weapons were part of Trump's plot and thought they were protecting the president from them by refusing to take him to the Capitol.

We know now that the plot failed, but also that an important part of the plan was not implemented--Trump's leading the mob into the Capitol. So I have to give him props for being willing to put his body on the line, something I thought at the time was beyond him and his bonespurs. And as I wrote back then, there's good reason to think that the plot would have had a better chance of succeeding if he were there to lead the mob into the Capitol. Imagine the confusion. Would the police have resisted him and the mob following him into the Capitol at all? Would his personal presence with the mob behind him have intimidated Pence to refuse to certify the electoral count? We owe a debt to the Secret Service. 

These hearings have been a strange experience for people like me because they don't tell a story I didn't already know. They are just filling in the details. Sure there are little things like the reason Trump didn't go to the Capitol that I got wrong, but the real story is much worse. The only way to be wrong about Trump is to underestimate how awful he is. We will learn nothing in coming weeks as more details become exposed that exonerates him or makes him look better. The only question is whether learning all this will matter. Will this information break the spell on the Trump supporting public as it broke the spell for Cassidy Hutchinson? 

Her testimony was remarkable on so many levels. Who is this young woman? What was she--three years out of college? Why was someone so young so quickly promoted to a position of such importance? This wasn't an intern position. Could they no longer find anybody older and more experienced willing to take the job? Why was she so highly thought of and trusted by all those she interacted with from Pat Cipollone to Rudy Giuliani. Why would she presume to be taken seriously  when tells Meadows, a man more than twice her age with decades of insider experience, not to go to the Willard Hotel plot meeting? Why would anybody confide in her or take her seriously in the way people seem to have? Again, why would she have been so trusted?

She is clearly, bright, competent, and well spoken. But more important I think is that she's a Conservative idealist, a true believer, who had not yet been made cynical. I wouldn't be surprised if it was her youth, her naïveté, and her idealism that made her so trustworthy in the eyes of her Machiavellian elders. Perhaps she reminded them of a younger version of themselves before politics killed their idealism. If she believed in what they were doing, then maybe they could believe in themselves. They were like Dads who wanted their innocent daughter to trust and believe in them, and as long as she did, all's right with the world. And she did, until she couldn't anymore. 

I've been a teacher of young people in her age cohort for over thirty years, and I have taught many young conservative idealists like her. They are usually former military who have come back to get their degree, or they are kids in ROTC. They want a life of significance. They are looking for a noble calling, a life of service, and the military provides an avenue for them to achieve that. They have a maturity and a sense of moral purpose that most of their peers do not. There is something deeply admirable about them while at the same time something deeply tragic. Tragic because the earnestness of their idealism is precisely what makes them so manipulable by their cynical elders. How many young idealists have died in the unworthy wars waged by their elders?

The best and most spirited young people are idealists, but what matters more is what happens when their elders disappoint them. Do they become cynics or do they become wise. Cynicism is the disease of idealists who have come to think their ideals were delusional.Wisdom is idealism tempered by understanding how the real world works. Wisdom requires retaining one's ideals and moral commitments but becoming less absolutist about them. It requires retaining the capacity to do what's called for, no matter how difficult, when the situation demands it. Was Hutchinson wise beyond her years in this sense?

In Cassidy Hutchinson, we encounter a remarkable young woman who didn't enter the military, but she entered public service as a conservative idealist. She was not made cynical by what she learned in her encounter with the dirty reality of politics, but retained her ideals and her moral instincts in a robust enough way that enabled her to do what was called for, including giving her live testimony yesterday. To do so meant turning on the leaders of her tribe, people who liked and admired her, people like Meadows and Giuliani. Apparently she thought well of Trump and was proud of her role in supporting what he accomplished, but she could not stomach what she learned about him as a witness to the events surrounding J6. And that's what led her to testify publicly yesterday. Both Trump and Meadows disappointed her, and so she was able to overcome whatever compunction might have impeded her from telling what she knew about them. 

On Monday night, before learning that Hutchinson would be today's witness, I had the impulse to watch a John Grisham movie. It was either The Firm or The Pelican Brief, and settled on the latter. It's the story of another young idealist in her mid-twenties played by Julia Roberts who had the courage to confront people with enormous power to do her harm. It is a story of Washington political intrigue but about different issues with different levels of violence. The Roberts character is being pursued by professional assassins to keep her quiet, and she is particularly good in this movie for giving us a feeling for how terrifying her situation was. It's clear to me that Hutchinson was under some threat, which was reinforced by Cheney's warnings about witness tampering at the end. I doubt Hutchinson had reason to fear being assassinated, but she has exposed herself in a way that required enormous of courage. When the dust settles and the movie is made of these events, I doubt Hutchinson's character will play a major role, but I suspect there are a behind-the-scenes events that remain yet invisible to us that would make a very compelling, Grisham-esque story. 

In the movie there is a very Trumpy president played by Robert Culp, but the really sinister character is his chief of staff. Unlike the Chief in the movie, Meadows is not nearly so sinister or villainous. Meadows is rather a cypher, a zero, a banal yes man just doing as he's told, telling everyone what they want to hear. He is a man without either ideals or dark ambitions. He's just there in the midst of it all aware of it all and doing nothing one way or the other and by his enaction enabling these crimes. 

And I wonder what the next step will be for Hutchinson? I want to think well of her, but I fear that what we might hear next about her is that she's working for Lindsay Graham or Jim Jordan. But perhaps her path will be more like that of Amanda Carpenter, another young Conservative idealist who earlier in her career worked for Ted Cruz. She's an intellectually honest one, though, who is now a never Trumper at The Bulwark.

Bremerton Coach Wins His Crusade

Speaking of religious fanaticism and the courts, I wrote about this guy in May in response to David French's defense of his right to pray on the fifty yard line. He won his day in court 6-3 with Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. Here's how I concluded in my piece in May:

It's not clear from the reporting what the nature of his prayers were. While I am myself someone who prays, I am not someone who believes that God has or should have a rooting interest in my team winning, and it goes against everything that I believe that I should pray to him that he may help me to defeat my opponent. I'm not saying that this is what Kennedy prayed about because I don't know, but a court precedent would open the door to coaches who would pray in this way, and if I were a religious student athlete, I would feel that I was being coerced to pray to a God I don't believe in because that God doesn't take sides in such matters. He's not praying to the Christian God revealed in the gospels but to a deity more like Mars, the Roman god of war. 

And to take it a step further, once you set the precedent, what is to prevent a coach from praying to Moloch or Satan--or some Wiccan deity? Is French willing to stand by some other coach if such entities are the object of his worship and parents and school administrators object? Do you really want to open that can of worms? Where do you draw the line? Once again, the fundamental problem here is trying to litigate a metaphysical matter in the political sphere. It just doesn't work. 

If the coach prays for each student to do his best and may the better team win, let him do that quietly, and then publicly tell his students that he knows that each has his best game in him on that day. That would be laudable. And it would be the more Christian way to pray. Coach Kennedy and David French might well be reminded of Jesus's advice on the matter:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. ⁶ But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. ⁷ And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. ⁸ Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matt 6:5ff)

The Woe of Roe 2

Setting aside the record of insincerity from Alito himself and the other conservative justices, the reason not to trust his disclaimer is that the Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country. The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whatever stances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undead constitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along.

Adam Serwer, "The Constitution is Whatever the Right Wing Says It Is"

I have nothing much to add to what I think about overturning Roe than what I said in "The Woe of Roe 1" in May. This is a symbolic issue, and it symbolizes different things to different people. For the Left it symbolizes a regression to the Middle Ages, for the Right it symbolizes a restoration of traditional moral order. What it means in practice remains to be seen. Fifty years from now it will mean something very different from what it means now. A lot depends on the kind of society that we will have become. 

Context is everything. Insofar as this decision is made at a time when American Democracy is in jeopardy from threats posed by fascists and religious fanatics, it's understandable that whatever the moral or legal merits that support the case for overturning the Roe decision, it feels like a victory for the religious fanatics and fascists. This decision has also to be seen in relationship to the decision the day before regarding its ruling on New York's concealed weapon law. If the argument that all Roe does is allow the states to decide their own abortion laws, shouldn't the states also  be allowed to decide their own gun control laws? There isn't even a pretense of consistency. "We don't have to make credible arguments," they seem to be saying, "because we don't have to anymore. We just rule as we please because we have the votes." As Serwer points out elsewhere in the article quoted above regarding the New York decision--

In his concurrence in that case, Alito sneered, “How does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.” The logic of the assertion suggests that laws against murder are useless because murderers continue to exist; it is a quality of reasoning that might come from a fifth grader. The argument is also not in any sense a legal one, just a paraphrase of culture-war blather one hears in right-wing media—which are a much more significant influence on the majority than the law or the Constitution is. Clearly Alito does not believe laws against abortion to be similarly pointless even though abortions will continue regardless.

These are just Fox New talking points. As the Eastman/Trump scheme was a coup plot in search of a legal theory, so are the majority's opinions conservative outcomes in search of rationalizations to justify them. Like most ideological conservatives, law and order does not mean for them a respect for the rule of law, but to use any cockamamie justification to bend the law to conform to their idea of order. If you understand that, you understand why someone like Ginni Thomas feels perfectly justified in supporting Trump's coup attempt. The rule of law has no legitimacy for her and people like her to the degree that it does not reflect their reactionary vision for social order.

So the problem is not just their decision on this issue, but the lack of judicial constraint that it portends. Thomas and Alito are fanatics. And the others? Gorsuch and Barrett seem cluelessly, nerdily naive in their Federalist Society ideological bubble. Kavanagh is a chameleon. No surprise there. Roberts seems, relative to the others, to be more in touch with reality. But as has been pointed out, he no longer matters as a swing vote now after the Barrett appointment. I have to say that I was open to giving Barrett the benefit of the doubt. I thought she might be a conservative more in the Roberts vein, but alas. 

Whether or not this is a Pyrrhic victory for the conservatives remains to be seen. Like the original Roe decision, the decision to overturn it now is perceived by huge swaths of Americans as overreach, and overreach did then and will now create a backlash. It would be ironic indeed if this decision, even moreso than the revelations of the J6 Committee, leads the country to retain the Democrats in power come November.One thing's for sure, though. Whatever legitimacy the court might have had until now is gone for the foreseeable future. For the conservatives on the court and elsewhere, it's about the exercise of raw power. 

Making Sense of Rusty Bowers

As another of my colleagues, Juliette Kayyem, wrote recently, the January 6 hearings offer an off-ramp to Trump-ambivalent Republicans. But not enough of them are taking it. Many Republican leaders have talked themselves into the position that the policy views of Democrats are so dangerous, or Trump’s policies are so good, that it is more important to support him than it is to defend the basic process of democracy.

This is partly a product of an era when the parties are further and further apart on policy; partly a product of an era of affective polarization, in which partisans are driven as much by hatred of their political adversaries as affinity for any cause; and partly a result of diminished attachment to democratic ideals among voters around the world.

Once you’ve decided that your specific policy planks are more important than ensuring that the fundamental system survives, however, the result sooner or later is a government that has no interest in the will of the people. Imagining this doesn’t take much creativity: After the 2020 election, Trump tried to ignore the will of the people and remain in power. He was stopped only by the courage of people such as Rusty Bowers. If even Bowers is willing to back Trump again, despite his eloquent condemnations, the outlook for popular democracy is very bleak.

David Graham, "The Comment that Reveals the Depths of the Republican Party's Collapse"

The comment in the title referred to is Rusty Bowers' statement, as reported by the Associated Press, that should Trump be the nominee in '24, he will, alas, vote for him. Bowers, of course, was a compelling witness on Tuesday concerning his resistance to a pressure campaign by Trump to break his oath and go along with his plot to overturn the Arizona election results. How to explain how a man who seems on the one hand to have such integrity can support another man who has none?

I don't know Bowers, but he reminds me of some conservatives I know who live in a very, very small, very tightly structured formulaic world that makes it very difficult for them to deal with complexity. Within that small world, life is simpler, and for some with a scrupulous superego, it's possible to be both principled and foolish. 

Many people mistake moral rigidity and/or moral absolutism for integrity. It's not. It's better to have some moral principles than to have none. But it's better yet to have a well-developed conscience, which is the cognitive capacity to think through morally complex issues rather than to just apply simplistic formulae. Bowers appears in this instance to have two operative rules or moral formulae: First, be faithful to your oath. Second, always be loyal to and support the GOP candidate once nominated. Morally formulaic people He can mechanically apply both rules and not be bothered by how they contradict one another. 

So a person who seems to be morally principled can be both admirable in some situations and foolish in others. Is Bowers a fool? I won't go that far because (1) I don't know Rusty Bowers, and he might have reasons for saying he'd vote for Trump again that I'm unaware of. And (2) he hasn't actually voted for him again yet. What matters is what he actually does, and, like Mike Pence, when it counted most, he did the right thing when pressured by Trump.

So for now, let us all be grateful that if it was Bowers' formulaic moral rigidity that caused him to resist Trump, it was enough to stop him from stealing Arizona. It's more than we could have expected from many other politicians, and for that he should be remembered, not his statement about what he might do two and a half years from now. 

Constitutional Jump Ball

If it wasn't clear already, it is now. January 6 was a coup attempt, and it had a good chance of working had Mike Pence been the wimp that Trump always thought he was. Pence is reported to have thought of himself as on a mission from God, and maybe this was it: to stand in the way of Trump's plot to stay in power. Would Kevin McCarthy have resisted Trump if he were in Pence's shoes? It's hard to say because I would not have thought that Pence would have the spine to do it, but he did. Perhaps McCarthy would have surprised us as well. I look forward in eager anticipation of his surprising me some day. 

What became clearer to me from yesterday's testimony was how much pressure was placed on Pence, who told Trump that he was looking for every way possible to go along with the plot, but he couldn't find it. His chief counsel, Greg Jacob, told him there was no way. Michael Luttig told him there was no way. Dan Quayle told him there was no way. But right up to a phone conversation that Trump had with Pence on the morning of 1/6, Trump was putting all the pressure he could on him, shouting at him that he was a wimp and a pussy, and that he hadn't the courage to do what Trump wanted. And it became pretty clear that Trump was, at best, indifferent to Pence's safety in his tweeting to the angry mob that Pence had betrayed him--and them. And the mob reacted as we've all seen from previous video footage. There is testimony from and FBI agent embedded with the the Proud Boys that had they found Pence, they would have killed him. 

So hats off to Mike Pence. I do not think he is a particularly good or admirable man, but few of us are, and our lives are often defined by doing what's called for in a particular moment. This was his moment, and he rose to the occasion despite a monstrous amount of pressure to get him to do otherwise. It was, so to say, his Sydney Carton moment--"a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done..." Maybe that's a bit much. Nevertheless I think that people are being unfair to him who say he was just doing his job. 

What also became clear is that should Pence have gone along with the plot, we would have had a 'constitutional jump ball', to use Greg Jacob's phrase. It's not at all clear what would have happened. Eastman argued in his conversations with Jacob that the supreme court would have stayed out of it because of the 'political question doctrine'. If that were the case, then Jacob and Eastman both understood that the question would have to be resolved in the streets. Let that sink in. Eastman and Trump were willing to create the conditions for a violent defense of this coup, and it's clear now why all those weapons were being held  in reserve by the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in the D.C. suburbs.

But what if the court took the case and decided against Trump and Pence, who would enforce it? The executive branch?  Trump/Pence would still be running it, and they certainly wouldn't enforce the court ruling. Perhaps DOJ would revolt, but it's clear now why it was so important to get Jeffrey Clark in place at DOJ. Had Pence gone along with the plot, no doubt Rosen would have been fired and a plot-compliant Clark would have been appointed AG. Would the military intervene? Under whose authority? General Milley's? But then that would be a military coup against a sitting president. Would he do that? Would others in the military follow his lead? Perhaps, if he were to pledge his allegiance to Biden, despite his not yet being officially certified or sworn in as President and Commander in Chief. Would pro-Trump factions within the military violently resist? Who knows? That's the point. Nobody knows how this would have played out. It would be chaos, and Trump thrives on chaos. 

So it's clear that all the Trump people saw Pence as the weak link. If he caved, it was a jump ball, and there was a very, very good chance that Trump could have stayed in power. At the very least there would have been a crisis unlike anything we've experienced in American history. Luttig was called upon to make that point rather emphatically. All this in the service of a sociopath, and yet it's still very unlikely that neither he nor many of the the people in Congress who were complicit in this plot will be held accountable. Eastman and Giuliani are in trouble and maybe a few other minor players. But will Garland go after Trump, Meadows, and the coup-compliant in Congress? Clearly the committee is giving him all he needs to do so. But it's a bad precedent, and he has good reason to be worried that should the GOP take the White House in '24, the new AG will come after him. That's where all this is going if the Dems lose in November and then again in '24. When it comes to revenge and reprisals, we ain't seen nothin yet. 

That's the thing. This isn't over. 

Progressives v. Jacobins

For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothing’s given me more hope than the rage and the recalls. “San Franciscans feel ashamed,” Michelle Tandler told me. “I think for the first time people are like, ‘Wait, what is a progressive? … Am I responsible? Is this my fault?’”

San Franciscans are now saying: We can want a fairer justice system and also want to keep our car windows from getting smashed. And: It’s not white supremacy to hope that the schools stay open, that teachers teach children, and, yes, that they test to see what those kids have learned.

San Franciscans tricked themselves into believing that progressive politics required blocking new construction and shunning the immigrants who came to town to code. We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.

From Nellie Bowles, "How San Francisco Became a Failed City" in The Atlantic

Bowles, a progressive in good standing, laments, at least as I see it, the takeover of San Francisco by Jacobins on the identitarian cultural Left, which is a parallel phenomenon to the way the Republican Party has been taken over by Jacobins on the identitarian Right. We see much of what she points to in San Francisco dysfunction here in Seattle. There seems to be in both "progressive" cities a deficit of common sense that directly results from a kind of woke Jacobinism. By Jacobin I mean a kind of political fanaticism born of an unbalanced idealism that takes absolutist positions on particular values and issues. It's not that there isn't something true and important in what Jacobins assert; it's rather the absolutism of their assertions and their need to forcefully repress any dissent as being in bad faith or counterrevolutionary . 

The Jacobin is someone who becomes captured by the logic of an abstraction in such a way that the abstraction and what one extrapolates from it become more real than reality. Jacobinism is usually associated with a kind of revolutionary zeal on the Left, as in the Jacobins behind the terror in France in 1793. But Neoconservative Jacobinism was the driving force behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003. MAGA Jacobinism was behind the storming of the Capitol on January 6.

As a side note, I haven't paid much attention to Jacobin magazine over the years since I assumed by its choice of the name that it was run by Leftist absolutists, but I was interested to learn this week on the Ezra Klein podcast that Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, is not himself a Jacobin by my definition of the term. Rather, he's a common-sense, 'non-identitarian' Democratic Socialist, which is how I would describe myself.

His interview with Klein made clear to me that he gets how the culture war is the biggest impediment preventing progress toward more important structural goals with regard to wealth distribution. Why?  Because insofar as its brand has become aligned with Left identitarian politics, it prevents the lower 80% on Main Street--working class, and non-college educated people--from feeling comfortable with Democrats. It's precisely this kind of Left cultural politics that has led to the dysfunction Bowles describes in San Francisco. I don't know that Sunkara, if he lived in San Francisco, would have voted to recall Ches Boudin, but he is very clearheaded about the limitations of imagination and thinking on the Left that led San Franciscans to recall him. In any event, Sunkara has made a Jacobin subscriber of me after listening to this interview. 

Despite Sunkara's not fitting my definition of Jacobinism (I'd say he has misnamed his magazine), I'd argue that a true Jacobin is someone who has an important insight or intuition, and he builds a reductionistic worldview from it that excludes any evidence that doesn't fit into it. It becomes crazy because of its surfeit of rationality and a deficit in understanding how people actually live and think.

To understand a Jacobin, you have to understand his foundational intuition, and then how he extrapolates from it. For Neocon Jacobins, Saddam ran a corrupt autocratic regime that that needed to be toppled so that in its place a model democracy could be created that would inspire other Islamic states to emulate. Again, a worthy ideal is at work there, but it's completely divorced from how people actually live and think in the Middle East. For MAGA Jacobins, the foundational insight is that the political system is run by corrupt elites from which the country must be saved. There's some truth there, but their idealism and the fanatic militancy of their solutions is completely divorced from reality. The fault does not lie in the validity of the original intuition about corrupt elites, but in the reductionistic worldview it engenders, which leads them to misidentify who exactly those elites are, which are mostly people the GOP's entire mission is to protect. 

And a similar dynamic plays out for the Jacobins on the Left. There is a difference between having extreme views and being a Jacobin. Bernie Sanders or AOC are not Jacobins. They might appear to have extreme views in relation to others on the political spectrum,  might but they are not purists. Sunkara talks in his interview about how AOC is taking flak from her Left because she actually wants to work to get some things done, and that requires compromise and working with the enemy, which the Jacobins to her Left cannot tolerate. A true Jacobin is an absolutist for whom compromise is anathema.

For Left identitarian Jacobins, the fundamental intuition is that American society is built on the exploitation of people of color and other marginalized populations and that justice requires that those historically marginalized be become privileged. In order to do this, the justice system, so historically biased toward oppressing the marginalized, must be constrained from doing so in the future, and if that means a reduction in public safety, or homeless people shooting up and dying on the streets, or street muggings, store robberies, and other street crimes going unpunished, it's a price justice requires that the heretofore privileged must pay.

In their minds it's a way to restore balance, a balance that I'd agree needs to be restored. The question is how?

The problem with Jacobins is that there is a moral absolutism that is incapable of patience and their contempt for anybody who does not share their absolutism that is to say the least, alienating and counterproductive if you have any understanding about how politics work. Jacobins have no real understanding of human nature or a sense for how humans--and human societies--actually grow and change. For them there's no faith in the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice; it must be justice now.

It's for that reason that Progressives are not Jacobins. Progressives in my definition believe that both moral and material progress are a possibility, but that it is a long, difficult slog toward their achievement. Jacobins--whether on the Left or the Right--are like adolescent idealists who are spirited enough to feel deeply the transcendent power of Justice, who see clearly and are disgusted by the hypocrisy of those in charge, and who in their youthful zeal want to destroy the whole corrupt thing.

I sympathize. But it's one thing to be an idealist, and it's another thing to know how to make progress toward those ideals. Wisdom requires that we not only feel deeply the ideals that inspire us to work toward bringing the world into a deeper alignment with Justice, but to have a felt understanding of the intransigency of the resistance that impedes us. And a big part of that intransigency is to be found in the depths of our own souls, where progress toward an inner transformation of that intransigency must be made first in order that we might actually have the capacity to confront and overcome the intransigency in the world. That capacity is moral, and moral capacity has nothing to do with Jacobin moralistic absolutism. 

There is simply no true material progress without moral progress--the two are one and the same. One without the other isn't progress. That's why developments in technology are not progress by themselves. They become part of the movement toward progress when they serve moral ends. Technocapitalism has no moral ends. But there is no true individual moral progress that does not in some small way have a correlative transformative material effect on the world. The progress of the human spirit is deeply entwined with the spiritual renewal of the earth. [See note 1] 

Patience with ourselves leads to a patience with with the world. The trick is not to confuse patience with complacency, and to refuse cynicism, and to believe that the little things matter, that the small, often faltering steps we take forward matter--often more than we know. 

-----------------

Note 1. Such a grand statement needs more unpacking than I can give it here. My main point is to counter the broadly held idea both east and west that spiritual progress is all about getting out of space time, the house of illusions and exile, and into eternity. I would argue that the solution to the feeling of cosmic homelessness is not to find a home elsewhere, but to gradually build it here on the earth. The goal is not to escape into transcendence but rather the be focus points in space and time through which transcendence is infused into the earth, which is the historical evolutionary process that will effect its renewal. The Christian Neoplatonic frame I use to support this idea can be found here.

I realize that such a framework for most people--even Christians--seems too fantastic to take seriously. So it seems for now. But a metaphysical imaginary like this is required if humans are to find the inner resources and the practices that will give them the moral capacity to fight what is coming. A purely secular progressivism cannot provide that. 

My ongoing series--temporarily suspended, but to be resumed shortly--A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity is an attempt to rehabilitate Christian Neoplatonism in a postmodern key. I argue that Christian Neoplatonism is the ur-cultural operating system for Western Civilization. It lies there in the background mostly misunderstood but still shaping us in ways we are mostly unaware, but can be more fully awakened and developed in a way that could be restorative.  

The Case against Trump--and the GOP

Liz Cheney's indictment as summarized by Amanda Carpenter:

1. Trump’s misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th.

2. Trump corruptly planned to replace the Attorney General of the United States so the U.S. Justice Department would spread his false stolen election claims.

3. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on January 6th.

4. Trump corruptly pressured state legislators and election officials to change the results.

5. The Trump campaign and other Trump associates instructed Republican officials in multiple states to create intentionally false electoral slates, and transmit those slates to Congress, to the Vice President, and the National Archives, falsely certifying that Trump won states he actually lost.

6. Trump summoned a violent mob and directed them, illegally, to march on the U.S. Capitol.

7. Trump failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol. 

That's the case, now the question is whether proving it over the next several weeks will disqualify Trump from running for office in '24.  It's still probably too much to hope that he'll be in jail by then. 

It's interesting that if the Republicans just bit the bullet and voted to impeach him last year, all of this would have been easier for them to put in the rear-view mirror. Instead their fate is very much linked to his. They wagered they could just make the hearings look like a partisan exercise, as their Benghazi hearings were. But the difference here is that while Benghazi was just a bad-faith effort in blowing smoke, the 1/6 hearings are all about about an outrageous criminal act of political arson.Most people can tell the difference. And more importantly, there are no Jim Jordans on the committee to obstruct the telling of the story with bad-faith irrelevancies.

It very well might be wishful thinking on my part, but holding these hearings now could be the one thing that prevents a GOP sweep in the midterms. It's up to the Dems to make the case that it's not just Trump who is culpable, but every GOP congressperson who refused to vote against his impeachment and conviction. They need to make that case that the vast majority of Republicans were essentially part of an effort to whitewash what was clearly a failed coup. That makes them as a group fundamentally unworthy of public trust. The committee has an enormous amount of evidence to make this case.

This might be enough to scare conservative-leaning independents and suburban Youngkin-adjacent Republicans from giving McConnell and McCarthy back their respective houses. At Charlie Syke's Newsletter, Terri wrote this in a comment about the first hearing last night:

I watched the whole thing. I will NOT look away. As a lifelong republican (no more), all I kept thinking was, THIS is what our government should be like. Serious people, not crazy, craven sycophants posturing for 'sound bites' and prostituting themselves for MONEY at the people's expense is what hundreds of thousands, millions even, of men and woman and given their LIFE for. We owe it to them and our children to STOP republicans and their dishonest and ugly vision for the future of our country. Am I naive to think that most Americans are capable of understanding what Terri does? That the GOP no longer has legitimacy? That some things are more important than inflation and baby formula? Maybe, but we'll see.  Cheney's close summed it up: I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain. Amen, sister. And kudos to the Dems who are grownups enough to stand back and let Cheney take the limelight.

Quote of the Day: Nate Hochman

Today’s culture war is being waged not between religion and secularism but between groups that the Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz has described as “the woke and the unwoke.” “Catholic traditionalists, Orthodox Jews, Middle American small-business owners and skeptical liberal atheists may not seem to have much in common,” he wrote in 2020. But all of those demographics are uncomfortable with the progressive social agenda of the post-Obama years.

The upshot is that this new politics has the capacity to dramatically expand the Republican tent. It appeals to a wide range of Americans, many of whom had been put off by the old conservatism’s explicitly religious sheen and don’t quite see themselves as Republicans yet. As the terms of the culture war shift, Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — the mix of millennials, racial minorities and college-educated white voters whose collective electoral power was supposed to establish a sustainable progressive majority — is fraying, undermining the decades-long conventional wisdom that America’s increasing racial diversity would inevitably push the country left.

That thesis was prominently advanced by the progressive political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, but both of them have grown alarmed about the rightward movement among nonwhite voters in recent years. “If Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not canceled out entirely,” Mr. Teixeira wrote in December. “That could — or should — provoke quite a sea change in Democratic thinking.” In the absence of that sea change, however, it is likely that disaffected people of all races will continue to move into the Republican coalition.  (Source)

I've been saying for years that Dems are delusional if they think the browning of America works in their favor because unless you are an elite brown American, the party doesn't really represent your interests except to be not the party of white nationalism. 

Republicans will sooner or later figure this out and quash the white nationalist factions within the party and become simply the party of traditional values. Some already get it. As soon as they do, Dems become a rump party of coastal and urban elites. Once again, as I've been saying for years, the Right/Left divide is not primarily defined by economic policy. Sanders/Warren policies would be embraced by large swaths of traditional-values Americans if Republicans proposed them rather than Democrats.

Is that likely to happen? Well, the GOP would have to oust the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells from leadership if the GOP were to become truly representative of the cultural and economic interests of the bottom 80%. The question is whether the 1% will continue to be the real power in the GOP or whether MAGA crazies will come to dominate it. The strategy so far has been for the establishment (non-MAGA) GOP to use the culture wars to alienate as many of the non-elite 80% as possible from the Dems so that it can continue to represent the interests of the 1%.

If the MAGA folks take over, does that mean that there's no future for McConnell and his 1% politics? Will the 1% be able to keep control if leadership passes to people like Elise Stefanik and Josh Hawley? Probably. The House is more vulnerable to be led by a true believer MAGA crazy than the Senate would be or even, despite his anti-corporate MAGA posturing, a DeSantis White House. Hawley, Cotton, DeSantis know who butters the bread in the GOP, and they will do what they need to to keep the MAGA base in line while doing their work for the 1%. And in the long run it's more likely that most corporate cultures will bend to right-wing conservative pressure than the other way around. 

In effect that describes exactly what happened during the Trump years. Bannon's populist nationalism was never really taken seriously. The most important accomplishments of the Trump presidency was his tax cuts and his getting a Supreme Court majority whose Federalist Society ideology is pro-Big Money and anti-voting rights, both of which favor the 1%. Everybody is obsessing about abortion, about which the 1% couldn't care less one way or the other. For them, the truly important thing about the Trump/McConnell  court appointments is their having a court that supports a 18th century fundamentalist interpretation of the constitution that gives them an open field on which to run.

Bottom line--so much depends on which party captures the allegiance of non-elite Americans. The culture war, because it is the most salient driver of American politics, will be lost by Democrats in the political sphere unless they find a way to navigate cultural issues in ways that aren't so alienating to most non-elite Americans--whatever their color. If they lose the culture war, the GOP wins the political war, and whether or not that leads to a banana-republic or an Orban style autocracy, it certainly leads to the unfettered dominance of American society by the interests of the 1%. 

Crazy Always Wins...

...in a culture that has lost its mind.

This isn't a statement of hopelessness, because I believe that we will eventually recover our minds, even if it takes fifty or sixty years  to do it.

I haven't said anything about the mass shootings of the last few weeks because no solution seems possible until we have recovered our minds. The real problem is that most Dems, Never-Trump conservatives, and moderate Independents are sane, and sane doesn't have a chance against crazy when crazy is motivated, well organized, and well funded. In other words their institutions, norms, and rules don't have a chance when crazy becomes institutionalized, which it has done now in the GOP.

Most of those in Blue America, because they know nothing about guns and gun culture, have no idea what guns symbolize for Red America. Blue America just can't understand why common-sense gun control measures can't be passed. They don't understand that their common sense and decency is no match for the insanity that will stand in the way of any such measures. It doesn't matter that sane gun control measures poll well. If the Blues are for it, the Reds will be against it. Actual policy has no political salience, only Blue- and Red-team loyalties do. 

Guns have become fetish objects in the culture wars. They symbolize power and agency for a huge segment of Americans who feel they have neither. They've invested whatever is left of their identities and sense of dignity in their ownership, and to take their guns away is to take what's left of their dignity, and so they will use them to defend that dignity when they are made to feel disrespected, which is what any kind of sane gun control makes them feel. The NRA understands this, and hence its bumper sticker: "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands" 

It's too late now. It was criminal negligence on the part of the Republican congresses in the 2000s that that it didn't support the renewal of the assault weapon ban. Now there are so many assault weapons out there, that anybody who is determined to get one by extra-legal means and to use it will not be significantly impeded by such legislation. The assault weapon black market will grow and thrive, and in red states, and in red counties in any state, the police will do nothing to crack down on it. Such a ban will only reinforce the de-legiimzaton of Democrats in Washington and increase the motivation of the kind of people I described in the previous post to take power by any means necessary and to prevent Dems from ever getting it back again.

The problem is not that there are many sane, decent people who own guns, but that there are so many unstable Americans who do--or can get them so easily when they feel the "need" for one.  And so the only real remedy is to address the underlying causes of the identity loss and its ontological dizziness that has made America so crazy. This is partly a metaphysical question, but it's also a social political one caused primarily by the destructive effects of Neoliberalism on the American social fabric. The second flows from the first, but the most egregious negative effects can be remedied by a politics of decency that strives to support American families. 

I think that most Democrats understand this, but they get in their own way by having allowed themselves to become branded as "woke", which everyone outside the media and the universities finds at best irritating for its priggishness. It's not that 'woke' is technically wrong, but nobody likes a prig except other prigs, and so it makes Dems so unpopular at at time when they really, really need to be popular if we're to save our democracy. If there is any political solution, it would have to come from a political realignment that would require a new party to emerge comprising thoughtful social conservatives and communitarian (anti-Neoliberal) Progressives who were willing to agree to disagree about culture-war issues and start confronting the all the ways that Neoliberalism has destroyed the basic social infrastructure of working-class America. Obviously this is not something that will happen any time soon, but something like it is what's called for. 

There is not that much in economic policy differences that separates social conservatives on the Red Team like Patrick Deneen, Oren Cass, Sohrab Ahmari, and Erika Bachiochi from social Liberals on the Blue Team like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren when it comes to policies designed to help American families. Both factions understand how destructive Neoliberalism has been in the lives of most ordinary Americans, but they can't get together mostly because of differences about sex and identity politics. But that's part of what makes us so crazy now. Progressives have become the party of "woke" and Conservatives the party of "anti-woke". As I said above, nothing else has political salience. 

 

The Danger of the Moment 2

In what follows I imagine a conversation with someone like Sohrab Ahmari, about whom I wrote in a post entitled Radical Elites on the Right 1. I say someone like Ahmari, because I don't want to put words in his mouth. I'm just looking for someone who is smart enough to understand that Trump is an idiot, but sees him as a useful one because of the kind of American future that he hopes for. It begins with my question and follows with his answers:

Are you willing to risk the loss of American democracy to prevent Liberals from remaining in power?

I think Liberals are exaggerating the threat. Democracy will continue but with stricter controls on who gets to vote. 

Are you saying that more than half the country should have no say in who gets elected?

I'm saying that it's better for the country that the party of traditional American values has the power to make decisions about what's good for America. Liberals are allowing the moral fabric of American society to unravel, and they need to be stopped for their own good and for the good of the country. 

But you understand that in a democracy a minority can't just impose its will on a majority that doesn't agree with it, right?

I think most Americans do agree, but they just don't know it yet. Liberals are like people in a cult who need an intervention. Once we're in power, we will throw out the filibuster and enact programs that will enable them to see the error of their ways--the law is a teacher. And especially when we enact Bernie-Sanders type programs to support families, we will get the support of most of them. 

But then how can you say that such actions will not destroy American democracy?

Well, because with or without Trump we'll be voted into power in '24 with broad popular support.

But you realize once you impose your 'law-is-a-teacher' program, it will be seen as very unpopular and will lead to your being voted out in the next cycle, right?

Well, I question that it will be as unpopular as you think, but while I hope it won't be necessary, we might have to temporarily suspend elections until our new Moral Majority regime gets broader support. What we're doing is truly revolutionary even though it's only restoring the old moral order. America has become deformed; we simply want to re-form it according to its original blueprint.

Do you think the people in Blue states in the Northeast and West coast will take this sitting down?

Once we're in power, what are they going to do? Take to the streets? Let them. They will be perceived as radicals with a far Left agenda who will broaden public support for our regime. Any violent counter-revolutionary actions will be violently suppressed. But not to worry--it's not as if we'll have to deal with armed militias, right? Not a Left kind of thing. Our militias are armed and ready, and they will take care of any serious problems of public resistance. 

The great danger in the upcoming midterms, but especially in '24, is that Main Street moderates will vote for Republicans because they blame Democrats for inflation and  baby formula shortages. In the next month, through the public hearings of the January 6 Committee, we will learn whether Main Street is capable of grasping the enormity of what happened in the last months of the Trump presidency and that it is likely to be repeated in '24 but with more success.  

Democracies have shown time and again that they are perfectly capable of voting themselves out of existence. The question remains whether Independents and moderate Republicans understand that they might be doing just that if they throw the Democrats out. We will learn soon enough whether Main Street has any real understanding about what's at stake. 

Go to Danger of the Moment 1. 

Radicalized Elites on the Right 2

Appelbaum on Ezra Klein this week:

I remember having a conversation — must have been about 2017 or 2018. I was in Texas, and I sat next to some people at a dinner. And they were pro-Trump, and we started talking about that. And I asked them, you know, aren’t they bothered by Trump’s corruption? They said exactly that. No, he’s just doing in public what everybody did in private. And although, of course, that’s not true — Obama was not running a business out of the White House, and George W. Bush was not running a business out of the White House — the impression that Washington is somehow corrupt was so deep and so broad that Trump was seen as just a smarter guy who was doing it openly. So I think the impression that the system needs to be smashed, that the hypocrisy needs to be exposed and that anybody who does that is good, even if they’re offering a completely different set of values, is clearly something, again, that’s very powerful, a powerful human phenomenon that we have now, and we also had in the 1930s.

Klein responds:

So there’s corruption, which we’ve been talking about — dark money and running businesses, and enriching yourself — but there’s also something else in that Arendt quote about virtue. To use it again, she says, “The bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions, and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues, which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt.”

I’ve been doing this series for the show on the populist right, and so I’ve been spending a lot of time in what people on the populist right have been writing. And I’m really struck by the potency of this exact thing, this feeling that society’s current elites — like, what they like to call often, like, the managerial class, or liberals, or whoever it might be — that they’re out there telling you, you’re racist, you’re sexist, you’re bigoted, you’re backwards, you’re deplorable.

And there they are, taking millions of dollars from Goldman Sachs and jet setting all around the world, and telling you how bad climate change is while they fly in their private jets and have their big mansions. And you know, you can poke holes in this, but there is something, I think, to the power at least of this feeling, the power of what it feels like to believe that you’re being judged morally suspect by people who are themselves morally suspect, but simply control the mechanisms by which virtue is assigned.

And that — out of that comes a real desire for somebody who says, screw those mechanisms, screw who decides whether or not you’re virtuous, or kind, or good. I’m going to break this whole thing wide open.

This is how cynicism creates the conditions for the possibility of Trump. If you're openly corrupt, you are perceived as morally superior to the hypocrites who insist they are not, and then have the nerve to judge you. This is the mentality of the GOP right now. They assume that the Democrats are as corrupt and hypocritical as they are, and some, of course, are. This is why the Biden/Burisma business was so important to them. It was to draw a moral equivalence between him and Trump.  But a difference in degree is a difference in kind, and the degree of corruption and hypocrisy of GOP leadership is significantly worse in degree. But that's impossible to argue with people who have swallowed the cynicism pill. 

UPDATE: Is cynicism realism? From George Packer:

Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin are star political reporters for The New York Times, and their scoops in This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future have already made headlines. But the book is more interesting than just for perishable news that will attract ogling Washington insiders. It’s a document of decline and fall—a chronicle that should cause future readers to ponder how American leaders in the early 21st century lost the ability and will to govern. Step back from the page-by-page account of congressional Republicans’ desperate grasping for Donald Trump’s favor or the Biden administration’s struggle to pass its legislative agenda: You’re confronted with a world of almost unrelieved cowardice, cynicism, myopia, narcissism, and ineptitude, where the overriding motive is the pursuit of power for its own sake. It’s rare that a politician thinks about any cause higher than self-interest.

The book’s Democrats are at least sane, but they’re beset by petty quarrels, forever trying to solve the “identity politics’ Rubik’s cube,” and dragged down by a pervasive exhaustion; their elderly leaders are unable to grasp the brutal political forces swirling around them. The Republicans are hell-bent on the destruction of American democracy, or else too craven to stand in the way—the result is the same. Each party has a handful of impressive young politicians, but because they take governing seriously, they’re probably doomed to obscurity or defeat.

The vote to keep Democrats in control is not a vote for a solution; it's a vote for the maintenance of some level of sanity and stability. The solution has to come from a shift in the cultural sphere. How that happens I don't know, but our problems deep down are metaphysical, not political. The solution, if it is to work must involve a mythos, a theology if you will, that embraces a collective positive future possibility that is broadly embraced. In lieu of that, a regressive mythos of blood and nation will fill the vacuum. The problem with the Democrats is that they have have constructive policies but no mythos. The problem with the Republicans is that they have a mythos but no constructive policies. 

Radicalized Elites on the Right 1

And I think this is why it is now the case that the Right finds it easier to move left on economic issues than the Left finds it to move right on social issues. And this is why, whether you like it or not — and this is not going to result from our conversation, but whether you like it or not, the Republican Party is becoming the working class party, and the Democratic Party is becoming the party of high tech managerial elite, the college educated, and so forth.

So the question to you is not that you should convince me that I should be a supporter of the Democratic Party. My question would be, why is this party that you’re trying to convince me I should be supporting — why is it no longer supported by the people that once, a generation ago, would have supported your party?

--Patrick Deneen

Good question.

Ezra Klein is trying to understand the far Right. His recent interviews with Matt Continetti and Patrick Deneen have been interesting, and an interview on his show in October conducted by Ross Douthat with Sohrab Ahmari is also very instructive. I'm particularly interested in Deneen and Ahmari because of their recent public profile as intellectuals who have become radicalized Rightists. Why?  How can they justify such a move? And so it's interesting to learn that when push comes to shove about actual policy, they are both, in effect, Bernie-Sanders social democrats who differ from him primarily only in that they want the government to support their conservative social values. 

Both Douthat and Klein push their interlocutors to explain why they are not Sanders/Warren-wing Democrats, and they never really answer the question satisfactorily. In the end, imo, it comes down to this: Despite the ample room there might be to become coalition allies with folks on the Left in helping to ease the economic strains on ordinary Americans and their families, they cannot agree to disagree about cultural issues. In the end, what matters most for them is not policy, but tribal identity, and they cannot stomach joining the party whose values presuppositions they see as having become inimical to theirs. 

I understand and sympathize with the conservative critique concerning the limitations of the Liberal Order. I lay out why here in the first post in the Genealogy of our Current Insanity series. But given the current political landscape, the Democratic Party is the only vehicle for achieving their goals on the political-economic front. The values influence of the meritocratic managerial elite is strong in the Democratic Party, but do they really think that a nihilistic DeSantis/McConnell/McCarthy government that at best gives lip service to conservative social values would deliver anything more than a few crumbs here and there? The only thing that such a government deeply cares about is retaining power and serving the interests not of the meritocratic 20%, but of the plutocratic 1%. Do Deneen and Ahmari they really believe that Bannonite/Trump populist rabble-rousing is anything more than a cynical con? (Deneen is far less Trumpy than Ahmari.)

You can work with the Democrats because most of them are interested in solving problems, whereas most Republicans are only interested in trolling. Klein goes down a list of things that both Obama and Biden have done to help families that Deneen acknowledges as constructive, but that doesn't matter because at the root of the problem for him are the sexual politics. It was interesting to me that in the Ahmari interview with Douthat, he starts out well and ends badly. At first Ahmari presents himself as thoughtful, incisive critic of Neoliberalism, and only toward the end gets unhinged in his animus toward Liberal hypocrisy and then goes on to defend Orban in Hungary. In the Deneen interview, the opposite happens: he starts with stereotypical conservative grievances about how the sexual politics of the last thirty years has upended traditional ideas of sexuality, but by the end of the interview he sounds like Sanders, Warren, or John Fetterman. Deneen is a Wendell Berry, small-is-beautiful localist, not a wild-eyed, proto-fascist Bannonite. In the interview he says--

I’ve taught at some pretty elite universities. And the presumption is that the students who go to those universities will all enter the economic order at its point of greatest economic opportunity and reward, which in some ways, you could say they also have limited choice once they accept those set of presuppositions.

Right, they’re all going to end up working in New York City, or Washington D.C., or Chicago, or what you will. So once you set up the defaults in that way, the presumption of many choices actually turns out to be, which city am I going to end up living in? Which consulting agency will I end up working for — whereas a different set of defaults is, in what way will I be a contributor to this or that community?

And it might be the one that you came from. And in many ways, of course, that was the default. That would be turning the clock back. Whatever the town, the hamlet, the city, wherever it was that you grew up, that’s where the kind of person who today goes off to Harvard or Princeton or Yale and ends up living in New York City or London, that’s the kind of person that once lived in that town and became the trustees of that town, the major contributors of that town.

These are the George Baileys from Bedford Falls, right, who don’t get out of the town, but end up making the town a much better place. And so the question, to my mind, is not how do we force those people to stay, but how do we rethink a world, if it’s possible — I don’t know, but it seems to me a question worth asking — but how do we think about a world in which we don’t just funnel off all of the talent to like six cities in the world, where they’ll end up contributing to an economy that I think we would both agree is not a very just or good economy right now.

And unless we’re asking that question, then we’re really not going to be addressing this vast, gaping divide in those two features that you just described, of those weakening institutions that are harming especially those who are left behind, and the benefits that are enjoyed by an elite class that have actually, today, a vested interest in having those institutions remain weakened, in sort of securing their places as members of the ruling class.

So it seems to me, just a basic old fashioned class analysis, but what do we do to begin to make the ruling class more responsible to, and more in touch with, and frankly, living among the people whom today they largely seek to escape from?

This is a position antipathetic to the communitarian Left?! The real enemies for both Deneen and Ahmari are not Liberals, but global technocapitalism and the Neoliberal values presuppositions that dominate political and economic elites who support its unhindered expansion and domination of the political economy. They are absolutely right that their values are hegemonic in the halls of power whether in Congress or in corporate C-suites. They are absolutely right that technocapitalism is destructive of the social and economic infrastructure that is essential for the flourishing of ordinary Americans in local communities. Both want to break up monopolies, they want to impose limits on the greed of corporate Saurons to shape American values and political policies.

Both are absolutely right about all that, and while those Neoliberal elites are attracted to the Democratic Party, they are educable in a way that Republican elites are not. AOC is most emphatically not the Left-wing mirror image of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Pramila Jayapal, my congresswoman and the Progressive caucus leader, is a deeply intelligent, thoughtful, and decent woman. She's not a hair-on-fire ideologue. She wants for families what Deneen wants. And there are lots of other people on the Left who agree with them that you will not find on the Right, at least the Right whose story Continetti tells in his book. So again, why don't they hook up with Jayapal/Sanders/Warren Democrats? Why could someone as smart as Ahmari support Donald Trump and Victor Urban? It makes him impossible to take seriously no matter how cleverly tortured his rationale. In the end, I think it's all about who you hang out with. Who are the people you feel most at home with? And for them it's not Liberals. [See Note 1.]

The discussion with Deneen didn't get that specific about the politicians he supports. But even a non-Trumpy GOP moderate like Will Hurd is all about the meritocracy and letting capitalism do its thing without government interference. But I think that's the problem with Deneen that Klein exposed. He's more about first principles and less about implementation, which should never be left to people like him or Ahmari. 

Conservatives don't pay attention to the reality that's right in front of their noses; it's only the underlying "philosophy" that matters. I remember having a conversation with one of my Clinton-despising Republican brothers in the 90s. I agreed with him that Clinton was a sleaze and I couldn't vote for him (I voted Nader), but I was amazed at how he saw Clinton as a socialist. I remember being astonished by the Republicans' anti-Clinton mania. It was my first inkling that the GOP had clearly gone off the rails. I told my brother that as ugly as I thought Clinton's personal behavior had been, I disliked him even more for implementing the Reaganite Neoliberal agenda that Republicans had been championing.

The Republicans had a president in Clinton who wanted to give them what they wanted, but they couldn't say yes. Even then it was never about policy. He was on the other team. He was a "Liberal". And for that reason, people like my brother saw Clinton as the embodiment of everything that they hated, and it therefore made it impossible that they could actually agree on policy. Deneen and Ahmari, it would seem, are cut from the same cloth.

It's a shame, because the culture war is a waste of time and energy, and it cannot be resolved in the political sphere. And even if one side succeeds, the fundamental instability rancor won't go away at a time when we need to have sane people in the middle dealing pragmatically with pressing problems that need to be addressed. Deneen and Ahmari correctly identify the Neoliberal elites as the real enemy, but nobody is more pleased than these elites that the culture war continue unabated because it insures that those on the cultural Left or Right keep fighting one another rather than fighting them. 

----------

Note 1: Klein addresses this in his subsequent interview with Anne Appelbaum concerniung the ways a deep feeling of alienation causes people to seek out groups with whom they can identify and feel at home: 

"I was thinking while I read all this that some of the older people in my life who have drifted right, or when I go and report with right wing thinkers who have become much more radicalized in recent years — something I hear again and again is that sense of non belonging, this feeling the world has changed too much for them to find a place in it, or that its mores have changed in a way where they feel like people are hostile to them and what they think."

People want more than anything to belong, and they will say stupid things if they think it will enhance their good standing in the group they identify with and refuse to say other things if doing so will undermine their good standing. It's as true on the Left as the Right, but more pronounced on the Right because many on the Right think their views used to be mainstream and see no good reason why they still shouldn't be. 

The Danger of This Moment 1

“Unlike the bulk of their colleagues who are eager to remain in office, Romney and Cheney have decided continuing to serve in Congress is not worth the bargain of remaining silent about an individual they believe poses a threat to American democracy,” Jonathan [Martin] told me. “They also can’t understand why Republican colleagues they respect don’t share their alarm.

In an interview for Jonathan’s and Alex’s book [This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for American Democracy], Cheney specifically mentions her disappointment with McConnell: “I think he’s completely misjudged the danger of this moment.”

--David Leonhardt

I've been thinking about the different interpretations of what's happening now in the U.S. in the wake of the Trump presidency. You could put them in five broad categories:

1. Traditionalist (mostly White) Nationalists, many of whom think that the country needs to be saved from a Satanic plot run by Liberals or others who see themselves as the "real Americans" and think that Libs are priggish, condescending, effete, woke un-American globalists who need to be "owned". Both think they are defending an idea of America that when push comes to shove has no need of democracy, if democracy means letting anybody but them run things. Pols like Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley are vying to get in front of this group's parade should Trump falter. 
2. Cosmopolitan Liberals who dominate mainstream cultural institutions, particularly the the media and the universities, and those who are most influenced by their ethos and world view. These are people who think that "woke" is not a pejorative term, but simply a word that describes basic decency. They live in a bubble reinforced by their own smug complacency that the facts and their being on the right side of history support their politics. Examples here are every Democratic leader who has an absolutist pro-choice stance on abortion and who thinks that sexual identity and racial equity issues in general are more important than economic issues that that have destroyed the social fabric of working-class America. 
3. Main Street Americans who lean conservative and who care about American democracy but who think that it's in no danger, that what's going on in the political sphere is just the same-old-same-old partisan wrangling. Trump was bad, but not that bad. What happened on 1/6 was more or less the same as what happened in Seattle and Portland during the Black Lives Matter protests in Summer of '20. They see extremists as on both sides, and they see them as a nuisance, not a real threat. This group comprises corporate friendly "blue-dog" Democrats and plutocrat-friendly Republicans like Glen Youngkin and Mitch McConnell. 
4. Establishment institutionalists, whether Liberals or Never-Trumper Conservatives, who think that culture-war resentments and populist anger and credulity are driving a political movement that will destroy American democracy. And while the threat comes primarily from the Right, they are dismayed by the way the cultural Left continues to live up to the worst stereotype that Main Street Americans have of them. They might be right on the issues, but they seem to have no idea how unattractive they make their positions to people who are not already persuaded.
5. People who are oblivious and so have no interpretation. They wouldn't care if the U.S. became a monarchy or an absolutist dictatorship so long as it didn't affect their day-to-day life.

Obviously, there's overlap between categories. 

The culture war is being waged between those who dominate the first and second categories, and it's this war that is at the root of our political dysfunction. I'm in the fourth category as someone who while having no illusions about the failures, contradictions, and raw inadequacy of the Liberal Order, see it as far preferable to an illiberal one. I fear that the Republican Party's future lies with its domination by illiberal culture warriors in category 1 in coalition with corporate and plutocratic interests whose policies dominate in category 3, and that would be a disaster for the American experiment because illiberalism and the interests of the 1% have no vested interest in democracy. 

But I'd argue that the future of democracy lies with the rank-and-file Main Streeters who naively vote for the pols in the third category. They don't see that what happened during the Trump presidency culminating in 1/6 as that big of a deal, but rather as an aberration. They are the suburbanites who vote for Glen Youngkin or they are pols like Will Hurd who think that the Republican Party can become again the party of normal conservative values--low taxes, small government, strong military, and secure borders. And clearly people like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy want people to believe that about the Republican Party, and they believe that they can hold onto power with a coalition of category 1 people with most of those who are in category 3 and those who bother to vote in category 5.

McConnell, McCarthy, and most of the non-Freedom Caucus pols that follow their lead have no illusions about Trump, but they see no need to hold him accountable. They wouldn't mind if the Democrats push him out of politics, so long as they are perceived by the base not to have cooperated in such an effort. Otherwise, they think Trump will just eventually go away, and they tell themselves that they can continue to keep the MAGA crazies under control so long as they throw them a bone or two from time to time. The Marjorie Taylor Greenes, Louie Gohmerts, Paul Gosars, and Matt Gaetzes are an embarrassing nuisance, but we can keep them under control, they think. That's their bet, and for them it's a bet worth making because all the structural factors favor their taking the Senate and the House if they don't blow it with the base.

And so the question is who's got the better grip on the future of the Republican Party--people like Liz Cheney in category 3 who believe we are in a very dangerous moment or those like Kevin McCarthy in category 4 who think not so much?  Since the more likely scenario is that a coalition of categories 1 and 4 will take the legislature in '22, and a good chance that they'll take the WH in '24 if either Biden or Harris are the Dem candidates, we'll find out, won't we?

Got to The Danger of the Moment 2

The Praying Coach of Bremerton

Teachers are state employees, but they are not the state’s robots. When they clearly speak on their own, the First Amendment should apply. Whether they kneel in prayer or protest, it’s not just acceptable for students and parents to see teachers as people and citizens; it’s imperative. The best way to teach pluralism is to model pluralism. Let Coach Kennedy pray, for all our sakes.

David French, "Let Coach Kennedy Pray" in The Atlantic

I respect French as a thoughtful, serious conservative, but in this he's blinded by his team affiliation, so to say.

The real issue is to what degree is Coach Kennedy's praying coercive. It's one thing to pray, it's another thing to gather the team around him as he does so. I haven't made a deep study of it, but from the reporting I've read, apparently he did both, and his doing the first led to to the second:

Kennedy spent much of his coaching career behaving like a preacher, holding public prayer sessions for students — many of whom Kennedy wielded authority over. And, while there’s no evidence that he ever ordered a student to kneel with him when he performed a religious ceremony on the 50-yard line, he did not discourage students from joining him, either, and a majority of the students on his team eventually did so. (Source)

The problem is that in a complex pluralistic society it's more likely that some students are going to feel that they are being pressured to do something they don't want to do. You can say that they are free to abstain, but what does that do for team unity? Isn't that the coach's primary responsibility--to build team cohesiveness and morale? If he thinks the assertive public display of his religious commitments are more important than the requirements of his job description, he should be fired on those grounds alone if they lead to feelings of favoritism, resentment, and exclusion, which apparently they did. 

The school administrators tried to work with him and set some limits--

Initially, the coach complied. But he soon unleashed a coordinated legal and PR campaign against the school district. About a month after the superintendent ordered Kennedy to stop preaching religion to his students, Kennedy’s lawyer informed the school district that the coach would resume praying at the 50-yard line immediately after games.

What followed was a circus. Kennedy went on a media tour presenting himself as a devout coach who “made a commitment with God” to performatively pray after each game. Good Morning America did a segment on him. Conservative media ran with headlines like “High School Coach Bullied Into Dropping Prayer at Football Games.” By the end of the month, 47 members of Congress — all Republicans — wrote to Leavell in support of Kennedy.

At the conclusion of the next game, coaches, players, and members of the general public mobbed the field when Kennedy knelt to pray. A federal appeals court described the rush of people onto the field as a “stampede,” and the school principal complained that he “saw people fall” and that, due to the crush of people, the district was unable “to keep kids safe.” Members of the school’s marching band were knocked over by the crowds. (Source)

It's one thing to let everybody know that you are a sincere, committed Christian. I think most people would respect that, especially if you behave like one. It's another thing when you assert your beliefs in such a way as to make a public space like a school a battle field in the culture war.  I don't know the man, but from the reporting Kennedy comes of as more of a fanatic than a love-centered Christian. And If he is so fanatical about this that he is making a Supreme Court case of it, he's not someone I'd want coaching any child of mine. He should just get a job coaching at a conservative Christian School where his zeal will be appreciated. 

It's not clear from the reporting what the nature of his prayers were. While I am myself someone who prays, I am not someone who believes that God has or should have a rooting interest in my team winning, and it goes against everything that I believe that I should pray to him that he may help me to defeat my opponent. I'm not saying that this is what Kennedy prayed about because I don't know, but a court precedent would open the door to coaches who would pray in this way, and if I were a religious student athlete, I would feel that I was being coerced to pray to a God I don't believe in because that God doesn't take sides in such matters. He's not praying to  the Christian God revealed in the gospels but to a deity more like Mars, the Roman god of war. 

And to take it a step further, once you set the precedent, what is to prevent a coach from praying to Moloch or Satan--or some Wiccan deity? Is French willing to stand by some other coach if such entities are the object of his worship and parents and school administrators object? Do you really want to open that can of worms? Where do you draw the line? Once again, the fundamental problem here is trying to litigate a metaphysical matter in the political sphere. It just doesn't work. 

If the coach prays for each student to do his best and may the better team win, let him do that quietly, and then publicly tell his students that he knows that each has his best game in him on that day. That would be laudable. And it would be the more Christian way to pray. Coach Kennedy and David French might well be reminded of Jesus's advice on the matter:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. ⁶ But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. ⁷ And when you pray, do not keep on babblinglike pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. ⁸ Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matt 6:5ff)