After the Future

How Significant, Really, Was Bill Buckley?

I’ve just finished the Tanenhaus Buckley biography. It engaged me on a number of levels, not the least because his life, 1925-2008, mapped to the lives of my parents, and reading the story of his big life helps me to understand their smaller ones. Like most good biographies, the story told is not just about the individual but about the times and the changing cultural milieu. Buckley didn’t live long enough to see Obama move into the White House, but my father, who was three years older but lived ten years longer, lived long enough to see Trump move in. My father voted for Trump. I’m not sure whether Buckley would have. In 2000 he wrote the following about him—

What about the aspirant who has a private vision to offer to the public and has the means, personal or contrived, to finance a campaign? In some cases, the vision isn’t merely a program to be adopted. It is a program that includes the visionary’s serving as President. Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something.

But so many “principled” conservatives said similar things about Trump before 2016 and then recanted. And the story that Tanenhaus tells about Buckley is not of a principled conservative, but of a culture warrior and polemicist. If for tribal conservatives, loyalty is the most important, maybe the only principle, Buckley had that in spades. That made him a famously good and generous friend, but also an ally and defender of some truly awful human beings like Roy Cohn and Edgar Smith. ¹

Buckley was probably the most famous American Catholic of his generation, but he was a Catholic in the mold of a Latin American oligarch.² I think this is the key to understanding everything that was proto-fascist about him. The Kennedys, whose family trajectory runs a parallel course to the Buckleys, were very Irish Catholic. Their patriarch had more in common with rough-and-tumble Boston Southies than the WASP Ivy Leaguers who were his kids’ clasmates. The Buckleys were more Ivy than the Ivies—except of course in their Catholicism.

The point is that he was a cultural Catholic first, a tribal Catholic, and that tribalism was key to his behavior and attitudes. His patrician style was always a way for him to say that we Catholics are the creators and stewards of Western Civilization. Everything that is great about its intellectual and artistic achievements comes through a Catholic prism. Even the Protestant Bach, whom Buckley adored, wrote Catholics masses. How dare you boring, pasty-souled WASPs look down on me and the rich tradition I love! That anti-WASP/Liberal Establishment animus drove him since his high school days in the WASPy prep school he attended. He honed his debating skills there in the 1930s, and though he was a rhetorical prodigy, he always lost in debate. His defense of outré “America-First” positions didn’t go down well with his classmates and the faculty, no matter how brilliantly he espoused them.

And so what any of this had to do with the spirit of the gospels and his Christian commitments was secondary. He knew very little theology,³ and couldn’t care less about any Catholic social teaching that contradicted his father’s laissez-faire capitalist commitments or his mother’s Southern segregationist commitments.⁴ Buckley was not the kind of person who was interested in the truth, only in defending his familial legacy. The picture that emerges from Tanenhaus’s biography is of a man who was a moral adolescent—intellectually sophisticated and verbally adroit, but not particularly thoughtful or curious. The only ideas that interested him were those he could enlist in his assault of the Liberal establishment.

So why should I find him so interesting? It’s hard for me to put my finger on it. Perhaps because I see an adolescent part of myself in him and in his loyalties that I came to reject—but nevertheless still haunts me. As a sixteen-year-old I wanted to be him. And so perhaps for that reason I understand why so many young people drifting toward the Right find in him an attractive model providing an alternative to the cultural Left they find so emotionally and spiritually bleak.

Buckley was right about the richness, texture, and complexity of his, and my, tradition that very few Americans knew about then or know about now. And he was right in his disdain for the moralistic, flat-souled, spiritual poverty of American Calvinism. But his reactionary Catholicism offers no healthy alternative. These young people attracted to that brand of Catholicism are being seduced by something that, like Buckley, is all style and, in the end, very little substance.

And that style, though more sophisticated and charming than anything we see today coming from the MAGA Right, it was born of a resentment then that is the same animating spirit of the MAGA Right now. The fact is that the assault on the Liberal establishment, and even his America-First positions that he defended in prep school are triumphant in 2024. Leonard Leo and his supreme court picks, and the fanaticism of Russell Vought, JD Vance, and Kevin Roberts are all Bill Buckley spawn. If he were alive today, would he embrace them as his? Probably.

See also “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” and “Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary”.

Notes

1. And he was a vigorous defender of Joe McCarthy, and never came to think he was wrong in that.

2. Despite Buckley’s association with the New England/New York elite society, his father was a Texas-born oil man with interests in Mexico, and Buckley Jr lived in Mexico for the better part of his first six years, and learned English as a second language. His mother was born in Louisiana, and the family owned estates both in Sharon, Connecticut, and Camden, South Carolina.

3. He relied on Garry Wills to fill him in. Wills had been a Jesuit seminarian, and he was someone for whom his Christian commitments mattered. He left National Review because of it stance on segregation. Buckley was deeply wounded by Wills’ ‘disloyalty’.

4. Later in life he recanted his segregationism, and acknowledged that federal intervention in the South was necessary.

Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary

[I’ve been reading Sam Tanenhaus’s rich, complex, and long-time-coming biography of William Buckley entitled Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. I’ve just finished the bit about his role in grand jury tampering to get Adam Clayton Powell indicted. I hadn’t known about his role in that, and it’s instructive about Buckley in so man ways.

But Buckley was a fixture of my youth growing up in a large, conservative Irish Catholic family in the ‘50s and 60s. The Buckley family lived on grand scale what we lived far more modestly, but we were very much swimming in the same pond. That’s a world that’s long gone, and Tanenhaus’s book can help you understand what was both wonderful about it, and what was truly vile; why people would fight so hard to defend it, and why justice required that it be destroyed. It is a study on how very good and very intelligent people can talk themselves into defending the indefensible.

In any event, my reading Tanenhaus reminded me of a piece I wrote about Buckley in 2008. I thought I’d repost it here. I think it largely holds up—my comment near the end about his irrelevancy is debatable—and Tanenhaus just adds more detail and texture.]

Billl Buckley: Romantic Reactionary

If there is one overarching emotion that characterizes Romanticism, it's nostalgia. The Romantic hates modernity and longs for something lost, a lost age (or a lost childhood) when one did not feel so estranged, when men were men and women were women, where nobility and grace and chivalry were the rule, where the world was full of mystery and enchantments. The Romantic feels these as a kind of memory that triggers in him such longing. This kind of nostalgia is often enough benign, but it frequently enough manifests in a kind of toxic social psychology. It links those who would fly the confederate flag longing for the Old South with the Germans who dreamed that they could be once again Teutonic warriors, and links both of those with Islamic mullahs who dream that a Muslim civilization may once again extend from east Asia through Europe. They long for a lost culture that in their imaginations, whatever it may have been in reality, in which people were deeper, more spiritual, more connected, more human. Romanticism is a reaction against the soul-flattening, social leveling and mechanistic, materialistic rationalism that is, in the Romantic's view, the spirit of modernity.

I think that this kind of romanticism explains Bill Buckley's reactionary Catholicism and all that came with it: his hatred of communism, his defense of Franco's Spain, his defense of McCarthyism, why he supported the war in Vietnam but had no enthusiasm for Iraq. (The mullahs, after all are romantic reactionaries like him). And this longing for a lost romantic nobility distinguishes him from other red-meat, John-Birch conservatives and neoconservatives on the American scene with whom he consorted but never felt comfortable. Those other conservatives are motivated by fear and powerlust; Buckley was not, his conservatism was rooted in a romantic idealism.

I think also for Buckley his playing the romantic reactionary was kind of a lark. He was deep down the trickster mocking the pretensions and hubris of the modern welfare state. He was a more sophisticated, lighter-hearted, wittier, and gentler Ann Coulter: somebody who didn't take himself and his quixotic projects that seriously. He had a lighter, cooler style and enjoyed more the jousting and the skewering of the less-nimble establishment liberals like David Susskind with whom, in my youth, he seemed eternally to be debating on his TV show. He defined himself primarily not as "for" but "against," and what he was against was communism and all of its offshoots, because communism was the modern disease par excellence, and from the spirit which animated it, all the ills of the modern age flowed. I never saw him as a corporate capitalist. His defense of capitalism was motivated not by his loving it, but by its being the opposite communism. My guess is that if he could live in an ideal political-cultural world it would be under a doge in 15th-century Florence or Venice.

I think that this important to understand because for the kind of romantic reactionary Buckley was, American liberalism was just a watered-down version of Marxism. The spirit of modern liberalism was the same as the spirit of communism--its materialism, its naive optimism, its rejection of tradition and religion, its rational mechanistic solutions to social problems, its top-downism, its Jacobin hubris. His life's purpose was to wage war against the mindset that characterized secular liberalism which for him was a disease that eviscerated the soul and made humans into gutless, dependent, children--"men without chests," as C.S. Lewis described moderns in his Abolition of Man. This is important to understand if you're to understand the animus of Buckley's kind of conservatism against what for most sensible people seems the benign common sense of liberal welfarism. For such romantics Liberal programs are not common-sense solutions to practical social problems; they are the emanations of a spiritually crippling social disease.

And so for all of his elan, Buckley in the end was an irrelevancy. It's the problem of all reactionaries who refuse modernity rather than embrace it in order to live through it. I would contrast him with another kind of traditionalism--the kind, for instance, that the radical social critic Ivan Illich represents. Illich was a Catholic priest with deep family roots in old Europe. Anybody who knows his work knows that for him tradition was not something into which he retreated nostalgically, but was the source for his radical and energetic critique and imagination of solutions. From Cayley's Conversations with Ivan Illich:

Illich has often drawn attention to how traditional his views are and to how novel such views can seem in the context of contemporary cultural amnesia. As early as 1959 he introduced an essay called "The Vanishing Clergyman" by saying that he was not writing "anything theologically new, daring, or controversial." "Only spelling out of social consequences," he went on, "can make a thesis as orthodox as mine sufficiently controversial to be discussed." In these pages, he remarks that today "it's very difficult to speak about . . . things which seem to have been obvious and unquestioned during a thousand years of Western tradition." " I often have the impression, he says, "that the more traditionally I speak, the more radically alien I become."

No kidding. Anybody who has been reading this blog over time knows that I am sympathetic with the conservative critique of modernity while at the same time refusing conservative solutions for the problems of modernity. So I understand where Buckley is coming from, but I completely reject his politics and his imagination for a cure. People like Illich are fecund with future possibility, while Buckley's vision in the end is barren.

I wonder if Illich ever appeared on "Firing Line". That would have been a very interesting conversation.

The Bannon-Brooks Interview

Monday was consequential for being the day the Trump Immunity ruling came down and Steve Bannon went to jail. Again. His interview with David Brooks published on Monday is pretty disturbing, but clarifying in light of the SCOTUS ruling. Bannon even references Project 2025:

Project 2025 and others are working on it — to immediately focus on immigration, the forever wars and on the fiscal and the financial. And simultaneously the deconstruction of the administrative state, and going after the complete, total destruction of the deep state.

In the first 100 days — this is going to be different than ’16 — we will have 3,000 political appointees ready to go. …

That’s the significance of the Chevron ruling. There will be no impediment to Trump gutting the administration of competent professionals with institutional memory and replacing them with MAGA hacks.

It used to be a mantra of the free press that the greatest disinfectant is sunlight, meaning that as soon as the citizenry understood what malefactors were secretly planning, they would oppose it. That’s no longer true. The amazing thing about living in an age where there’s so much information is that there is no longer a need for the bad guys to hide what they intend to do. It’s all there in plain sight, and yet nobody pays attention because it’s lost among the deafening noise of so much other information that drowns it out. You can’t see —or hear—what you’re not looking or listening for. Bannon makes this point in the interview:

The historical left is in full meltdown. They always focus on noise, never on signal. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump.

I think he’s right. Most people on the Left haven’t a clue what’s animating the MAGA right, and they are distracted by distraction from distraction. They just dismiss MAGA as a bunch of retrograde, racist yahoos who believe the moon is made out of cheese. But Bannon, like most of the really serious people on the hard Right, don’t take Trump seriously. He’s just a means to an end. If the braintrust gets its way, a guy like J.D. Vance will be Trump’s running mate. He’s fully read in, understands the Project 2025 agenda in way that Trump is not capable, and he’ll be in place once Trump is gone. I don’t know that Vance will be acceptable to Trump, but watch out if he is.

Project 2025 is hiding in plain sight, and as I argued yesterday, the Supreme Court Majority is playing a key role in providing the legal infrastructure for it. Indeed, the majority is in essence, rewriting the constitution to make way for it. Sure Project 2025 is getting some attention even now in the MSM, but are ordinary Americans paying attention, or are they drowning in the noise?

I’ve always taken Bannon seriously as a kind of raw articulator of the alienated rage that animates so much of middle America. That rage is real. It derives from what I call ontological dizziness, and it has to be taken seriously. Ontological dizziness is what happens to you when you discover that the world you thought was solidly real isn’t. “All that is solid melts into air,” to quote a famous observer of the effect. This is what happened to Red America since the 80s when their world was gutted by Neoliberalism. The infrastructure of their world, the world they thought was solid, melted into air, and the suffering that they have endured is real and must be taken seriously.

I think that most Liberals are clueless about why MAGA has so much energy. It’s because they are so comfortable in the world that populists like Bannon hate. They don’t understand the alienated rage that Bannon represents, and it’s for that reason that they need to listen to Bannon. He’s a symptom of the disease who mistakenly thinks he's the cure. But he’s important to understand if we’re to understand the disease.

Bannon addresses one of its primary symptoms here and how MAGA offers a remedy:

Bannon: Now, the biggest element that Buckley had that the book “Bowling Alone” had, and you talk about, is the atomization of our society. There’s no civic bonding. There’s no national cohesion. There’s not even the Lions Club things that you used to have before. People tell me all the time: “You changed my life. I ran for the board of supervisors, and now I’m on the board of supervisors.” They have friends that they never had met before, and they’re in a common cause, and it’s changed their life. They’re on social media. Every day, they have action they have to do.

Brooks: This was Hannah Arendt’s point that loneliness is a seedbed for authoritarianism. But you’re not about conversing with the other side, you’re just fighting with the other side.

Bannon: What do you mean, not conversing with? There’s nothing to talk about.

Brooks: Well, how about you have a conversation with the Biden administration. The Biden administration has spent a lot of money. And now, when I go to Central Ohio, they’ve got an Intel plant coming in. You go to Upstate New York, they’ve got a Micron plant. These are benefits for the working class.

Bannon: Some of that stuff’s OK. But on the fundamental direction of the country, we are separate. We are two different worldviews. And those worldviews can’t be bridged.

Brooks’s PBS/NYT cluelessness is amusingly on full display here. As if Bannon/MAGA was ever interested in sitting down and having a nice, rational debate about the merits of its policy preferences. Oy.

Nevertheless, while I don’t think that most Americans want what Bannon represents, it’s important to understand the spiritual need that MAGA Right fills for so many ordinary Americans. The Left has nothing to match it. So if Biden wins, it will be because most Americans want normalcy rather than finding this kind of life-changing meaning in politics. Do they?

We are truly in uncharted territory now, and anything is possible. We are in the Age of Whatever, and anything goes. And victory likely goes to whoever has the most compelling narrative, and Bannon understands that such a narrative need not be based on facts. The “spiritual” energy on the Right and the narrative that supports it cannot be underestimated, and if the Right wins, its extremist leadership will be in no mood to play nice. They plan to cut through American liberal institutions as Sherman cut through Georgia.

Bannon sees Trump as a third founder following Washington and Lincoln, both of whom led the only two bloody wars fought on American soil. Could it come to that here again? Conservative Institutionalist and NY Times columnist David French wrote a book about how it might come to pass entitled Divided We Fall. It was largely scoffed at when it came out in 2020, but I took it seriously, and wrote about it then in a post entitled “David French’s America”. I wrote —

So while French's book offers a vigorous defense of the culture and values of Red America, he has no illusions about how Red America is being poisoned by Trumpism. Some might argue that principled conservatives like French have been delusional to think that most conservatives think and feel the way he does, and that the contemporary Red American values that he defends were, contrary to what a proud Southerner like him wants to believe, always proto-fascist. It's not primarily about racism, but about a premodern imagination of social order. I have argued here over the years that the New South deep down isn't that different from the Old South, which has more in common with Latin American autocracies than the democracies of North Atlantic societies. That's what defines America's two souls. 

In my post yesterday, I quoted from the Introduction of Project 2025 and then discussed two contradictions, the first being that the writers believe that they represent the ‘soul of America’. Well this is what they mean. The Soul of the Old South is the “American Soul” that Bannon, Project 2025, and the Supreme Court majority think they are trying to save. It should be clear that they are on a spiritual crusade to do so, that this is no longer partisan politics as usual—it’s a right-wing holy crusade akin toi the Spanish Reconquista—and that the defenders of the other half of the American soul, the Yankee half, better wake up to the fact.

If Trump wins, I think it's more than likely that the radical Right that supports him—from the MAGA rank-and-file to the braintrust at the Claremont Institute, American Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society—will look at his victory as a restoration of the true soul of America, the soul of the Old South, the soul represented in the Stars and Bars, and that it must use the full power of the state to suppress any other. They truly believe that they have God on their side, and that they are doing his will.

Forget about the 'rule of law', which was always just a Yankee conceit. It will be all 'law and order', which is completely different. In the Old South the law had legitimacy only insofar as it aligned and reinforced its social order. What matters is the order, not the law.

This the underlying logic that explains the Supreme Court rulings. It’s clear now that those in the majority no longer feel the need to use ‘originalist’ b.s. to justify what they are doing. They have no interest whatsoever in a constitutional rule of law. They want the ‘leader’ to rule by fiat so that he might restore the old order. The sheer audacity of it is breathtaking. But they are confident that history is on their side. Is there vitality enough left in the Yankee soul to prove them wrong?

Reality: Nice While It Lasted 2

From Thomas Edsall's column a few weeks ago:

Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”

Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits

a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power

against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”

“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges.)”

Klaas asked:

What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?

How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II(which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?

In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”

I think there is something to the banality of crazy idea, but I don't think this is the MSM's fault in the way that Klass does. There's plenty of anti-Trump stuff in the MSM. The problem lies in that Red America does not trust the MSM. So, for instance, nobody in Red America is going to read Edsall's column because it appears in the NY Times--Red America trusts the NY Times about as much as Blue America trusts Fox News.

And so because there is no shared trusted media source, there can be no shared sense of reality. When there's no shared sense of reality, people believe whoever tells them what they already believe or want to believe. It doesn't matter how detached from Reality it gets because there's no foundation in reality against which nonsense can be contrasted. You believe whom you trust. When everybody one knows and trusts believes nonsense, how can they all be wrong?

I think the basic trust dynamic works the same on the Left as it does on the Right. The difference lies in that the media that the Right consume are largely nonsense, and the media those on the Left consume mostly meet traditional journalistic standards. That doesn't mean that there's no bias in the Liberal media. But the bias lies in the interpretation of the facts not in the fabrication of them. It's been proved time and again that Right media has utterly flouted journalistic standards in its willingness to  report nonsense. But that's not reported in the Right media, so the consumers of Right media remain shielded from those facts. 

For this reason, I think that anybody coming from Mars who objectively observed the beliefs and behaviors of those on the Right and Left would see clearly that those on the Right are more detached from Reality than those on the Left. You don't find thousands of people on the Left showing up in Dealey Plaza expecting the return of JFK or believing anything like Qanon conspiracy theories or joining plots to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. There is a cargo-cult quality in what's going on in Red America to which nothing corresponds in Blue America.

When people believe something that is fundamentally untrue, deep down they know it's untrue, but they don't want to face it.Their sense of meaning, purpose, and identity largely derive from believing nonsense, and there is a very real terror associated with learning that they've accepted nonsense as reality. It would be humiliating and identity-shattering to have to face this.

Driven by this fear of humiliation and identity loss, they must resist any information that might lead to the unraveling of their nonsense-based beliefs. It becomes virtually impossible to entertain facts that might prove them wrong, so they double down, and in some cases adopt violent means of resistance to reality rather than to face it and be corrected by it.

Fanaticism and extremism in the service of nonsense become signs of being a truth-teller, and because the fervor of fanatics is respected by the less fervid, the fanatics rise into positions of leadership. Then a competition to out-fanatic the other arises among those who seek leadership and power. Moderation and sanity become signs of weakness. Then the fanatical leaders demand proof of loyalty and commitment from the less fervid. Willingness to break the law or commits act of violence becomes the test of one's belief. Are you with us or against us? Prove it by joining us in our plot to kidnap Grethcen Whitmer or to storm the Capitol or tamper with voting machines.

This is how it goes--the more fragile one's nonsense-based beliefs, the more one has to double down; the more one doubles down, the more the need to violently resist reality; the more one resists reality; the more fanatical one becomes; the more fanatical one becomes, the more detached from reality--and the more prone to become involved in a militia that's planning acts of domestic terrorism.

The not-yet-radicalized will not go so far, but they will show their commitment to nonsense by voting for the "77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection," etc. It's the least they can do. 

So here we are. 

Is a Post-Liberal Open Society Possible?

I have no truck with the Illiberalism of either the Right or the Left, and yet I look at the Liberal Order as no longer sustainable. We are moving into a Post-Liberal world whether we like it or not. I want to defend an open, pluralistic society, but it seems clear to me that the philosophical presuppositions that undergird Liberalism that were largely responsible for making the Open Society possible in the first place, can no longer sustain the Open Society in the future.

Something else is called for to take the baton from Liberalism to run the next leg. Whatever comes next will be, by definition, Post-Liberal, and I fear a forced Illiberalism, most likely from the Right, is our future unless a solidarity-gelling, transcendentally inspired alternative that supports an Open Society emerges as a counterforce.

This is not just a battle of ideas between magazine intellectuals. Something far greater is at stake: it's a battle for the human spirit in which the forces that would advance the human project are contesting with enormously powerful forces that would destroy it. Those destructive forces are inherent in technocapitalism and justified by the reductio ad absurdum of Liberal principles in the Neoliberalism that since the 1980s has accelerated the profusion of the toxic potentialities inherent in Liberalism. This is precisely why Liberalism is useless for us in this moment. It's presuppositions and contradictions created the mess we're in now, and a solution cannot be found within an imaginal/intellectual framework that is constrained by Liberal presuppositions. 

The reductive eschatology of Marxism has been utterly de-legitimated and offers no real possibilities unless coupled with a Christian eschatology, as in some possible future interation of  Liberation Theology. And the legatees of J.S. Mill on the cultural Left are all decent, reasonable people, but when push comes to shove, they are incapable anything inspiring a robust solidarity movement in the broader culture. They haven't the intellectual and spiritual resources to take us to whatever comes next if technocapitalism doesn't destroy us. 

Liberals of goodwill are defenseless against the deeper dystopian il-liberalism inherent in techno-capitalism (See Note 1) because Liberals share with techno-capitalism its fundamental presuppositions in Rationalist Materialism. Liberals accept the inevitability that technocapitalism will drag us wherever it wants, and that at best they can mitigate its most humanly deleterious effects. So instead they become preoccupied with identitarian issues that by comparison are trivial like transcending the gender binary. The best Liberals seem capable of at this point is simply to ask, "Can't we all get along and play nice?" 

What a compelling alternative might be or how it might emerge, I have no specific proposals or program. I trust it will arise in ways that are now unforeseeable. But I do believe that the general framework or components of what I think need to emerge are gestured to in the previous post entitled "Here We Are". I want to make clear that any form of il-liberalism would be utterly incompatible with everything that I think and that I care about.

But I believe that our movement into a Post-Liberal era is inevitable, and it will be Post-Secular in character. The choice in the future will not be between secularism and religion, but between good religion and bad religion. What's the difference?  Bad religion closes off possibilities for human flourishing, while good religion opens up possibilities. Liberalism is failing us now because it is has become bad religion. In coming decades, we have good reason to fear that its weaknesses will allow it to be defeated by something far worse. 

Liberalism played an important historical-cultural role in opening up new possibilities for human flourishing, and we humans must not lose what we have gained from it. But it's done it's job, and now it's time for something new, something humanly deeper and richer that can take us forward to a place where Liberalism simply cannot. 

For a more expanded version of the argument, See "Progressivism in a Post-Liberal World". 

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Note 1: Whatever might be the ever-changing opinions of Sohrab Ahmari from week to week, his Tyranny, Inc. makes an overwhelming case that the Libertarianism embraced by the corporate overclass, despite its often woke window dressing, means freedom for them and peonage for everybody else. 

Are You Feeling Politically Homeless?

If you are an ordinary, i.e., non-overclass, American, Michael Lind explains why you might be feeling that neither party represents your values or your interests: 

...the center of gravity of the overclass is center-right (promarket) on economic issues and center-left (antitraditional) on social issues. In comparison, the center of gravity of the much larger working class is center-left on economic issues and center-right on social issues.

Populists combined with social democratic leftists make up half or more of the US population, but they are almost completely unrepresented among the college-educated overclass professionals who make up most of the personnel in legislatures, executive agencies, courts, corporate suites, think tanks, universities, philanthropies, and media corporations. This explains why, for the last generation, “centrism” in American politics has been defined as overclass centrism, identified with support for cutting working-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare in the name of “fiscal responsibility,” while embracing individualistic liberal views of reproduction and sex and, more recently, gender identity. Meanwhile, the “radical center,” the midpoint of the working-class majority’s political spectrum, has either been ignored by politicians and pundits and academics altogether or grossly mischaracterized by overclass journalists and overclass academics as the “far right” and lumped together with neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Michael Lind, The New Class War, p. 73

Lind is waging war on what he calls the Overclass, the bipartisan Neoliberal elites that have made such a mess of things from Reagan through Obama. Each of these writers wants center-left policies when it comes to wealth redistribution and government programs that help ordinary Americans and their families. He wants to make the case that ordinary Americans, especially the ones that support a guy like Trump, have justifiable beefs that Overclass elites are blind to. 

I'm very sympathetic to that argument. I think that ordinary Americans that support Trump are not evil, but they are too easily seduced by evil. And I do disagree with Lind when he argues that people like me who are patronizing these folks when I describe them as naive and easily manipulable. However annoying people might be on the Left, they cannot be blamed for J6. Those who participated proved that the Liberal stereotype was largely correct. Such people are naive and easily manipulable.Whatever level of responsibility elite Liberal clueless has played in in annoying MAGA, is nothing compared to the cynical exploitation of that naivety by illiberal elites on the Right. 

But I get it. Lind wants to argue that the Neoliberal overclass elites are oblivious of the underlying causes that made Trump a possibility, and there's an argument to be taken seriously there. But regardless of the degree to which the overclass has provoked non-elites, we can no longer look at the MAGA populists as a benign movement after J6, and we can no longer trust to the basic decency of too many of the ordinary Americans who are attracted to Trump. That decency will not impede their doing terrible damage to our polity precisely because they so easily manipulable. That's on them; not on Overclass elites. If that sounds patronizing, too bad. It's just the obvious truth. And that naiveté and manipulability has been and is continuing to be weaponized by cynical right-wing pols and right-wing media. 

Later in Lind's book, which came out in early 2020, he mocks overclass criticism and alarm about the threats that Trump posed: 

A far more common view among transatlantic elites interprets the success of populist and nationalist candidates in today’s Western democracies not as a predictable and disruptive backlash against oligarchic misrule, but as a revival of Nazi or Soviet-style totalitarianism. One narrative holds that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime, by cleverly manipulating public opinion in the West through selective leaks to the media or Internet advertisements and memes, is responsible for Brexit, the election of Trump in 2016, and perhaps other major political events. A rival narrative sees no need to invoke Russian machinations; in this view, without aid from abroad, demagogues can trigger the latent “authoritarian personalities” of voters, particularly white working-class native voters, many of whom, it is claimed, will turn overnight into a fascist army if properly mobilized. These two elite narratives, promulgated by antipopulist politicians, journalists, and academics, can be called the Russia Scare and the Brown Scare (after earlier “brown scares” in Western democracies, with the color referring to Hitler’s Brownshirts).

The reductio ad absurdum of this kind of mythological thinking is the adoption of the term “Resistance” by domestic opponents of President Donald Trump, which implies an equation between Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans and the heroic anti-Nazis of the French Resistance. The anti-fascist theme also provides the name for the Antifa movement which, like the earlier “black bloc” anarchist movement, is made up chiefly of the privileged children of the white overclass who abuse leftist ideology as an excuse to dress up as movie-style ninjas, vandalize property, and harass people.

The New Class War, pp. 90-91.

He's like the Ross Douthat conservatives who thought that the Left was overreacting to Trump. I wonder if he thinks that now. Would he be so dismissive of Brown Scares after J6? And while I don't believe that Putin caused Brits to vote for Brexit or Americans to vote for Trump, Putin did what he could to nudge things toward those ends, and in an election as close as it was in '16 it's not implausible his efforts made a difference. I also believe that someday we're going to find out that Trump's relationship with Putin was far more significant than Lind seems to think it was.

I want to take the ideas of thoughtful, good-faith conservatives like Lind, Patrick Deneen, and Sohab Ahmari (See Note 1) seriously because they have important insights that most conventional American Lefties need to understand. But because these three writers' sympathies lie with heartland anti-elites, I think they are (were?) not nearly as concerned as they should be about the brown-shirt energies that are there to be aroused and manipulated--indeed that have been aroused and are being manipulated. 

Because most people who voted for Trump are not White Nationalists or Christian Nationalists does not mean that (1) these forms of proto-fascism aren't the primary driving force of the GOP now, and (2) that rank-and-file, "decent" Republicans  will 'resist' these forms of illiberalism if their advocates come into power. A Christian Nationalist is the freakin' Speaker of the House now. Does that not alarm Lind or Deneen? Is Johnson's kind of theocratic populism something they think should be in the person of someone who's second in line to the presidency? 

I think another important, if obvious, point to make is that the Republican Party as the Party of Trump, Kevin McCarthy, and now Mike Johnson can no longer be taken seriously as a governing party. It has surrendered to reactionary clowns and spineless empty suits who go along with them. So if Lind, Deneen, and Ahmari are serious about their ideas becoming policy, they will have to do it through the Democratic Party.

But because the Democrats are the only party capable of governing, they have a responsibility to make room for serious, good-faith anti-Neoliberal, cultural conservatives like Deneen and Ahmari to find a home in it. It cannot do that so long as Middle America sees the Intersectional Left as the Democrats' public face. 

Yes, the Intersectional Left has more influence in the cultural sphere than it has in the political. Most elected Democrats are not seeking to transcend the gender binary or support the anti-colonialist ideology that justifies 10/7. But Heartland America connects the Democrats with that Left extremism because the Democrats are the Party of the Left Progressivism because it's the  Party that wants 'progress'.  And so because 'progress' these days is defined by the Intersectional Left more than it is by Gandhi or MLK, the Democrats, or anybody who identifies as "progressive" are guilty by association with the extremists. Americans have seen how the once staid Republican Party has been taken over by its extremists, so it's not utterly ridiculous for many moderate voters to think that the same thing will happen to the Democrats. 

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Note 1. I don't think there's much in the critique of Neoliberalism found in Deneen's Regime Change or Ahmari's Tyranny, Inc. that Bernie Sanders would disagree with. I think that Deneen's 'aristo-populist' ideas resonate with Christopher Lasch's ideas about the need for elites instead of being rootless staying in the communities that they grew up in and actually dealing with non-elites in a face-to-face way. Demographic sorting and the nationalization of local politics is a huge problem.  And while everything in a society dominated by Neoliberal values works against that, he's right, at the very least, that we need more mixing and less separating.

But the 'aristo' part of aristo-populism isn't palatable to most on the egalitarian Left for whom the Iron Law of Oligarchy is so deeply offensive. So are death and taxes offensive, but an elite overclass we shall have always with us. The future political challenge is not to abolish the elite, but  to establish a polity in which its elites can be more effectively pressured if not compelled to take the material and cultural needs of non-elites seriously. Lind addresses this in a recent essay about power alignments in coming decades:

Whether human society in the future consists mostly of “a mass of semi-slaves” depends on whether the wage-earning majorities in particular countries, by means of disciplined mass-membership institutions like political parties, labor unions, and religious organizations, are able to exercise countervailing power to restrain the “aristocracy of talent at the top.”

In other words, ordinary people have to organize to resist and hold accountable, not to overthrow, the overclass. It needs to find ways that compel the overclass to see how its interests lie in taking seriously the interests of the non-overclass seriously. Both Lind and Deneen point out that the institutions that enabled ordinary Amerians to do that in the mid 20th Century have collapsed. That coupled with the fact that 18th-century liberal ideas about contracts, property, and individual freedoms are used as an ideological cudgel by overclass elites like Koch brothers and the legal hacks attracted to the Federalist Society to crowd out any possibility of balancing these in a regime committed to the common good.

See Deneen's second interview with Ezra Klein here and his 2019 interview with Lind here. I talk about that interview and another with Ahmari in a post entitled  "Radicalized Elites on the Right 1" and the homelessness theme in "Radicalized Elites on the Right 2"

Quote of the Day: J. V. Last

Dune is the story of how the indigenous people find their savior—he is called Muad'Dib—who leads them to overthrow the empire and take control of their home planet. How does he do it? By threatening to destroy the spice.

Muad'Dib explains his insight this way:

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

This simple maxim is root of all power. And it explains why Donald Trump controls the Republican party, absolutely. ...

And here is the fundamental truth that Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, and the rest intuitively grasped: (1) They cared—still do care—a great deal about the Republican party. (2) Trump does not care about the party at all. If the Republican party were broken, institutional Republicans would be at sea. Mitt Romney’s reporting makes that clear.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, would simply move on to the next grift.

The Republican party is Trump’s hostage because he is willing to kill it and traditional Republicans are not.

Jonathan V. Last

About that Romney piece. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that for most people adulthood is just a continuation of high school. The Coppins' piece shows that, at least as far as the Senate Republicans go, it’s a continuation of middle school. These GOP senators have the emotional and moral maturity of 5th graders.

Romney stands out because he's the 8th grader. He is like the bright, boy-scouty counselor at Christian summer camp trying to keep the 5th graders in line. But there's this very cool, rule-breaking 6th grader who is always making fun of the stiffly upright 8th grader because he's so profoundly un-cool. The 5th graders at first find the 6th grader uncomfortably naughty, but look, he's getting away with it. Wow. They'll do whatever he wants. 

I appreciate Romney for whatever it is in him that resists the juvenile nihilism of his colleagues. He is in comparison a decent man. To what degree it is his potty training and to what degree it is genuine conscience I don't know. It's some measure of both, but the level of his naivete and simplistic thinking is gobsmacking.

How Not to Defend Liberalism

Instead of class conflict, politics became a battle between two cultural factions, neither of which represented the working class. On the left side of these politics are many professionals whose concerns for equality have narrowed to involuted and essentialized conceptions of race and gender detached from the real material needs of the marginalized groups they claim to support. Meanwhile, the reactionary Right is populated by many relatively high-earning but uneducated small-business owners and tradespeople who obsess over the excesses of the Left, indulge in fear-mongering about crime and immigration, and toy with—or outright embrace—racist tropes. While this right-wing identity politics likes to invoke the downtrodden white working class and sometimes borrows from the rhetoric of mid-century labor politics, it effectively serves the interests of another set of the elite through a standard business-oriented Republican playbook. Our fervid cultural politics do not emerge, bottom-up, from a public that channels its economic anxiety in misguided, illiberal directions; it originates with those at the top of the economic system, whose privileges it obscures.

Alexander Stern in Commonweal

The subtitle for Stern's article is "Embracing technocracy will pnly fuel the populist surge." It is one of the best pieces I've come across in summing up our predicament. The culture war is a proxy war in which uneducated working class voters are manipulated to fight for the interests of the wealthy who stoke resentments by telling them that big-gummint-woke-Democrats want to destroy everything that they hold sacred. And so the Cosmopolitan Left enters the fight fists aflyin' on the culture-war terms these wealthy interests have defined. They think their cause is righteous, and, you know, they're gonna win because history is on their side. But guess what? The historical dialectic is a bitch. 

I have not been writing here about the Trump indictments because it's going to play out the way it's going to play out. I think his strength in the national polls is meaningless.Nobody's focused on politics now. The reigning commonplace is that both parties are corrupt, and a pox on both Republicans and Democrats. But when push comes to shove, most Americans will not vote for Trump. And they're less likely to do so in the swing states that put up the looniest of MAGA candidates last year. They know what they're dealing with there because they've seen the crazy up close. And while I doubt a sociopath like DeDantis could get elected again in FL because since the pandemic Floridians have come to see him for the cynical empty suit that he really is, that doesn't mean he can't get elected if he ran against Biden.  

I understand the arguments of those who think that Biden's running again is an unforced error by Democrats. I certainly would feel better if Dems ran Gretchen Whitmer or Chris Murphy or any reasonably competent Democrat under the age of 70. I think Douthat's analogy in today's column is apt. Putting Biden out there is akin to Boston's keeping Bill Buckner on first base in the '86 world series. They thought that it will probably be all right. What are the odds that a ball will be hit to him that will go under his gimpy legs? Well it did then, and it can again. Biden during the next year is one McConnell-esque TIA away from losing the game. And then what? What is the Dem Plan B? Is anybody in the Dem establishment talking about that?

In the meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether MAGA can be anything more than a rabid personality cult that can bring itself to think strategically. Probably not in time for '24, but at some point, post-Trump, it probably will. And this is really the point of Stern's article. Whatever happens in '24, MAGA is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is broad detestation of the technocratic managerial state and its elite, Neoliberal, cosmopolitan, meritocratic ethos. Defending that is not a long-term viable solution for Democrats. The Dems have got to find a Capra-esque multi-racial mythos that will re-establishthe Dems as the party of the little guy. I think lots of Dems think that's who they are because their policies are in fact more worker and family friendly, but they just don't get that that's not how they are perceived anymore. And it's up to educated Dem elites to understand this and change it.

And it's also the point that I've been making here for years. The cosmopolitan Left is deeply mistaken if it thinks it can win the culture war in the long run. It thinks it can win because it believes young people share their cosmopolitan values and MAGA will age out. But, again, the historical dialectic is a bitch, and now that Woke defines boring conventional establishment thinking, it provokes robust anti-woke rebellion in the young. Count on this continuing to be a thing. 

BTW, if you want to understand why Hard-Right thinking can be so compelling for serious, spirited young people, read A World after Liberalism by Matthew Rose. He's raising all kinds of warning flags that a complacent Left should be paying attention to. And so the Democratic Party, as the vehicle for what is a very confused and feckless Left, must return to its class-first roots, and that requires that they find a way to win back the white working class, and in doing insure that they retain the loyalty of the Black and Brown working class.

What's going on in the Hard Right is an overdetermined, complex social phenomenon, and while an atavistic white racism is a part of it, it cannot be reduced to and dismissed as just that. There were an uncomfortable number of Black and Brown people storming the Capitol on J6. Educated Black, Hispanic, and Asian ideologues do not represent the thinking and values of working class Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. And yet the thinking and values of these educated elites have become the brand of the party. How many educated Democrats understand how alienating that is for the rank and file? 

Self-Transcendence, Constraints, and Social Order

Every society needs moral norms and behavioral codes. Without them we would all be in Hobbes's state of nature. The culture war that is tearing the country apart right now is about who gets to define what those codes are. The main combatants are the Left and Right wings of our Calvinist heritage--the priggish Neo Victorians on the Right and the equally priggish Neo Abolitionist Identitarianss on the Left. The Right is wrong because the old social order was unjust in its repressiveness of women and minorities; the Left is wrong because its basis for abolition is not 'justice' but 'desire'. The cultural Left seeks to abolish taboos that impede desire understood in a postmodern Freudian sense, and they find a way to do it that is insufferably moralistic. 

The intellectual vanguard on the cultural Left, at least for now, does not believe in transcendentals. For them Truth and Justice are just stuff we make up for the sake of convenience to navigate in a world that at root makes no sense. Justice is just a name for whatever is the cause of the day, which is usually what is trending in elite academic circles. For this faction on the Left, the idea that Justice is a transcendental ideal that calls a society to become its best possibility is an impossibility.  But without justice as a grounding principle, it must find something else, and it draws on forms of postmodern Freudian theory like that of Lacan, Zizek, Deleuze, and Guattari to find it--and all they's got is 'desire', which in the American context is conflated with the 'pursuit of happiness' and the freedom to determine for oneself what that happiness might be. Any attempt to argue that some desires are better than others and some may be destructively narcissistic is rejected except when it involves violence. 

So to boil the postmodern Freudian doctrine down to essentials, humans are all victims of the Oedipus complex, which is the cultural download we each receive when we are weaned and learn that we are not the center of the universe and must learn to play our role in society. These roles are cultural constructs and are  by definition repressive and as such the greatest impediment to our pursuit of happiness, and so they must be deconstructed and abolished when they are obstacles to any individual's pursuit of happiness however that might be construed. 

These roles are social constructs and as such are in flux over time, but they trace back to our premodern cultural heritage, so, for instance, the vast majority of children who are born biologically male and female must learn to play the roles of men and women, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, etc.  Daddy insists on it, and so does Mommy, perhaps even more vehemently. Those roles for men and women are different in different societies, but one gets assigned a role and one must fit into it whether one likes it or not, and mostly we humans don't like it.

I accept that humans are born polymorphously perverse, and that as a result no matter what the gender or sexual role assigned to us, it's a constraint.  And so the Oedipal desire to kill the Father is not personal; it's about the child's resentment at being constrained when she or he loses the Mother as his or her exclusive object of desire. The people who fail to make the Oedipal transition become primal narcissists--people like the fictional King Lear or the all too real Donald Trump--people whose driving force is to become once again the center of the universe as they were in the pre-Oedipal state where their wish was their desire. So what is this desire about except to restore our polymorphous perversity, which means a longing to return to a state of primal narcissism?

So all of us at that early age and continuing through life resent the constraints that were forced on us with our acculturation, some more than others depending on the configuration of the tribal codes and the roles they assign. But the resentment is always there, and so if we have not learned to own and manage these resentments, they lie festering in the soul. And when someone completely unrepressed and infantile like Donald Trump comes along, he gives permission to many for all that unmanaged, festering resentment to express itself in deeply destructive ways. And so here we are wallowing in a culture of narcissists, the Left not being much better than the Right in that regard. 

So the resentment is a problem for the powerless post-Oedipal child, and he must repress it and seek the Father's approva--or else. There's a fundamental slavishness to it as the child becomes rather like a dog seeking the approval of his master, and spirited human beings rebel in adolescence in different ways. But its why, especially in more straitlaced, repressive societies, the repressed admire the rebels among us insofar as they seek to break the taboos and assert their individuality over against the regime imposed by the symbolic Father. We all go through this in adolescence, but it's a phase for most of us that we pass through if we become successful adults. Adults understand that there are positive and negative constraints. Negative constraints keep us trapped insofar as they remain unconscious and unexamined; positive constraints become a path to liberation if chosen and worked with.

So, for instance, It's one thing to have a parent who forces his child to play a sport or a musical instrument so he can live through his child vicariously; it's another if the parent imbues a love of the sport or music in his child that inspires him to want to be the best he can be. To become the best you can be requires discipline and constraint. To give your life a shape, you have to constrain desires that if indulged would lead to shapelessness. To become an adult means to have chosen to give a shape to one's life. A man-child is either trapped by his fear of displeasing the Father or trapped in a resentful need to rebel against him. The Right tends toward the first kind of childishness; the Left toward the second. 

The adult has become of aware of his resentments and desires, has learned to own and manage them and to integrate them into a bigger, richer, shapelier possibility for becoming a full human being. So you can look at constraints as a problem or you can come to understand them as what gives a good life its shape in a life-long process of auto-poiesis and self-transcendence. In Neoplatonism, the more form a being has, the more densely real it is. So in Neoplatonic terms, true freedom is exercised in a continuous, dynamic trading in one set of constraints for another in an ongoing auto-poetic process of becoming more densely, humanly real. Another word for this intensity of form is 'virtue', and at the end of the process is what Aristotle called eudaemonia, which is the only happiness that is worthy of our desire. This sense of the word 'virtue' must be retrieved. In a society in which Calvinistic moralism is so dominant, we hear the word only in the sense of what Big Daddy wants. 

We must have constraints, but we must develop some wisdom about which constraints are healthful and which are not; we are children to the extent that we live passively with the constraints that were imposed on us children. We become adults to the degree that we come to understand those constraints and find ways to transcend them by adopting other constraints that are auto-poetic. This was the Nietzschean project, but as I'll argue below, it was in a deeper way the Socratic project. I respect those among our cultural elites who see Nietzsche as a model of self-transcendence in this mature sense. The argument that I've been making here over the years is that we have to move beyond Nietzsche to retrieve Socrates understood in the right way. 

***

Every society has constraints, aka taboos, and every society always will, and the culture war in this country right how is about who gets to define what those taboos are for our children. But the deeper, really important question is how do you decide which constraints are healthy and which are not? And the answer depends on how you define what it means to live a full human life, and about that we clearly have no consensus. And so, as suggested above, an important part of living a full human life is to develop the capacity to transcend the constraints of our acculturation, but not in a way that is completely shapeless.

My critique of the the Cultural Left is that while it's right about transcending oppressive cultural constraints, it's wrong insofar as it leads to social shapelessness and forms of narcissisim. We humans both need constraints and we need to transcend them, but transcendence for the sake of transcendence, the Nietzschean option, is not a foundation on which you can build a healthy society. The Socratic option is to transcend one's cultural constraints but in such a way that one comes into a deeper relationship and alignmnet with Reality. This is not a possibility on the Cultural Left because it cannot believe that there is any such thing as Reality in the Platonic-realist sense of the word.

So instead the Cultural Left, insofar as it is in thrall to the postmodern Freudians, is obsessed with sexual desire. But do we really believe sex and sex drives are what most deeply defines us? Don't we all deep down recognize that the cult of Sex Positivity takes something that's partially true and pushes it into something that's unbalanced and distorting and fundamentally empty? 

So, from my pov, the moral program proposed on the Left, insofar as it makes an idol of Desire in the post-Freudian sense, is reductive and as such offers no genuinely 'desirable' alternative to the program of the Right. And quite possibly the Left is endorsing a program that is harmful for people in the throes of ontological dizziness insofar as it endorses metaphysical meaninglessness and shapelessness at a time when we need to feel that there's something firm underfoot upon which we can take a stand.  

Using 'desire' as a criterion for defining the 'good life' is not the problem; defining what is most deeply worthy of our desire is. Desire, like the intentionality of consciousness, is always 'about' something. The most important question we need to ask ourselves is what is our desire about? In other words, what is worthy of or deepest aspirations? What kind of society might there be that would help people to shape their lives inspired by such aspirations? To make it so much about sex is shooting too low at best, and at worst promoting a narcissistically regressive infantilizaton.  

But if sex is not the main thing, what ought to be the object of our desire--on what ends, individually and as a society, should we focus our attention and energies as worthy of our deepest aspirations? Is it possible that we could come to some consensus about that? I genuinly believe that we can because in the final analysis Socrates was correct--what we all desire is the Good, and if we knew it, we would choose it. (See Note 1) I believe this deep desire for the Good is innate in all human beings, even the worst of us. We just live in a society that has no memory anymore about what that Good is as something to guide our collective cultural aspirations. 

But the taboos can only be transcended in a healthy way if there's agreement that such transcendence is in the service of the Good. If there is no mutually shared idea of the Good as a transcendental aspiration, then all you've got is desire, and one man's desire to grab a woman in the genitals because he wants to and can is equal to another's to give up her life to save someone else's. To argue otherwise is implicitly to acknowledge that there's a hierarchy, i.e., some desires are higher and more worthy than others, and that only makes sense if there is some transcendental standard that defines what is more or less worthy, more or less truthful, more or less Good, more or less Just. We all deep down recognize this. None of us are moral relativists. We just don't know how to talk anymore about what it means to be truly a moral agent, which involves the capacity for self-correction and self-transcendence. We perform instead what we think others expect of us as moral behavior--whatever the Daddies and Mommies of the Left or Right demand--rather than to be inspired by what is truly, deeply transformatively Good. 

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Note 1. What Socrates means to "know the Good" is another question. We mostly have opinions about what the right thing to do is that derive from our programming by to prevailing cultural conventions, which is quite different from 'knowing' the good. According to Plato/Socrates, it's possible to have right opinion, i.e., when your opinion about what is good happens to correspond with what the Good is, but that is different from knowing the Good. Knowing the Good comes from a deeper kind of disclosure that transcends convention. And because such disclosures are a possibility, convention is always vulnerable to challenge. In the Neoplatonic tradition, there are degrees of knowledge--from inklings to satori-like theophanies. But inklings are where most of us start. 

A healthy society has norms that derive from right opinion about the Good. It passes onto its children habits and attitudes that will make it easier for them aspire to the Good and to be open to its disclosures--in other words easier for them to become free adults. The segregated societies in the South clearly did not have norms that were aligned with the Good, and most people of good will recognized that. Clearly, there are other things about southern society and its customary culture that are aligned with the Good, but if it were a healthy society, it would have recognized that slavery and segregation was just wrong, and not looked for all manner of sophistical arguments to justify it.

It's in this sense that southern society has trapped too many of its citizens in such a way as to make it harder for them to become free adults. They are trapped by their resentments and find themselves incapable of transcending them. This, as suggested above, is why they have embraced an infantile nihilist like Trump. He has legitimized their resentments of the Liberal Big Daddy that shames any behaviors that are not P.C or woke, and encourages their acting these resentments out. Before Trump those resentments festered. He blew the lid off whatever contained them, and bizarre, delusional, clownishly ineptly childish events like J6 were the result. 

But societies that have mostly right opinion about the Good are not good enough unless they encourage its children to become free adults. In Calvinist societies we think of Virtue as a cage. If we lived in a Neoplatonic society, we would think of it as a trellis. That used to be the goal of a liberal education. All spirited human beings want to overcome illusion and ignorance; they want to develop a deeper and richer relatiohship with Reality. They are not satisfied to live in a shadow realm but want to live in a world where the deep Real lives and shines. And the project for Socrates was to play the role of midwife for his interlocutors, that his he sought to bring their innate capacity for recognizing the living, shining Good into awareness.  

Socrates agreed with the Sophists that most people's thinking was shaped by social conventions, and insofar as they were, they were living in a world of shadows. He disagreed with the Sophists that shadow thinking was the the only kind possible.The postmodern Freudians, like the Sophists, would argue that there are only the conventions, and our freedom--if we have any freedom at all--lies primarily in transgressing conventional constraints, i.e., saying No to Big Daddy. Is there really any more to it than that, and  is there anything truly morally serious about that for anyone older than 17? 

The naivete, if not the absurdity, of the postmodern Freudians, I hope, is apparent to most readers. It's sophisticated nonsense. Their position leads to regression toward Hobbes's state of nature which forces the social contract that creates the Leviathan--which is for Hobbesians, most of our cultural elite, a closed system in which transcendence is an impossibility. To this extent Freud was correct in Civilization and Its Discontents. Being in society creates constraints, and those constraints are the source of our resentment and violence and discontent and we long to break out. 

None of us want to live in a closed, repressive system. But we can't live in one that is completely without constraints. We want to live in a system where self-transcendence and auto-poeisis is a real possibility, but transcendence toward what? Making our Selves into what? Anything we want? But is anything we want the Good? I don't think so, and neither can anybody who thinks about it for a minute. We all deep down know there is a "Good". Why are we so afraid to acknowledge it and build a society around a collective aspiration toward it? 

Middle American Radicals Twelve Years Later

In December 2010, at a time when thoughtful readers frequently commented on my posts, I put up an essay entitled "Thanksgiving Encounters". It was about visiting with relatives at a Thanksgiving gathering in North Carolina where my father had retired. I found myself astonished to learn that these thoughtful, well-educated relatives, people I care about, were adamant in their defense of Sarah Palin. I knew these relatives leaned conservative, but I was astonished that they could even for a minute take Palin seriously. It was my first encounter up close with something happening among cultural conservatives that I hadn't yet felt the full import of. And it was the beginning of my not being able to talk politics with these relatives because subsequently the gap had become too wide and too emotionally fraught. Before then, I knew the extremists were out there, but I could not bring myself to believe they were so close as this. 

I wrote then—

Sarah Palin conservatives look at Liberals--and people like me--as people defined precisely by their lacking this "common sense", as lacking a groundedness in a given world of meanings and traditions that give their world sense and shape.  I'm family, so they want to think well of me, but they can't quite understand how I went astray. My father attributes it to bad influences in my formative years in the sixties and seventies. But it struck me recently that the way Sarah Palin conservatives see "liberals" is similar to the way the American Indians saw the white man. 

The Indians thought the white man was "crazy", as having no understanding, because the white man lived outside the system of sacred relationships that gave the Indian world its shape and meaning. And so white behavior was inexplicable and barbaric to them. Well that's pretty much the way Liberals appear to Conservatives. It's not just a difference of opinion that makes conservatives different from liberals; it's a completely different epistemology, a different way of experiencing what's true and what's not, what has value and what doesn't.

The basic question they seemed to be asking me was "Why are you siding with those kooks? Why aren't you loyal to your roots?" In other words,  "It's either you're with them or you're with us." It wasn't really much more complicated than that. A big part of what I've been writing about since then has been to understand how we got ourselves into this cold civil war and about my fears that it will become a hot one. 

Mathe, one of my occasional commenters in those days, saw the possibility of it becoming a hot civil war before I did. She thought I was being too kind to try to understand things from their pov, and that the shift I was describing in the post wrote then was about something much more dangerous than I understood. Her thinking seemed to me then to mirror the kind of paranoia that I was seeing in my relatives, and so while I agreed with much of what she said, I thought then she was too alarmist. Writing now, 12 years later, it's clear she saw a threat then that I didn't take as seriously. She was talking about Middle American Radicalism before it was understood how radical it was becoming. My family is not a natural constituency for MAR, but they were enlisting. Here's the exchange that we had back then. The underlining for emphasis is mine: 

mathe said...

The real question is how your Sarah Palin loving relatives react if the economy really goes bad. It seems clear to me that one very real scenario is launch a systematic campaign of persecution and elimination of the "Liberals" much like the campaigns in Yugoslavia or Rwanda. There is more going on here than just a difference of world view or of "common sense" versus the insane liberal formulations. Sectors of Americans, particularly whites who call themselves middle class are being psychologically manipulated into a separate reality that in particular rejects those who have the ability to use the knowledge they have to sort out "the facts of the matter" apart from what is spooned out to them-- regardless of their politics.

They reject would be servants of the public interest like Russ Feingold , or the recent Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, or countless others. This is NOT just a liberal vs. conservative modality, but goes much deeper than that. Whatever arguments one could make for traditionalism, localism , small government or other small c conservative shibboleths have been made irrelevant by the global political crisis which alas, is just in its infancy.

As Chris Hedges argues, leftists have got to get into the conversation and present the case in forceful and courageous terms. In particular that means a clear and unblinking attack of the so-called conservatism of the last 50 years.

Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 03:00 PM

Jack Whelan said...

Mathe--

I guess my point is that not everybody who admires SP is a fanatic, and a lot of them see her for what she is, but nevertheless enjoy how she rankles liberal types. I guess I've been arguing here for a while that because the most visible Right Populists are extremists, not every one is. In fact most are not, and I still believe some common ground can be found between moderates who are attracted to the Tea Party and the economic Left who are able to bracket culture war issues.

If the economy really seriously self-destructs--which some in my family believe is inevitable--then who knows what's going to happen. Is there the possibility of a "Seven Days in May" scenario?--sure there is. Do I think it will happen? No. It really depends on how bad it gets of course.

I understand where Hedges is coming from, but I think he would agree with me that Left Liberalism is a spent force--it offers no robust alternative to Right Populism. I believe the alternative has to come from sane "believers", people who can talk to Main Street on terms they understand using biblical language and metaphors where appropriate, but which also seeks to invite people who are deeply sequestered in their right wing ideological silos into a larger, more complex world.

Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 12:35 AM

mathe said...

Jack,
Admirers, followers, people who agree with SP do not need to be extremist. By definition most people aren't. Nevertheless, whole populations are capable of being manipulated (or manipulating themselves) into terrible acts. The instinct to attack apparently vulnerable and unpopular minorities is present with or without a rationale. People may or may not be amenable to the "right sort of argument". There is a wide spread understanding of the fact that much of the present crisis is caused by the business and economic elite. Yet I am not convinced that a populist argument couched in the kind of moral terms you describe would be all that effective in and of itself. There has to be as you suggest some sort of common meeting ground where the conversation and possible argument can take place. Sara Robinson and others have talked about the kind of world view that people in right wing silos occupy. Events that effect them personally and over time have more weight than argument.

Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 05:25 PM

Jack Whelan said...

Mathe--I'm not convinced that a cross-left/right-cultural populist movement is possible either. And it certainly isn't possible with the Libertarian wing of right-wing populism, which really wants the Federal government out of everything. They may hate Wall Street, but they hate the Feds more.

I'm thinking more of the traditional New Deal constituencies--ethnic Catholics and other white blue collars, including many in the south, and white collar Main Streeters who are conventionally conservative in their thinking and tend to sway one way or the other depending on the national mood. Along with the strength that would come from enfranchised Blacks and Hispanics, who aren't particularly culturally liberal in their values either.

I think a political movement capable of taking on the power of Wall Street and other powerful moneyed interests can only come if Blue Collars of whatever tribe are at the center of it, not educated liberal elites.

Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 07:50 PM

mathe said...

The problem with the group of white conservatives or conservative sympathizers is that their desire to rule the roost unchallenged in power or worldview is that it is far stronger than their desire to challenge the economic overlords responsible for their worsening condition. I think the understanding of the class war going on now is deeper than you suggest. I think middle and working class whites understand what is really happening in that regard but they cannot confront the implication; namely that they are now just like as African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans. In fact, the cultural destruction and dislocation they sense is not unlike that experienced by these groups. It is their turn to be left behind. You say many of these people are like the Southern planters on the eve of the Civil War and that is precisely why I am very uneasy. There is a restless, violent rule or ruin emotional current that was somewhat moderated by two centuries of almost constant but largely successful warfare. Now that time is done but they and the nation they largely dominate is heavily armed.

As malleable as they are and given what we know historically and recently what will stop them from turning their rage on the groups they hate?

Let's take one group that you mentioned-- ethnic Catholics. Your argument is that many are angry about the damage modernism has brought to traditional values.The fact of the matter is much of the damage to traditional values comes not only from untrammeled and immoral capitalism which the Catholic Church occasionally criticizes but results as well from war, the preparation for war and the worship of war and the unquestioning brutal authoritarianism of the military. Many of these ethnic Catholics would reject Catholic heroes like the Berrigans and the still active anti-war, anti-torture communities they founded, or Father L.Bourgeois and other campaigners against the School of the Americas.

In his speech at Riverside Church in 1967, Martin Luther King got the nature of our problem as a nation exactly right. It was three fold, Racism, Materialism and Militarism. Yes, white working class and middle class conservatives are a little unhappy with Materialism right now because it's not working for them all that well at present-- and your argument is that this creates some kind of opening. I am telling you that it doesn't because of Racism and Militarism. The new coalition has to be one with radically different ethos than what I see in any American subgroup or ethnic group on the right. Many of the values of the new coalition--if it ever comes to fruition will be a spiritual re-imagining of democratic American values. I say spiritual but not religious. How do we engage with these people or more exactly how do you engage them without feeding their prejudices about "liberals". It's simply wrong to paint everyone on the left with the same "secular liberal" brush. It is not enough to just act as if believing in God were the issue when it is so obviously not.

Thursday, December 02, 2010 at 09:03 PM

Jack Whelan said...

Mathe--

I agree with much of what you say, particularly in the first half of your comment.

I resist, however, the idea that blue collar catholics are typified by the attitudes of cranks like Bill Donahue. I think they are more down to earth, and have none of his fanaticism. Those that do are a very small minority. But you're right when you say that they would perceive the Berrigans as kooks, but that doesn't mean that they are not on the whole decent and sane. They work with Black blue collars day in and day out, and they are no longer Other. Most were George Wallace supporters back in the sixties, but not now. I think there's more common ground and mutual respect between the blue collar ethnics and the blue collar blacks than there is between either of them and culturally left educated elites.

Southern whites, mostly Scots Irish, are another kettle of fish, and I think most of your worries about racism and military are much more a factor. But they were very much a part of the New Deal coalition, and not all of them are frightened idiots.

I don't know how long it's going to take to happen, but sooner or later it must. Real change in this country isn't going to come without blue collar Americans, whether white, ethnic, black or hispanic. Sooner or later, they will see where their mutual interests lie. They'll get organized, and cultural liberals will join their parade; these blue collars are never going to join the parade organized by the cultural left.

Thursday, December 02, 2010 at 11:14 PM

mathe said...

Jack,

I truly and fervently hope you are right about blue collar America. As a member of the "cultural left", I've participated in enough marches, spent hours in enough phone banks, where blue collar people are neither seen nor heard to see they have little interest in "us" even if we are fighting in their interests.

Nevertheless, I do experience them as busy (distracted), ill-informed and thus easily manipulated. When they finally do rise, what will be their issues aside from anger and revenge? What is to prevent new demagogues riding the emotions of the moment to power? People who have been lucky enough to have the leisure to study, think and analyze our situation need to be involved, really in educating and publicizing in ways that appeal to the mass of people. It may be that there are such people for example among the veterans groups, particularly veterans of the Iraq wars. Many of these people are working and middle class folks who could not afford to go to college and chose the military. Their years inside opened their eyes to what is going on. They have a certain credibility that "intellectuals" (that is largely what the cultural left is) lack.

However it happens, a real left, like the one that existed before the incredibly damaging McCarthy era. If the world doesn't blow up in war or blow away in a global warming catastrophe I am quite certain it will arise- it has to. Countries like Germany, and the Scandinavian countries (which by the way are increasingly multi-cultural) show that mixed economies can work. What I am less certain about is whether the US can remain one country or not as the inevitable transition mixed economies comes about.

Saturday, December 04, 2010 at 04:56 PM

Now over 12 years later, here's what I would say in response:

What strikes me is that Mathe's sense of doom was prescient, and my hope for a political Left winning over ethnic blue collars in an anti-Neoliberal coalition has proved, so far, to be disappointed. I wonder, though, what would have happened had Bernie Sanders won the Dem nomination in '16. That's a counterfactual that cannot be tested because Hillary and her Neoliberalism won, and because she did, most of what Mathe predicted proved correct in four years of Trump. But I remember arguing in '16 that unless Bernie won, then it would likely be the last chance for the economic Left, as contrasted with the cultural Left, to win the white working class. Bernie might have failed had he been elected rather than Trump, but he was our last best chance for assembling a multi-racial, working-class Democratic coalition that excited anti-Neoliberal young people,  and would have broad appeal among the bottom 80%. Not everybody, but I think a majority. The Libertarian wing of the conservative movement would resist Sanders with all it has got. 

The problem that too many influencers on the Left don't see now, though, is not that parts of white working class are so horrible--they are--but the degree to which Neoliberal values have infected the Cultural Left, which in turn has captured the Democratic Party and in so doing has made the Democratic Party broadly perceived in Main Street America as the party of 'kooks'. If anything that perception is worse now than it was in 2010. The cultural Left does not offer a remotely realizable political future in the American political sphere because non-elite Americans will continue to resist what seems to be its assault on normalcy. So long as Democrats’ continue to be perceived as captured by elite ideology, it will continue to push normie Americans--most Americans, including Blacks and Latinos--toward the Right.

I assume that Mathe was a Bernie supporter for all the reasons I was, and I assume that she would share with me the perception of the Democratic Party as complicit in the rise of Trump because of its surrender to Neoliberalism, not just in the economic sphere but in the cultural sphere as well. For the white working class, politics has become a culture war for all the reasons described in the post. The mistake the Left makes is being drawn into the culture wars on the terms the Right frames--normies vs kooks. That's why Youngkin and DeSantis have won in what used to be competitive states for the Dems. 

Look, the cultural Left is right insofar as it promotes a policy of compassion and justice for Americans who have been marginalized for whatever historical-cultural reasons; they are wrong to the degree that they frame that support in the language of poststructural theorists they learned about at university and then get all sanctimonious about it. The Democrats have moved away from the Clinton/Obama embrace of Neoliberalism in the economic sphere, thanks to Bernie, but their Neoliberalism has gotten stronger in the cultural sphere.

As I've argued here, the justice project of the great 20th Century social justice figures like Gandhi, King, Mandela, has been replaced by a liberation project theorized by Foucault, Guatarri and Deleuze. Whatever the merits of discussing the latter in the university seminar room, any attempt to bring their theory into the American political sphere is suicidal. The problem for many on the cultural Left who aren't philosophically literate is that they have been captured by 'theory' whose deep presuppositions most don't share, but most who lean left adopt it because it feels more "compassionate". 

But is genuine compassion what drives its hegemony among cultural elites? It can't be insofar as it shapes one side in a zero/sum culture war. So the debate becomes not about what is truly just and compassionate, but about whose value frame--that of the cultural right or the cultural left-- shall be hegemonic. The vast majority of Americans don't comfortably fit within the value frames of either the extreme cultural  Right or Left, but they feel more antipathy for one or the other, and that defines their politics. And so Left and Right gridlock the system over cultural issues that have little to do with the real existential threats that face us. Not to mention that the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer. 

From my pov, the value frames of both the Right and Left are deeply flawed--the Right because its values are a form of zombie traditionalism--form without life; the Left because its values are based on incoherent, nihilistic set of ideas that have almost nothing to do with deep, genuine human flourishing. The Right, at least, understands we're in a profound meaning crisis; the Left has no idea how it has become a cultural force that exacerbates it. The cultural Right whether its rank and file realize it or not has become captured by the aforementioned loathsome, racist ideology of the Middle American Radicalism articulated by Sam Francis, popularized by Rush Limbaugh, and normalized by Donald Trump; the rank and file on the cultural Left, whether it realizes it or not, has become captured by theory that too often leads it into becoming a self-parodying woke joke. They are two sides of the same coin. Some other currency is called for. 

All the King's Horses, etc.

Can anybody put Humpty Dumpty back together again?  Sure secession would be crazy and irrational, but it was in 1861 as well. Lots of smart people then, Lincoln included, thought that saner heads would prevail. They didn't. 

On Election Day last year I wrote:

I've been talking for years about how something has to give, how the basic compromises that held things together must break apart. The framework has always been fragile and the pressure has been building for years, at least since the Bush administration disasters in Iraq and the financial meltdown, but really since Reagan's fusion of Hamiltonian financial elitism with Jacksonian rural grievance that made the disasters of '01, '03, and '08 all but inevitable. And Reagan's Republican Neoliberalism was a reaction against the New Deal, which was a Democratic/Jacksonian reaction to the classical laissez-fair, Republican/Hamiltonian liberalism of the Robber Barons who emerged out of the Civil War, and the Civil War traces back to the North-South compromises made during the founding, which we're still fighting about today in this interminably irresolvable culture war between Hamiltonians and Jacksonians.

The Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian rift is largely cultural, but the deep underlying problem is about class and correlative issues regarding wealth and power distribution. But the class distinctions get suppressed because of the peculiar way party affiliation has worked in this country. FDR's New Deal coalition required an alliance of culturally conservative Southerners to work together with progressive Northerners in a coalition that required leaving Blacks out. And Obama's coalition required an alliance between Blacks and Liberal Cosmopolitans that leaves White working class folks out. And so we fight not about wealth and power distribution, but about cultural grievance. Nothing could please the 1% more. 

But if the real problems are not about such grievances but about power and wealth distribution, the solution lies in creating forming some sense of multi-racial solidarity that overcomes cultural grievances and focuses instead on wealth and power disparities. The Left seems unable to understand that anymore because the Left has come possess the values and the interests of the privileged, and so they choose to fight an unwinnable culture war about grievances that costs them nothing rather than fight a justice-inspired, winnable class war that might cost them a little. And so the great bulk of Americans who have zero sympathy for Left cosmopolitan values will very likely continue to move toward a right populism that will eventually lead to illiberalism and to the complete suppression of cosmopolitan Left values. Humpty will be put together again, but he'll be wearing a MAGA hat. 

It was a primarily a culture war in the 1850s as well, and while the North won eventually on the battlefield, they never won hearts and minds. The U.S. has been making the same stupid mistake over and over again in thinking that military victory is the only really important one. Didn't it work in Japan and Germany? So why not in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? This kind of cookie cutter mentality typifies Liberal thinking. It always has done and probably always will be. A guy like Charles Sumner really believed that the South would just say, "Ok. We lost. Now we'll be good boys and girls just like you Yankees want us to be."

The naivete of it is astonishing, and so as then when after Reconstruction North and South just agreed to disagree, so now will we now eventually learn the lesson that fundamental cultural differences cannot be resolved through zero/sum conflict. But solidarity of the bottom 80% can win the class war if anybody were really serious about rectifying the astonishing maldistribution of wealth and power in this country. But nobody is really serious anymore. Everybody just wants to perform seriousness for other serious people who are "serious" as they are. The Left is just as performative in its way as the MAGA folks were performative in their storming of the capitol on J6. Nobody wants to actually get anything done. Everybody wants to focus on how nobody respects them. Everybody, left and right, seems stuck in Middle School. Everybody, when push comes to shove, only really cares about increasing their presence on social media.  

I exaggerate to make a point. Not "everybody" is like this, but you know what I mean. Nevertheless, it seems pointless to write about politics anymore, and that's partly why I've had little to say about it recently. What's the point when "nobody" really seems to understand what the real business of politics is. Everybody wants to fight about culture and identity, and it's as stupid as the Catholics fighting the Protestants in Ireland, and the Greeks fighting the Turks in Cyprus, the Israelis fighting the Palestinians in Israel, and the Hindus fighting the Muslims in India. What we're doing in the country is no saner or smarter, and even the smartest people, especially young people in media, don't seem to get that.

In the end it always comes down to people just agreeing to disagree about their cultural differences and then finding common ground to work together to solve real problems. Is that end in sight?

David Brooks's Lessons from History

David Brooks has a long think piece in The Atlantic about how things are not as bad as they seem. The argument he makes is a tired one: There's nothing new under the sun; we'll find a way to muddle through; the positives outweigh the negatives. So keep your chin up, America. Don't let the nabobs of negativism get you down. The better angels in the American spirit will always win in the end.

Maybe, maybe not. Here's the nub of what he has to say--

The first problem with all this pessimism is that it is ahistorical. Every era in American history has faced its own massive challenges, and in every era, the air has been thick with gloomy jeremiads warning of catastrophe and decline. Pick any decade in the history of this country, and you will find roiling turmoil.

But in all of those same decades, you will also find, alongside the chaos and the prophecies of doom, energetic dynamism and leaping progress. For example, the current historic moment is frequently compared with the 1890s, another period of savage inequality, rapid technological disruption, pervasive political dysfunction, and controversial waves of immigration. Someone alive in 1893—as unemployment surged from 3 percent to almost 19 percent among working-class Americans, as populism rose and spread, as class conflict and horrendous poverty became more rampant—might easily have concluded that this country was coming apart. And yet, the 1890s didn’t lead to American decline—they led to the American Century.

Are there similarities in our current situation to those of previous decades of American history? Of course, but it depends on which decades you think are most relevant. Is what we're going through now more like the 1890s or the 1850s? I'd argue the latter. You can make similarly overly optimistic arguments from historical differences. Neoconservatives like Brooks were arguing that Iraq in the 2000s was not Vietnam of the 1960s. It was true: there were very significant differences. But in the end what mattered more were the similarities. And now similar arguments about differences and similarities between the U.S. now and Germany in the 1920s/30s can be made. The differences are significant, but so are the similarities. It remains to be seen which for us will be more significant.

And so now while none of us has the perspective to understand what's really happening, we have to use our best judgment as to what are the more significant similarities and/or differences, continuities and/or discontinuities. History has lessons to teach us, but it matters what lessons one has learned. If you're Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, et al, the '20s in Germany would seem to provide lessons in the way of a DIY manual. Are Carlson and Bannon to be taken seriously? Maybe, maybe not. How many of the David Brooks types in 1920s Germany took Hitler seriously? 

If Brooks's argument turns out to be right, it's not because his lessons from history are correct but because anything can happen. The similarities and dissimilarities in these historical circumstances are more balanced than we think. Unexpected things happen that can tip things one way or the other. Things tipped in the direction of crazy in the runup to the American Civil War and WWII in ways that were very difficult for sane people to believe possible five or six years before. And so perhaps the most important lesson to take from history is that If we're to err, we should never underestimate the power of crazy. In such historical situations the wise hope for the best but do everything they can to prevent the worst. 

Some Thoughts on 'The Banshees of Inisherin'

Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic?  I would expect it to be, but It sounds eastern European. That's weird. So after watching the movie, I look it up, and it turns out that it is Bulgarian folk song Polegnala e Todora, and the first thing that comes to mind is Yeats great poem of spiritual longing, "Sailing to Byzantium". 

1920s Ireland/Bulgarian folk song/Istanbul/Byzantium/Yeats. Ok, it's a stretch. I have no idea whether this was in McDonagh's thinking, but it's in mine. So while making that connection of the song to Yeats might appear somewhat tendentious, indulge me. It provides an interesting entry point into a film that otherwise seems so bewildering. I've pasted the full text of the poem in Note 1 below. Read it first, and then I'll try to explain how the movie and the poem explain one another. 

This movie has been described as a breakup story between Colm and the younger Padraig, and it is that, but clearly it's working with much more than the psychology of friendship. It's also been analogized to the breakup that defined the sides in the Irish Civil War, and clearly that's there, but more in the background. These folks live on an island that is undisturbed by history. [See Note 2] 

The site for this film is Edenic, and there are three characters that stand out because they don't fit in it: Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic. Everyone else is more or less like Padraig, happy children in paradise. [See Note 6 about the priest and the policeman.] Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic are restless in a way the other islanders are not. All three need to get out of this beautiful but spiritually claustrophobic world into something bigger. Siobhan takes the boat; Colm takes to art; Dominic commits suicide. 

The story begins in that opening scene when Padraig arrives at Colm's little white house to fetch him to go the pub as is their daily ritual. When he knocks, Colm won't answer. Looking through the window, Padraig can see Colm just sitting, staring blankly, unresponsive to his calls to come out with him. Flummoxed, Padraig tells him he's going to the pub, and he'll wait for him there. No response. Padraig arrives at the pub without Colm, orders two pints, and when Colm comes in later he avoids Padraig at the bar and takes a seat by himself. When Padraig asks him what's going on, Colm tells him he no longer wants to be friends because he finds Padraig too boring.

This is a rather blunt, if not cruel, thing to say to an old friend, especially someone as good-natured and likable as Padraig. We take Padraig's side immediately in this dispute. Colm seems to be a grumpy, old curmudgeon, but soon we learn that the older Colm is feeling his mortality, and he wants to do something with his life--he wants to touch eternity.

This sounds at first rather pretentious, and surely that's how it looks to Padraig and others. But Colm is dead serious. When Padraig refuses to take Colm's ending the friendship seriously, Colm threatens to cut off one of his fingers each time Padraig talks to him. This is shocking, and soon enough, because Padraig cannot restrain himself and so peristently tries to restore the friendship on its old terms, Colm cuts off all the fingers of his left hand, first one and then the other four all at once.

What's going on? Is Colm suffering from some borderline personality disorder? I think this is where Yeats' poem might help us to understand Colm better. He's the aged man about whom the poem speaks--

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

We learn that Colm is composing a tune, and he wants to devote all his time to his music, and so the time he spends with Padraig is time wasted. Well, ok. But it still seems unnecessarily cruel for him to be so blunt about it, and we feel for poor Padraig who finds this change in his friend utterly incomprehensible and destabilizing.  He doesn't understand that Colm has set sail for Byzantium, and in doing so he must leave his old friend behind him if he won't come along.

 

Yeats' poem is about old age, but more than that it's a poem of deep spiritual longing, a longing to be transformed by spiritual fire--

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

We don't think of art as performing this function anymore. And so if there is nothing in you that feels the pull of that to which Yeats is pointing, it will probably be difficult to accept my reading of Banshees: But clearly the movie isn't just about two friends breaking up because one has lost interest in the relationship, but about one waking up in a bigger world and the other adamant to remain dreaming in a smaller one. It's about one who longs to soar, and the other who is happy, utterly unrestless and unalienated, and blissfully undisturbed until the events of the movie that turn his life upside down. But rather than adapt and grow in the new situation, he insists to remain only a talking animal, one whose talk is little more than good-natured birdsong, He's Papageno, [See Note 3] --one of the--

The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

In other words embedded in the beautiful, waxing-and-waning cycle of life and death, an eternally closed but repeating cycle the artist and the saint seek in their different ways to break open.

To sail to Byzantium does not require that one be an artistic genius. Colm is not one, but the longing for eternity that Yeats's poem so beautifully articulates is working in him. He must hearken to it, and he must resist all the forces that seek to draw him back into dreamy Eden. Chopping his fingers off is his way of saying that he no longer lives in a world where such a gesture is absurd. Absurd because why would he do that if his music is so important to him? It prevents him from playing it. But playing isn't the important thing, creating is, even if what he creates is modest by most standards. 

 

I've been re-reading Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining, and this morning came across this passage about Moby Dick that explains exactly what is working in Colm and then why he must resist Padraig's friendship--

Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land “seemed scorching to his feet.” And he thinks there is something serious and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.

...

Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville’s view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore’s safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, although they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God, and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.

For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the “damp, drizzly November in the soul” that we shall see is so important to Melville’s central character Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the “slavishness” of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. 

All Things Shining, pp. 50-51

It should be pointed out that D&K think Bulkington is a kind of nihilist because of his inability to live a normal, grateful, down-to earth life where the local gods will shine if you can attune to them. They see the longing for transcendence as a temptation to be resisted and that leads inevitably to suicide. There is something of Bulkington in Yeats and Colm, but maybe more in Yeats--

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

 

And while I'm sympathetic to much Dreyfus and Kelly's argument against the kind of transcendence that seeks to lift humans off the earth and out of nature, there is a place for such ecstasy, and ecstatics need to be part of the mix in a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. [See Note 4] And the phrase "out of nature" could be parsed in ways that mean more a transformation of nature than an escape from it. [See Note 5]

 

So Colm is a Bulkington type who must resist human slavish comforts and vulnerabilities if he is to hearken to eternity's call--he needs neither his fingers nor his house to live in the free air of the spirit. But I think there's an important difference between Bulkington and Colm in that Colm's path is not some Icarian, hubristic flight toward the sun. His path is that of an artist. Artists like him don't seek to leave the immanent world to live in a transcendent one, but to bring the transcendent into the immanent world through their poeisis. And that's the reading that I'd give to Yeats' fourth verse. The artist becomes an agent of spiritual transformation in his act of making. He becomes himself transformed by the power that inspires his making. 

Two scenes illustrate that Colm is not about escaping Nature but about transforming it. The first occurs in the moments after he finishes his tune, in his joy he wants to dance, but not alone--he tries to teach his dog to dance. This is not about living among the animals as Padraig does but lifting the animal into the spiritual. The other is the scene at the pub where the fingerless Colm while spraying his blood all over the table leads his students in the playing of his new tune. It's a Eucharistic image. He can no longer play, but he's fully engaged with the other players as they are bathed in his blood in this participative ritual around an altar. This is no depressed loner. This is not a man who is seeking to be absorbed into infinity, but to bring some small part of the infinite into the world in musical ritual.  

Colm can only befriend Padraig if he’s willing to come with him on his voyage to Byzantium. He has this kind of friendship with his students and the other musicians. But Padraig can only befriend Colm if he returns to his dreamy, embedded, Papageno level of existence. Padraig is as stubborn in his resistance to wake up as Colm seems to be in resisting the old comforts. Padraig is intransigent, and he declares war on the one who would disrupt his paradisal life. But of course, because it is already fatally disrupted, there can be no restoring it. So like those today on the American Right who are stewing in similar resentments about the disruption and loss of their world, they grieve rather than nimbly adapt, and go to war against those who have destroyed their sleep.

Siobhan's solution is the story told in Brooklyn of those who left the comforts of the familiar to live in a bigger world. But for Siobhan it's more than that because for her it's not just freedom from the old ways, but a freedom that is defined by the life of the mind and the love of learning. For her there’s no neglect of the monuments of unageing intellect. She leaves the island to take a job as a librarian, i.e., to work as a caretaker in a repository of such monuments. [See Note 6] She is happy in her bigger world and wants Padraig to join her, but he cannot. His world is in Eden and his sense of purpose in life derives from his grievance war with Colm. 

I think that it's rather beautiful the way McDonagh celebrates the ways in which this longing for eternity plays out in the lives of ordinary people. It's as if to say great spirits are all around you if you have the eyes to see them. You don't have to be a prodigy to share in some part of this greatness. You have only to recognize it and hearken to it in whatever capacity you have--and be willing to pay a price for not fitting in.   

 

Note 1: 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 

 

II

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

 

III

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

 

IV

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

Note 2: It also occurred to me that there's something of the argument between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. Yes and No. Andre wants to soar; Wally finds meaning in a more down to earth way. The trick is to live in the tension between the urge to ascend and descend by finding a way to bring what's higher into what's lower, and to raise what's lower into what's higher. Seems to me that's what happens every time a mass is said. What's above lives into our death, so that we below might die into into the life that comes to us from above and so in our dying into life become gradually agents whose task is to renew the face of the earth. 

 

BTW, Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining is a resolute rejection of Andre and endorsement of Wally. They abhor all things post Axial Revolution. They make their case in what is rather a reductive interpretation of David Foster Wallace's suicide--

PERHAPS THE SADDEST PART of Wallace’s story is that the human qualities he aspired to, the capacities of spirit that he revered and coveted, are a mirage. Indeed the entire mode of existence that he castigated himself for not being strong enough to achieve, far from being the saving possibility for our culture, is in fact a human impossibility. Wallace’s inability to achieve it was not a weakness, but the deep and abiding humanness in his spirit. (p. 42).

Well, maybe impossible for an entire culture, but not a mirage and not an impossibility for some individuals.

To be fair to D&K, they are mostly critical of DFW for imagining this reaching out for eternity as a willful, egoistic, Icarian project absent a spirit of gratitude, which I'd agree with if it were true about him. But I doubt that was true for someone for whom  St. Paul and Dostoyevski were his favorite authors. DFW is more complicated than that, and he deserves better treatment from D&K than he gets from them as a straw man who represents the longing for transcendence that they, good Heideggerians that they are, abhor.

Note 3: Whatever. Colm makes an oblique reference to Mozart most noteworthy for his being corrected by Siobhan about getting his dates wrong. Colm doesn't really care about history. But then a little more free association gives us Mozart/Magic Flute/Tamino v Papageno/Freemasons/Order of the Golden Dawn/Yeats. It's also interesting that Colm finds Padraig most interesting and likable when Padraig laces into him in drunken rage in the pub. His talk then is more than birdsong. It's also interesting that at the end, Padraig is awake in a way he was not because that's what conflict does--it wakes you up. Colm must concede that he will have a relationship with Padraig even if now it will be eternally adversarial. They can only be friends if the one or the other surrenders to live on the level of his adversary. 

Note 4: It's unlikely that if you've read this far, you need persuading that this transcendent dimension exists. But it's a territory that doesn't get much explored in mainstream, late-modern high culture or pop culture. I don't know if this is McDonagh's intent. I'm not yet familiar enough with the rest of his work. My Geneaology Series is largely about trying to make the case for the retrieval of that sense of transcendence as essential for the restoration of a vertical dimension in our broader cultural/metaphysical imaginary. I deal specifically with the idea of Platonic and Neoplatonic ascent in Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic . Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism, and Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation. For me Christianity works faithfully with the Greek transcendental ontology when it reverses the Platonic movement from ascent from below to above, to descent from above to below. Big difference. It’s a difference biblicists and fideists like Luther through Barth never seemed to grok in the way the Chirch fathers through the cathedral schools to Aquinas and Bonaventure and later Cusa and Ficino did.

Note 5: This kind of transformation echoes Ariel's mysterious Sea Change song in The Tempest:

 

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

 

Note 6: What about  Dominic, Peader, and the priest? It's interesting that McDonagh chooses not to take the easy punch at the priest by making the policeman the sexual abuser instead. I don't know that there's much to be said about the priest. Nothing special about him except the role he plays that he fills in an uninspired, pro forma way. The church, of course, symbolizes the community's spiritual and moral ideals, but usually in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way. For most people the Church is a community's superego, its proclaimer and custodian of social norms.  And while the church seems to spend most of its energies in the domestication of what remains untamed in its flock, it is also the custodian of a tradition that calls its members to  the highest levels of spiritual aspiration. It's interesting to me that McDonagh seems to respect that about the church in that the island's Church has a home for both the domesticated and those that like Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic who don't comfortably fit. 

 

The policeman is the enforcer of the community's norms, but in Peader we have the perverse transgressor of them. I could go off on a tangent a la St. Paul about the psychodynamic of law and repression, but the main point here is that in his abusing his son Dominic, he has awakened him. He is no longer asleep in Eden as the others are. He is no longer an innocent and can no longer live there. He seems at first rather a feral animal than the others like Padraig who are more domesticated. He has become something raw and wild and uncomfortable. But then there's that tender moment with Siobhan when in his stumbling way he asks if it would be possible for her to love him. Siobhan understands the poignancy of the moment, and is kind in her refusal. But for Dominic it was his last hope, to be loved by someone he recognizes as capable of loving but not loving him. And that's the end for him.

 

 

Santos 'R Us

Jackie Silver, of Great Neck, said she had voted for Mr. Santos and would do so again. Ms. Silver said that those calling for him to face further investigation, or even relinquish his seat, were only targeting him because he is a Republican. ...

“He has to ask for forgiveness, and he’ll be forgiven,” Mr. Mallett, a registered Republican, said. He added: “He’s just making it way too complicated. It’s really simple.” ...

Barbara Vissichelli of Glen Cove, N.Y., said that she had met Mr. Santos while helping to register voters and had bonded with him over their shared love of animals. Ms. Vissichelli contributed $2,900 to his campaign and said she would continue to support him.

“He was never untruthful with me,” she said.

NYT 12/28/22

In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.

David Brooks

As Jackson's defeat of Adams was a fork in the road in 1828, so was Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980. Both roads led to disaster. Both Jackson and Reagan were popular, 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. I'd argue there are similar paths taken from Jackson to Jefferson Davis as from Reagan to Donald Trump. ...

So since Reagan and the GOP, with the acquiescence of Neoliberal New Democrats, have not only impeded the country's social and material progress, but have 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-promoted 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.

"Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism", 7/3/22

See also "Elon Musk's Text Messages Explain Everything". The good news, I suppose, is that Reality always breaks through sooner or later. The bad news is how extraordinary and destructive the effort people make to keep it at bay.

Maybe Republicans are right when they say they represent the 'real America'. If so, you'll forgive the rest of us when we tell you that we'd prefer to live somewhere else. 

 

Tom Frank on Liberal Obtuseness

... liberals, intoxicated by their own righteousness, can never figure it out. They keep expecting the right to die off, as if poisoned by its diet of wickedness, and yet the Republicans persist, dreaming up new culture wars against the “liberal elite,” radicalizing themselves continually along the way, refusing to succumb.

And what do liberals do? We dig in. We cheer for our side, we cheer some more, we demand that everyone else also cheer. We react hysterically to bad news, we refuse any analysis that doesn’t begin by ascribing Satanism to the G.O.P., and we go on Twitter to scold those who don’t measure up to our standards in some way. This is not strategy. It is fandom. ...

If I have learned one thing from the experience of the past few decades, it is that America cannot expect genuine reform to come from Democratic Party leadership or enlightened technocrats in Washington; it must come from the bottom up. It must be demanded by ordinary people, in solidarity, coming together by the millions in a social movement capable of sweeping all before it. Unfortunately, liberals don’t build such movements these days: What we do is purge them, police the unruly public via social media and write off wayward voters as sinful or beyond redemption.

Frank, "The Deadly Lack of Imagination in the Democratic Party"

The subtext here is that the Left has to accept Middle America where it is culturally, which is a place that is decidedly un-woke. It's not a question of who's right or who's wrong in the culture war, but to recognize that it's a war that's unwinnable in the political sphere. A more effective Left politics would build coalitions of solidarity by establishing a broad-as-possible common ground with constituencies that have shared interests. It's not hard to find where that common ground lies--it's in how the bottom 80% are being hurt by the persistence of Neoliberal policies Reaganite Republicans in coalition with Clintonite New Democrats have made since the '90s. The Democratic brand for most of traditionalist Middle America is Neoliberal, and for good reason. Frank points out that --

The “New Democrats” won the war inside the Democratic Party, defeating the traditionalists [i.e., New Deal Social Democrats]. They were given many chances to rule. They triangulated and sought grand bargains. Today we live in the future to which they built their celebrated bridge, with a deregulated Wall Street, a devitalized heartland and college diplomas held up as the answer to all problems. Turning their backs on the populism they loathed, our future-minded, new-style Democrats declined to take the opportunity offered by the 2008-09 financial crisis to remake the financial system. Instead, some of them came to identify with that system.

Right now the American populace has two fundamental political drivers: One is Neoliberalism, which is fundamental to the interests of America's economic elites, many of whom are finding that the Democratic Party is a more comfortable home for them these days than the GOP. The second driver is identitarian politics, which is at the heart of the culture war that is framed by the Right as a zero-sum game. This war is being fought, on one hand, by traditionalist white Americans who were never on the fringe fearing that they will be pushed there, and on the other, by racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities who were always on the fringe and want to claim a place of respect and recognition in the center. 

 

I want to live in a society in which nobody feels marginalized--except Neoliberal sociopaths and Neo-Nazi psychopaths. And maybe a way to achieve such a society if for every American who is not captured by these pathologies to find a way to work together to redress the injustices that Neoliberalism has wrought. Because in the end, the way we all find a way to live together is to realize that in the cultural sphere respect for one another's humanity is not a finite spiritual resource. We can learn that by working together to more equitably distribute the earth's finite material resources. In other words, call a truce in the culture war, and join forces against the entrenched Neoliberal elite. 

 

Sooner or later we're going to figure this out, but the tragedy, of course, is that it will be later rather than sooner. Because as much sense as building such a non-elite coalition makes, it's not going to happen because too much is working against it: (1) the Cultural Right won't let it happen because its cultural grievances and fear of displacement are more important than its material interests; (2) the identitarian Left won't let it happen because it thinks racial and gender equality issues are more important than economic justice issues; and (3) Neoliberal economic elites in both parties won't let it happen because it's not in their material interests, so they will do what they can to keep the culture war going because it keeps non-elites fighting one another and not them. 

 

So here we are, and here we're likely to sit until reality comes and punches all in the face. Can't wait.