After the Future

Left Authoritarians?

This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters the argument I made in Naive Idealists posted on 9/6. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, work with the energies of one-sided Doves, aka Naive Idealists. You don't have to be a Dove like Robespierre or John Brown to be an authoritarian. Stalin and Trump were one-sided Serpents, but even they could not have succeeded without the support of easily inflamed and manipulable Naive Idealists. While the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy, whatever its flaws and limitations.

Another difference between contemporary Right and Left authoritarianism is that authoritarian movements, especially on the Right, tend to require a personality cult to catalyze its latent energies. There is no personality on the Left who performs this function in the way that Donald Trump has done for Right authoritarians. Bernie Sanders might have been recruited for such a role by Left authoritarians, but he's no authoritarian. He's too much of a mensch to have ever assumed the role in a way that could ever have been effective. And the energies on the Left in this moment are not incendiary to the same extent that they are on the Right. In other words, the Left in the U.S. is not ripe for demagoguery in the same way that the Right is. 

The question for me at this point is whether someone like Trump is needed to sustain Right authoritarian extremism in the U.S. If Trump fades from the scene, can anyone replace him? I'm not sure about that. I don't think that Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, or a twerp like Tucker Carlson can, but maybe there's someone else lurking on the fringes who will emerge that can. Or it could be that rank-and-file authoritarians don't care who gets in front of their parade. Maybe any figurehead will do so long as he or she tells the mob what it wants to hear. I don't know. We'll see one way or the other. 

No 'fuehrer' emerging in this sense even imaginable in the short-term future on the Left. AOC and Stacy Abrams have the charisma, but imo they, too, are too menschy, too balanced, to play such a role. But I don't know them personally and I could be wrong. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine the energies on the American Left being catalyzed by them or someone yet to emerge in the way Trump has catalyzed the Right. Whatever the whackadoodle Right says about the threats posed by Left authoritarians, there is very little short-term danger posed by them compared to the threat posed by the Right. 

Lenin pointed out after his successful Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that the 1905 First Russian Revolution was its dress rehearsal. The same thing might be said about the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Germany. There's good reason to fear that we will come to see J6 similarly as such a dress rehearsal. That's a threat that comes from the authoritarians on the Right, not the Left.  

One of the biggest obstacles to restraining the authoritarian Right at this moment are the one-sided Serpents that dominate the Beltway political class. They are capable of thinking only about what is in their short-term political interests, and are virtually incapable of thinking about the big picture. They see politics as a game, and they are incapable of seeing what they do as having consequences beyond what affects their narrow interests. What distinguishes the various Beltway Insider players is how they have responded to the radical way in which the game has changed since 2008. 

Some Republicans like Boehner, Ryan, Corker were shrewd enough to understand that the game has changed in such a way that they no longer wanted to play it. Others like Susan Collins, Joe Manchin, and Kristen Sinema seem clueless that the game has changed at all and continue to play by the old business-as-usual rules. And others, extreme Serpents like Graham, McCarthy, McConnell, Cruz, DeSantis, Hawley et al., recognize that the game has changed, but they still want to play--even if it their winning means destroying American democracy. They don't care so long as they come out on top. 

I think that most prominent Democrats understand what's at stake. There are few naive idealists among them. (Most Naive Idealists on the Left are in the media or in academia.) Prominent Dem pols--Pelosi, Schiff, Raskin, Sanders, and others--are both shrewd game players who also are sincerely committed to preserve and improve American democracy. The question is whether they will be able to get the clueless snakes like Sinema, Manchin, Collins, et al. to recognize that business as usual is no longer an option. If they don't, the shrewder snakes in the GOP and Right-wing media will continue to demagogue the Naive Idealists on the Right, and if they are effective in focusing the intensity of Right-wing passions, they just might find a way to win.

I don't think they will win, but there's a very good chance that they will.  

The Historical Significance of This Moment

Over the years, [Ian Bassin] said, that kind of alliance has mobilized against autocratic movements in countries including the Czech Republic, France, Finland, and, most recently, Poland, where the center-right joined with its opponents on the left to topple the antidemocratic Law and Justice party. The chilling counterexample, Bassin noted, is that during the period between World War I and World War II, “center-right parties in Germany and Italy chose a different course.” Rather than directly opposing the emerging fascist movements in each country, they opted “instead to try to ride the energy of [the] far-right extremists to power, thinking that once there, they could easily sideline [their] leaders.”

That was, of course, a historic miscalculation that led to the destruction of democracy in each country. But, Bassin said, “right now, terrifyingly, the American Republican Party is following the German and Italian path.” The belligerent Jordan may face just enough personal and ideological opposition to stop him, but whether or not he becomes speaker, his rise captures the currents carrying the Trump-era GOP ever further from America’s democratic traditions.

Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic 

My sense is that most of the Republicans who hate Matt Gaetz and now support Jordan have no sense whatsoever of the historical consequences of their fluctuating allegiances. They don't think in terms of historic calculations. It never enters into their minds. They and their staff just calculate what's good in the short term for their careers. As a group, these are not thoughtful, well-educated, or well-informed people. And so, while I hope at least some of them prove me wrong, they strike me as intellectually and emotionally incapable of making choices that support the long-term health of American democracy. Such thoughts are beyond the scope of their thinking. 

Do the voters who elected Republicans to the House in Biden districts in New York and California regret giving the GOP the majority? How many even think about majorities and minorities? And unless they voted for George Santos, most don't regret their votes because they don't even remember who they voted for or could tell you his or her name. Most are not paying attention to what's going on now in Washington. To the agree that they're aware of it, it's just the same old, same old with little significance for their lives. And the radical, anti-democratic force the Republicans have become is papered over by old caricatures about what they used to be, like fiscally responsible. What they have become is beyond the scope of their thinking because these voters rely on such cliches to navigate in a world they don't have the time or interest to understand more deeply. 

So most voters don't understand that we're on a razor's edge. And either they will not understand the historical significance of what we're going through until it's too late, or if somehow we avoid Germany's and Italy's fate, they will never understand how close we came. 

The Oliver Anthony Dilemma

Good piece in the Atlantic about Chris Murphy and Oliver Anthony. Anthony's song, "Rich Men North of Richmond"...

... which became an unlikely national hit, also took jabs at “obese” welfare recipients and high taxes. The right applauded and that turned off the left. Vox christened Anthony a right-wing breakout star; Variety floated accusations that he was an “industry plant”; The Washington Post divined in his song the “mainstreaming” of conspiracy culture. The press coverage of Anthony, and the dismissive tone on the left, would change only on Friday, when the singer released a video in which he disowned the right’s championing of his song.

So if right-wingers like the song, then cultural Lefties have to hate it, right? Those are the rules of engagement in this absurd culture war that the Left plays so obtusely. But really, what does it tell you that the Right immediately identified with this song and Left rejected it? Well, maybe there's good reason for ordinary Americans to see the Dems, the party of the cultural Left,  as the party of rich men north of Richmond. 

But Murphy had the compassion to see the song--without the culture-war lens--for what it really is, a scream of pain...

 Progressives who want to fix a broken economy, Murphy argues, better find a way to hear out people like Anthony. It was with that in mind that a few weeks ago Murphy typed out a post on X (formerly known as Twitter):

a. I think progressives should listen to this. In part, bc it’s just a good tune.

b. But also bc it shows the path of realignment. Anthony sings about the soullessness of work, shit wages and the power of the elites. All problems the left has better solutions to than the right.

Murphy’s comment did not please his tribe. Some social-media liberals—skeptical that ties between Democrats and the rural working class can be repaired—decried Murphy’s apostasy and wondered archly if he had hit his head. Others muttered that the 50-year-old second-term senator deserved a primary challenge.

Is this negative response to Murphy's common sense compassion typical of Democrats? Certainly not typical of rank-and-file Democrats, but among the Dems' cultural elite? Alas--

Murphy is a repeat provocateur. In July, he tweeted that “there are a lot of social conservatives who believe in populist economic policies, and it would be a good idea to have those people a part of a Democratic/left coalition and accept a bit more intra-movement friction on culture issues as a consequence.” That post included a thoroughly unscientific but still revealing poll that found that 77 percent of those who responded disagreed with him.

Good for Murphy.

Whatever happens in the general election next year, the future of the country depends on whether the Dems or the GOP win the broad blue-collar vote, a vote comprising white, black, and brown voters--all of whom lean conservative in their cultural values. Most ordinary Americans are not ideologically driven, but they have no interest in the preoccupations of Neoliberal tribalists in media and the universities. Ordinary Americans have good reason to be completely turned off by those preoccupations, and insofar as those preoccupations become associated with the Democrat Party's brand, it gives them good reason not to vote for Democrats. 

So what will be  the post-Biden future for Democrats? Will it be the party the Clintons, i.e., the party of rich men and women north or Richmond,  or the party that Sanders and Murphy, the party that sticks up for ordinary Americans? 

It's the Meaninglessness, Stupid

Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.

But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.

Why are these young intellectuals so attracted to illiberalism? Because they reject the flabby meaninglessness of life in the Age of Whatever. There is no future in flabby meaninglessness, so people--me included--who are committed to retaining an open, free society had better find an antidote for it. If we don't, Illiberalism in some form or another will win. 

Liberals say that finding meaning is something you do on your own time in the cultural sphere--go meditate or go fishing, join Doctors without Borders, go camping in the wilderness, start collecting stamps--whatever. Meaning in life is what individuals choose it to be, right? This is commonplace Liberal thinking, and we're so inured to it, it seems irreproachable.But meaning doesn't work that way. It's filtered or disclosed through cultural constructs, and our current culture mostly filter out the deep sources of felt meaning in ways that are suffocating us. Finding a pleasant hobby is no solution. This explains why conservatives feel this need to make their meaning everybody else's. They feel a need to change the mediating social forms. I get that, but they don't understand that illiberalism provides a cure that is worse than the disease. 

But this mentality among young conservative intellectuals should be seen as a miner's canary signal by complacent Liberals. The empirical reality, whether Liberals recognize it or not, is that everything about what a LIberal society produces is fake and meaningless. And spirited young people are disgusted by it, and want something more. In 1962, they put together the Port Huron Statement. That noble, humanistic project failed miserably. The Left since then has capitulated to a postmodern priggish moralism that feels completely out of touch with Reality as most people live it, and almost anybody with any sense gets that Liberal anything goes cluelessness is inadequate to meet the challenges that the world will confront in the coming decades. So now a significant minority of young intellectuals are willing to look for other ways to make change happen. 

This is why Nietzsche and his shallower imitators like Ayn Rand resonate with these young intellectuals. (See Note 1) They hunger for more than vapid Liberal bromides. Nietzsche and Rand map out a path of self-transcendence, a path toward what the Greeks called arete, excellence, which is what all spirited human beings long to achieve. The Liberal Left instead have become of the celebrators of the mediocre. In their misguided understanding of equality, they want a society that levels everyone to the least common denominator. And so in the Age of Whatever, Nietzsche and Rand seem to offer the only legitimate alternative for such a noxious leveling mentality.

But Nietzsche's and Rand's self-transcendence project leads to barbarism, not excellence, because both were involved in what Ernest Becker called causa sui projects. A causa sui project is a parody of self-transcendence, and Rand's heroes are parodies in this sense. I'm more sympathetic to Nietzsche and would argue that most would-be Nietzsheans have no understanding about what he was talking about. Nevertheless Nietzsche books, particularly toward the end, virtually beg to be parodied by lesser human beings.

What Nietzsche and Rand have in effect done is to take what is a profound human longing for excellence and to pervert it in the promotion of what every great metaphysical imaginary from Taoism to Buddhism to Neoplatonism insists is delusion. Self-transcendence? Yes. Uebermenschen? No. Last Men? No. The true humility, and so the true excellence of Socrates and Chuang Tzu? Yes. 

Is it possible to build civilizations on such an impractical ideal? It was done before; it can be done again. 

I believe it's possible because deep down everybody, including Garsten's right-leaning young intellectuals, hungers for reality. Garsten's students are starved for Reality, and they reject the system whose main produce is the false and the fake. They are right to do so, but they will choose instead whatever seems more authentically, deeply real, even if it isn't.  

That's why it's important that some how some way we find a way--as a broadly accepted societal ideal--to make contact with Reality at its deepest something that is what the most spirited human beings strive for. I believe it's possible because I think that Socrates was right, that people chose the Good when they know the Good, because the Good is the deep Real. The challenge is to find a way to make that experience of the Good available as something that's easier for people to know and so to choose. That's almost impossible where a nihilistic materialistic consumer-choice Neoliberalism defines the terms of discourse. A rationalist materialism is not necessary for preserving a truly free open society. Indeed, it creates the conditions that make it almost impossible to sustain. 

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Note 1: I am a practicing Catholic, so I understand why there is a hunger among Garsten's Catholic students for a pre-Reformation Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary. One finds in Aquinas and Dante, and later in Cusa and Ficino, a beautifully articulated imaginary that resonated among its greatest souls at that time. We must draw now upon the deep originary sources that gave rise to those articulation then in a way that fits what we've become since then. Catholic Integralism is a truly crazy solution to a real problem, and I reject it utterly and completely. 

My argument on this blog might seem equally crazy, but at least I recognize that there can be no imposition of a confessional religion on the broader society. That's why I'm an advocate for a restoration within the cultural sphere--by no means the political sphere--of a form of Neoplatonism that provides a vertical pole to the metaphysical imaginary that is cognate with all the great post-Axial religions and philosophies.

As far-fetched as that might seem in this moment, I think it's possible because Neoplatonism points to something whose truth is not to be evaluated in its historical propositions, but rather in the way it is an expression of something deeply, vitally true in an originary sennse. And because we all hunger for truth and to have deeper contact with Reality, I think we will find our way to it once again. The Integralists are wrong because you just can't take the forms from another era and impose them on people who don't feel the originary energy that gave rise to them. New forms have to arise in a new way that inspires people because they shine with originary Reality. I sincerely believe that such a restoration lies ahead of us.

I focus on Neoplatonism as restored in a postmodern key because it can provide a on a civilizational framework that works with the innate human longing for the Good while not being prescriptive or dogmatic about it. And it provides a lingua franca for people who are averse to religion but who are attracted to a kind of Emersonian transcendentalism, and this in turn can put them in conversation with Christians, Jews, Muslims of goodwill in the West and with the same constituencies in the religions of the East. Something like this is necessary if we as a human race are going to find a way to define what it means to be human in the face of threats posed to the human by nihilistic technocapitalism.

Thoughts on the Yesterday's Indictment

From Charlie Syke's Morning Shots--

Jack Smith and other prosecutors have flooded the zone with Trump’s criminality. The rapidly filling legal calendar means that 2024 will be dominated by:

• Trump the fraudster

• Trump the rapist

• Trump’s hush money payments to a porn star

• Trump’s violation of the Espionage Act

and

• Trump, the conspiracist, who tried to overthrow the government

“Each of these conspiracies — which built on the widespread mistrust the defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud — targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

If only Republicans had been warned. But they bought this ticket; and this is the ride they are about to take.

I've been avoiding talking about politics on the ground if I don't have anything to say that isn't being said over and over and that doesn't fit into already established ideological bins, there's no point in writing about it. But his indictment yesterday on charges that relate to his failed coup attempt on J6 demand some acknowledgement.

I accept that American society is broken, and that it's main fissure line is defined by whether you voted for Trump even once. If you are a principled Conservative, the only option for you was to have become a Never Trumper. That so few Conservatives made that choice spoke, and continues to speak, to the deep trouble that we are in. Too many Americans see Trump as a legitimaage politician, and in doing so have defined down legitimacy and shattered any ideas of norm-al politics for years to come. Chaos 'R Us and will continue to be until there's a shift in the zeitgeist. Trump's indictments will not decrease the chaos; rather they are a harbinger of a more intense experience of chaos to come next year. 

Those of us who were appalled by Trump, who thought he was a grifter, a bull-shitting fabulist, and a demagogue, also thought that a sensible majority of Americans, both Liberal and Conservative, would see through his con. We were like Lincoln and many of the otherwise astute Northerners in 1860 who thought that saner minds would prevail and that the South would never provoke a Civil War. They were wrong then, and we were wrong in 2016. Chaos ensued, and it's not over for us yet in this recent iteration of this old American story. It's an open question as to how violent things will get. No reason for optimism because, 'Violence 'R Us'. 

A major theme in this blog since its inception provoked by the fabulism among Neoliberal elites that led to our invading Iraq in 2003 has been why are Americans are so prone to delusional thinking that seeks a violent outlet? The short answer is that without a vertical pole in our metaphysical imaginary, American society spins but without a center, and the consequent erratic,meaningless spinning leads to mass ontological dizziness. The consequences of the amputation of vertical pole began to be felt acutely by the Western cultural elite around 1850, and since then we've experienced a gradual development toward a broadening intensification of the experience of ontological dizziness. What affected mostly educated elites in the 20th century is affecting everyvbody now. 

It was aggravated by Neoliberal ideology and policies that became normative for elites since 1980 and who in their callow hubris after the collapse of the USSR thought that they should impose it on the world. And even now, despite its magnificent failures, the only class of people--mostly educated elites--who are not feeling particularly dizzy are those whose identities are in some degree still enmeshed in Neoliberal ideology and its nihilism. Why? Because of all the ways they benefit from it. (But how are their hyper-anxieety-prone children doing?)

But Neoliberalism and the cultural 'whateverism' it promotes is unsustainable for any society, and a society suffering from ontological dizziness will find a center one way or the other. And the question is whether or not it will find a true center--or whether it will just invent one around a cult of personality or some of other form of delusional thinking. 

And so as we "look forward" to what will be certainly one of the most chaotic and unpredictable election years in American history. As I've written in a series of posts earlier this year, while a Trump nomination by the Republicans looks extremely likely, it's unlikely that he will be elected in the general. Nevertheless, it's scary because, who knows--he could be elected. Those of us who thought it was impossible in '16 could very well be wrong again because we underestimate the degree to which American society suffers from ontological dizziness. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree with those who think that the combined effect of Trump running for President while under indictment or while appealing his convictions--there is no way he'll be running from jail-- is very bad politics, and not a good thing for the Republican Party up and down the ballot. And whatever is bad for Republicans is good for America, at least in the short term. 

So better Trump than a Republican who has a better chance of winning. The MAGA wing of the GOP must be completely an utterly discredited, and the best chance of that is letting them run and watching them lose. The best possible outcome for America as 2024 will come to a close will be for Democrats to win resoundingly everywhere. Why? Not because Democrats offer any real solutions but because Democrats are the true conservatives now. Whatever you might think about their views on cultural issues, they are the political force that stands for conserving norms and traditions in the political sphere. Republicans just don't care about them anymore, and no decent Republicans can get elected if they don't not cater to their ontologically dizzy base that wants to tear the whole system down.  

But if Democrats prevail in '24, as we should all hope they will, that is at best a short-term fix unless important voices from within the American soul emerge who articulate what ontological dizziness is and why it is such a profoundly destabilizing force in American--or any-- society. And then they must also develop an imagination of an American future where there is a cure for it. If this could happen in America, it would be truly a light shining on a hill. But maybe it will happen first elsewhere. It doesn't matter so long as it happens and it is broadly recognized as the next step forward. 

As I've been writing here for years, cultural problems and conflicts cannot be resolved in the political sphere. The American Civil War is a classic example: The North won in the power politics sphere, but not in the cultural sphere. Forcing people to change their values hardly ever works. The resentments fester and swell, and it's only a matter of time before they burst out in ways that debilitate the entire system. But because almost all politics lies downstream from culture, cultural warfare in the political sphere is extraordinarily hard to avoid. 

So if the real problem is ontological dizziness, what's the cure? As I argued last month, I don't think there is one until we experience a profound shift in the zeitgeist. Until then we're all like the ancient Hebrews wandering in the wilderness. There are those among us--mostly on the religious right--who long to return to the fleshpots of Egypt (aka the 1950s--and for some the 1850s). But there are also many Americans of goodwill, whether they lean conservative or liberal, who in their quiet, everyday lives provide ballast for the larger society. They put one foot in front of the other, do what must be done as conscience indicates, and they live lives of quiet integrity and hope. They do not suffer from ontological dizziness, and hopefully from out of their ranks a thoughtful, new leadership will emerge in the cultural sphere, and so consequently in the political sphere. Such leadership will succeed to the degree that it inspires most Americans to move toward a saner, ontologically less vertiginous place by the end of the century.

There can be no endlessly muddling through. Dome significant shift needs to happen. Better that it not be effected by the forces of darkness on whose behalf a guy like Trump works. 

 

Why I Prefer Trump 2

 From a Firing Line interview with Charlie Sykes:

HOOVER: So, Charlie, what happens in a general election then if it is Trump versus Biden? 

SYKES: Then I think the election becomes a referendum on Donald Trump. And I think this is the decision the Republicans have to make. 

HOOVER: A referendum on Trump? 

SYKES: Yes, because I think under normal circumstances the general election is a referendum on the incumbent president. And if it’s any other Republican other than Donald Trump, the 2024 election will be a referendum on Joe Biden and his record and his agenda. But if it’s Donald Trump, it becomes completely reversed. That election becomes about Donald Trump. And that will determine what the turnout is. That will determine the levels of enthusiasm. Joe Biden does not need to gin up enthusiasm among the Democratic base if Donald Trump is on the ballot. The formula shifts.

This is another way of making the point I argued in my earlier piece Why I Prefer Trump 1. If DeSantis runs, it's a referendum on Biden, and Biden is more likely to lose for all the reasons his approval ratings are so low now. It will seem more like a normal election. If Trump runs, it's a referendum on Trump, and it's far more likely that he will lose because most voters, if they are not disgusted by him, are tired of him. He's a known quantity now. Biden as a known quantity should defeat Trump as a known quantity. Biden against DeSantis?  Not so clear. For the typical swing voter, DeSantis is still an unknown quantity.

So is Trump worse than DeSantis? That's not the important question. They are both sociopaths, and we just don't know how bad DeSantis is yet. And in the short run, that's his primary advantage in the general election. To the swing voter, he's seems kinda normal. The people in Florida seem to love him. Liberal media hate him, so how bad can he be? He's young. He's new and fresh. He has a pretty wife and kids. He's kind of Kennedyesque if you don't look to closely. Let's give him a try. 

But the problem is neither Trump nor DeSantis--it's MAGA. Both Trump and DeSantis in their different ways are human ciphers who are vying with one another to get out in front of the MAGA parade. If, as I believe, the enemy is not Trump or DeSantis or any one personality, but MAGA, it doesn't really matter who leads it because nobody is really leading it. Anyone who wins with MAGA support will be a Kevin McCarthy-like creature of MAGA. Nothing is more important than crushing and delegitimating MAGA through the electoral process. 

If you think that DeSantis represents a more acceptable version of MAGA than Trump, you really don't get it. If anything, he's the next evolutionary step in its emergence from the slime. If MAGA wins the White House in '24, America as an open society is very likely over. So the really important question is not who's worse, DeSantis or Trump--or anybody else who wins with MAGA support--but who is more likely to deliver a victory for MAGA in the general election, and that is the MAGA candidate who can win in the swing states.

I'm not saying that Trump can't win, but extreme MAGA has been a loser in the last two cycles. DeSantis has a far better chance of winning because he appears  less blatantly MAGA to swing voters, many of whom have come to see the Democrats as having lost their minds on gender issues. Most swing voters are normies, and they tend to agree with DeSantis on sex and gender issues. Democrats and those influenced by the cosmopolitanism of Liberal media are so caught up in their own sanctimony that they  have no clue how much they scare normies on these issues, and how easy they are making it for Republicans to frame the election as normies vs kooks.

This is largely what the last election was about, and that's why Biden won. He was perceived to be the normie and Trump the kook. Will that be true again if Biden runs against DeSantis? I don't think so--at least insofar as the Dems allow themselves to be framed as the anti-normie party. It's in this sense that DeSantis will be able to make the general election a referendum on Biden and the anti-normie Democrats in a way that Trump would not be able to do.  

So "lucky" for us, Trump is the more likely GOP candidate in the general. It will be another circus, but he likely loses again in an election that I believe will be framed again as kooks vs. normies. His mounting legal troubles might help him with the MAGA base to secure the nomination, but they will not help him with swing voters in the general. The swing voters have already rejected him, and there's no reason so far to believe they won't do it again. DeSantis, on the other hand looks a lot more like Youngkin, a GOP winner in a state that was trending blue, and there's good reason to believe that he will get much of the national purple vote--certainly more than Trump would do.

That's why DeSantis scares me far more than Trump does. Trump was the wrecking ball that threw the country into chaos. DeSantis will present himself as the philosopher king who will restore order.  It's a one-two punch: Trump--vicious jab to the jaw; DeSantis--crippling uppercut to the gut. 

 

Defending the Western Canon

A part of my mission at After the Future has been to save the Western Canon from being captured by conservative ideologues. That is a heavy lift these days, and it shouldn't be. There's a reason why people like Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt--and really anybody who is truly culturally literate--have spent so much time with Plato and St. Augustine. The former recognize how the latter wrote the cultural software that runs Western Civilization. If you don't understand how Plato and Augustine did that, then you don't understand what or why you think what you think and believe what you believe. For one of the best explanations for why the Western Canon is important from a Progressive perspective, read director of Columbia University's core curriculum Roosevelt Montas's Rescuing Socrates or this piece in Jacobin by Liza Featherstone entitled "The Left Should Defend Classical Education". 

So I get a little frustrated when the more public-facing defenses of classical education are showcased in the MSM as part of the conservative social agenda. The results are predictable when a conservative businessman like Jeremey Wayne Tate, the founder of the Classical Learning Test (CLT), gets interviewed by a conventional progressive like the NY Times Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Why is Tate worthy of the attention of the NY Times? Because Ron DeSantis is pushing to replace the SAT with his CLT in the Florida State education system. 

I am no defender of SAT or of the whole standardized testing regime in general, including Tate's CLT. But I get pretty frustrated when guys like Tate become the frontmen for defending the Western canon. He doesn't have a prayer against Garcia-Navarro. He's at best a well-intentioned businessman who says, rightly, that a classical education should not be either conservative or liberal--but human. But he's a conservative guy trying to run a company. He'is worried about making payroll, and if the conservatives want to be his customers, then hoo-rah for conservatives.

He gives a ridiculously naive explanation for why public schools are failing and for why even Catholic schools like the one his daughter attends shape their curricula to the test. If the school is daughter attends was serious about their values, they would determine the curricula by their own pedagogical standards, not by what the SAT requires. (See Note 1) And so with such defenders of a classical education as Tate and DeSantis, it is easily condemned as guilty by association by the liberal consumers of the NY Times. Liberals used to know better, but don't now precisely because of the consumerist design and career-training ethos that has become the default in university curricula in the last several decades. Why would anybody in their right minds waste their tuition money on a philosophy or literature course?

I was going to do a more detailed analysis of how the presuppositions of both Garcia-Navarro and Tate gurantee that they will talk past one another, but who really cares? It's the same old, same old. Garcia-Navarro is smart and she asks fair questions, but it's clear that she's in the why-should-we-care-about-what-dead-white-men-think camp. Her audience would be better served if she interviewed Roosevelt Montas or Cornell West (who has a seat on the CLT board), both of whom would be far more capable of defending the importance of the Western canon from a non-conservative perspective than Tate is. She might learn something if she were to do so. 

----------

Note 1: One of the more significant absurdities in Tate's justification for the CLT is the story he relates about how his daughter's Catholic School offers an elective philosophy course that no students sign up for. Why? Because, according to Tate, it doesn't give them AP credits or isn't covered in the SAT. Waste of time. So, in Tate's mind, if curriucla are determined by the standardized test, then you must change the standardized test. It never seems to occur to Tate that if this Catholic School were truly effective in shaping the souls of its students, they should all be chomping at the bit to take this philosophy course for intrinsic motivations. But clearly this school is just turning out kids like every other elite high school, i.e., kids who don't care about learning but about getting ahead. They make choices not according to criteria that Socrates or Aristotle might approve but by what a Neoliberal careerist agenda approves. They are so many young Hippocrates-es looking for a life that Protagoras would train them for. Neither Tate nor Garcia-Navarro get the irony because neither clearly has any idea about what Plato was about. 

Plus Ca Change...

“The debate over the Ku-Klux never effectively silenced those who argued that the Klan did not exist at all,” Parsons writes. “Despite massive and productive public and private efforts to gather, circulate, and evaluate information about the Ku-Klux Klan and despite the federal government’s devoting attention and resources to the Klan as though it were a real threat, the national debate over the Ku-Klux failed to move beyond the simple question of whether the Ku-Klux existed.”

It worked because of the half-truths people are willing to swallow in order to survive with their self-perceptions intact. Reconstruction-era Republicans used the persistence of racist violence in the South as a political weapon against their Democratic opponents. Klan denial helped Democrats rationalize reports of that violence away as a partisan conspiracy to strip them of their rights. They made themselves the true victims of the narrative, preserving their conception of their own benevolence and of the evil of their political opponents. “Part of the allure of misrepresentations,” Parsons notes, “is that they can help individuals or societies gloss over their own inconsistencies and develop more robust and appealing self-understandings.” When Republican Representative Andrew Clyde went from barricading doors in the Capitol against the January 6 mob to calling the attack a “normal tourist visit,” it wasn’t because he was having difficulty navigating a complex media environment.

Adam Serwer discussing Elaine Frantz Parsons's Ku Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction

Serwer's larger point is that whatever the fog that enshrouds and distorts partisan contested issues when we're in the middle of contesting them, the truth eventually is established for any fair-minded person who cares to know it. I find that the only argument that I can make with those on the Right who today insist that their grievance ideology is justified is simply to say, "Come back in twenty years, and we'll see who proves right." That would have been the best argument twenty years ago this month in disagreements I had with those supporting the imminent invasion of Iraq. 

Delusional thinking now will play out the way it always plays out because the more things change the more one can count on fools making a mess of things. But sooner or later reality reasserts itself.

Worshipping in the Temple of the Invisible Hand

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”

Let me offer an addendum here: There is plenty to worry about when the state controls technology, too. The ends that governments could turn A.I. toward — and, in many cases, already have — make the blood run cold.

I might, for that reason, alter Chiang’s comment one more time: Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.

--Ezra Klein

We Americans won't do anything do anything to constrain A.I. because Technocapitalism does not serve us, but we it. We Americans are worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand, and it is a jealous god that will have no other gods beside it. All our blessings derive from our being a Nation most servile to this god and so most favored by it. And we dare not risk angering it, for surely for such sacrilege we will be cast out of the Temple and be forever forsaken. 

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?

Forcing Change vs. Inspiring Change

Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for diversity trainings have frequently come to discouraging conclusions. Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. ...

If diversity trainings have no impact whatsoever, that would mean that perhaps billions of dollars are being wasted annually in the United States on these efforts. But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them. (NYTimes)

Who'd a thought?

There's a naive mindset, more typical of Liberals than Conservatives, that believes classroom education is the answer to all of humanity's problems. That's why they blame teachers for the achievement gap between kids who grow up in affluent families and those that grow up in poor ones. It's often been said that the number that is the greatest predictor of academic achievement is a kid's zip code. And this is why busing to desegregate the schools didn't work, no matter how laudable the the goal. The kids from the poor zip code have to go home after going to the school in the affluent zip code. And so does everyone who goes to a diversity training workshop have to go home after it. 

The underlying problem is the way we are acculturated. When are weaned, we learn that we are no longer the center of the universe, and that we must play our designated place in the tribe. This requires that we learn the tribal code and to play the role assigned to us by our family and by extension the larger society, which for most kids in low-income zip codes means learning the folkways of the streets.

Among the kids who grow up in a family whose parents don't value education, it's the rare one who will find a way to value it. Why should he care, if nobody he knows or cares about cares? Certainly his friends on the street don't. So why do people think that the time spent in school will change all that?

And it's even more ridiculous to think that a bunch of hours in a diversity training workshop will change resistant attitudes. The participants still have to go home after it. The people who are most resistant will sit through it because they have to, but their eyes will be firmly rolled back into their heads, and when they get back home or to the local bar, they'll vent about how these woke liberals are trying to brainwash everyone. 

But then again, we're a society that thought we could march into Iraq and make it a beacon for democracy throughout the Middle East. The astonishing, jaw-dropping naivete of it. You'd think we'd learn, but alas. We can't so long as we're trapped within the shallow constraints of our rationalist-materialism and its utilitarian approach to solving complex moral spiritual problems. 

Our deep cultural programming as kids isn't a closed system. Upgrades are possible, and people can and do transcend it. But when they do, it's because something has inspired them. They have an onto-normative experience, which means that something dormant in their souls is awakened to some better possibility for themselves to become more deeply themselves, i.e., to become more deeply human. No inspiration, no deeply substantive change.

Every teacher worth his or her salt knows that you can't teach kids who don't want to learn. You can't force it; you have to inspire it. It's the same for any kind of substantive positive cultural change. But in order to inspire it, you have to have been inspired at some point yourself. You have to have experienced in some small way an onto-normative awakening. Such an awakening is what drives the idealism of the best of our young people, but it's a seed, and it needs to be cultivated in the right way to grow into something strong and vital and wise. Does a Masters in education at the typical state university cultivate that kind of wisdom? Only if students encounter faculty there who themselves have some measure of it. Is it disqualifying if you have none of it? Of course not. 

The classroom approach to developing more positive attitudes toward diversity is as silly as teaching ethics in a business school. The smartest kids will tell the instructor what she wants to hear because the incentives demand that they do, but when they go to work at a place like Enron none of it will matter because the new social environment has incentives that completely contradict and mock what they were taught in class.

Learning in a classroom about the difference between consequentialist and deontological ethical systems through case studies and trolley-car thought experiments might be interesting for few hours, but are such discussions designed to wake up what is deeply, innately, ontonormative in the student? Not in my experience. Same with diversity training. So it might work if the business school ethics instructor has that spark or if the diversity workshop leader does. But is it disqualifying to teach these classes if you don't? And so it's not surprising at all that they have little success and often make things worse.

What about the people who teach our kids in school? Do they have that ontonormative spark? I'd say that most probably start out with one, but our bureaucratized and politicized and corporatized schools rarely provide environments in which that spark can be cultivated. The basic model for education reform over the last twenty years--whether Bush's No Child Left Behind or Obama's Race to the Top--incentivizes all the wrong things. It disregards sparks and emphasizes spark-dimming incentives that focus on data and scores. "We need to close that gap," these education reformers say, "and we need data to show that we're getting results."  

I wouldn't be surprised if many people who support diversity training or closing the achievement gap in schools have some dim sense that waking people up to their best possibilities is what they're trying to do, but they don't really have a clear picture of what a human being is and what motivates his or her deepest moral aspirations. They don't even understand this about themselves. It's very difficult in a society whose metaphysical assumptions are dominated by rationalist materialism. So they work with the behavioral/utilitarian models that they've been taught and hope for the best.

"So," you might ask, "if none of this works, should we then just do nothing?" No. We do what we can no matter what the limitations of the situation in which we find ourselves. But when the problems inevitably flow from the structural limitations of the kind of imagination shaped by the culture's utilitarian rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary, it's hard to feel optimistic that any statistically significant, widespread solutions are possible. We'll just keep doing what doesn't work over and over again because, y'know, we have to do something, right? And we'll keep doing it even if it makes things worse. 

Nothing changes in any significant way until the underlying metaphysical assumptions do. Structural political and economic changes are possible only if there's the will to effect them, but having such a will depends on a broad consensus about what kind of society promotes deeply human flourishing. What people talk about at home and in coffee shops and local taverns and churches and Rotary Clubs has to change. (Yes, and whatever the social media equivalent of all that is these days.) And the consensus that is required for any kind of substantive structural change is impeded by the materialist Neoliberal utitlitarian assumptions that dominate American thinking by its public intellectuals--both Liberal and Conservative--about how social change happens. It's hard to see how anything fundamental can change so long as that remains the case. 

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. 

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.

 

Beth Dutton: Uebermensch?

Some further thoughts on themes about Fukuyama and how his ideas about Hegel and Nietzsche are represented in Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone:

The concern of the last part of Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man is the "Last Man" part. The Last Man is Nietzsche's counterpoint to Hegel's First Man, the warrior aristocrat who is willing to risk his life in a prestige battle to the death. [See Note 1] Yellowstone's John Dutton is a victorious First Man in this sense, who is the successor of a patrilineal line of First Men. The First Man ethics defines the  logic by which the show establishes that the lawless, violent things the Duttons do are in fact worthy or our admiration. They live something intensely real that the rest of us in Blue Liberalstan don't.

The Duttons are Hegelian-Nietzschean First men, not Hobbesian/Lockean Last Men. The first have spirit; the second are timorous animals who are motivated by nothing higher than avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. [See Note 2] For the Las Man only lives for pleasure. He's analogous to Kierkegard's human who lives only on the aesthetic, a man who is in despair and doesn't know it. He thinks his shallow life is just great, that it can't get any better. That, at least, is what he keeps telling himself. 

John's daughter, Beth, is also a First Man. If you didn't understand this already, this week's Season 5 Yellowstone episode makes it clear.  Beth and the hated eco-activist Summer have a First Man prestige battle. They traded punches to the face until one gave up. It was brutal. Beth, of course, long inured to cowboy ethics, would have died rather than concede, but she also knew that it was just a question of time before Summer would, and she did. 

Summer gets props for lasting longer and punching harder than anyone thought she would, but it's clear from the get-go who's superior and who's inferior. In a previous episode John describes Summer as one of the sheep, and she scolds Beth for taking advantage of her. Well, Summer proves she's better than a sheep by cowboy standards, but let's not get carried away. She's still a member in good standing of the Liberal Order to which the Duttons are sworn enemies. If her character is redeemable in Yellowstone world, it will be by her conversion to the cowboy ethic and in her ceasing to be such a sanctimonious, Liberal prig.

Later John is talking to Rip about the fight and says that there is no one he knows whom he envies--except Beth, because she is so uninhibitedly free. She is made of  pure Hegel First Man stuff, and there's a Nietzsche vibe in it that echoes a scene from Season 3--

Beth: I subscribe to Nietzsche’s thoughts on right and wrong.

Rip: Hmm?

Beth: He was a German philosopher who died of syphilis after he cornholed some prostitute, so not exactly a life to model yours after, but his thoughts on right and wrong, good and evil.

Rip: Which were: there’s no such thing.

Beth: That, I believe. I believe in loving with your whole soul and destroying anything that wants to kill what you love.

Rip: That’s it.

Beth: That’s all there is.

Beth might seem like a deeply troubled, vengeful psychopath to the uninitiated observer, but the show doesn't think of her that way. She's a megalothymic First Man. Her apparent psychopathy is what makes her admirable precisely because it's so uncivilized by standards set by the Liberal Order. She simply will not be ruled by that order. Sheridan clearly admires Beth precisely because she is a wild woman who doesn't care what anybody thinks about her. She's the opposite of the Last Man that is produced by the Hobbesian/Lockean culture that emphasizes bodily security and material comfort.

It could be argued that the whole show is an argument about how the post-Industrial Revolution Liberal Order produces spiritless, weak Last Men ruled by nothing more than their appetites. And really, the show asks, wouldn't the world be better if aristocratic barbarian warlords like John Dutton with Beth-like lieutenants ran things on Master Slave principles? Is any other kind of human truly worthy of our respect? These are intensely real humans, not snowflakey fools Isn't that really at the heart of alt Right fantasies about destroying the administrative state? Sheridan has protested that his show has no partisan axes to grind, but it's clear where his sympathies lie. 

But is Beth an exemplary uebermensch? I don't think that Nietzsche in his saner moments has someone like Beth in mind. My reading of Nietzsche's uebermensch focuses on the 'ueber', which is often translated as 'super' as in 'superman', but also sometimes as 'overman'. I prefer the second because it suggests 'overcomingman' or 'selftranscendingman', which comes closer to the Hegelian and German Romantic idea of the human being as free and undetermined, a being whose dignity lies in his or her capacity to transcend culturally imposed limitations. Beth has some of that, but I think that Nietzsche had a nobler kind of post-conventional human being in mind, someone like Lou Salome, a highly cultured human being, not a neoprimitive defined by her brutality.

But then, there's this photo(?) of Salome, Nietzsche, and his friend Paul Ree. It's clear who's the Master and who the slaves: 

Nevertheless, I think that given the choice between someone like Hillary Clinton or Beth Dutton, Nietzsche would certainly prefer to hang out with Beth. I think the same might be true if he were given the choice between Beth and someone like Jane Addams. Addams is more my idea of a 'selftranscendingman'. But more on that another time. 

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Note 1: Fukuyama writes:

But Hegel’s “first man” differs from the animals in a second and much more fundamental way. This man wants not only to be recognized by other men, but to be recognized as a man. And what constitutes man’s identity as man, the most fundamental and uniquely human characteristic, is man’s ability to risk his own life. Thus the “first man”’s encounter with other men leads to a violent struggle in which each contestant seeks to make the other “recognize” him by risking his own life. Man is a fundamentally other-directed and social animal, but his sociability leads him not into a peaceful civil society, but into a violent struggle to the death for pure prestige. This “bloody battle” can have one of three results. It can lead to the death of both combatants, in which case life itself, human and natural, ends. It can lead to the death of one of the contestants, in which case the survivor remains unsatisfied because there is no longer another human consciousness to recognize him. Or, finally, the battle can terminate in the relationship of lordship and bondage, in which one of the contestants decides to submit to a life of slavery rather than face the risk of violent death. The master is then satisfied because he has risked his life and received recognition for having done so from another human being. The initial encounter between “first men” in Hegel’s state of nature is every bit as violent as Hobbes’s state of nature or Locke’s state of war, but issues not in a social contract or other form of peaceful civil society, but in a highly unequal relationship of lordship and bondage.

The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 146-47

In other words, the Hegelian account of the move out of the state of nature into society is more historically accurate. The social contract idea was completely new, modern idea. But the point that Fukuyama emphasizes is that the Hegelian account is more psychologically astute. What makes the human human is not to be merely well fed and secure like our animal pets, but to have a self-consciousness. And Hegel picks up on the Fichtean theme that self-consciousness is awakened in conflict. We coast along in a dream until reality snaps us out of it, and, and we are most aware and self-conscious when we confront death.

Animals fight, but they don't do it with the self-consciousness of risking death, and so the human being proves himself to be superior to the animals in his self-conscious choice to transcend animal instinct and to risk his life in mortal combat, to "live free or die", so to say. This is the Dutton ethic. But it's also the motto of those that stormed the Capitol on J6. These are people who want to prove to themselves that they are truly human.

Someone like Beth Dutton is smart enough to see that these people are all deluded, but she would respect them for their willingness to fight. It's the same respect she seems willing to afford Summer after their fight. She still thinks Summer is deluded, but at least she was willing to fight. It is honorable to fight and lose than not to fight at all.  If you don't understand that about what's happening on the far Right in the U.S. today, you don't understand what's at stake for them, this is what it means to be red-pilled. Their radicalization correlates with their waking up to what it means to have dignity as a human, which apparently they had not experienced before in such a powerful way. This is not something that can be understood in Lockean/Hobbesean terms except with horror. Through a Hegelian/Nietzshean lens it looks quite different. See Note 2. 

Note 2: Fukuyama--

One might think that to uncover the real meaning of liberalism, one would want to go even further back in time to the thought of those philosophers who were the original source of liberalism, Hobbes and Locke. For the oldest and most durable liberal societies—those in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, like England, the United States, and Canada—have typically understood themselves in Lockean terms. We will in fact return to Hobbes and Locke, but Hegel is of particular interest to us for two reasons. In the first place, he provides us with an understanding of liberalism that is nobler than that of Hobbes and Locke. For virtually coeval with the enunciation of Lockean liberalism has been a persistent unease with the society thereby produced, and with the prototypic product of that society, the bourgeois. That unease is ultimately traceable to a single moral fact, that the bourgeois is primarily preoccupied with his own material well-being, and is neither public-spirited, nor virtuous, nor dedicated to the larger community around him or her. In short, the bourgeois is selfish; and the selfishness of the private individual has been at the core of critiques of liberal society both on the part of the Marxist Left and the aristocratic-republican Right.

Isn't this kind of selfishness the core animating spirit of leave-me-alone Libertarianism? Keep your nose out of my business, and I'll keep mine out of yours. So scram. Get off my lawn. 

Hegel, in contrast to Hobbes and Locke, provides us with a self-understanding of liberal society which is based on the non-selfish part of the human personality, and seeks to preserve that part as the core of the modern political project. Whether he ultimately succeeds in this remains to be seen: the latter question will be the subject of the final part of this book.

The second reason for returning to Hegel is that the understanding of history as a “struggle for recognition” is actually a very useful and illuminating way of seeing the contemporary world. We inhabitants of liberal democratic countries are by now so used to accounts of current events that reduce motivation to economic causes, so thoroughly bourgeois in our own perceptions, that we are frequently surprised to discover how totally non-economic most political life is. Indeed, we do not even have a common vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts. The “struggle for recognition” is a concept as old as political philosophy, and refers to a phenomenon coterminous with political life itself. If it seems to us today a somewhat strange and unfamiliar term, it is only because of the successful “economization” of our thinking that has occurred in the past four hundred years. Yet the “struggle for recognition” is evident everywhere around us and underlies contemporary movements for liberal rights, whether in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, Asia, Latin America, or in the United States itself.

The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 146

Hobbes/Locke vs. Hegel/Nietzche = Hamilton vs. Jackson. See "Some Thoughts on Election Day" where I explicate the Jacksonian/Hamiltonian dyad. Old School Democrats are captured by economic thinking, but the far Right and Left by identity thinking. It's not the economy, stupid, but identity and recognition that is the true driver of politics nowadays. Neither the cultural Left nor the cultural Right will allow politics to be about what is proper to politics, which is solving practical problems concerning the common good in ways that require mutual respect, compromise, and working things out. The culture warriors on both the Left and Right are bent on a prestige battle to the death. Isn't that what this Supreme Court case about the anti-gay wedding website designer is all about? It's certainly not about working out this conflict in a way that solves the practical problem. Rather, one side or the other must have complete victory because to lose is to become the slave to the other. 

The problem of the Last Man in the world technocapitalism is creating is crucial for Liberal Democracies to resolve if they are to survive into the 22nd Century. Fukuyama takes it on in the final part of this book, and, imo, fails to envision a satisfying solution. For as the robots do more of the work, and humans have more leisure, Lockean/Hamiltonian presuppositions lead to a society envisioned in Huxley's Brave New World in which everyone has time but doesn't know what to do with it. In a utilitarian Lockean desire culture the end is pleasure--sex, drugs, escape into virtual games in which we pretend to be First Men. It's all a dream. What else is there? The other Hegelian/Nietzschean/Jacksonian possibility would be a reversion to a battle of all against all. We'll all become First Men again. Primitive, but intensely real. In the first, everyone is bored to death; in the second we live in a neo-barbaric Westworld except it's not a virtual game. Isn't it clear which world Sheridan would prefer to live in? Isn't Yellowstone the non virtual reality of Westworld?

 

 

Some Thoughts on Election Day

Whatever happens this week in the midterm elections, it won't be decisive. The stalemate will continue regardless whether the Red or Blue team gets the upper hand. 

America has always had a split personality: One part Jeffersonian/Jacksonian, mostly premodern in its outlook, wanting to stay close to the land and keep to the old ways, hating progress and most anything industrialized. And the other part Hamiltonian and Whiggish--more about economic growth, change, development and as such celebrators of the creative destructive energies of capitalism.

In the first two centuries after the founding, the first dominated in the South and the second the North, but since the 1970s the split is more rural/urban whether in Texas or in Wisconsin, Georgia or Pennsylvania. The Republicans used to be the party of the urban Hamiltonian elites, but over the last thirty years has become the demotic party of rural Jacksonians. And the Dems have become the party of Hamilton, the party of urban, educated elites and Technocapitalists. No wonder an incongruous rap musical about him was so popular in New York. 

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.

Things started breaking apart for the first time in the thirty year run up to the Civil War starting with the Missouri Compromise, and in a similar way they've been breaking apart again in the in the last thirty years starting with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine during the late Reagan administration, insofar as it provided a media soapbox for the repressed grievances of Middle America through Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. And so here we are in the MAGA Age when it feels as if Humpty Dumpty has fallen off his wall and all the king's horses and all the king' s won't be able to put him together again. 

History doesn't repeat itself exactly--the particularities matter--but certain historical themes do. We're not in the 1850s now, but we're in a situation where many of the same patterns are working very similarly. In the decade before the Civil War, the authoritarian, one-party South had advantages that enabled it to win most of the big fights in Congress and the Courts, and the pattern is repeating itself now. It remains to be seen how it will play out this time around.

The mistake the South made in the runup to the Civil War lay in its obsession for control that led to its overreaching. Most prominently The Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision crossed a line that forced the North, which was mostly indifferent to slavery so long as it stayed in the South, to push back. The GOP is overreaching similarly now in its obsessive need for control and in that it has made it abundantly clear that it would be quite happy with one-party rule going forward. 

Most everyday Americans aren't paying attention, or they see politics rather like sports and so without real-life implications other than the team they root for winning or losing. They can feel a passionate bond with their team, and they really, truly hate it when their team loses, and hate the other team for beating them. But the idea that one team doesn't believe in democracy anymore is for those rooting for the Red team too abstract, not enough for them to break with them, and so the real-world implications of the Red team winning are something they are going to have to feel before they understand them. Lots of Red Team fans won't care about one-party rule so long as their team wins, but most Americans will not be ok with it. They don't want the Red team running things, and they won't stand for it. 

The 1850s culminated in a war that killed north of 600K people, and while it's hard to believe that kind of violence is a possibility for us, we're in for some level of increasing violence, especially if the Blue Team finds a way to keep winning. MAGA is not going away peacefully. We're  not likely to see a territorial war, but I could see assassinations and terroristic acts that will make the 60s and the McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing seem like the good old days. And it's not inconceivable that a Red block of mostly rural states, for instance, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas declare a Democratic administration and Congress illegitimate, and assert their independence. 

And what's a Blue President going to do? Send in the army? Not likely for fear of pushing the border states--the more urbanized Red States like Texas, Florida, Georgia--into the secessionist camp. But if he does nothing, then other rural states like Mississippi, Alabama, etc. will go "independent". Then what? Corporations and Wall Street won't care so long as they're left alone. A lot will depend on where the how many MAGA heads are in the army--not the top brass, but MAGA brigadiers, colonels, and captains, the Michael Flynn types, who command the loyalty of the MAGA lower ranks.

It could get messy. There are a lot of unknown unknowns, so to say. Who knows what kind of plotting and collusion between military and local militias is going on even now? 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 the other hand, If the Red team wins and institutionalizes a nation-wide, one-party system, and continues to stack the courts, it's not as clear to me what the Blue states would do. People will take to the streets, but Blue America has no infrastructure like Red America to support militarized resistance. If there will be any militarized violence it will come from the Red government moving in to suppress the rioting. I think it's likely that we'd become Hungary or Brazil for a while, but not China. It's unlikely that a regime that will be so fundamentally unpopular could last very long, but it could make things miserable for a while. The Hamiltonians won in the 1860s, and the smart money would be on their eventually winning again if a scenario like this unfolds, even if, as then, the early rounds go to the Jeffersonian/Jacksonians. 

Ok, sure I'm letting my imagination get the better of me. But neither scenario is as inconceivable today as it was ten years ago. Who knows what things will look like ten years hence? Better to hope and work for the best and yet be prepared for the worst. But one way or the other, it's likely to get violent in some areas of the country, and if so, it's going to be profoundly destabilizing. How that actually plays out, nobody, I least of all, knows. But it's hard to believe that we're just going to muddle through without there being some catastrophe-generated major realignment.

I'd prefer a scenario in which we'd find a way to muddle through without catastrophe. I'd prefer a stalemate to chaos in the political sphere while we wait for a breakthrough in our cultural life along the lines of what I wrote toward the end of my previous post. But it seems that we humans only learn the hard way. But whatever happens in the short run, I don't really trust the Blues or the Reds to get us safely through the next fifty years without a restoration of the wisdom axis in our metaphysical imaginary. That might be a long shot, but in the meanwhile, better the Blues come out winners because pragmatic is always better than fanatic.

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Note 1: Jacksonians constitute the MAGA base of the GOP, but GOP elite leadershp--McConnell, McCarthy, Romney, Cheney, Stefanic, etc.--are Neoliberal Hamiltonians who often campaign as Jacksonians to remain in power. This is the coalition of Neoliberal Hamiltonian elites and Jacksonian Reagan Democrats that Reagan forged. Reagan was Barry Goldwater with FDR populist charisma. The Jacksonians (for cultural reasons) and Hamiltonians (for economic reasons) in this GOP fusion share common ground in their both wanting as little interference from the federal government as possible in the private sector. But the populist/elite tension between them is real, and it will be interesting to see if the Hamiltonians in the GOP establishment will retain leadership positions in the House and Senate in coming years. Establishment Republicans are the Party of the One Percent, and its interests simply do not align in the long run with the GOP populist base. 

The Democrats, formerly the party of rural and ethnic urban Jacksonians, don't know who they are. Their establishment does not represent the interests of the Hamiltonian One Percent, but of the Hamiltonian top Twenty Percent plus rural and urban Blacks. They have have become resolutely anti-Jacksonian on cultural issues and have become instead a mishmash of Hamiltonian cosmopolitan urban and suburban coastal technocrats and technocapitalists, Blacks, feminists and LGBTQ+ identitarians. As such, the Dems have no real positive uniting vision for an American future. The only thing that unifies them now is in their being the party of anti-MAGA. But, as I've said elsewhere, they won't always have crazy to run against, and there's no future in No.

Since this is the week of the premier of the fifth season of Yellowstone, it's worth a few minutes to show how this Jacksonian/Hamiltonian tension is really the heart of the show.  Jacksonians like John Dutton are in conflict with Neoliberal Hamiltonian developers. Dutton votes Republican, but it's a safe bet that his developer enemies vote Republican too. The few Blue team types that show up are usually portrayed as naive flakes from California.

Beth and Jamie Dutton are both comfortable in the Hamiltonian world in a way that the other Dutton Ranch characters are not. Beth is acceptable to her father in a way that Jamie isn't because Beth's loyalties are beyond question in a way that Jamie's are not. Loyalty is the supreme value in the Jacksonian world. Having no loyalties except to your self is beyond contemptible.

Beth, a true loyalist, submits her Hamiltonian skills to Jacksonian ends; Jamie is untrustworthy because his east-coast elite education has inured him to the Neoliberal Hamiltonian order. He's no longer truly a Jacksonian, and his pursuing a career in the Hamiltonian world is, when push comes to shove, more important to him than defending his family's Jacksonian heritage. He protests that he's loyal, but his loyalty is for hire and can be bought by the highest bidder. He went to Harvard, after all, a place where you learn to be a soulless, Neoliberal, meritocratic, careerist for whom the only value is what the market determines. Ask Larry Summers.