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.  

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. 

++++++++++

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.

++++++++++

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. 

The Coming Violence

These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.

There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.

What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them. 

Tom Nichols

I thought this quote from Nichols was an appropriate follow up to my post yesterday about the foolishness of some moderates who think the more prudent course is to compromise with a paranoia-driven fanaticism by refusing to hold Trump to account legally. There is no remedy for fanaticism, so compromising with it makes no sense. There is only containing it and suppressing it.

Yes, I understand that doing so will feed the paranoia. But the problem with paranoids is that their behavior and attitudes create the enemies that would not exist if not provoked by their paranoid behavior and attitudes. Once paranoia is acted out violently, it's too late to talk them down. It must be dealt with by the lawful exercise of the police powers of the state. And then, yes, the political process should address the legitimate grievances that are the underlying causes of right-wing fear and resentment--what I call ontological dizziness--insofar as that's possible. That's the purpose of my A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity series. 

In the meanwhile the forces of sanity need to contain the forces of insanity. Fanatics we shall have always among us, but J6 was a break point, and GOP complicity in abetting or condoning that violence should de-legitimate the party for all truly sane, patriotic Americans, which most Americans are. The problem is that too many Americans still don't understand what's at stake; they tend to minimize the dangers posed by this paranoia-driven fanatacism--how its inherent authoritarianism deeply threatens both the execution of fair elections and the judicious application of the rule of law. But hopefully that is changing.

True patriots must use the tools available to them to suppress the paranoia while they still have those tools available to them--the law and elections. If there are no longer fair elections or the judicious application of rule of law, there is no longer America. Moderates fear that if the true patriots use the law they will lose the elections, but if patriots don't defend the rule the law for fear of feeding the insanity, what's the point of their winning the elections? 

Update: After posting above, I read Rich Lowry NYT op ed entitled "A Defense of GOP Paranoia":

If it is too difficult now for Democrats to imagine how they might react to such a prosecution of one of their own, they might have a clearer sense soon enough. An indictment of Mr. Trump would invite retaliation, and if Republicans retake the White House, a motivated G.O.P.-controlled Justice Department could be expected to aggressively pursue a reason to indict Joe Biden over his son Hunter’s business dealings.

In the tumult over a Trump indictment, both sides will accuse the other of violating the country’s norms and traditions. But there’s no doubt that a fierce Republican response, deeply distrustful of the authorities and openly defiant, would be profoundly American.

Yes, paranoia, is deeply American.

Lowry really seems incapable of seeing what's going on in terms other than Red Team vs. Blue Team. Lowry purports to want to help Democrats and independents to understand why GOP paranoia is justified, but it seems that it is he who needs much more help in understanding why Democrats, Independents, and Never-Trump Republicans cannot understand why Trump is never held accountable for the blatantly illegal things he does. 

The assumption here is that if the FBI were to come after Biden or Obama, Democrats would be just as upset as  Republicans are that the FBI is going after Trump. Yeah, they would be if the sole justification was revenge, and not holding the accountable for egregious illegal behavior while in office.

I feel like with Lowry, heir to the Wm. Buckley legacy as editor of National Review, we're dealing with someone here whose moral development was stunted in Middle School. Buckley, whatever his limitations, was not a moral moron. Can you think for a moment, Rich, not just about what's good for the Red Team but what's good for the country?  Hunter isn't the president. You get that right? He's no threat to the good governance of the country. He, unlike Trump's kids, has no involvement with Daddy's administration. Whatever they have on Hunter is likely to be dwarfed by what they could get on the Trump kids, but have at it. Go after Hunter, if that makes you feel better. If he broke the law, indict him. Sheesh. The pettiness is breathtaking. 

Here's what Republicans like Lowry can't quite grasp. They assume that because Democrats don't share their pinched, moralistic world view, that they must be even more corrupt and immoral than they are.  But they just aren't by any objective standard. How many of Trump's, Reagan's, and Nixon's associates have been indicted? Lots. How many of Obama's? None. Is that because the FBI has a bias favoring Democrats? Hardly.  

Are there venal, corrupt Dem swamp creatures here and there?  Sure. Go after them if they actually broke the law. But go after them because they broke the law, not just because you want to get even. But there's less to go after because most Democrats believe in the rule of law in the way Republicans don't. Republicans habitually do clumsy illegal and corrupt things in a way that Dems don't. Trump is off the charts, but he's following in the footsteps of Nixon's Watergate and Reagan's Iran-Contra. The idea that Republicans are the party of law and order is facetious. More Republicans get indicted because more Republicans break the law.

Rich, If and when the Dems put up a lying, corrupt, promoter of insurrection, stealer of top-secret documents, who is the first to undermine the peaceful transfer of power in our history , and who otherwise had continuously abused the power of his office for the most venal reasons, then let's talk.  

The Moderate Fallacy against Indicting Trump

If the matter culminates in an indictment and trial of Mr. Trump, the Republican argument would be more of what we heard day in and day out through his administration. His defenders would claim that every person ostensibly committed to the dispassionate upholding of the rule of law is in fact motivated by rank partisanship and a drive to self-aggrandizement. This would be directed at the attorney general, the F.B.I., the Justice Department and other branches of the so-called deep state. The spectacle would be corrosive, in effect convincing most Republican voters that appeals to the rule of law are invariably a sham.

But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it? It would be a risible claim, but potentially a politically effective one. And he might well continue this campaign even if convicted, possibly running for president from a jail cell. It would be Mr. Trump versus the System. He would be reviving an old American archetype: the folk-hero outlaw who takes on and seeks to take down the powerful in the name of the people.

We wouldn’t even avoid potentially calamitous consequences if Mr. Trump somehow ended up barred from running or his party opted for another candidate to be its nominee in 2024 — say, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. How long do you think it would take for a freshly inaugurated President DeSantis to pardon a convicted and jailed Donald Trump? Hours? Minutes? And that move would probably be combined with a promise to investigate and indict Joe Biden for the various “crimes” he allegedly committed in office.

Damon Linker

Dear me. If we uphold the rule of law, the lawless won't like it. Linker seems to believe that if the Democrats don't indict the egregious criminality of Republicans that Republicans will refrain from using the law as a weapon against Democrats. Really?

Here's the problem with moderates like Linker, Brooks, et al. They think they're smarter than Democrats because they are not driven by partisan passions, which they assume is all that's driving Democrats. They think of themselves as understanding the situation better because, as moderates, they are by definition more rational and sensible, that they have a clearer view of what's happening in a way that impassioned Trump haters do not. They see the big picture, but really they don't. They have no real understanding about how their reasonableness leads to a kind of misreading of the situation. 

They are like the moderates in 1850s who thought that the more sensible Southerners would prevail and so they needed to keep compromising with Southern demands. Fugitive Slave Act? Sure, if it makes Southerners happy. But it never makes them happy because fanaticism is never satisfied with compromise. Perhaps because people like Linker are so moderate and rational they are incapable of understanding how fanaticism works. With the GOP now, as there were in the South in the 1850s, there are still some non-fanatics, but they have no influence. None. There is no possibility of compromise if there are no sane actors to compromise with. 

Moderates think that to indict Trump is to pour gasoline on the fire, but the fire has already broken loose in the forest; it's burning out of control and moving toward the cities. One of the chief symptoms of this out-of-control fire is its toleration of egregious criminality.  And as there is no compromising with a raging forest fire, so there is no compromising with the fanaticism of the  GOP; It can only be suppressed or contained.

The Democrats, for all their limitations, are cast in the role of firefighters, whether they want the job or not. And only they have the tools to suppress and contain the fire--suppress by defeating Republicans in the next two election cycles, and contain by insisting on the rule of law. For the firefighters to give up the rule of law is for them to surrender one of their most important tools to contain the spread of the fire. Linker seems to think that if you refuse to contain the fire, it will just go out on its own. Clearly that's not going to happen. Appeasing fanaticism looks weak and feckless because it is. It's a failure of nerve.

The Democrats must persuade non-fanatic Americans that they must use both tools to fight fanaticism--elections and the rule of law. Remember, Republicans are only 23% of the electorate, so the fight here is to persuade Independents that Republican fanaticism is the most important threat to their liberties, and that the rule of law is really what's at stake here. Better to make the case for the rule of law by using the rule of law, than to appear feckless in appeasing fanaticism. 

Yes, it might be too late--the fire might already be uncontainable. But it might not be, so Democrats have to use every tool they have as effectively as they can use them. And I can guarantee that if the firefighters unilaterally disarm by refusing to enforce the rule of law, the game is lost and the negative consequences that Linker predicts will ensue anyway. Does he really believe that if the Democrats are lenient with Republicans that the Republicans will be lenient with Democrats? 

Of course they won't be because to think so assumes that they are sane actors when they are not; they are fanatics. And so that's why Republicans must be kept out of power. But even if Republicans regain power, we have reason to hope that, at least in the short run, the GOP's use of the courts as a political weapon against Democrats will be as effective as their use of the courts to assert Trump's claims about election fraud. The Democrats must use the courts while they still respect the rule of law, or in the long run the courts will become precisely the political weapons that the fanatics already, wrongly, believe they are. 

Update: All the above being said, I agree with Douthat--

It seems like a reasonable presumption that the documents in question are more serious than just some notes to Kim Jong-un but that the potential incrimination falls short of Trump literally selling secrets. But that’s a presumption, not a prediction. I’ve learned to be unsurprised by Trump’s folly and venality but also by his capacity to induce self-defeating blunders among people and institutions I would have considered relatively sensible before his ascent.

So no predictions, just the warning: Don’t miss.

 

A Word about Liz Cheney

I can think of few jobs that are less desirable than being a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. There's a reason why so many Republicans with a lick of sense and a shred of human decency retired. Only a fool would  think of it as a prize to be clung to. It's a prize only for people who have nothing more productive to do with their lives, which would include almost anything. Peter Meijer, Jaime Herrera-Butler, and now Liz Cheney "paid no price" for their vote to impeach Trump; they have all been freed to do something useful, work that will put less stress on their integrity as human beings. They should get down on their knees and thank God that they have been delivered from one of the deeper rings of hell. Their story is not a tragic one, but of liberation. The beast spit them out, and now they can recover their humanity. I congratulate them. 

My view about the worth of any our lives has less to do with one's politics or admirability by whatever conventional standard but rather if when the moment demanded it you stood up and did what was required. Most people are called to do that in quiet ways that don't make headlines or are even noticed at all, and some do it in ways that are in the media glare. None can know what the mix of motives are, and it's none of our business anyway. The main thing is that each of us when we hear the voice of conscience, we hearken to it. In Cheney's case, she clearly stepped up, and I'm grateful she did. Any speculation about other motives is silly. The same is true for Mike Pence, who similarly, after four years of feckless sycophancy, did the right thing. 

I don't think this makes them losers, because they gained more than they lost. They simply did the right thing when they were called upon to do it, just like millions of decent human beings do everyday in ways less publicly visible. The only difference is that history will remember them for it, and history will forget all the others about whom we can say that whatever is left of their humanity and integrity continues to be digested in the belly of the beast that has become the Trumpian GOP. 

Theda Skocpol on Looming Illiberalism

In an inteverview in the Atlantic:

Skocpol: {Trump]’s not necessary for an authoritarian movement to use the GOP to lock in minority rule. The movement to manipulate election access and counting is so far along. I think it’s too late, and we’re vulnerable to it because of how we administer local elections.

What’s happened involves an interlocking set of things. It depends not just on candidates like Trump running for president and nationalizing popular fears and resentments, but also on state legislatures, which have been captured, and the Supreme Court. The Court is a keystone in all of this because it’s going to validate perfectly legal manipulations that really are about locking in minority rule. In that sense, the turning point in American history may have happened in November 2016.

Godfrey: The turning point toward what?

Skocpol: Toward a locking-in of minority rule along ethno-nationalist lines. The objective is to disenfranchise metro people, period. I see a real chance of a long-term federal takeover by forces that are determined to maintain a fiction of a white, Christian, Trumpist version of America.

That can’t work over the long run, because the fastest-growing parts of the country are demonized in that scheme of things. But a lot of things liberals do play into it: Democrats are the party of strong government, and they’re almost as fixated on the presidency as Trumpists are. People on the left started bashing Joe Biden less than a year into his presidency. Why won’t the president just exert his will? Well, that doesn’t work.

The hour is late. This election this fall is critical.

This supports themes I've been developing over the past year. It doesn't matter whether or not Trump's grip on the party is loosening. The party has already been corrupted by him no matter whether he runs or goes to jail. And I think it's pretty obvious to anybody who thinks about it that the southernized GOP bent on one-party rule, has no interest in preserving an open society and has enormous structural advantages that benefit it in the short run. But I've also argued that it can't retain power in the long run for the same reason that the Puritans couldn't retain power in England after Cromwell. Powermad fanatics are loathsome, and the most dynamic and affluent elements in American society simply won't put up with them.

We're not Hungary or Russia where habits of illiberalism are the historical norm. The problem for the forces of sanity in the short run is that most Americans don't think it's as bad as all that. They think that things will get back to normal again, and so the only thing that will arouse them to the reality about what is really happening is for it to happen, and that might require them to experience a good dose of illiberal minority rule. 

Is there a risk that these illiberal fanatics will find a way to consolidate power through the mechanisms of the surveillance state and the military. Yes, there is. And it would be infinitely preferable for us not to run that risk, and as Skocpol says, that's why the midterms are so important.

And it could be a lack of imagination on my part, but it seems to me that this is where American federalism is a bulwark against centralized tyranny. The New England states, most of the Mid-Atlantic states, and the states on the west coast just won't go along with it. Will a GOP Federal gov't declare martial law and occupy these states if they resist? Would the military go along with such a thing? Possibly. But it's hard to imagine such a thing being sustainable. 

And I could be underestimating the illiberal Right, but its leadership has yet to prove that it has the intelligence, discipline, and sophistication to pull something like this off in a society as dynamic and complex as that in the U.S. Whatever success in the U.S. the forces of illiberalism might have in the short run, the reality is to complex for them to control it in the long run. Roger Stone and Steve Bannon are trickster agents of chaos, not strategic geniuses. The other prominent GOP leaders are trolls and hacks who have yet to prove that they have a broader strategic perspective than winning the next news cycle. The militias are full of cranks high on their own delusional thinking. Too many are like the guy in Ohio who attacked the FBI office with a nail gun. 

Whatever the similarities on the level of cultural breakdown, and there are many, we're not the Weimar Republic of the '20s. We're much bigger, more diverse, more economically dynamic, and too allergic to federal overreach, and the fanatics on the Right will overreach. Overreaching is what they do. 

We are living in unprecedented times, and it's impossible to say how all this will play out. We are so used to thinking pessimistically, but we could be surprised by something unexpectedly positive. I do really believe in the basic decency and sanity of most Americans. The problem with them is that most don't grasp the seriousness of what we're facing. Politics is for them like sports, an entertainment, and many root for the Red Team because that's what they've always done, and most Americans have no idea how a hard turn to the Right will concretely impact their lives for the worse. They need to be aroused, but once aroused, they will push back against indecency and insanity. 

So the question before is us whether we're going to save democracy the easy way by refusing to elect Republicans or the hard way by having to endure their illiberalism. We'll find out in the midterms whether the forces of sanity are already aroused enough to resist the forces of insanity. Did anybody expect Warnock and Ossoff to win in Georgia? I know I didn't. I'm feeling more optimistic than I have in a while. We'll see soon enough if I'm just indulging in wishful thinking . 

Stop Saying that Republicans Are the Party of Law and Order

Order maybe; Law, not so much.

Too many in the punditry are talking about conservative Republicans as if they're hypocrites because they endorse the lawlessness of J6 or because they're now calling to defund the FBI. The GOP has not been a party that respects the rule of law for a long, long time--at least since the Republican Party became southernized after Nixon. The Republican Party has inherited the autocratic ethos of the Southern Democrats who have always felt that they are justified to break laws without compunction that they believe are based on liberal principles. There is nothing more liberal than the enlightenment concept "rule of law", if by it we mean that whatever legislatures produce through the democratic process. That's not the 'southern' idea about what law is about. 

I wrote Rule of Law vs. Law and Order in February 2020. Here's a relevant excerpt:

I wrote a long piece in October entitled Law and Order and the Jacksonian Right in which I argued something that I don't think most Liberals understand, which is that for Law and Order Conservatives, the emphasis is on Order, not on Law.

...Republicans see themselves as the party of law and order. I think this only makes sense if you understand that the more important word in that pairing is "order", in the sense of social order, not the political or legal one. Or to put it another way, the political and legal order has legitimacy only insofar as it is a reflection of the social order. The social order that shapes the politics of [American] social conservatives traces its roots back at least as far as the 1820s when the party of Jefferson became the party of Jackson. Then a rather primitive, premodern customary sense of American identity came to dominate in the political sphere, and in doing so replaced the modern, enlightenment imagination embraced by most of the founders. It was a collective return of the repressed. 

We were taught in school that the Jacksonian democracy was a good thing, that it made America more representative of the will of the people. We tend, however to romanticize the "people" because we were not taught that the "people" who saw Jackson as their hero couldn't have cared less about the rule of law and the kind of virtue that is necessary for a true republic to thrive. With the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the older republican imagination of America infused with Enlightenment ideals was displaced by an imaginary that legitimated the lawless, loutish, violent impulses exemplified by Andrew Jackson himself. These Jacksonian Democrats never really cared about good government; they just wanted to be left alone to do their lawless, loutish, violent thing, especially regarding their slaves, the Indians, and the Mexicans. Trump, despite his un-Jacksonian bone spurs, is Jackson redivivus. 

Law and Order is not the same as the Rule of Law. Laws are only legitimate for law-and-order Conservatives if they align with and support their traditionalist social order. Any laws that undermine that order or are out of alignment with it have for them no real legitimacy. Law-and-Order conservatives in the past have often approved lynchings, or the kind of thievery and dirty tricks that led to Watergate, or the defiance of the Bolland Amendment that led to Iran Contra, or the contravention of international law that led to the invasion of Iraq, or now the egregious, flagrant, out-in-the-open lawlessness of Donald Trump.

Conservatives feel not need to take the law seriously except when they get to use it as a club to punish their enemies. What matters is the conservative sense of order, and any illegal actions Conservatives commit need not be punished so long as they either promote the traditionalist social order or transgress it in minor ways that don't destabilize it. Shoplifting is a far more serious crime than tax fraud. 

Russia used to be an enemy of these law-and-order conservatives when it was ruled by the godless communists, but now that it is a nominally Christian, traditional-order autocracy, they see it as an ally. They are very happy to accept its help in keeping Trump in power. They are gleeful that Brennan, Comey, Yates, and all the national security types who appear on CNN and MSNBC are in such a snit about Trump's dismantling of the government and institutions they have devoted their careers to defend. 

And so this explains why Evangelical Christians support Trump. They see him as someone who is restoring the old social order. His personal behavior and lawlessness are irrelevant because they see hm as sent by God to destroy the godless secular Liberal Order. If that means destroying American democracy, so be it. Better a kingdom or autocracy where civil laws align with divine law (in the primitive lex talionis sense) than a democracy that is out of alignment with it. The authoritarian thugs, of course, don't care about the divine order; they just care about maintaining power. But they understand that they need to be seen as champions of the divine order if they are to maintain their base of support.

Liberals need to understand what they're up against with Republicans. The law is no constraint for them because they don't think it's legitimate. We're currently in a cold civil war that is likely to get very hot in the next decade. On the one side Independents and Democrats believe in the rule of law; on the other side, the southernized Republicans who don't. The latter group only believes in using power--violent power if necessary--to impose their idea of social order on everyone else. The law has legitimacy only insofar as it aligns with their idea of underlying social order, which is for them best articulated in Christian Nationalism. 

So nothing is more important than Independents and Democrats keeping Republicans out of power, and to do that they must not vote for them, and when in power they must use the full extent and power of the law to keep their lawlessness in check. 

Third Party Solution?

Jamelle Bouie doesn't think so:

Let’s not mince words. The new Forward Party announced by the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former Representative David Jolly is doomed to failure. The odds that it will attract any more than a token amount of support from the public, not to mention political elites, are slim to none. It will wither on the vine as the latest in a long history of vanity political parties.

Maybe he's right, but the real question for me is not whether the Forward Party will succeed but whether the Democratic Party will fail. Bouie's historical arguments in his piece proceed as if we're living in ordinary times, when in fact we're living in extraordinary times that most resemble the 1850s. The story then was not so much about the emergence of a third party but about the replacement of an old, ineffective one. If Democrats consistently fail in the next decade to beat the GOP nationally, it will have to be replaced, whether it will be with the Forward Party or something else. 

So I agree that a third party cannot succeed in an environment in which the Democrats retain some level of viability, but it's questionable whether it will. A successful new Party will have to be essentially the Democratic Party but reborn, as the Republican Party was the Whig Party reborn. So we're not talking third party here in the ordinary sense, but rather the death and rebirth of the Democratic Party in a form that will be more appealing to sensible non-elite Americans.

I understand that the idea of replacing the Democratic Party seems far fetched at this moment because the Dems seem strong in Blue States and they won the presidency in the last cycle by a healthy margin. But how strong are they going forward if their support among "little-guy" Americans continues to erode? If you are among the educated, affluent elite living in an urban or coastal Liberal enclave, it's your party and you can't understand why everybody doesn't feel about it the way you do. But you're only about a quarter of the electorate, and you have no compelling story that makes your politics attractive to the other 75%. You are hemorrhaging working class voters--even brown and black ones.  You have no structural advantages in the Senate or the electoral college or the courts. A lot of your votes in '20 weren't about choosing you but about rejecting Trump. In the long run, if all you have to offer is we're not those guys, you will fail. The future of American politics will be largely shaped by who wins the white, black, and brown non-elite vote, and right now it's not digging the Dems, and for good reason. 

The silver lining of Republicans seizing control in the short run would be that it will clear the deck to make room for something new and sane, and from where I sit that would be a party that looks a lot like what the Democratic Party was in the pre-Reagan days before Neoliberalism ruined it, i.e., before it became the party of educated elites and was the party of the little guy.

The problem with any party that Yang, Whitman, and Jolly endorse lies in that it will probably be something more along the lines of what educated urban elites would feel comfortable with rather than what most non-elite white, black, and brown Americans would feel comfortable with. Is the Forward Party New Deal 2.0 or just another iteration of Neoliberalism? It will depend on who the key players will be that play a role in shaping it. Will it become a party dominated by Michael Bloomberg types? Then it's dead in the water.  

Nevertheless, I like that the Forward Party sees itself as starting in local races and building ground up. They have no aspirations to put up a presidential candidate in '24. As such, I see them as building an alternative infrastructure that will be in place should the Dems fail in the next two cycles. So I have no idea how all this will play out, but I'm glad that Jolly et al are taking this initiative in the meanwhile. If the Dems fail, it will be a good thing that the infrastructure for something to replace it will have been established. 

The new party that I think could be a winner would be New Deal 2.0. It would be center right on traditional, i.e., family values, center left on economic and environmental issues, compassionate but realistic on immigration issues, common sense on gun safety, and less blunderingly grandiose in foreign policy. I think this is where a good chunk of the rank-and-file Democrats are today, but the party is hemorrhaging blue-collar membership because, as I've argued here and here, the party is too identified with cultural and economic Neoliberalism, the Aspen Institute Liberalism embraced by corporate and other cultural and technocratic elites who play such a large role in shaping the current perception of what the Democrats stand for. 

So the most important question is whether the Dems can staunch the hemorrhaging. If they don't, they will go the way of the Whigs. I'm still a registered Democrat, not out of loyalty or conviction, but because the Republicans are so off-the-charts horrible, and other parties are too narrow in their focus. So I'll continue to vote Democratic until something more broadly realistic emerges, and we'll see if the Forward Party can be that or whether it will just be Neoliberalism in different packaging. 

Update: Tim Miller takes up the same question here. He sees such a party as failing if it has to compete with the other two parties. I agree, but I would say the same to him as I would say to Bouie: A Third Party isn't the answer, but rather is the death and rebirth of the Democratic Party and its fundamentally pro-little-guy progressive impulses. That requires that something like the Forward Party be waiting in the wings should the current Dems fail. 

I would also say that Miller is wrong to think that such a party has to capture Trump voters if by that he means hardcore MAGA voters. According to Gallup, 27% of Americans identify as Republicans, 27% identify as Democrats, and 43% identify as Independents. These Independents are evenly split as to whether they lean Republican or Democrat. A "reborn" Democratic Party along the lines described above can attract a big chunk of the Independents who lean Republican in a way that the current party can never do so long as the Democratic brand is so toxic in traditional-values Middle America.

I'm arguing that the Democrats as they currently present themselves to the country can never win decisively enough to break the gridlock. Far more Americans are Independents than either Republicans or Democrats, which means they have no confidence in either party as they are currently constituted. This is a ripe situation for something new to emerge that holds most people who currently identify as Democrat or lean Democrat, and wins over the many Republican voters who vote against their interests because they believe Republican propaganda about Democrats.

7/30/22 Update: In a post earlier this week I used the metaphor of a string dipped in a chemical solution to which some facts--molecules in the solution--cluster on the string and others find no place to adhere. Whether I'm right about the chemistry is irrelevant--the point is that the string either repels or attracts certain facts or story lines.

The question I'm asking in the post above is whether the Democratic Party has a string anymore that works for non-elite black, brown, and white Americans. If it does, what is it? I'm saying that the Dems need a new string, not because its basic policy agenda is wrong, but because they have become incapable of selling it to a huge chunk of the electorate who have come to see the Dems according to Republican negative stereotypes. Republicans do not hate what most Democrats actually stand for but rather they hate the idea of Democrats as they are negatively stereotyped in conservative media. The Dems so far have found no effective way to push back against such negative stereotyping because they no longer have a positive stereotype that appeals to non-elite Americans. 

The idea of a new party is to provide a new string. Again whether that will be the Forward Party, I don't know. But one way or another American politics needs a more powerful left-of-center narrative string attractive to non-elite Americans than Democrats are now capable of providing. Maybe the only solution is to throw the old one out and start all over. Obviously we're not there yet, but we'll see how things look at the end of the decade. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems likely to me that the Democratic Party, because of its association with the elite ethos of the cultural Left, will continue to lose on other Progressive issues regarding the economy, environment, gun safety because so many people who would side with Democrats on these issues won't vote for them because they believe the Republican negative stereotypes about them.  

Toward a Normie Progressive Politics

I'm getting a little self-conscious about my incessant references to Ezra Klein, but he is quite remarkable for having his finger on what I see as the critical issues. This week he had on Michelle Goldberg, a woman I respect as a sensible Progressive and like for her intellectual honesty and personal authenticity. But she's a good example of this kind of intellectual with all the good will in the world, who I'm sure does not think of herself as a nihilist but whose presuppositions make it difficult for her to argue against ideas that deep down she knows are nonsense. From the podcast transcript:

You know, I’m not sure that there is. I do think that there’s utopian thinking around gender, and this is probably a generational division. And I’m in some ways the wrong person to speak to. There’s someone I interviewed for the piece that I didn’t end up quoting for that bigger piece that we were talking about. I didn’t end up being able to work it in, where she was saying that the thing that really excites her now is the movement for trans rights and these new ways of thinking about and talking about gender.

And it’s not feminism per se, but the idea of making the gender binary, kind of irrelevant as a social organizing principle, I mean, that’s pretty utopian. We’ve never seen anything like that in, as far as I can tell, the history of the world. I mean, this is something that Margaret Mead the anthropologist wrote about, that every society organizes gender differently, assigns different roles to male and female. So those roles, there’s nothing really natural about them. And there’s also a ton of societies that have different iterations of like a third gender, or that allows some sort of flexibility.

Nevertheless basically every society is organized in some sense around the gender binary. You know, so I think there are younger people that have a vision of a society in which that is not true. And it might just be my own lack of vision or creativity that I find it hard to even envision. So I think that is where a lot of the utopian energy on the kind of part of the left that is really concerned about gender.

Utopian thinking is now about making the gender binary irrelevant as a social organizing principle?!?! Goldberg, a married heterosexual with two kids, is rather defensive about her normie status. Maybe, she says, she just doesn't have the vision or creativity of these younger people. Maybe she's just an old fogey now, as if the arrogance of youth gives them a special wisdom and their ideas a legitimacy their elders must bend a knee to. It's the classic conundrum for the contemporary cosmopolitan Liberal elite. The rationalist materialism into which she was acculturated gives her no tools with which to push back when a truly off-the-wall, disembodied Gnostic head trip like this is presented to her.  She has to accept its fundamental validity as the next really cool new thing on the cutting edge even though it goes against what her common sense is telling her is nonsense. Margaret Meade is a straw she desperately grasps at to offer some legitimacy for her understandable negative reaction, but she can't seem otherwise to find a basis to explain it.

The problem here is that this so-called utopian project on the Cultural Left is one that can only be imagined in a society where people believe that humans are only what they are culturally conditioned to be. It's an historicist, anti-essentialist view of humanity, so to be human means whatever people want it to mean. So in the future, since there's no basis for understanding what a human is or what the human good is, whoever has the most power gets to define it. And so at some point, assuming the Cultural Left is running the government, it can decree that all children be acculturated in an AI-powered Skinner's Box where they will be molded into a society that has transcended the gender binary and whatever else the government thinks will make them happy, good citizens.

And why would anyone resist? Everybody will be happily liberated from the constraints of gender. So in such an ideal world we'll all live happily in a transhuman polity where everyone is polymorphously perverse, and no one identifies as male or female, and babies are made in Skinner labs where they are cultivated to fit in a world where everyone is programmed to be like everyone else--happy, happy, happy.

Nobody wants this--not even the people on the cultural Left--but it's what the consequences of their unbalanced equality program lead to. Equality must always be held in tension with freedom, and freedom requires a metaphysical imaginary that is open to possibilities that transcend any particular social arrangement, no matter how utopian its proponents think it. All spirited human beings aspire to something more, something that requires risk and moral courage. The irony of the Cultural Left's project lies in that the "more" that it aspires to leads ultimately to less because its presuppositions shut out other, deeper human possibilities.

Real moral progress cannot come from a behavioral modification regime but by awakening dormant but expansive moral dimensions within people's souls. Such an idea has no resonance within the secular Cultural Left.  People who are awakened like this will be respectful and kind to those who don't fit easily into the broader society's norms, but they will have common sense enough to realize that the norms, though stretchable, cannot be stretched beyond a breaking point. There's a way to make room for people who don't fit without destroying archetypal human norms.

Perhaps in another post I'll talk about how Jung says we're both male and female and St. Paul says we're neither male or female and why I think they're both right teleologically, but my focus here is about our current political situation. My objective here is not to develop an extended argument why this kind of thinking is wrong for us here and now. The gist of such an argument lies with what I've been saying for years now about the way in which Calvinism, Capitalism, and Science have deeply alienated us from any deeply felt connection with the Living Real.

This, I think, was Goldberg's dilemma. Goldberg feels the anomaly, but she can't articulate it in a way that maps to her presuppositions. So this goes to my point about how Liberals are in their own way incapable of thinking outside the norms-destroying frame shaped by Neoliberal and late capitalist presuppositions. These presuppositions certainly shape the ethos of the NY Times and news media in general--but other cultural institutions like universities, non-profits, film, literature, and the other arts. Are the people who work comfortably within these Liberal cultural institutions any more brainwashed than their less sophisticated opponents on the Right?

To the degree that their thinking is simply a reflection of the cultural milieu in which they swim, I'd say they are quite similar in their being unconsciously captured by their respective narrative frames. Are the two frames equally delusional? No, because the Liberal frame maps closer to the world that late capitalism has given us. Even if one is unconsciously captured by it, it aligns with what's there. The Right's narrative exists in a bubble that has only a tangential relationship to what's there. That's why history almost always proves them wrong sooner or later.

And so hard-right narratives are either naive or intellectually dishonest in a way that the Liberal narratives, for all their limitations, are not. Whatever positive step forward that comes next will develop not out of the Right's narrative frame but the Left's. That doesn't mean that we might have to live for a time in a world where the Right tries to jam its narrative down Liberals' throats. But I feel relatively certain that even if the Right enjoys some big short-term victories, it will not be able to sustain control of the critical institutions that shape American society in the long term. They seek to control forces that they simply don't understand.

***

Most Americans accept gay marriages, and if you know any gay-parented families, they are as normal in every way as other American families except for their being two dads or two moms. The point here is that in gay marriage what has been the traditional norm stands; the norm just became flexible enough to accommodate same-sex relationships that before were not accepted as normal. They are broadly acceptable today precisely because while they stretch a norm, they don't seek to abolish or destroy it. Because gay marriage accepts the basic norm, it's easier for traditional normies to accept gay marriage. 

Getting rid of the gender binary, on the other hand, is fundamentally different because such a project assumes that long-standing gender norms are arbitrary constructs whose primary function is to justify patriarchy. I think that's a rather simplistic, reductive way to account for gender. But for the social justice warriors for whom transcending the gender binary is desirable, it follows that it is just as oppressive as racial segregation because it was part of the same patriarchal social structure, and as such has no legitimacy. I have no desire to defend patriarchy, but if there's no idea here of justice as a transcendental, but only of a flattened idea of justice as the repeal of all oppressive taboos. But without any sense of the dignity of human beings as in some way deeply linked to transcendental moral aspiration, the secular cultural Left's taboo-cancelling project ends locking everyone up in some version of a Skinner's Box. 

So there's a difference between stretching norms and destroying them. Insofar as Democrats and Liberals in the media become associated with ideas that are associated with destroying norms that normal Americans believe are central to their identity and to the operating of a healthy society, they will be rejected by most normie Americans. This is a real problem for Democrats insofar as they have allowed themselves to be perceived in the culture wars as associated with cultural energies that are norm destroying. And so it's a real problem for democracy because it depends on Democrats retaining power. 

Democrats differ from Republicans for reasons I outlined yesterday because they are a diverse party of normal Americans who who value tolerance and compromise. However the Democrats as a party have become too identified with extremist activists in their coalition who do not represent the views of most rank-and-file Democrats. Democrats need to become the party of cultural normalcy that contrasts itself with the Republicans who have become the party of crackpot, anti-democracy extremists. To the degree that they can do that, i.e., to the degree that they can accommodate but not become identified the culture-war extremists in their coalition, they can establish a solid governing majority that could pass progressive legislation that will actually be popular.

Most Americans would find Democrats' programs attractive if they weren't proposed by Democrats. Too many normie Americans have come to perceive Democrats as captured by culture-war, norm-destroying activists within their coalition, and so don't trust them in other policy areas. Most rank-and-file Dems are normies, but to the degree that they come to feel that their normalcy is under attack by major constituencies in the Democrats' coalition, they will be pushed toward the Republicans. For Democrats to allow this to conintue in this critical moment would be political malpractice. Democrats need to do everything they can to win the culture war by presenting themselves as the party of normal American values, and if they do that, then they can win on left-of-center Progressive policies. 

Every healthy society needs an avant-garde, but it belongs on the fringes. It stops being avant-garde when it demands to be at the center. Then it just becomes a new Jacobin establishment that will inevitably generate a backlash. So let the avant-garde play its role in challenging and stimulating the thinking and often the gradual evolution of normies, but don't let them push too hard. If they do, they will almost inevitably bring on a backlash that if successful will push them beyond the fringes to underground hidey holes to which they must flee to escape the wrath of the Right that wants payback for all its perceived slights. 

Bremerton Coach Wins His Crusade

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

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

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

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

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

Update 9/17/22: Guess coach has better things to do than coach. 

The Woe of Roe 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See "The Woe of Roe 1".