After the Future

Extreme vs Moderate

In fact, as the Democratic party has moved to the left over the last four years, they have actually done worse among their base voters. They’ve lost a good chunk of their support among nonwhite voters, especially Hispanics, and among young voters. Since 2018, Democratic support is down 18 margin points among young (18-29 year old) voters, 20 points among nonwhites and 23 points among nonwhite working class (noncollege) voters. These voters are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative in orientation and they’re just not buying what the Democrats are selling. Moderation = Democratic votes.

Ruy Teixera, "Ten Reasons Why Democrats Should Become More Moderate"

It depends on how you define "moderate". 

A guy like John Fetterman is a down-to-earth moderate on culture war issues while at the same time being a Sanders economic justice progressive. Is he a moderate or an extremist? Kyrsten Sinema is a corporate shill who's left-of-center on sexual politics issues. Is she a moderate or an extremist? Raphael Warnock is a Christian pastor who is progressive on economic issues. Is he a moderate or an extremist? Which candidates better represent future electoral success for Democrats in "moderate" purplish states? It's obvious to me--the two that represent progressive economic issues that benefit the bottom 80% while maintaining moderate positions, i.e., reasonable and respectful to both sides, on culture war issues. 

So what does Teixera mean by "moving left"? Is he concerned about moving left on progressive taxation, providing affordable childcare, affordable prescription drugs and health care, cleaner air and water, policies to manage climate change, better support for K-12 education, better training programs and financial support for displaced workers, better infrastructure, expanded social security benefits, saner gun safety legislation? Does anybody really believe that normal Americans in the bottom 80% oppose more progressive policies on these issues? It's only special interests who oppose them, and too often being a "moderate" means being in the pocket of special interests. Does moderate mean splitting the difference with Republicans who are against progress on all these things for no good reason except that they are against government doing anything? 

Or does Tuxeira mean by "moving left" moving toward cosmopolitan elite values and against traditional populist values? That's different altogether. I've been advocate for moderation on divisive culture war issues since forever, but that doesn't mean that you should be a moderate on economic issues that benefit most Americans. The two tend to get mashed together in the media and so therefore in the publican imagination, but they should be separated out. Moving left on economic issues is not a loser if Democrats can find a way to regain their lost reputation for being the party of the little guy, which they lost when they became the party of cosmopolitan, Neoliberal elites. Becoming the party of the little guy means accepting that most, whether they are white or people of color, are more culturally conservative. 

So what moving Left means for non-elites is not so much about economic issues, but about cultural and identitarian politics. I understand that identitarian politics is important for the Democrat base--the educated, urban elites and Democratic donor class who dominate the party. I understand that for much of this base economic and cultural justice issues go hand in hand, and I'm not saying that the identitarians should just shut up. I am saying that coalition building requires that factions with shared interests find a way to agree to disagree about the issues that divide them. Woke Neoliberals are greater impediment to substantive progress than culturally moderate everyday Americans.

The problem with any party, whether on the Right or the Left, is not whether its base is morally or intellectually correct, but that those in it tend to be absolutist and unwilling to compromise. And nothing is more alienating and more obstructive to effective coalition-building than factions that take absolutist positions. Nothing generates backlash and oppositional behavior and attitudes more intensely. Absolutists persuade no-one except other absolutists or the weak-minded who go along to get along.

The whole point of coalition building is to de-emphasize what separates and emphasize what unites. Clearly this is a lesson that the Republican Party seems incapable of learning because of the way that its absolutists dominate. The Democrats are not nearly so far gone as Republicans, but the absolutists among them impede their taking advantage of an historic opportunity to win back the more culturally moderate Middle. This 'middle' is willing to move Left on economic justice issues but won't because they dislike and distrust so much the Democrats who would take them there. If Democrats don't do it, the Republicans will eventually wise up and find a way to do it. Populist sentiment already leans their way. So Democrats--wise up. Find more John Fettermans and Raphael Warnocks. And ignore the Gavin Newsoms and empty suits who otherwise check all the boxes like Kamala Harris.

Liberalism + Whatever

There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.

--Ross Douthat

There are many Liberalisms from the hard, classic Libertarianism of the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute to the soft Liberal Niceness of bleeding-heart Dems, but Liberalism, whether left- or right-leaning, is the basic cultural operating system that runs American society, and as such it is essentially the ideological justification for the material conditions that Capitalism has created. And whatever the material benefits produced by Capitalism, this ideology in turn justifies its sociopathies in all its iterations from Industrial Capitalism to Consumer Capitalism to what I've been calling Technocapitalism, the thing that is warping our minds and flattening our souls as our humanity becomes more deeply disembodied and simulacral.

So it's not surprising that Liberalism is under attack from both the Left and the Right, but mostly from the Right--whether it's the Claremonsters like Michael Anton and John Eastman, the Federalists like John Daniel Davidson, or the Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, all of whom in their different ways are are at the very least dabbling in illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum and in doing so has given Progressives a bad name. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below. 

So both Republicans and Democrats are Liberals, and both parties assume its Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, no matter what the individual religious or spiritual beliefs of its members. Michael Novak's theo/neocon nonsense notwithstanding, the phrase Christian Capitalism is an oxymoron. American Democrats' biggest blind spot is their assumption that Capitalist political economies are the best and really the only healthy possibility. At the same time, neither party denies that Capitalist political economies are in their essence sharklike--predatory, impersonal, cruel, vicious, untameable. The difference between them lies in that the Democrats think the shark is tameable and the Republicans don't.

So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves. 

Republicans, the "Conservative" Liberals, are probably right and in this sense they are more realistic than Democrats about how capitalism and the society it has created really works. They see Liberal Democrats as feckless in their thinking that Capitalism has a benign face, and just plain silly insofar as Dems try to be Bruce, the fish-friendly shark in Finding Nemo. You know, "Fish are friends, not food." Cute idea, but unless someone like St. Francis is his trainer, a ridiculous one. The problem with this kind of "liberal" Liberal is that they are too comfortable with Capitalism and too complacent about its fundamental nihilism and so too easily find ways to to live with it because for the most part they benefit from its predations.

So implied in the Douthat epigraph above is that that Liberalism is a cultural operating system that anybody who feels the emptiness of its nihilism finds ways to hyphenate it with what he calls "liberalism plus"--Liberalism plus nationalism, Liberalism plus mainline Protestantism, etc. The "plus" is what gives Liberalism the meaning that it can't supply on its own. But in the end all these "pluses" are simply remoras clinging to the shark's underbelly. And mainstream Protestantism might have had a genuine spiritual energy for a while that imposed some constraints on the monster, but Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist forms, was always in an uneasy tension with the beast its theology cleared the way for. Eventually the monster ate mainstream Protestantism leaving only its most fanatical forms behind, and now the shark roams free gobbling up the customs and traditions of the heartland. We call the shark's unconstrained freedom since the Reagan era Neoliberalism.

Democrats feel guilty about how they benefit from Capitalism in a way the Republicans do not, and Republicans, as a way to deal with their own repressed guilt, project their contempt for Democrats as weakness, gutlessness, or a fundamental lack of manliness. Blue America is thought of by Red America as overly populated by educated hollow men like Jamie Dutton. And as for the underclass, life is hard, they assert, and we do the weak no good to make it easier for them. Better to brand them like a cow or make them shovel out the stables, and then see if they have what it takes to become a real man. And so we get these absurd, cringey manliness performances from people who have no center--empty suits  like Don Jr., Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. And yet they are embraced by Red America despite the utter inauthenticity of their schtick. "They're phonies, but they're our phonies," declares Red America.

But Liberal elites on the cultural Left, rather than focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief from their guilt in a performative priggishness. Is there real compassion and thirst for Justice that motivates those in the woke social justice warrior project on the Secular Left? For some, of course, yes, and I don't question their sincerity. But the ethos that frames this project is more the heir of Foucault and Deleuze than Gandhi and King. Does this cultural Left mindset allow for the possibility of Justice as a transcendental ideal? Clearly not. Whether these folks have read Foucault and Deleuze or not, the mental framework that shapes the SJW project derives from a postmodern commitment to historicism that makes any talk of transcendentals incomprehensible.

So my criticism of the post-Marxist Left, i.e., the Left that has given up on class war for culture war, is that its identitarian politics leads to a form of groundless metaphysical lostness that gives meaning and purpose to its warriors only so long as one is engaged in the liberating project to abolish taboos. But once you run out of taboos, then what? This project is only good at saying No but has nothing inspiring to which it can say Yes. 

Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 1] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.

Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 2]

The project on the illiberal, reactionary Right derives from an assertion of ontonormativity divorced from an intuition of it as participating in the Living Real. They focus on the empty form, not the life that gave the form its shape. And so without the life, the empty form too often becomes filled by dark, chthonic impulses that serve ends that are quite the opposite of what ontonormativity would inspire. They justify the illiberalism of their project because they believe American society needs an intervention, and that because they know better, they must rescue society from its nihilism and restore Justice and Cosmic Order to a society that has lost any sense of either. But, in fact, they don't know any better.

And yet they persuade themselves that if people don't understand it now, they'll nevertheless benefit from their tough-love intervention. Eventually those who resist will come to appreciate the benefits of having been "educated" by the new regime. So they use this appropriation of transcendental idealism to justify their illiberalism, and are either ignorant of or don't care that in the past similar justifications have legitimated the most horrifying violence. It derives its energies not from the Living Real, but from an old, anal, control-freaky impulse that leads to the auto da fe and pogrom. 

I agree that the only real solution to the nihilistic crisis that is at the heart of contemporary Liberalism is a religious one, but I have argued here for years that that the fundamental choice that lies before us as a society is not between religion and secularism but between good religion and bad. Politics as religion is always bad religion because politics--and economic striving, as well--when they become the primary source of meaning in people's lives, become parodies of religion, and as such a form of idolatry. One's participation in politics and the economy should be shaped by one's religious commitments, but they should never be substitutes for them. 

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Note 1: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

See also Geneaolgy Part 8 "Plato--Habitus as Heuristic"

Note 2: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it. 

I spend a lot of time talking about Vervaeke in Parts 4A,4B, 5, and 6 of my Genealogy Series. In Part 6 I make the case why I find Vervaeke's insistence on understanding ontonormativity within a naturalistic framework inadequate. So I am appropriating the term in way that is congenial to my Transcendentalism that is different from Vevaeke's use of the term. My idea of ontonormativity bears some relationship to the Eastern idea of the Tao or the Western idea of Natural Law, but not in a way that is primarily intellectualized or systematized. By that I mean that the ontonormative is discerned by the supple or wise heart. It's grounded in a kind of inspired or awakened experience that breaks through our acculturation from a transcendent source. It's not derived from logic but from the cognitive capabilities of a supple heart. 

 

Sincerely Bad Religion

I wrote a post last week about Tolkien, fantasy, and escape that attempted to make a relatively nuanced argument that fantasy escape can be a healthy thing if one is truly imagining a world that represents a reality that is more real than the prison in which we are currently confined. It is healthy if, for instance, it inspires or wakes us up to aspire to a nobility of spirit that we have been unaware of or need reminding of. So some fantasies are qualitatively better than others if what is imagined is truly ennobling in some way. Vulgar fantasies of wealth and fame and power, not so much.

Tolkien's romanticism imagines a world before the twilight of the gods, i.e., before it became disenchanted. It is suffused with nostalgia in that sense, and there is no future in nostalgia. But it is a world in which many of its characters have a nobility of spirit that is no longer found in our most important public figures, and that needn't be the case. There are ways in which figures of the past can be represented that inspire us to find ways to retrieve it in a contemporary key. That's why we read the classics--or should.  There is no going native in the past, but we have much to learn from the ancestors, who knew many things that we have forgotten.

And because we live in a secular, disenchanted world does not mean that we must always do so. I believe that in the long run the human project is to find the interior spiritual resources to renew the face of the earth, to create such a world if enough humans could find within themselves the nobility of spirit that could do it. But such a project cannot be accomplished by people who might want such an outcome but haven't the spiritual maturity to effect it, and such people are dangerously naive if they think that if they dominate in the political sphere they can restore by fiat what has been lost or forgotten.

And so it was depressing but not surprising to learn in this piece in the NY Times about the Italian far Right's Giorgia Meloni's assertion that Tolkien's LOTR is sacred text:

But in Italy, “The Lord of the Rings” has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-Fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes and creation myths free of Fascist taboos.

“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” said Ms. Meloni, 45. More than just her favorite book series, “The Lord of the Rings” was also a sacred text. “I don’t consider ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fantasy,” she said.

...

“The genre of fantasy in Italy has always been cultivated by the right,” said Umberto Croppi, a former member of the Italian Social Movement who is now the director of a national association of public and private agencies in Italy’s culture industry. He said that the two worlds shared a “vision of spirituality against materialism, a metaphysical vision of life against the forms of the modern world.”

Tolkienism, as I'm sure Tolkien would be the first to tell you, is bad religion. But this speaks to what I've been writing about here for quite some time now, which is that people are inherently religious, and that in a secular society they will adopt bad religion rather than none. Cosmopolitan Liberalism represents the "None" category in questionnaires that ask what one's religious affiliation is. And in the U.S. the Democrats have become in public perception the party of None.

And so since the traditional churches have worked so hard to undermine their spiritual authority and offer no robust healthy alternative, bad religions proliferate like weeds. None seems a perfectly understandable response. I don't belong to the Nones, but I don't think politics should be about metaphysics, but about solving practical problems that affect the common good. But I recognize that in a time when the churches have largely failed to deliver good religion, people will grab onto any kind of bad religion. And politics--whether on the Right or the Left--is always bad religion when it becomes an arena for achieving one's metaphysical fantasies. 

Another example of this was rather poignantly represented in this week's Paola Ramos's Field Report in which she meets with Republican Mayra Flores and her Evangelical supporters. Flores is interesting because she is a Republican from the religious right who flipped a traditionally Latino-dominated district from blue to red in a special election earlier this year. What makes this show poignant is Flores's sincerity, her basic decency, and her naïveté. She's is in way over her head for failing to understand how her personal story is being manipulated by fascistic forces that I'm sure she would disavow if she understood better what's really happening.

One of the basic ideas through Ramos's show is how many Latinos who habitually voted Democratic have come to discover that Democrats simply don't represent their values, which they define as God, family, country. The Republican Party, in their view of it, comes much closer to representing those conservative values than the Democratic Party, so why do they just mindlessly vote Democrat? That's very powerful question to pose to Latinos who have voted for Democrats not out of conviction but out of habit. There are a lot of Latinos in Texas and elsewhere right now that are being confronted with that question, and what answer do the Democrats have for them? That they're not as mean as Republicans on immigration? 

That is very weak tea compared to the need so many people feel for their politics to align with their deepest metaphysical longings. That's what explains both Meloni in Italy and Flores in Texas--there is this deep desire for a more meaningful politics, a politics that is not just about fixing bridges and paying medical bills, a politics that aligns the world down here with the world up there--"thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", a longing that seeks a cure for the disease of secular disenchantment.

I understand that longing, but I also understand how easily it is demagogued. Demagogues understand these longings, and they understand how to channel what should be the focus of religion into a place where they don't belong, which is politics. It is one thing for one's religious commitment to inform his or her political choices; it's another to force those religious commitments onto others in the political sphere. 

Conservatives have always been very alert to the dangers of immanentizing the eschaton when the imagined eschaton is Leftish, but less so when it is Rightish. The inevitable result, whether Left or Right, is a cure that is worse than the disease. Politics should not be where you find your life's meaning. In a pluralistic society, meaning comes from diverse cultural sources--religions, philosophies, customs, traditions--that must be respected in their diversity. The political sphere should only be concerned with finding consensus about solving practical problems that affect us all as Americans. Whether or not you agree with the solutions that Democrats propose, they are serious about solving problems in a way that the GOP just isn't. The question going forward is whether the Democrats' utilitarianism, which is proper for politics, can compete with the GOP's metaphysical project, which is proper for religion but not for politics.  

Flores's pastor is a key figure in her political success. Whether or not he is a demagogue, I don't know. But it's clear that he's very ambitious--and has adopted as his slogan the Trumpian "Make America Godly Again".  I'm sure in his own mind he sincerely believes he's ambitious for God, not for himself. But so do all religious fanatics believe that. Hopefully that fanaticism will be repellant to most non-evangelical Latinos in Texas, but who knows? Again there's a naïveté here that is both touching and frightening. And what's frightening is that in Flores's success, the GOP sees a strategy for winning over a traditional Democratic constituency, and the Democrats as they are currently constituted have no effective antidote, at least none that I'm aware of. 

UPDATE 9/10/22: It turns out that Mayra Flores got whooped in the regular election for her seat 53% to her 44%. Fun while it lasted. 

Moral Parity

The former president recognized that the fact of an investigation was far more important than the results. It worked with the Benghazi investigation, about which House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was accidentally honest, and in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, which didn’t produce charges but did hobble her presidential campaign. By the time Trump was extorting Volodymyr Zelensky by withholding defense supplies in 2019, all Trump wanted was for Ukraine to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden. He didn’t even care whether it actually happened, because the talking point is what he needed.

Each successive new gambit offers the tantalizing prospect that the crooked behavior everyone has seen on public display from Trump over the past seven years is somehow actually the product of nefarious plotting by his opponents. Now Trump is on to a new battle over his alleged absconding with presidential records, including highly sensitive information, to Mar-a-Lago. Once again, he has claims of hoaxes. Once again, they don’t hold water. Yet hope springs eternal among MAGA backers, well fertilized by manure spread by the former president. Trump’s vindication can never be failed; it can only be delayed.  

David Graham

The whole premise of MAGA is that Democrats are so corrupt, so evil, so beyond the moral pale that whatever wild accusations are made about Democrats' crimes only scratch the surface of the dark horror that lies below. Just wait--it will all come out. It's just a matter of time before it all comes to light.

"Sure," those on the religious right argue, "Trump might have crossed the line here and there, but whatever he's done is nothing compared to what these demon-possessed Democrats have done." That the evidence supports the opposite, that more corrupt Republicans get caught than Democrats by a fairly wide margin does not matter because, they think, the Dems are just cleverer in avoiding getting caught or the Liberal Media in collusion with the Deep State insures that they don't. 

The first step toward moral maturity is owning your projections, or as the gospel puts it, "Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but fail to notice the log in your own eye?" That's really at the heart of the problem for those on the religious right in this country. They think they are morally righteous when in fact they haven't even taken most basic steps toward achieving it. Matthew goes on: "You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."

Seeing clearly is not something that happens much in MAGA world because they are so easily manipulated to see what is not there. MAGA folks are too obsessed with seeing evil in the Other. And so they have not the moral maturity or aptitude to recognize that that they see the Other not as they are but through the lens of their own unowned wickedness.

I was talking about Tolkien in my previous post and about how 'fantasy' often finds a way to urgently illuminate truths in a way that plain prose or realistic fiction cannot. This passage from The Silmarillion is about how the fallen Valar Melkor works with ordinary, decent folk who lack the discernment that comes with moral maturity--

Long was he at work, and slow at first and barren was his labour. But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed while others reap and sow in his stead. Ever Melkor found some ears that would heed him, and some tongues that would enlarge what they had heard; and his lies passed from friend to friend, as secrets of which the knowledge proves the teller wise. Bitterly did the Noldor atone for the folly of their open ears in the days that followed after.

When he saw that many leaned towards him, Melkor would often walk among them, and amid his fair words others were woven, so subtly that many who heard them believed in recollection that they arose from their own thought. Visions he would conjure in their hearts of the mighty realms that they could have ruled at their own will, in power and freedom. . .  .

J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion, p. 69

The manipulation of the religious right, Qanon, and others in MAGA world by Melkorian lies is as old as the hills. Liberals, of course, are not immune from such manipulation, but their vulnerabilities lie in their seduction by the material abundance produced by techno-capitalism. "Let the Invisible Hand do its thing," whispers Melkor. "Don't interfere or you'll make things worse. Leave it to the Hand. All shall be free; all shall be well."  And way too many Liberals in the cultural and political spheres kneel to the Hand. 

The delusions of the Cultural Right might lead to the end of democracy in the short term, but the delusions of the Cultural Left might lead to the end of humanity in the long term. So in this sense there is moral parity: the delusions and moral immaturity of both work hand in hand to paralyze the collective will to find a cure for what most deeply ails us. But in order to be able to deal with the long-term threat, we need a vibrant, healthy, democratic open society--a society that is open to allow remedies to arise bottom up, and which has the discernment to know which remedies are delusional and which might actually work. 

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.

 

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.  

Why Don't Biden's Achievements Matter?

Pildes cites American National Elections Studies data on white voters in the 2016 election showing that Trump won among all income categories of whites making less than $175,000, while Hillary Clinton won only among whites who made in excess of $175,000.

...Democratic support plunged from 49 percent to 27 percent among Hispanic conservatives between 2012 and 2020 and from 69 percent to 65 percent among Hispanic moderates. These changes suggest that ideology, rather than identity, is beginning to provide more of a voting basis among some Hispanics. If a marginally greater number of working-class Latino or Black voters start to vote the way that white working-class voters do, the ability of the Democratic Party to win national elections will be severely weakened.

Thomas Edsall, "Red and Blue America Will Never Be the Same"

The answer to the question posed in the title is that his accomplishments are abstract and boring for everyone who's not a wonk. They don't engage the public in a way that gets them to pay attention or to care. Not to go completely Postman here, but what grabs the attention is not that Biden was able to get something important done, as it appears he will for instance in this recent environmental legislation, but the way that Manchin toyed with Biden, and finally threw him a bone. It fits with how weak he looks physically, how weak he looked during the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and how he didn't really end Covid decisively, and is ineffective in fighting inflation. Substance on other issues, whether the rescue plan, the infrastructure plan, or now this environmental bill doesn't matter; image and stereotyped interpretive frames do. Biden does not deserve the astonishing low approval numbers he has had for the last year, but this goes a long way to explaining why he has them. 

Biden's actual effectiveness is overwhelmed by all the ways he's perceived as ineffective. He'll be remembered by historians for getting quite a lot done in a narrow timeframe with narrow majorities in an unprecedented politically polarized environment. His record so far is really quite remarkable, but that probably won't help him or the Dems with the voters in the next two cycles. Or so it seems a this juncture. If the Dems have any chance at winning, it will be because the Republican establishment loses control of what has been its winning formula or stereotype since Reagan. The crackpot Republican base might just prevent the Republicans from taking power in a cycle when ordinarily they would in a cakewalk. Stop the Steal is not a winning formula. 

Republicans understand in a way that Dems don't that policies almost always have no political importance. Posture is what matters, and you have to have the right actor to play the role to enhance the illusion. What matters are stereotypes that are deeply embedded in the American collective psyche, and these stereotypes are like a string dipped in a chemical solution that draws certain facts and quasi-facts to crystalize on it while other facts can find no place to adhere.

The formula that has worked so powerfully for Republicans is captured in their self representation as fiscally conservative grownups who are strong on national defense while representing Democrats as irresponsible spendthrifts who are weak on crime and yet want a huge, intrusive nanny state to micromanage your lives. It works to their advantage in three ways--

It repels all the facts about Republican fiscal irresponsibility that led to the 2008 disaster and attracts all the facts that blame Democrats for inflation, unemployment, huge deficits.

It repels facts concerning GOP responsibility for the disaster in Iraq and its lack of support for veterans and attracts any ideas that Republicans would have done a much better job with getting out of Afghanistan.

It attracts facts that Dems are the party of racial unrest and social disorder in the tradition of the Watts riots, the anti-WTO riots, Occupy Wall Street and other examples of leftist unrest since the '60s, and it repels the idea that any upstanding Republican would ever be among the rioters on J6. It must have been Antifa, or a just a few bad apples.

Many facts, no matter how credible and well founded, find no place to crystalize and adhere on their string. The Democrats get blamed for every crazy Left thing that happens not because the vast majority of Democrats support them but because they are not perceived as strongly against them as the Republicans are. Republicans with terrible candidates can win when they use this formula effectively. Americans will vote for Glenn Youngkin but not Doug Mastriano. They will not vote again for Donald Trump. It remains to be seen whether Ron Desantis can work this formula while holding the MAGA base.

People who pay attention know that these stereotype have little or no relationship to reality, but it doesn't matter for the vast majority of voters. These are the mental habits that organize right-of-center thinking on Main Street, and it's why it's so extraordinarily difficult to get people to see or accept facts that don't fit. You have to have a truly overwhelming anomalous event to break such habits of mind, and you'd think that the Trump presidency that culminated in the events on J6 would qualify as overwhelming in that sense.

But what makes it so hard for the horror of J6 to break through is that it just doesn't fit habitual patterns of thinking for people on the center right and beyond. BLM, regardless of the merit of its concerns, fits the stereotype of Left-promulgated disorder, while on the other hand J6 doesn't fit the disorder stereotype because there is no stereotype in which conservatives promulgate social disorder. If conservatives use violence, they do it to preserve or restore order, not disrupt it. The good conservatives on J6 just got caught up in the moment. They sincerely believed they were patriots fighting to restore order to a disordered country. Maybe they went too far, but their intentions were good. They meant no harm. They're not like Blacks and other Leftists who want to upend social order with all their complaints about unfairness. 

It drives Liberals crazy to think that anyone can see J6 as less significantly disruptive than the BLM protests after the Floyd killing. But it's easy to understand if you understand why facts don't matter and only the interpretive frames do. And what shapes the interpretive frames are these long-standing habitual stereotypes, which are enormously difficult to break, and certainly rational argument and presentation of evidence isn't going to do it. Such contrary evidence and arguments have no string on which to cluster. 

So J6 is an anomaly whose most frightening implications simply cannot be comprehended by the old habits of mind, and so most otherwise sane center-Right Main Streeters are open to any explanation that will help them to push out of their minds the most disturbing implications of the Trump years and of the significance of J6. They don't want to believe it, and they won't if they can find a way not to.

What do the Democrats have to fight back against the way they are negatively stereotyped by the Republicans? The most powerful positive stereotype Democrats had through most of the last century was in their plausibly representing themselves as the party that fought for and cared about the little guy. That stereotype lingers, but since the Clinton administration has grown gradually less plausible as the party became increasingly dominated by Neoliberal elites. 

So what's the Dem brand now? It's become the party of facts and evidence, process and legislative good order. "Hey, we don't get much done," they say, "but we do it in a sober, responsible way. Wonkish intellectuals love us, and so you should, too. And even if we do get something done, you won't notice, because it won't affect your lives in a way that you will ever associate with us. You'll probably give the credit to your local GOP pol who voted against it. So choose us because we're boring and sane and the other guys are wild and crazy."

If the Dems have a better story than this, what is it? What story do they have that is the string to which their accomplishments can cluster?

But the message that the Dems are the party of good process and rule of law fails because the old habits see the Dems as the party of social disruption and the GOP as the party of sobriety and law & order. All the actual facts about each party are out of alignment with the old stereotypes, but it doesn't matter. The more confusing things get, the more the average voter doubles down on the stereotypes. 

But the problem is that even if the J6 Select Committee breaks through in a way that eliminates Trump from running in '24, which is looking more likely, it just clears the way for other less crazy seeming but just as toxic Republicans to take the field because they have a story that resonates while the Dems just don't--not with ordinary Americans anyway. The long-term viability of the Democrats as a party is thus a significant question until they find a story that works with ordinary Americans outside the educated elite. And you  can't do that overnight.   

Update 8/7/22: The week since I've posted this has been as remarkable for Dem Good news as last summer was remarkable for Dem bad news. That positive shift is reflected in the MSM, but it's too early to tell whether it makes a difference in the public perception of Biden and his party. How and why some things break through and others don't is rather mysterious to me. I'm old enough to remember that everybody thought Reagan was a failure after his first two years--he had a 35% approval rating, but things shifted rather quickly in the second half of his first term. 

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. 

The Difference between Republicans & Democrats

Today’s Republican Party … is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government’s role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for “balance,” constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.

--Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein

Mann and Ornstein are two scholars of American politics with a decades-long reputation for non-partisan analysis. This excerpt from their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks, is quoted in Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized where he talks about why Republicans seem unified in a way that Dems never seem able to be. Republicans can go deep, while Democrats must go wide. This requires that Democrats be more willing to compromise, which in turn requires that they be less ideological and fanatic. Klein writes--

The percentage of Americans calling themselves conservative has long dwarfed the percentage who identify as liberal. In 1994, conservatives outnumbered liberals 38–17. That gap has closed in recent years, but as of January 2019, conservatives still lead, 35–26. Three-quarters of Republicans identify as conservative, while only half of Democrats call themselves liberals—and for Democrats, that’s a historic high point. Self-identified moderates outnumbered liberals in the Democratic Party until 2008. What that means is Republicans have been able to appeal to their party through ideology. Democrats haven’t. They’ve had to appease a coalition of whites and nonwhites, liberals and moderates, the fixed and the fluid. They’ve done that by promising different policies to different groups—offering a transactionalist, more than ideological, approach to party building.

In their book Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins offer the most careful study yet of the differences between the Republican and Democratic coalitions. What they find is that the Democratic Party is a diverse collection of interest groups held together by policy goals, while the Republican Party is built atop a more united base that finds commonality in more abstract, ideological commitments. (Why We're Polarized (2020), pp. 231-32)

So a couple of takeaways here.

First, Democrats are not nearly so ideological as Republicans. They are more practical and willing to compromise. There are ideological factions in the Democratic Party, but they do not dominate the party in the way that ideologues dominate the GOP.

Second, Republicans, notorious for their projecting their own attitudes onto others where they don't exist, see Democrats as they see themselves, as fanatics driven by ideology. They want to believe that the "squad" is calling all the shots. They're not. The Progressives coalition, for instance, lost the internecine Democratic fight about linking the vote for BBB to the Infrastructure bill. Democrats just want to solve problems. Ideologues and fanatics dominate in the GOP in a way that they just don't in the Democratic Party. The argument that both parties are equally driven by their extremists just isn't true. 

Third, Democrats are vulnerable to be identified with the ideolgues in their midst because in their diversity the Dems are a mashup of interests who too easily become identified with the sillier extremist, e.g., those who want to defund the police or who are caught up in some politically correct purity obsession of the moment. People who have these concerns, of course, have a right to fight for them, but the Democratic Party should not be identified with them at a time when democracy depends on the Party broadening its appeal.

Democrats are a mishmash in terms of policy substance, but Republicans perceive them as rabid ideologuues. But because no other identifying vision stands out in this mishmash, there's no robust, sane, positive counterweight to shape public perception. The extremist ideologues stand in the foreground crowding out the more accurate perception that most Democrats are moderate, down-to-earth problem solvers. The solution for this is for the Democrats to find what I've been calling a motivating Progressive vision that unites and inspires their broad representation of the American population--and perhaps might even inspire those independent thinking Republicans who are not ideologues. A vision that is Lincolnesque in its broader outlines to achieve a more perfect union, not so fragmented as to be identified with particular culture-war factions within the coalition. People should feel proud to identify as Democrats. How many do? I know I don't. 

A fourth point is that you can't run a democracy with one party unwilling to compromise, and that's why the future success of the Democratic Party is so important. Mann and Ornstein entitled their their book It's Even Worse Than It Looks because they saw in 2012, even with Romney as the GOP presidential candidate that year, that the party had already been captured by the crackpot ideologues that would inevitably embrace Trump. One of the worst things that MAGA world can say about a Republican today is that he's a Romney Republican. Those relatively sane Republicans have no place in the party anymore. Some have figured that out. Apparently Romney has not. I admire his integrity; I'm dismayed by his obtuseness. 

A fifth point is that the description that Mann and Ornstein give of the GOP above is a description that now fits the Supreme Court majority. 

Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

--Ronald Reagan quoting Thomas Paine in his speech accepting the GOP nomination in July 1980. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until Reagan, even in the South, we were making real progress toward a more perfect union, and then it all stopped. Why? Because of Reagan's radical program to start the world over again by which he meant to restore America to a time before the New Deal. 

I know it's more complicated, but I trace the acuteness of the current crisis of American democracy back to Reagan. Morning in America was really the beginning of a journey into the heart of darkness, a journey that led us to Trump. With Reagan the sorting and the polarizing and the  tribalizing begins. He opened up the space for the more cretinous, resentment-driven, and hateful characteristics of the American character to emerge and to be legitimated.

At the root of the current crisis is a fundamental inability of great swaths of the American populace to distinguish truth from fantasy. Reagan's was always an American-greatness fantasy that had little to do with the complex realities of living in America. It gave Main Street Americans a meaning story when they intensely felt the need for one, but while it might have seemed benign and Norman Rockwell-y enough at first, Morning in America was the beginning of a longer story that has created in so many Americans a compulsive need for delusion that has made it possible for them to take Donald Trump seriously. as a legitimate political leader. 

Conservatism, traditionally, has never really had a program; it was always primarily about enlisting a natural resistance to change as a way to protect the interests of the the wealthy. The philosophical roots of Conservatism are not Libertarian--quite the contrary--but Libertarianism has a convenient ideology to justify its negative animus toward an intrusive, constraining administrative state. Everyday Americans are duped into thinking that a bootstrapping, rugged individualism constitutes an essential element of the American character. Such an attitude might have promoted one's chances for success during pioneer days, but they make no sense in America after the Industrial Revolution.

More thoughtful Conservatives, guys like Bill Buckley, thought that too-rapid change was destabilizing and driven by naive, do-goody Liberals, who, even with all the best intentions, promoted a project that would destroy the social and cultural infrastructure that makes civilization possible. He was partly right, but it wasn't do-goody Liberals who were to blame but the fundamentally socially disruptive dynamics of laissez-faire capitalism. [See Note 1]

So conservatives don't like the way America changed after WWII, but really since FDR. And they waited a long time for their moment to roll things back. And they got their chance when the Progressive America that Brownstein describes above started to unravel in the late 60s and 70s. This unraveling was not caused by Liberals but by the necessary lancing of a long festering boil on the American soul--segregation in the South combined with outrage at a futile war in SE Asia. All this exploded in unrest in the context of a society whose norms were dissolving in consumer capitalism's torrential acid rain. 

Reagan couldn't bring himself to blame consumer capitalism, so he blamed government: His laugh line--“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."--became a mantra for Republicans, and Neoliberal Democrats accepted that the era of big government was over. In doing so, they gave in to the idea that big government was the problem. Of course it wasn't. It was never about getting rid of big government but about whose interests it would serve--those of wealthy elites or of everyday Americans.

The enemy for conservatives was always the administrative state, the state that in its New Deal and Great Society programs provided the infrastructure for the progress described in the Brownstein excerpt above. Traditionalist Conservatives blame Liberals for getting in the way of their restoring the America they love and that they believe was taken from them, but it's rather like blaming Liberals for hurricanes and tornadoes--and then doing everything possible to prevent them from taking steps to mitigate their most destructive effects.

***

I'm not against capitalism; I'm against unfettered capitalism. I'm not against change; I'm against change that is dehumanizing. In order to direct change in such a way that it promotes human flourishing, you  have to have a model of history--a compelling meaning story--that has some working relationship with the dynamic forces that are shaping history. In other words, you need a philosophy or a theology of history to make sense of it. It has to be plausible and intellectually honest, and that requires that it never present itself as the absolute truth, but rather as a working model to help us navigate history in the most humanly productive way. But it needs to be inspiring. 

Americans have no such public philosophy of human flourishing except one shaped by a crude, it's-the-economy-stupid materialism. Our public religion by default is the cult of the Invisible Hand, the market deity that makes everything turn out right if we just let it do its thing. The Invisible Hand doesn't care about traditional values. It's a rapacious deity that is fed only by human greed and a compulsive need for growth. And it is greed and growth that have destroyed what Red America feels so deeply the loss of. They blame Liberals, but they should blame the Invisible Hand. And if they're honest, they will recognize that they, too, are worshippers in its cult.

Directing change that promotes broad human flourishing is almost impossible to do when there is no consensus about what constitutes human flourishing. in a Libertarian ethos, we are constrained from making judgments about the choices people make. Who are we to judge? So this in turn leads us to a least-common-denominator imagination of human possibility, for instance human possibility as Judd Apatow or Mark Zuckerberg might imagine it. Apatow's vulgarity and Zuckerberg's callowness are wildly successful as measured by the marketplace, and their success therefore makes them saints in the Invisible Hand's cult.

But most spirited Americans want to think better of themselves than that, and so they are likely to grab onto anyone or anything that tells them they can do better. Some join the military. Others Doctors without Borders or the Peace Corp. Fundamentalist religion offers another possibility, and often that is combined with the 19th-century American mythos to which Reagan gave new life--a mythos of rugged individualism, never-stand-down toughness, and loyalty to god and country. 

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

But Democrats and Liberals in general seem incapable of understanding this simple idea: It's the meaning, stupid. They keep thinking that the solutions to the crisis are primarily economic, and of course there must be an economic dimension to any solution that might work. But such a solution can only be advanced within a larger, animating meaning story, a story that Liberals haven't the resources to tell. Red America does have an animating meaning story; it's divorced from reality, but it inspires action and commitment in a way that Liberals don't understand. Because the solution for finding a progressive animating story is a religious one, and Progressives don't trust religion. 

Liberals, at best, see religion as a consumer choice, and most don't feel a need for it. Their lives feel meaningful enough without it. They are mostly educated and prosperous, and so have the financial and cultural resources to live decent, interesting lives. But they see themselves as magnanimous and openminded about religion. "If you want to be religious," they'll say, "good for you."  But this is so patronizing, and really they are thinking, "Why can't you just be like us? Isn't your religion just you're clutching a teddy bear to get you through the night? Do you really need it? Grow up."

Blue America can't understand why it is hated so much by Red America  or why Red America won't become more like Blue America. And because it won't, Blue America justifies its contempt for Red Americans as a failure to adapt. It's rather like the way white settlers came to see Native Americans as sullen, drunken layabouts for their unwillingness to assimilate. Of course, it never occurred to the white folks that their having destroyed their thousands-year old culture might be a soul-crushing loss and cause for disgruntlement. You lost. Get over it. Move on. Is Rust-Belt and rural resentment toward educated elites essentially different? Aren't their resentments cognate with the resentments of Native Americans toward the whites who held them in contempt for similar reasons? I'm not saying the situations of the two groups is equivalent, but analogous. [See Note 2]

***

Now I say I blame Reagan, but you might retort that if it wasn't Reagan it would have been someone else. Maybe. But what if the someone else that had been elected in 1980 had the stature and charism of Lincoln or FDR? What if it were someone who could have faced down the dark side of the American character and led the nation out of the confusion of the 60s and 70s toward a more perfect union. Is that so hard to imagine? Isn't that in our American DNA as much as the delusions of grandeur that Reagan represented? ...

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

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

***

I've been arguing here over the years that fundamental to the crisis in our political order is a deeper crisis of meaning in our cultural order. This dimension of the crisis is something most Liberals in Blue America don't feel acutely for reasons alluded to above. And so their ideas since WWII about progress have always been shaped by a utilitarian calculus about material progress. And so their program has been mostly limited to economic policies designed to mitigate the destructive effects of capitalism on those most vulnerable to be hurt by them. This kind of materialistic utilitarianism lacks the fervor and animating vision of the early Progressive movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Liberals don't understand that It's the meaning, not the economy, stupid.

The Progressivism that gave us all the progress that Brownstein describes above was incapable of dealing effectively with the crisis of meaning that Main Street Americans experienced in the wake of the disruptions of the 60s and 70s. All Democrats had to offer were programs that never addressed the underlying causes of the crisis, which was Traditional America's losing its meaning story as it was embedded in its customary culture. The loss was accelerated by Reagan's program to dismantle the New Deal and unfetter the nihilistic forces of corporate capitalism. [See Note 3]

So I would argue that most Liberals don't understand that there's double whammy here for Red America in its feeling that Liberals are the cause of their having become both culturally and economically marginalized. While cripple-the-government Republicans are more to blame for their economic losses, Red America blames Democrats for both because they've come to think that Republican pols care about them when they show up wearing their red jerseys and then feed their resentments regarding their cultural losses. These pols and their media propagandists tell Red America that the Liberals want to take away their religion, their guns, and their whiteness, but guns, religion, whiteness are just MacGuffins in the meaning story plot. Give Red America a better meaning story, and they lose their importance. But until that story changes, they play a central role in supporting the cult. The challenge is not to persuade Red America that their ideas are wrong, but to inspire them with a better story. 

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

But as bad as the Clintons were, they were simply adapting to the world that Reagan created. His Morning in America was a celebration of both unfettered, deregulated capitalism and traditional American values. And so follows the irony that in the name of traditional American values he unleashed the forces that in subsequent decades destroyed the social infrastructure that supported them. In doing so, Reagan began the process of creating a deracinated, anomic mass that was ripe for exploitation by the first demagogue to come along, which turned out to be Donald Trump.

That such an absurdly ridiculous figure should be so successful in not a testament to his talent, so much as it is a testament to the social psychological damage done to the country by Reaganism. His unfettering of the nihilistic forces of capitalism, dressed up in a 19th-century, rugged individualist fantasy, thrust Red America into a ferocious ontological vertigo, a vertigo that they could remedy in this crusade to take their country back from the Libs who are absolutely convinced stole it from them. Trump's claims of a stolen election are so persuasive because it fits the story that that's what Libs do, steal and cheat. They did it to them, and so, of course, they did it to Trump. That's what explains MAGA and J6. Reagan and the right wing demagogues who emerged after him told them to blame big-government Liberals, and Trump has just taken it all to its logical conclusion.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as in the 1850s, the forces of resentment and reaction are aggressively overreaching today. Conservatives are justifying their support for Trump because he gave them the court that overturned Roe, but more consequential is that he gave them the court that is bent on its project to dismantle the administrative state--to return us to the 1880s if they can. Or something even worse. We could be headed toward the fulfillment of Bannon's "Leninist" dark fantasies to destroy the administrative state, and to replace it with what? Some Putinesque, synarchist-theocratic nightmare?

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

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

++++++++++

Note 1: Buckley is a fascinating character, and I have more to say about him in a post entitled "Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary". But his Catholicism and his embrace of capitalism never really made much intellectual sense. Capitalism has always been more of a Calvinist thing. But he came from oil wealth, and so for all his purported Catholic fervor, that side of him never really got into a very deep conversation with the capitalist side of him. His Catholicism and therefore his conservatism always struck me as having more in common with that of Latin American oligarchs--i.e., more about protecting their privileged place in the social order than about the spirit of the gospels. His theology was deeply correlated with his sense of social privilege in an older oligarchic sense. 

Nevertheless, there's a partial truth buried in Buckley's critique of the naïveté at the heart of the Liberal project, but the deeper reality is that Liberals simply adapted to the dynamically changing world that post-WWII consumer capitalism created. Capitalism's consumer-driven-choice-and-self-indulgence ethos was the acid that slowly dissolved whatever feeling Americans had for the public interest that formed during the depression and WWII. 

Note 2: That's why Liberals are so obsessed with education. Education is always the solution for Liberals because it was the key to their own success. But getting educated has come to mean for Red America its becoming brainwashed in institutions dominated by the ideology of its enemy, the enemy that destroyed everything they and their ancestors held sacred. The brouhaha about CRT has nothing to do with CRT; it's all about the fear that traditionalist Red Americans have about losing their kids to the enemy and its ideology. Conservatives see themselves as the earthy, valiant, freedom-fighting Celts in Braveheart, and Liberals as the ever-expanding machine, that is, the hated, snotty, slick English that would as soon squash them all as if they were only bugs. Liberals aren't that, of course, but they are more comfortable in the machine than conservatives are, and so are guilty by association. 

Note 3: I'm surprised this theme doesn't get more attention. Reagan's program was abetted and advanced by Neoliberal Democrats in the 90s. The Washington consensus for deregulation and free trade endorsed by both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats insisted that lower prices were good for everyone, and if in order to get them some people needed to lose their jobs, well that's unfortunate, but they can be retrained to do something else. Was it ever a consideration how such policies atomize American society and have destructive effects on families and the communities that support them? Conservatives are right that government programs are no substitute for healthy families and communities, but conservatives--thick, dull guys like Romney and Paul Ryan--never understood how market capitalism worked so mercilessly to destroy them.

Oren Cass is an interesting conservative exception who understands that public-private partnerships are essential to promote healthy local communities and the families that are their life. This should define the common ground between Democrats and Republicans, but the Republican Party policy wing is dominated by Libertarians who don't want the government involved in solving problems. They are worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand. Just lower taxes and let the markets do their thing, and all shall be well. There are a lot more Democrats in today's congress who would be open to Cass's ideas than Republicans. 

----------

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

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

 

Constitutional Jump Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's the thing. This isn't over. 

Circular Firing Squad

From Tim Miller:

To the delight of Republican senators, Schumer plans to make Democratic senators vote on abortion legislation that is both unpopular—it would legalize abortions through all nine months of pregnancy, a position most Americans disapprove of—and hopeless, since it does not have the votes to pass.

Here’s a tip: If you are going to force everyone to take a meaningless messaging vote for public-relations purposes, consider choosing a bill that hurts the other party’s popularity, not your own!

Democrats have the political advantage in the wake of what most Americans perceive as judicial overreach if the court overturns Roe. But they seem not to understand the moment and how best to take advantage of it. Instead of opposing a right-wing absolutism with sanity and moderation, they are matching it with Left-wing absolutism. Talk about living in an elitist bubble. 

I wrote the other day about how the Democrats' political malpractice in losing the white working class began in their full throated endorsement of a NARAL absolutist version of abortion rights in the 70s and then their endorsement of Neoliberal ideas about free trade in the 90s. You'd think they would have learned a lesson or two by now, but they insist on living up to the worst stereotypes people who are not them, i.e., most average Americans, have of them. It's so much more fun to perform in the cosmopolitan moral outrage game than to think strategically. 

Because the alternative is truly so horrifying, we really need the Democrats to win this year and in '24. But they seem to have leadership that is bent on destroying any hope of winning the decisive vote moderates on Main Street will deliver. Sane Main Street folks mostly have no idea of the peril that the Republicans are putting us in; they just want to believe that a return to some level of decency and normalcy is a possibility. Democrats need to understand that the absolutist pro-choice position does not help them in that regard.  

This dismaying level of Democrat ineptitude is really the larger point that Miller is making in the post excerpted above:

When it comes right down to it, I find it hard to to see the current legislative logjam as anything but a monumental failure on the part of Chuck Schumer and Democratic leadership . . . with a fail assist given out to the White House for chilling in the back seat while their Build Back Bettermobile veers over the median and into oncoming traffic.

It’s not as if they couldn’t have seen this coming. They had only the one cheat code [reconciliation], and there were only two senators who needed to get brought on board in order to use it. Cut a deal and get ’er done.

This is 101-level politicking.

Sure Manchin and Sinema don’t seem to have been the most fun to deal with. But any Democrat with a brain had to recognize that to get something passed they would eventually need to stop moaning about how unfair it all is, recognize that a magic filibusting fairy wasn’t going to save them, and get Manchinema to the table to produce the best deal they could muster.

But nearly a year and a half has gone by, wasted.

Time is running out. If Schumer isn’t capable of getting a deal done by Memorial Day, Senate Democrats should find someone else who can. Otherwise they are going to butt fumble away both their majority and their agenda without even using the one weird trick that could’ve let them get something done.

Main Street Americans will not reject BBB because it is bad policy, which it is not, but because it is being proposed by a party they identify with a cosmopolitan cultural Left they feel no affinity with and so cannot trust. 

Progressive Fever Dreams

Every reconstructive president must confront vestiges of the old regime. The slavocracy evaded Lincoln’s grasp by seceding; the Supreme Court repeatedly thwarted F.D.R. Yet they persisted. How?

What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside F.D.R. stood the unions. Each of these movements had their own institutions. Each of them was disruptive, upending the leadership and orthodoxies of the existing parties. Each of them was prepared to do battle against the old regime. And battle they did.

Social movements deliver votes to friendly politicians and stiffen their backs.

--Corey Robin

Dear Corey: You are describing what the Right has, and the Left hasn't even a whiff of. The Right is politically organized at every level; it is well financed; it is armed; it is highly motivated. That it is delusional doesn't matter because their delusions have teeth, which cannot be said of the reconstructive dreams on the Left.

Look, I'm with you in what I would hope a progressive politics could achieve in this country, but what the Left must understand much better than it does is why the Right is so much more successful in mobilizing than the Left is. And while the reasons are complex, it comes down to the Right's having an infrastructure of values that builds cohesiveness and toughness in a way that the Left does not have now, nor will have any time soon. The Left depends too much on an ethos that validates rank-and-file snowflakiness among too many who are not embarrassed when they freak out about micro-aggressions.

I'm exaggerating to emphasize that, relatively speaking, they lack the resiliency to face the truly aggressive violence and instability that's coming. The point is that there is very little moral heft on the secular Left--secular Liberal morality has no foundations and is mostly performative for the benefit of the likeminded. Otherwise, it's mostly about the least costly way for one to feel better about himself. There's very little in the secular Liberal ethos that promotes a sense of feeling a part of something bigger, of something that one might sacrifice his or her life for. That's not true on the Right.

I'm not criticizing individuals on the secular Left who are clearly motivated by good will. I'm criticizing the enervating ethos that has captured them. Different people are captured by it with varying degrees of conformity or independence, but it's the ethos that makes any effective, morally serious political progressivism extremely difficult because of the way it celebrates safety, anality, a rigidly stubborn niceness, and a suffocating fetishization of process. The people most deeply shaped by this ethos are not ready for the no-rules fight to the death that the hard right wants so badly and will probably get. Much less to push through a progressive reconstruction of government.

The Progressive cause became progressively a losing one in this country as soon as it lost Evangelical Christians. The social gospel movement was the driving force behind abolitionism in the early 19th Century and the Progressivism in the late-19th/early-20th Century,. Without it there would have been no political-social infrastructure for the New Deal. But Christian Evangelical progressivism started to dissolve after the Scopes trial,  and had disappeared in playing any meaningful role in Progressive politics by the 1980s. After William Jennings Bryan, with the brief but potent exception of MLK, no evangelical figures have emerged to inspire and mobilize a Main-Street Progressivism. And Main Street is the 'institution' that Progressives need most to win back if they want a sustainable movement.

In America, if your movement isn't a religious crusade, it's just smoke drifting in the wind. Like the anarchist OWS in New York or the absurdist CHAZ in Seattle. Marx was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about religion. It isn't an opiate; it's political fuel. Reactionary religion fuels reactionary politics; progressive religion fuels progressive politics. 19th Century Marxism was itself an eschatological cult. Now it's just armchair cultural critique. For lack of a progressive religion, the reactionaries take the field unopposed.

MLK's assertion that "The arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice" resonates with us because we are innately eschatological. It works within the collective psyche at a deeply archetypal level. But eschatology makes no sense within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. The two things cancel one another out. There is no possibility for a sane, sustainable progressive politics so long as the Progressives are captured by a rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary. Just not going to happen. Not in America , anyway. If you think any kind of religion is stupid and delusional, then it follows that you should think that any kind of progressive politics is too.

My Genealogy series is a long argument for an idea of the evolution of consciousness that seeks to establish the plausibility for such an eschatology that will integrate a progressive politics with late modern sensibilities that are becoming progressively post-secular with each passing decade. I have no illusions that a sane eschatological politics is something for the near term, but I do believe that if there is any possibility for a robust, progressive politics in the future, it has to retrieve this eschatological dimension. 

In the meanwhile, Biden's window to accomplish an ambitious progressive reconstructive agenda is closed. I thought for a while he had a shot, but it was probably never going to happen with the Senate structured as it is. Now the only thing sane Americans should care about is the survival of its democracy. Everything other short-term consideration is a distraction. 

See also "Young Socialist Intellectuals".

Edsall on White Unhappiness

Graham and Pinto measured poll respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and social well-being and found that “blacks and Hispanics typically score higher than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their white counterparts.”

Graham and Pinto write:

The deepest desperation is among cohorts in the white working class who previously had privileged access to jobs (and places) that guaranteed stable, middle-class lives. Rather ironically, African Americans and Hispanics — the cohorts that historically faced high levels of discrimination — retain higher levels of well-being, especially hope for the future.

The data suggest that a large segment of the white, non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition.

This discontent drew many disaffected Americans to Donald Trump, and Trump’s defeat in 2020 has produced millions of still more disaffected voters who support his claim that the election was stolen.

Michael Bang Petersen puts it this way:

We know that humans essentially have two routes to acquire status: prestige and dominance. Prestige is earned respect from having skills that are useful to others. Dominance is status gained from intimidation and fear. Individuals who are high in the pursuit of dominance play a central role in political destabilization. They are more likely to commit political violence, to engage in hateful online interactions and to be motivated to share misinformation.

If you read the rest of the article, the various researchers Edsall quotes talk about how 'trade shock' after NAFTA in 1993 and China entering the WTO in 2000 cut whatever vestigial ties working-class whites had to the Democratic Party. There's a lot of talk about status loss in the article, but I think the deeper issue is culture loss. I think the argument I make in the second half of Genealogy Part 1 about capitalism's destruction of customary culture goes to the heart of it.

This destruction has been a long-term, erosive process, but it was accelerated by these free trade policies that destroyed the economic infrastructure of so many rust-belt communities. Neoliberal Democrats like the Clintons supported free trade because they bought the Kool Aid that it benefits everyone in the long run economically. But they never took into consideration the destructive impact these policies have on local communities and their traditional cultures. Most Liberals couldn't care less about local communities and their local cultures because (1) they've never lived in one, or (2) if they have, they left them because they wanted to be free of the constraints that living in any kind of real community requires.

So Liberals understand that the trade policies they supported might be disruptive, but that living in a dynamic, innovative, future-oriented society requires that people adapt, that they should expect to have three careers, that they should come to love and embrace change, etc. But it's all self-justifying, capitalist b.s., And so it's understandable that those whose lives capitalism has disrupted resent having to uproot themselves, move from their homeland to where the work is, and be trained to assimilate into an economy that destroyed everything that they loved. And they particularly resent the smug Liberals who tell them that what they loved was stupid and that they should live like them: See how happy we are in the suburbs working in our cubbies!

Their situation is a lot like that of Native Americans who experienced a similar destruction of their customary culture when they were moved from their sacred homeland to places where traditional practices were not possible or not allowed and where they were pressured to assimilate into a culture that they despised. Black and Hispanic Americans are more resilient because they live in communities that have adapted to economic instability and have less reason to fear status loss because historically they have had more to gain in that regard and than to lose. 

So what's the solution? Well, maybe it would be good to start by not destroying local communities and cultures. Rather than assume that the economy and its mystical Invisible Hand always knows best, make the economy serve human needs. And most humans need stable community life and vibrant, local traditional cultures to live happy, productive lives. Stop letting utilitarian, economic logic be the only consideration as if good-paying jobs were the only thing that mattered no matter how disruptive the economy is in every other aspect of human life. Yes, it might be and probably is, too late to preserve what's vital, but recovery can't begin until you stop making a remedy impossible. 

Let's exercise some wisdom. But we can't do that, right, because our capacity for making wise collective decisions about what humans need to flourish was lost long ago. Instead, we've surrendered all our agency to the Invisible Hand. Our minds are so held captive by that propaganda, that no other possibility can be even entertained. 

The ironic thing is that far more people who identify as Democrats get this than do doctrinaire Libertarian Republicans. The Clinton Neoliberal wing of the party destroyed the Democratic brand with working class whites, but the Republicans couldn't care less about them. If we lived in a sane world, working class whites and people of color would take over the Democratic Party and force it to make the economy work in their interests, but the Democrats can no longer be a home for American working-class whites--the Dems are anti-gun, pro-abortion, et al.--and they're the party of the people of color who they fear seek to displace them.

And there you have it. There's good reason to believe that this will play out in the stupidest, most violent way possible because the best among us lack conviction, and they lack conviction because they lack wisdom, and they lack wisdom because they live within a metaphysical imaginary that discourages them from thinking such a thing exists. Expediency is all. 

Douthat on Democracy

To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.

But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.

This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called "undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process. (Source)

Douthat is doing his job as the designated cultural conservative at the Times to 'splain conservatism to blinkered liberals. This column on first reading seems kind of silly because the technocratic state isn't a Liberal or Conservative thing; it's a capitalist-elite thing. Capitalist elites don't care about what ordinary people think--except when it's in their interests to manipulate them into believing that what's good for capitalist elites is good for ordinary people. 

When I was actively involved in education politics in Seattle a decade ago, the enemy wasn't Liberals because everybody is Liberal--it was corporate education reform, the kind of reform that wanted to impose its top-down, we-business-elites-know-best, Neoliberal ideology on local educational communities. Neoliberal programs like like Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' and Obama's 'Race to the Top' were equally bad because equally "elite" in their provenance, and equally oppressive in their top-down-ness.

The battle lines were between parents and teachers deciding what was best for their kids rather than the folks "downtown" or the bureaucrats in Olympia. Control ought to lie as close as possible to the people who are affected by decisions--and that should be the rule broken only in egregious situations.

If that means that local schools make minor, stupid decisions, that's a price worth paying. In the Virginia gubernatorial, Liberals should be smart enough not to take the culture-war bait. McAuliffe put his foot in his mouth when he made himself too easy to identify with the top-down, centralized education policy that all engaged parents--Liberals and Conservatives--hate. He should have simply pointed that out that critical race theory isn't taught in the public schools and then moved on. Let the locals remove the thing that doesn't exist.

And if the issue is whether to remove a book or two from the library, let the locals fight it out among themselves. If books are banned, they can easily be found elsewhere and will be all the more attractive to the kids who wound'n't have been motivated to read them otherwise.  

If the Republican Youngkin was running against the Democrat Arne Duncan (Obama's Education Secretary), I'd hold my nose and vote for Duncan because I think that Republicans need to be completely delegitimated until the Cheney/Kinziger wing of the party restores it to sanity. But I understand why so many people have come to despise Democrats of the Duncan ilk. They're what I call Aspen-Institute Democrats. Completely clueless in their Neoliberal arrogance. This is the kind of Liberalism that Anand Giridharadas skewers in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. They are Liberal in their cultural values, but just as invested in elite control of the system to protect their elite interests as Mitch McConnell. (See Note 1)

I wonder how many Liberal, urban, educated elites in the media and business who watched The Hunger Games and rooted for Katniss and the others from the outer districts realized that everybody in Main Street America sees them as the Capitol elite. The people on Main Street see more of the Stanley Tucci character in establishment Democrats than they see FDR. That's why the ridiculous child-molesting stories stick. And Liberal public intellectuals and policymakers should learn to let people alone in their local communities unless they are doing something that is an egregious abuse of minority rights there. They don't have to impose their prissy, being-right-about-everything on everyone every time.

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Note 1: See Molly Ball's 2017 "On Safari in Trump's America" where she accompanies squishily clueless Neoliberal Third Way Democrats trying to make sense of Trump's America. The naivete and smugness of this "type" of Liberal is something you came up against time and again in the Education Reform wars. There was always this pretense of listening without showing the least aptitude for hearing.  They just know better because they're rich and all the rich people they know thinks as they do. Their epistemological bubble isn't quite as thick as the one that enshrouds the cultural Right, but it's pretty thick.