After the Future

The Bannon-Brooks Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the Nihilism, Stupid

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

But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.1

Why are Garsten’s students so attracted to illiberalism? Why are these students moving to the Right rather than to the Left? Why can’t they just be like other normal, educated young people? Why can’t they just adapt and flourish in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix like nice, young, meritocratic Liberals do? Well, because It’s the nihilism, stupid.

It used to be the young people on the Left who offered resistance to Late Capitalism and all the ways that it was hollowing out American culture. They wrote humanistically idealistic documents like The Port Huron Statement. They appealed to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They were the ones who first saw the insanity and nihilism of the Vietnam War and the rank injustice of Jim Crow. But now young people on the Left seem happily inured to life in the TCM, and they are more influenced by Foucault and Deleuze and so more inclined toward an identitarian politics that accomplishes little except to inflame an culture war that even Foucault understood was unwinnable.

And so where do young people go who want something that “feels” real? Well they go where the energy is, and there’s a lot more energy now on the Right than there is on the Left, and Liberals had better face the fact that the Right offers a path to give many young people a “sense of meaning and purpose” in their lives that the Left just does not.

I put quotes around “feels” and “sense of meaning” in the previous paragraph because I believe that these young people are being seduced by something that will prove to be smoke and vapor. Avant-garde, right-leaning intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and others were similarly seduced in the 1920s and ‘30s. Their hatred for Liberalism and modernity led them to love something that proved to be far worse. I fear Garsten’s students are on the same path. But for now it feels like something real to them, more real than whatever the nihilism of the TCM offers. And that’s why I’m inclined to think that the real threat in the long run from the Right does not come from yahoos at a MAGA rally, but from young people looking for meaning and purpose outside the TCM. Many of them have looked to find that meaning on the Left, but find only emptiness and nonsense there.

So here, for what its worth, is how I see our predicament: I have always believed that pluralism is a good thing, that differences make life more interesting, that they prevent us from ever becoming complacent and rigid in our thinking, that our limited, provisional understanding of the world is expanded by our being confronted by others who see things differently. But the problem with pluralism is the way that it keeps us divided and conquered in the face of enormously powerful nihilistic forces that seek to drag us where we don’t want to go.

Is it possible to find a place of unity that affirms something positive rather than just says No to what it fears? I think it is possible, but I think first we need to understand why it’s so difficult to find the solidarity required if we are to face the challenges that await us in coming decades.2

I hesitate to use a mechanistic metaphor, but it's perhaps never more appropriate for our current predicament: The TCM and its Rationalist Materialist presuppositions provide the “developed” world's OS, so to say. Not just here, but everywhere its influence is hegemonic—Europe, Asia, and among elites in the southern hemisphere. It runs China in pretty much the same way it runs the U.S. They are competitors playing the same video game, so to speak.

All of our individual beliefs—religious, philosophical, whatever—are like apps that must run on this OS. We don't have any choice about that because whatever our individual beliefs, unless we choose to live off the grid, we must live in a world whose fundamental presuppositions are shaped by the OS that runs the TCM. So some apps run smoothly, and others don’t. The problem for people with religious commitments lies in that most of the world's great religions originated in societies that ran on an OS that had a fundamentally different architecture. Let’s call it the Axial OS, which is the cultural OS that ran all the great civilizations from Taoism in the East to the Greek transcendental philosophy in the West starting in the mid-millennium BCE.

This OS was capable of runnning lots of different local apps like Buddhism, Vedantic Hinduism, monotheistic Judaism, and others. For over two thousand years the architecture of the underlying OS remained fundamentally unaltered, and it was flexible enough to allow for innovations and new developments like Christianity and Islam. But something changed in the west starting in the 1300s3 and culminating after the Reformation. The old Axial OS was replaced with something that had a fundamentally different architecture. Let’s call it the Baconian OS, after the founder of Western empirical science, Francis Bacon. And while the Baconian OS tried at first to run apps like Christianity and Judaism, they ran buggy at best, and eventually in ways that many found unusable.

I don’t think that the nihilism of the TCM was the intended consequence of the early Baconians, but it was implicit in the new architecture of its OS, and so it was only a matter of time before what was implicit became explicit. The emergence of the implicit nihilism in the system accelerated in the decades after 1850, and culminated in the decades after WWII. In the 1970s this new situation, the complete victory of Baconism with the emergence of the TCM, came to be referred to as Postmodernism. As Perry Anderson says, after the war, modernization was all but complete—

obliterating the last vestiges not only of pre-capitalist social forms, but every intact natural hinterland, of space or experience, that had sustained or survived them….

Where [high cultural] modernism drew its purpose and energies from the persistence of what was not yet modern, the legacy of a still pre-industrial past, postmodernism signifies the closure of that distance, the saturation of every pore of the world in the serum of capital. Marked out by no stark political caesura, no sudden storm in the historical heavens, this ‘very modest or mild apocalypse, the merest sea breeze presents a momentous transformation in the underlying structures of contemporary bourgeois society.4

Postmodernism is the slow-motion apocalypse that we are all living through mostly without understanding its significance. It is, in other words the triumph of Baconism in its Late Capitalist form, the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, and as such is its reductio ad absurdum. The Baconian OS brought us modernity and all its material bounty, but at the cost of suffocating what is most deeply spiritual in the broader culture. And that experience of suffocation, I would argue, is what’s motivating Garsten’s smart, young students to search for a place where they think they can breathe more freely.

Reality: Nice While It Lasted 2

From Thomas Edsall's column a few weeks ago:

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

Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits

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

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

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

Klaas asked:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here we are. 

Reality: Nice While It Lasted 1

My concern here is not that people aren’t taking Trump’s threat seriously enough (even if they aren’t) or that Biden isn’t getting some of the credit he deserves (even if he isn’t). Rather, the political reactions of American voters seem completely detached from anything that’s happened over the past several years, or even from things that are happening right now. We use vibes to talk about all of this: We’re not in an actual recession, just a “vibecession,” where people feel like it’s a recession.

But you can’t solve imaginary recessions with real policies, just as you can’t cure imagined diseases with real medicine. We are experiencing a kind of political and economic hypochondria, where our good test results can’t possibly be true.

Tom Nichols

I tend to think I'm still in touch with Reality, but, like Nichols, I'm not sure whether my fellow citizens have much a sense of it anymore. I'm no longer sure to what degree techno-capitalism and the ontological dizziness it has engendered has pushed Americans into some virtual reality and out of the real one.

There's no easy cure for that. The question is how many of us are in the throes of this vertigo?

We'll know by this time next year.

See also Reality: Nice While It Lasted 2.

Are You Feeling Politically Homeless?

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

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

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

Michael Lind, The New Class War, p. 73

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Class War, pp. 90-91.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day: J. V. Last

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

Muad'Dib explains his insight this way:

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan V. Last

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

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

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

How Not to Defend Liberalism

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

Alexander Stern in Commonweal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freddie de Boer on Class-First Politics (Updated)

I myself am a class-first leftist, and indeed the penultimate chapter of my new book is titled “Why is Class First?” And the answer is that class comes first because class approaches to politics are the best approach to combating injustice, including racial injustice. Being class-first is an instrumental position, not a moral one; it’s an approach to means and not a definition of ends. My basic gloss on racial inequality has been the same for forever: it’s futile to try and get everyone to not be interpersonally racist, but we can economically empower Black people and other people of color such that interpersonal racism no longer has the power to hurt them. A lot of people hate rich people, hate them reflexively and passionately. It doesn’t matter because rich people have money and money gives them power, which means the hate that’s directed towards them is impotent. Interpersonal racism, the state of some people hating other people because of their race, is unlike any other form of human hatred. But the same basic logic applies - if we dismantled Black people’s economic disadvantage, the structures that make up structural inequality, then the interpersonal hatred just won’t matter to anything like the degree it matters today. Of course I want people not to walk around with personal racial animus, but politics is about what can be achieved materially, not about manipulating people’s emotional attitudes.

You could contrast this with, say, Robin Diangelo and her obsession with ending micro-aggressions. Even if you could eliminate all of those little vestiges of social racism (you can’t), doing so would not put a dent in the Black-white wealth gap or eliminate mass incarceration of Black men or anything of that nature. That kind of focus does, however, fit comfortably with the social expectations of the kind of educated white liberals who buy her books. (

--Freddie De Boer

De Boer is a curiosity--a throwback, class-first Leftist. Not many of those around today. Too bad because he's mostly right. But his Left is not what passes for the Left these days. Class analysis and organizing requires real work and comes off as dry and abstract, while woke cultural politics costs little and is emotionally energizing--no matter how stupid, politically ineffectual, and downright counterproductive it is.

Woke Politics just feels so morally right, right? And that's what matters, feeling good about yourself and then everybody you know feeling god about you too, no matter how self-delusional in any deeply true moral sense such feelings are. This is not a Left that grownups can or ought to take seriously.

And then these members of the establishment Left in the universities and media wonder why so many young intellectuals are attracted to the Right. Why? Because it's what's you do these days if you want to be a rebel bad boy. It's not that hard to understand why some spirited young people feel a need to say No to a suffocating Niceness that passes these days for moral seriousness. That they do so is reactive, delusional, and predictable. 

I want to live in a world where people are kinder to one another, but most grownups resist being treated like kindergartners who must learn to play nice by the unctuously patronizing politically correct. Maybe this explains why DEI trainings don't work. I understand the good intentions, but this is a counterproductive strategy that gives Liberals a feeling that they are doing something constructive. But isn't such a program only asking people to behave with kindness to other human beings? Do people who have a good measure of kindness in them need to be taught to act? Can such a program work with people who are bigoted? Or Can mandating a DEI training create kindness where there's little of it to work with? And isn't such a mandate more likely to make the bigoted more angry and resentful when they are forced to take such trainings? 

8/16/ Update: From Edsall's column quoting former AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer:

The idea that the Democrat Party is a pro-business party, Podhorzer wrote, “is hardly a bulletin. It’s been pro-business since Carter. Deregulation (including Glass-Steagall, holding companies, communications, etc.) as well as trade agreements (NAFTA, China WTO, proposed TPP, etc.) are all Democratic Party ‘accomplishments.’”

Podhorzer, however, took sharp issue with Hersh, Shah and Teixeira. “I find Teixeira’s constant harping on Democratic ‘elites,’ as well as Hersh’s and others’ use of the term to be playing with fire at this moment,” he told me.

The focus on cultural elitism, in Podhorzer’s view, masks billionaires’ collective influence over the political process or the ways in which their success is responsible for immiseration and what we call “inequality.” This enables fascist politicians to shift the blame to intellectual and cultural “elites,” like liberals or people with college degrees, redirecting the inevitable resentments of the losers in the winner-take-all economy.

For that reason, Podhorzer continued, "Centrist commentators and Democratic strategists who have aggressively and continuously diagnosed the party’s capture by a woke 'elite' unwittingly — and without justification — affirm the fascist worldview in which 'cultural,' rather than economic or political, elites are the source of their disappointments."

I don't understand Podhorzer's problem with what Teixeira is saying. Doe he not think that the Democratic Party's capture by cosmopolitan elites and their values is a problem? Does he not understand that if they don't shift their branding strategy along the lines Teixera is suggesting that they will lose not just white blue collar voters, but black and and brown blue collars as well? These working class folks don't need Teixera to tell them that Democrat elites don't share their cultural values. They just need to watch the Dems who show up on mainstream media or to attend a typical local Democratic district meeting.

The educated White, Black, and Brown elites who are running the Democratic Party do not, of course, think of themselves as serving billionaires' interests, but they do serve their interests to the degree that they (1) promote Neoliberal policies, and (2) promote extreme woke cultural values that drive culturally conservative blue collars into the party of Trump and DeSantis.

They do less of the first thanks to the influence of Bernie, but they are doing more of the second. Does Podhorzer not get that what Teixera calls Brahmins are making the Democratic Party a hard place for non-college-educated, culturally conservative working class people of any skin color to feel at home? 

BTW, this is what Teixera says to Edsall--

Democrats continue to be weighed down by those whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curriculums and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy, and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue. With this baggage, rebranding the party — making it more working class oriented and less Brahmin — is very difficult, since decisive action that might lead to such a rebranding is immediately undercut by a torrent of criticism.

[Edsall] asked Teixeira whether the changing Democratic Party has reached a point of no return on this front, and he emailed back:

A good and big question. In the short run it looks very difficult for them to shed much of their cultural radicalism and generally make the party more attractive to normal working class voters. Over the medium to long term, though, I certainly think it’s possible, if there’s an internal movement and external pressures/market signals consistent with the need for a broader coalition. That is, if enough of the party becomes convinced their coalition is too narrow and therefore some compromises and different approaches are necessary. That may take some time.

That just seems to be common sense. Nobody's talking about restoring a politics of Meanness toward historically marginalized constituencies. The GOP has a monopoly on that. Rather it's a question of pushing a class-first strategy that is designed to support the welfare of everyday American working families. Who's not for that?

A sane politics is not a moral crusade to force everybody to think and behave and you do, but rather a very practical project to find common ground with people who have shared interests. Everybody, except GOP Libertarian cranks, wants to support working families, and that should be the Democratic Party's brand. Warren, Sanders, and even Biden seem to get this. It's not that others Dems are against it; it's just that other identitarian issues are for them more salient. The Robin DiAngelos should be listened to and treated with respect, but they should not be allowed in any way to become the face of the party.  

It's more complicated than that, of course. The  meaning crisis that flows from the slow-motion crackup of the Liberal Order still looms in the background. For there to be genuine relief, there has to be a shift in the zeitgeist that addresses these deep meaning needs. But in the meanwhile, we need to support a politics that mitigates the most negative consequences of the Neoliberal social order on the lives of ordinary working Americans. 

Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories

I understand the impulse to believe conspiracy theories. It comes from a largely correct view that most people are living in a consensus trance. It comes from that feeling that Neo had before he took the red pill: Something is deeply wrong. Why does everyone around me seem to accept these attitudes and behaviors that feel so off? And so when someone comes up with an explanation for what's going on, there's a strong temptation to go with it because now we don't have to be alone in our suspicions. There are others, too,  who "get it". We're not the crazy ones. Everyone else in the consensus trance is crazy. They're asleep. We're awake. Whether or not this alternative explanation is itself just another illusion--well, there aren't many incentives to consider that as a possibility, are there? (See Note 1)

Nevertheless, the feeling that one's life is mostly shaped by one's participation in a consensus trance is real, because we are. The feeling is innate in all of us because It's born of the same sense of falsity that compelled Socrates to challenge the Athenian consensus reality in his time and as Buddha did in the India of his time. Socrates' and Buddha's critique of what is false consensus reality was not purely a negative debunking, but rather part of an effort to open people up to the the really Real. 

Our consensus reality is largely delusional. But that's not to say it's something completely made up--it does indeed have a relationship to what's really there. That was true in Scorates' day and it is in ours. Our modern social imaginary--our current consensus reality--has a pretty clear picture about the surface reality of things, but it's the spiritual part that it filters out that is problematic. It's as if we see the notes on a musical score but are incapable of hearing the music. And it's this inability to hear the music that induces us into a materialistic trance that cuts off from the deep Real, which is where the music in its fullnness originates.  

Are we near deaf, or is it that there's just so much noise now that makes that music so much harder to hear? Either way, we live in a consensus reality that makes it extraordinarly difficult to hear the music. But it's the world we live in, and we have to navigate in it in our day-to-day lives as best we can. And a part of doing what we can is to make a serious effort to listen. The trick is to discern what's signal from what's noise, and then to find a way to filter out the noise. So conspiracy theorists are correct to be skeptical that the consensus reality is mostly noise that's filtering out the signal. But they should be even more skeptical that the alternatives their conspiracy theories point to aren't just more noise.

So we must live in the world in such a way that we accept the consensus reality for what it is--a provisional working model of reality that makes it possible for us all to live together. As we need a common language, we need a consensus reality to get along, and disrupting it for the sake of disruption because you think you're so smart as to see through it is just egotistical and often mean-spirited. Smartass intellectuals do it with their sophistical debunking, but so do redneck red-pillers who think they know better than everyone else about elites who are working behind the scenes with a plan to destroy the America they love.

They think they've had the BIG INSIGHT, and maybe there's kernel of truth in what they've learned, but they are always mistaken when they think that this kernel is bigger than it is, and when they think it is the key to explaining everything. It never is. All they're doing is creating more noise by insisting that their delusional thinking is better than the conventional delusional thinking. The challenge in the long run is to develop a consensus reality that is more deeply aligned with and so disclosive of the Deep Real, i.e., a consensus reality that is attuned to the Deep Music. 

Jumping from one collective trance into another is not a solution, and so the challenge for us individually is to do what we can to live in such a way that we grow in wisdom, which means that we progressively break with our innate tendency to be entranced by gradually getting  a better grip on Reality. We do this by becoming like Socrates. We start from a position of learned ignorance--we assume we know nothing and that we are inclined toward delusional thinking--and we gradually learn to overcome our tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. This is a life-long process. 

How do you know if you are becoming wiser? You see yourself slipping into and out of the trance, and knowing the difference. You find that your prudential judgments prove sound with increasing frequency. And you find that the perceptions and intuitions you have that depart from "consensus reality" stand up over time as more right than wrong. You learn better to distinguish between what's music and what's noise. Or to shift metaphors, you learn to distinguish the difference between going down a rabbit hole, which leads to delusion, from finding a trail of breadcrumbs, which leads toward a better grip on the Real. 

This is what I mean by the term 'self-transcendence' as I've been using it lately. Self-transcendence is the gradual process by which we come into a deeper, truer relationship with Reality. While we can use language to make an attempt, to essay so to say, what we have learned in this ongoing developing relationship, nobody knows the truth. Some people do, however, have a deeper relationship with it.

None of us is Wise, but some are wiser. And as a society we need to develop broadly accepted cultural practices that make it easier for people to become wiser, i.e., to hear the music, or to see the bread crumbs. We need a sapiential tradition that will help people--everyone from ordinary folks to elites--to overcome their tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. We lost our sapiential tradition in the West in the late medieval period, and we need to restore it now in a postmodern key. 

So if there are any conspiracy theorists out there reading this post, I commend you for your skepticism regarding the consensus reality, but your theory about what's really going on is probably wrong too. It's ok to play with alternative theories as a heuristic tool, but you must never take them too seriously or become fundamentalistic or dogmatic about them. Stay away from true believers. None of us understands what's really going on, and alternative theories to the consensus reality are just as prone to deceive us as the deceptions provided by the consensus reality. 

And yet we must always make the effort to get a stronger, deeper grip on Reality. That requires that we start from the consensus reality as a baseline, that we develop a healthy skepticism about it--which is the whole point of Socratic aporia. This creates a space for the breadcrumbs to appear, so we must keep an eye peeled looking for those breadcrumbs, and when they show up, we follow them where they lead us. And if they lead us down blind alleys, then we must have the humility and intellectual honesty to recognize it, learn from the mistake, and move on. It's ok. Making mistakes is part of the process of self-transcendence. Digging in when proven wrong is moronically self-destructive. 

But also to remember even when you have significant insights, i.e., when you make deeper connections with aspects of the Real, they never tell the whole story. They are just the next step on the breadcrumb trail. 

And a final bit of advice:  If you encounter a conspiracy theorist who is making a living from it, don't believe him even if there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying. He might even be sincere, but he has too much invested in digging in rather than admitting he's wrong when the evidence proves him so. Say No to moronically self-destructive beliefs and behaviors. 

----------

Note 1: I think that this rejection of the consensus reality in part explains why intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Mircea Eliade, and others were seduced by the alternative fantasies that Nazism or Fascism offered. It's not that far from what pushes so many American conservative intellectuals to embrace Trump now. Anything, they have come to believe, is better than the Liberal materialist consensus reality.

Liberals who feel comfortable in the materialist Liberal Order that is crumbling around them need to understand that rightist Traditionalist critique of modernity better than they do because they underestimate its power. I believe that we only move out of the current crisis with a progressive mindset, but it has to have different presuppositions than those that now shape Liberal progressive thinking. A new progressive mindset must not reject Liberalism so much as go beyond it, i.e., absorb its gifts and transcend it. Such a mindset, while it must be optimistic about the human future, cannot succeed unless it finds a way to retrieve and embrace the wisdom traditions these men of the Right drew from. They were more wrong than they were right, but it's the part that they got right that we need to learn from. 

The problem is that what is valid--even profound--in what they write is tainted by what seems to have been their often bizarre political commitments. Really they did that or wrote that? YIkes. They thought there was a political solution, whereas a political solutions was simply impossible for all the reasons they wanted one, which was that there was no spiritual-cultural foundation for it. Any political solution was doomed to be barbaric precisely because those on the hard Right in the 1930s trying to effect a political solution were spiritual cretins.There is no political solution unless there is first a profound spiritual-cultural transformation.

My political commitments lie mainly on the Left because the Left is more future oriented, less fanatic, and more oriented toward practical problem solving. It has its fanatics, but they are more annoying than they are dangerous when compared to the fanatics on the Right, at least in the U.S. context. The ethos on the Left is that of good intentions, while that on the Right is shot through with resentment-driven malice. But I do not expect a political solution to resolve our crisis because the Left offers close to zero when it comes to matters of the spirit. At best support of the Left in American society buys us time for something new to emerge. But the new thing, if it is to provide a true resolution, must come from outside of politics. 

CNN and Bias in Journalism

Journalism can never be unbiased because human beings can never be unbiased. The best we can expect from journalists, as is the best we can expect from human beings, is that they give a reasonable account in defense for their more controversial stories. So what constitutes a reasonable account? Well first of all a firm grounding in the facts. But it's not just as easy as that. The more controversial the issue, the more difficult to establish and prioritize the relevant facts. 

Have you ever had an argument with a 9/11 Truther? If they lean Left, they believe it was a Bush administration inside job, and if they lean Right, they'll argue that it was  coordinated by the Israelis or some other conspiracy. When you ask them what are the sources for their facts, they direct you to websites or podcasts where experts in engineering, explosives, etc., make a factual case for why the official explanations cannot be possibly correct, and so then select and present the facts and quasi-facts that support alternative narratives that they argue connect the dots in ways that make much more sense.  

They do not make irrational arguments, but they do make arguments that reek of confirmation bias in matters where the facts are hard to pin down. Am I guilty of confirmation bias in rejecting their conspiracy narratives? Maybe. But the official Osama bin Laden story makes enough sense for me that I choose to believe that it, or something like it, is the most likely explanation, even if the real truth is much more complex and thorny. 

But the bottom line comes down to this, I don't want to spend my time and energy going down these rabbit holes. I've got better things to do. But this gets to the nub of the issue when it comes to trusting journalistic narratives. Most people when it comes to the reporting of the everyday news don't have the time and energy to chase down the truthfulness of what they hear and read. They trust their sources, and they trust them to a large extent because of their own confirmation biases, i.e., because these sources tell them what they already believe and want to hear.

Nevertheless, despite the unavoidable bias, an essential criteria for trusting a news source is the quality of their fact checking. And so when I read the NY Times or The Atlantic or the New Yorker, I know that they take fact checking very seriously. Certainly in a way that FOX or any of the MAGA supporting media do not. Will the Liberal interpretation of the facts render their stories as unbiased? Of course not. Might the facts they choose to foreground as more salient and which to background be biased? For sure. But I trust that these media make a good-faith effort to write stories that are rigorously fact checked and reasonable. And I try to be aware of and critical as I can be of their biases--and my own--in evaluating the truth value of the story.  

And this is really the difference between the cultural Left and cultural Right at this moment. They both read or listen to media that confirms their biases, but the Liberal media have far higher journalistic standards for basing their stories in facts. The MAGA Right doesn't believe that. They believe that the stories reported in the MSM are just as factually baseless as the stories the Right media put out. But it's just not true. There's a huge difference between stories that have no factual or evidentiary basis and biased stories that do have a factual and evidentiary basis. You can have a reasonable argument with the latter; you can't with the former. 

Both Left and Right media focus on stories that support their biases because they both foreground facts that are shaped by those biases, but one is far more trustworthy than the other. One provides stories or makes arguments that are reasonable because they make a good-faith effort to be grounded in actual facts, and they are far more open to engage with alternative arguments that interpret the facts differently or emphasize facts that were backgrounded or de-emphasized. You can argue with people with whom you disagree but who are committed to factuality; you can't with people for whom facts don't matter.

This is why Chris Licht was doomed from the start at CNN and why his previous bosses Joe Scarborough and Stephen Colbert told him not to take the job. The picture of him that emerges from the Tim Alberta story that apparently did him in was that he was well-intentioned, but astonishingly naive in his belief that he could make CNN a place that was factually rigorous and still be a place where Republicans could feel comfortable. Why was this so naive? Because the only Republicans and conservatives who respect the facts are Never-Trumpers.

Liberal media is saturated with Conservatives who are never Trumpers. But none of them are in office because any elected Republican politician cannot remain an elected Republican politician unless he or she endorse Trump's egregious, over-the-top lies. To be a Republican who is not a Never-Trumper means that you cannot tell the truth when you appear on any media--whether Liberal or Conservative. Some Republican pols will tell reporters off the record that they think Trump is a sociopathic liar, but they won't do it on the record. To be a Republican with a future in politics requires that you either lie or refuse to refute the lie. You can rationalize it as the price of remaining in business, but it makes no sense to appear on any media where the fundamental lying will be challenged. Why expose yourself to that?  

That's why no elected Republicans (hardly ever) appear on CNN or MSNBC. It's not because of Liberal bias; it's because they don't want to be confronted with the facts because to acknowledge them is political suicide. The best they can do if they choose to appear on Liberal MSM is refuse to answer questions and filibuster talking points that they've prepared in advance. There is no possibility of a good-faith argument or debate. Chris Christie when he was a Trump surrogate was an outlier in willing to debate on Liberal media platforms, but now even he's a Never-Trumper. 

And so in the end, whatever might have been good faith in Chris Licht's attempt to make CNN more MAGA-friendly was always impossible if CNN was to retain any journalistic integrity. The absurdity of the CNN platforming the New Hampshire town hall proves it. Trump gets everything he wanted if he is to condescend to appear on CNN, and this means giving him an open platform to promote his lies. Sure, there would be a pretense of fact-checking, but in front of a live MAGA audience that has no interest in the facts and only cares about retaining its delusional narrative of election fraud and Liberal moral turpitude.

And so Kaitlan Collins, the CNN host, tried her best to challenge the lies, but they came so fast and furious that she couldn't keep up. And so the whole thing  blows up in CNN's face: Rather than presenting itself as media where MAGA can feel comfortable, MAGA folks walk away thinking that CNN is just what they always thought it was--hostile to Trump. Was any other outcome possible? The goal of having a fact-based forum with Trump in which MAGA world would feel comfortable was from the beginning an impossibility. To care about the facts and expect MAGA to thank CNN for insisting on them are two mutually exclusive goals. In the end CNN does not get its win. It just gives Trump another opportunity to excrete his lies and to give MAGA good reason to continue to hate CNN. 

Normies vs Kooks

Is there a scenario in which DeSantis can win the GOP nomination? Maybe. I don't think that DeSantis or any of the others running for the GOP nomination can win the nomination unless Trump's legal problems cripple his candidacy. We just don't know yet how the coming indictments will affect him politically. For now, at least, I'm in the camp that believes his legal jeopardy strengthens his candidacy with the MAGA base, and so makes it extremely difficult for DeSantis or any of the others in a split field to emerge strong enough to beat him.

But we don't know what's going to come out about Trump as these indictments start hitting, and there's good reason to believe that as bad as is everything we already know about Trump, the reality is probably much worse. People like DeSantis are in position to make the case that for the MAGA cause to win and flourish, it needs a leader without Trump's liabilities, and I don't see any of the other candidates who are in a better position to assume the MAGA mantle than DeSantis. 

So while the media for now tend to look at DeSantis as an unlikeable, Nixonesque bumbler, Nixon proved that being an unlikeable Machiavellian sociopathic schemer doesn't make one unelectable. Besides, he has time to get his act together by next spring when people are actually paying attention. He is in the strongest position to win the nomination should Trump become broadly perceived by the MAGA base as unelectable in the general. He already is unelectable, but MAGA World doesn't believe it yet. That might change by this time next year. If it does, DeSantis will probably be the guy most capable of elbowing his way to the front of the MAGA parade. 

But the bottom line is that a constrained sociopath like DeSantis scares me far more than an unconstrained one like Trump because DeSantis can fake being a Normie in a way that is acceptable to swing voters. Florida swing voters bought his act in '22, but would they re-elect him in '26? Not sure, but if not it's because Florida swing voters have seen up close what post-Covid authoritarian DeSantis is like in a way that swing voters in other states can't from afar. So while Biden might still be able to beat DeSantis, it will be much, much harder. Nevertheless, it won't be a cakewalk for DeSantis because he will have the very difficult job of retaining the MAGA Kooks while broadening his appeal to Normie swing voters. (See Note 1) It remains to be seen whether he has the political chops to do that. But he'll have the massive support of conservative media and the broader business community who care more about deregulation and taxes than they do about what their HR department says should be their DEI policies.

Your typical swing voters don't think their votes for president in '24 are about the survival of democracy in the U.S. They think only Kooks on the Left and Right believe that. They're wrong, but that doesn't matter. They just want normalcy, and whoever makes the better case that they are for normal and the other guy isn't wins. So for swing voters it comes down to Normies vs Kooks. If MAGA works against the GOP in the general, Woke works against the Democrats. The country elected Biden in 2020 because in an election between Normies vs. Kooks, Biden wins the Normie vote. The election in '24 will also largely depend on who wins the Normie vote.

Will most swing voters associate the GOP with the MAGA Kooks, or will they associate the Dems with the Woke Kooks? Remains to be seen. But you can be sure that the the GOP will make the anti-Woke Kook theme the core of their campaign, and it's not clear to me whether Dems understand their vulnerability. Their cosmopolitan smugness blinds them in that respect, and Dem Pols still seem quaintly to believe, based on their talking points on TV, that what most voters really care about is policy. 

See also Why I Prefer Trump 1 and Why I Prefer Trump 2.

Note 1: I disagree with Tim Miller in this regard--the question is not who would be worse--Trump or DeSantis--but who is more electable. If the American electorate is so insane as to elect Trump again, well that's the end. America goes out with a bang. If DeSantis gets elected, which is far more likely, America goes out with a whimper. MAGA wins either way. Choose your poison--cyanide or arsenic.

Why I Prefer Trump 2

 From a Firing Line interview with Charlie Sykes:

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

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

HOOVER: A referendum on Trump? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Why I Prefer Trump 1

There are pundits like Damon Linker who want us to fear a Trump candidacy more than a DeSantis one. I fear DeSantis more. The problem for me with DeSantis is not that he will be  more competent and effective authoritarian than Trump was--that's a toss-up. I fear him more than Trump because he's more electable than Trump will be in the general election.

If nominated, is there a risk Trump might win, yes, but it's very low, much lower than in '16. Why? Because then he was a blank screen onto which people could project their resentments. Now the general electorate knows too much about Trump for him to play the role of blank screen. Only the truly deluded and fanatical can vote for him, and while there are millions of them, there aren't enough to win in the swing states. 

DeSantis will be for most swing voters more like Trump was in '16. He is now what Trump was then--a blank screen onto which they can project their resentments of the arrogant elite Liberal System that everyone despises, even Democrats. Conservatives will vote for him because he's on their team, and they hate Liberals, but the swing voters will vote for him because he seems "normal", especially compared to Trump.

But he's not normal; he's just a different kind of sociopath than Trump. "And besides," swing voters will reason, "We're tired of Trump, and we're tired of Biden. Let's go with someone new and young." On such thinking the future of American democracy likely depends. 

In Trump v. Biden, Biden almost certainly wins. But DeSantis v. Biden? That's a matchup between democracy and authoritarianism that should really scare us. 

[See Why I Prefer Trump 2 here.]

Freddie de Boer on Today's Left

In his post today: 

In 2016, it certainly seemed like the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton split was defining a dynamic that would last for a long time: class-focused socialists bent on dramatic change opposed by centrists who weaponized identity politics to try and stop that change. It was very common for people to assume that this would be the battlefield for the American left-of-center moving forward. I did.

But that really hasn’t happened. The socialist left has almost entirely capitulated on its resistance to the dominance of identity politics in progressive spaces. Many of the identity-skeptical leftists I knew have adopted the identity language they once mocked. Some have simply gone quiet. And I think the reason is obvious: constantly being called racist for supporting Bernie really scarred them. It turned out that a lot of them really weren’t about that life. They were used to calling people racist, not to being called racist. And all of the bluster about how much they hated Clinton faded in a world where Trump was president. 2020 sealed the deal. People saw the great social and professional cost people were paying for even the most tepid criticism of the upheaval in the post-George Floyd moment and folded, fast. This dynamic has been exacerbated by the fact that most of the socialists that have been minted since Occupy Wall Street are very low-information, people with no backing in socialist history or theory. We were recruiting thousands of converts who were long on snark but who had no history of activism of grounding in leftist principles. So there wasn’t really anything for them to give up; they had no real socialism to abandon.

...The fight now is over the attempt to mandate this pinched vision of what the left is, to make identity liberalism literally the only left-of-center position. The insistence is that there is only identity politics or conservatism.

And so it goes: The rich continue to get richer and the poor poorer. As he goes on to say--

When you treat your political tendency like a cool party where people hang out, rather than as a vehicle to prompt change, you can’t tolerate anyone harshing the vibe. I have been an activist for my entire adult life and all of my political opinions are an expression of my peculiar form of Marxism, but since I’m identity-skeptical I must be called a conservative.

This faux Left is a feckless, impotent, smug Left, which, as I said in my previous post, is playing into the hands of the reactionaries insofar as it pushes the white working class and the so-called moderate suburban moms into the hands of people like Youngkin and DeSantis. With a Left politics that has come to define the Democratic Party like this, perhaps the only thing that will ensure that the Dems hold the White House in '24 is Trump's winning the nomination and running for the office from prison. 

See also my "What It Means to be on the Left".