After the Future

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.

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. 

Worshipping in the Temple of the Invisible Hand

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

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

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

--Ezra Klein

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

Tom Frank on Liberal Obtuseness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Progressivism in a Post-Liberal World

I do not consider myself a Liberal, but I do think of myself as a Progressive in the late-19th-, early-20th-Century sense, more with the Social Gospel/W. J. Bryan strain than with the Deweyan/statist, managerial liberal strain. I'm a communitarian/subsidiarist who admires Wendell Berry, but who nevertheless recognizes that the technocratic state is a necessity. I do not align myself with the kind of Progressive today who sees him or herself as a woke social justice warrior. I'm for Justice and compassion, not some form of intellectually fashionable, performative Neopuritan priggery.

While I recognize the necessity of the technocratic state, I see our task as citizens to be vigilant in holdingit accountable and to exert whatever pressure we can so that it will use its power to solve problems in the service of a democratically determined common good. Without a broadly shared cultural commitment to an inspiring ideal of the common good, no productive, healthy Progressive Left project can get traction. Material interests alone cannot provide a sufficient basis for a vigorous Progressivism that might actually enact Justice.

I reject as a dead end the poststructuralist historicism that plays such a large role in shaping the post-Marxist politics of the contemporary Left. An effective Left politics must derive inspiration from transcendentals like Justice, Truth, Goodness, Beauty that are the source of all ontonormativity. These are not intellectual abstractions but energizing sources of felt meaning. A truly vigorous Left politics becomes a possibility only when the broader culture becomes capable of imagining a possible future in which these provide a solidarity-creating energy for its accomplishment. And I'd argue that a true Left solidarity cannot come into being so long as Rationalist Materialism provides the dominant metaphysical imaginary for American society. 

So those on the secular Left who talk about the need for solidarity are quite right--nothing changes without it. But that kind of healthy, constructive, Left solidarity is playing no significant role on the American political landscape right now. We got a whiff of it in Bernie's campaigns, but the last time we really saw it was in the Civil Rights movement before the assassination of King. King, for all his flaws, was someone through whom Justice as a transcendental ideal shone. All Americans of good will felt it, were moved by it, and changed by it. But King was killed and reaction set in, and not long after with the ascension of Reagan, Neoliberalism and its inherent nihilism becomes the elite consensus for both the Republican and Democrat establishments. 

So after Reagan, a "Liberalism" that dominates both GOP and Dem elites becomes too entrenched an ideology to have any truck with Justice and a solidarity movement to instantiate it. Let the Invisible Hand do its thing. Goodbye labor unions, good by multi-racial solidarity, goodbye any hope on the Left for real Justice, goodbye any sense that there's such a thing as 'society', much less a common good. The hardcore Neoliberals consolidate their gains as the isolating, enervating, anti-common good, individualistic world they always wanted becomes realized by the proliferation of its solipsizing Technocapitalist produce. The Left retreats to fight cultural issues in despair of fighting structural power and for economic justice. Nothing pleases Neoliberal elites more--their opponents are divided in their squabbling over abortion and guns, and thus easily subdued. 

The historicist Secular Left has no robust answer for this because it has no real way of standing outside of it. If we've learned nothing else in the last few decades, some things other than material interests are important for the creation of solidarity. The Right has an easier job of creating it because its goals are served by drawing upon the primitive resentments and fears that have always been the primary animator of the mob. The mob is a form of counterfeit solidarity, and the best on the Left know that riding the tiger produces nothing good. Some other energies must be drawn upon to create a sense of solidarity, but they're not readily available except in small groups here and there. 

***

So how is my critique of Liberalism different from the one illiberalism makes? I do not think that Liberalism has created a world that is worthy of the hatred so many on the cultural right direct toward it. It is incomplete, not evil. But Liberalism,  whatever were the ideals that originally inspired it, has become reduced into an metaphysical imaginary and epistemology that rests almost completely on rationalistic materialistic assumptions. As such, it no longer has the resources from which we can draw to meet the challenges that face us. It has created a world that is for us now inadequate for true human flourishing. It's not about what it affirms as important so much as about what it rejects as unimportant.

For all its talk of freedom, Liberalism and its rationalist materialist imaginary imposes constraints on the spirit and closes off more possibilities than it opens up. The cure is not to destroy Liberalism but rather to subordinate what's good in it to something else more deeply humanizing. Science and critical thinking, pluralism and free speech, freedom of religion, democracy, and a conception of fundamental natural rights are good gifts Liberalism bequeaths to us. They must be retained and defended while realizing that they must inevitably be subsumed into a higher cultural synthesis in which the Wisdom dimension is restored. 

All I am asking of any defender of Liberalism reading this is to suspend disbelief, to treat what I'm saying as a thought experiment. I am asking you to try to step back from the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary that shapes all our ways of thinking whether we have religious commitments or not. We can surely say about Liberalism that it worked for a while, that it gave us a spectacular means to create material bounty. But it exacted significant costs, and we are no longer in a position to pay them. The cost was a loss of wisdom in our public life and of our capacity even to care that we lost it.

Insofar as people care about wisdom in their private life, it has at best indirect public impacts. But the fact is that wisdom never has a seat at the table in our political economy. Utility and expediency are the only criteria, and both are useless in solving the deeper problem, which is one of metaphysical imagination. The cost therefore is not just that we lack wisdom in planning for the future, but that without it we are we are spinning meaninglessly at a time when we need our wits about us and firm ground upon which to plant our feet if we are to face what's coming without being washed away.

The inadequacy of Liberalism is apparent to everyone but the 20% or so of educated elites who have benefited most from it and who are the primary constituency that the Democratic Party now serves. They cannot understand how the regime that has benefited them so much could be hated so intensely by those whom Sam Francis called years ago Middle American Radicals, the Jacksonians that supported George Wallace back in the day, and that the GOP recruited during the Reagan era but mostly neglected until the Tea Party and Trump. The gifts of Liberalism are not valued by the Middle American Radicals or the Integralists and others on the Right because they see Liberalism as the shark that has chewed up their world and everything they hold sacred. They're not wrong. And elite Liberals do not endear themselves to these folks when they tell them to get over it and move on. 

***

So if you've stuck with me this far, I'm likely to lose you in what follows. I have no expectation that what I'm trying to do here would be well received either by those who are deeply captured by a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary or by those who are rigidly dogmatic or fundamentalistic in their religious beliefs. I speak to those who care about the human prospect and share with me the sense of urgency about what is happening to us as a civilization. And I speak to those who are open to think through things in a way that doesn't fit neatly into any established categories, but nevertheless sees their thinking as part of a long tradition that dates back to the Axial revolution. There's lots of 'new' thinking out there about our collective life together, but the only thinking that I can take seriously has to be grounded in some understanding of the transcendent. Transcendence should not be surrendered to the Right. 

I'm arguing for something that is, to say the least, not obvious--especially to people who lean Left, who compose my primary audience. I see myself as a dog that's barking up a tree. I smell something up there and I think I know what it is, but it's hidden among the branches and leaves, so I'm not sure quite what it looks like. But there's something there, and we need to see it and understand it better.

I am among those who believe that any new political project must develop hand in hand with the emergence of a new cultural project. This new cultural project requires bringing what's up in that tree to ground. What that means for us going forward is outlined in the first five or six parts of my Geneaology Series, and if what I'm writing here makes any sense to you, I encourage you to at least read Part 1 and Part 2.

Here's an excerpt from Part 2 "Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West" to suggest what I'm barking about--

A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos/Phronesis and the vertical dimension Mythos/Sophia. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operates on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.  

In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture. 

A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. [Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.]

...

There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.

...

Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being as well as a healthy, integrated society "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. [See Note 1 for criteria to evaluate effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary.]

So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose individual lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their spiritual beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. 

Religious people respond in four basic ways to this split between what their religion tells them is true and the reality of their everyday world:

1. They separate their lives into public and private spheres. In private life they go to church and practice their religion with friends and family, but in public their lives are ruled by the law of the shark, and they, too, become sharks if they have any ambition.
2. There are, of course, lots of religious or spiritual people who live decent lives in this public sphere, but because they are not driven by ambition, they only rarely rise to leadership positions. They choose careers as artisans or in service professions. But even so, unless they own their own businesses, they must work in organizations--schools, hospitals, government bureaucracies--whose ethos is shaped by rationalist-materialist assumptions and that are often run by ambitious sharks. 
3. They retreat into quietism--monasticism, Anabaptist separatism, Dreher's Benedict Option, off-the-grid cults, etc.  It's possible to live an integrated life in such bubble worlds, but living in them requires the abdication of responsibility for what happens in the rest of the world.
4. They seek power in the political sphere to order the society into a theocracy in which they will no longer feel alienated even if almost everyone else will. This was Calvin's project in Geneva, and is now the Catholic Integralist and Evangelical Dominionist project. It leads to illiberalism and oppression. 

This is pretty much reality in North Atlantic societies as most people experience it, and few are really, truly happily thriving in it. The restoration of the vertical axis to the metaphysical imaginary cannot be forced in the way the fourth group wants. As soon as it's forced, it loses any claims to wisdom or spiritual authority. Nevertheless, the restoration of a wisdom dimension is desirable, and it's more likely to happen if people are prepared for it, look for it, hope for it--and live it in their own lives as best they are able. My Genealogy Series is an attempt to trace how the wisdom dimension functioned in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West until it didn't, and to make the case for its retrieval in a way that makes sense in a globally pluralistic world.

I do not see "wisdom" as being as exclusively derived from any one religious or philosophical tradition. I see religious and philosophical traditions deriving their legitimacy by their effectiveness in connecting or being a conduit for the broader culture to the Living Real. No religious or philosophical tradition is doing that for North Atlantic societies in this moment, and, I'm arguing, the lack of such a sapiential tradition with broad cultural legitimacy is at the heart of the crisis we are living through. A lot depends on whether we will be able to find a healthy way to resolve this crisis. 

The task as I see it is not to force anything on anybody but rather to ring an alarm that we are in a profound meaning crisis, and that we need to find some level of consensus on the vertical dimension. Any solution to this problem must be bottom-up rather than top-down. No sane person wants some Mandarin class to arise to impose its "knowing better" on everyone else. Or another way of saying this is that we should expect no solutions from our current Mandarins in the universities, media, and other cultural institutions, including the church's managerial class. If something 'real' arises, they will, after some initial resistance, adapt. 

How might this happen? I really don't know the specifics but suspect it will emerge in a way that is both continuous with Liberalism and discontinuous with it. How did Buddhism happen? How did Taoism happen? How did Christianity happen? How did is Islam happen? The energies of the  Living Real have a way of breaking through from time to time in a way that is recognized by the broader culture, and it does it in a way that is both continuous and discontinuous. Christianity, for instance, is both continuous with and discontinuous with Judaism. I have every expectation that something like these historical breakthroughs will happen again. How and when I have no idea, but we should hope for it, expect it.

If it happens it won't be about believing a new doctrine so much as it will be about restoring a felt connection to the Living Real. No felt connection, no breakthrough. And when such a breakthrough occurs, it's something that wise Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, other religionists, and all people of good will will recognize as cognate with their own wisdom traditions. Doctrine--right teaching--follows from the experience of connection.

The Living Real is accessible by all. Those of us who are Christians have an account regarding how such access became possible, but accepting that account is no prerequisite for access to it. What matters is that one hears the song and is inspired to sing it. It doesn't matter what language you sing it in if we all are hearing the same melody, the melody of Justice. Hearing this melody is the prerequisite for the solidarity that is necessary for any real progress.

So this is not an intellectual enterprise. It's not something you can think yourself to--and it's certainly not something a minority can force on a majority in the political sphere. It's about hearing the song. Lots of people hear it even now, but maybe only faintly because of all the noise that drowns it out, and because so few others who do hear it are singing it with confidence and gusto.

***

Question: But what to do if we don't hear it, or until we hear it?

Answer: The best we can. We respond to what's given to us and do what's called for. We work for Justice as best we can know and feel it. And sometimes that means just resisting as best we can the siren songs that lure us and our fellow citizens toward shipwreck.

In the short run, perhaps all many of us can do is say, No, that's not the song. I don't know what it is, but that's not it. That's the Socratic daemon working in us. Better to wait and trust that something true and new will break through. So while the temptation is for many compelling, the worst thing anyone can do is surrender to the siren song for want of anything better.

We are in that respect like Odysseus on the trackless sea or the ancient Israelites wandering in the wilderness. We must keep moving even if we don't know when we'll eventually arrive. And that means we must resist Circe's enchantment or the longing to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. These are mythopoetic archetypes that speak to us in this moment. I realize that this might sound like a rationale for complacency, but it isn't. It requires fortitude and hope beyond hope. It is not just about waiting passively because there will come a moment when we must act decisively, but there has to be a chance for success, even if a small one. Wisdom is knowing when the chance is presented. Only a fool expects his roses to bloom in January, but we must be alert, vigilant, and prepared for the first signs of Spring.

In a post last month I wrote that I was looking for an entertainment alternative to the nihilism that passes for prestige TV, and so I read for the first time Tolkien's Silmarillion, re-read the LOTR trilogy, and re-watched the Jackson films. I was surprised by how they engaged and moved me. And I've been wondering since why it works in a way differently from something like Game of Thrones, which after a while I found unwatchable. I think the key is that for all GOT's fantastical elements, there is no Mythos/Sophia or a vertical dimension in it. There's not a whiff of transcendence in it. It's just the modern secular world transposed into one where dragons and zombies and magic are real, but where true goodness and true wisdom are utterly absent. It's Succession in medieval garb. Some find such entertainments interesting and enjoyable. Some find Tarantino's films entertaining for the same reason. I find them suffocating.

In Tolkien's legendarium, the whole point is to imagine a world where the vertical Mythos or Wisdom dimension is integrated with the Logos dimension. It's an adventure fantasy and an entertainment on one level, but it strives and largely succeeds to create a metaphysical imaginary with a Mythos dimension that provides an analogue or metaphor for what we all long for but can't bring ourselves to believe in because of our Rationalist-Materialist cultural programming. 

So let me finish this long piece on a Tolkienian note. A few paragraphs above I referenced the mythopoesis of Homer and Exodus as a source of needed wisdom in this moment. Let me now reference Tolkien and his central character, Aragorn. "Not all those who wander are lost", he says. He knows this from his experience wandering anonymously throughout all Middle Earth for decades until finally his decisive moment arrives.

He goes by many names, but his real name, the name his mother and wife called him by, was Estel, which means hope beyond hope. Tolkien's entire legendarium is a meditation on fate and freedom, patience and fortitude, and of the centrality of hope when there seems to be no "Logos" for it. What is it in us that makes us capable of such a thing? Our capacity for living on the vertical, or mythos dimension, the dimension of depth and wisdom.

So to sum up, Liberalism Plus, i.e., the various Whatevers subordinated to "Liberalism" that Douthat talks about, can no longer work, but going forward the gifts of Liberalism must to be retained in a way that is subordinated to a living, developing, dynamic Wisdom Tradition. We don't have that now, but until we do, the bad guys and their seductive song of destruction must be resisted lest they steer us all to shipwreck . 

----------

Note 1: In Genealogy Part 5--scroll down to the second half of the essay--I lay out and develop in a preliminary way four criteria--coherency, scope, richness, and adaptability--for evaluating the effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary:

(1) how coherent its integration of its knowledge on both vertical and horizontal  dimensions,

(2) how broad the scope of its knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions,

(3) how both the scope and coherence of its knowledge adds a spiritual and emotional richness, meaning, and purpose to human experience, and

(4) how adaptable the imaginary is to changes in human experience of reality [and growth of knowledge] on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

...A rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary has broad horizontal scope, coherence, and adaptability, but lacks vertical scope and richness. Religious subcultures like the Amish or Hasids have coherent, vertically rich metaphysical imaginaries that lack horizontal scope. What a vital, healthy civilization needs is a metaphysical imaginary that has both vertical and horizontal scope, coherence that integrates knowledge on both dimensions, and richness that comes from a sense of meaning and purpose that derives from our expanding on both dimensions, and the ability to adapt as that expansion produces knowledge not yet recognized.

Sinema Explained

To win Ms. Sinema’s support, Democratic leaders agreed to drop a $14 billion tax increase on some wealthy hedge fund managers and private equity executives that she had opposed, change the structure of a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations, and include drought money to benefit Arizona. (Source)

Here's a Dem who really cares about the little guy. 

Update 8/8/22: I realize this is how politics work, but really--

Mr. Manchin’s recent surprise agreement to back the Biden administration’s historic climate legislation came about in part because the senator was promised something in return: not only support for the pipeline in his home state, but also expedited approval for pipelines and other infrastructure nationwide, as part of a wider set of concessions to fossil fuels.

It was a big win for a pipeline industry that, in recent years, has quietly become one of Mr. Manchin’s biggest financial supporters.

Natural gas pipeline companies have dramatically increased their contributions to Mr. Manchin, from just $20,000 in 2020 to more than $331,000 so far this election cycle, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission and tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics. Mr. Manchin has been by far Congress’s largest recipient of money from natural gas pipeline companies this cycle, raising three times as much from the industry than any other lawmaker.

...A spokesman for Mr. Manchin said the Mountain Valley Pipeline “will help bring down energy costs, shore up American energy security and create jobs in West Virginia.” An official in Mr. Schumer’s office said the pipeline deal “was only included at the insistence of Sen. Manchin as part of any agreement related to this reconciliation bill.”

Good for Shumer for making the deal because it's a net positive, but what both Manchin and Sinema show is how the Senate works, which is to make it cheap and easy for big-money interests to thwart good legislation. They don't have to bother at all with the Republicans; all they have to do is pick off one or two venal Dems with bribes made legal by Citizens United. BTW, when people talk about blue-dog Democrats or moderate Democrats, they don't mean reasonable Democrats, but more often they mean those who like Manchin and Sinema are bribable by moneyed interests--fossil fuels, Wall Street broadly understood, and pharmaceuticals being the most notorious. 

 

How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left I

A version of this essay first appeared in July 2014. It was inspired by Crispin Sartwell's Atlantic article "The Left-Right Political Spectrum is Bogus". This post expands on it and supplements recent posts about how the postmodern cultural left, whether it realizes it or not, is a form of cultural Neoliberalism. It argues that Neoliberalism is the perfect ideology for the postmodern milieu that dominates American cultural and economic institutions and that the cultural Left, populated in large part by Aspen Institute Liberals, fits too comfortably with economic Neoliberalism.

This type of cosmopolitan Liberal, beyond a certain callow noblesse oblige, has no genuine interest in the worldview of most ordinary white, black, and brown Americans, which they perceive as primitively steeped in traditional values. If the meritocratic careerists in elite American cultural and economic institution grew up with theses values, they shed them when they realized that success in their careers depended on losing them. If Tim Miller's book tells the story about how conservatives become acculturated into a radical right political ecosphere, Anand Giridharadas's book talks about a similar phenomenon on the cultural Left. Both are toxic for a functioning democracy. 

If we understand Left-Right in its most basic sense, the Left is identified with the modern Liberal project in Europe to disrupt and displace the old customary society defined by crown and altar. By the end of WWI it was clear to anybody that the Left had won that fight. The Right after that became identified with fascist or 'authoritarian' political systems, and the far Left with Revolutionary Socialist regimes like those of Russia and Mexico and later in China and Cuba.

Since 1989, this distinction has become irrelevant because there is no extreme Left anywhere that matters, and the extreme Right has become associated primarily with jingoism and fundamentalist religious extremists. So if the essence of the Left is open-ended disruption that embraces the destruction of traditional beliefs and ways of life, then free-market capitalism is the only robust force left standing that performs this disruptive Left function. 

The Left-Right distinction since 1989 is more confusing than clarifying because Left and Right since then have mainly to do with cultural values rather than with economic policy and wealth distribution. Insofar as there is a Left left in the 19th-Century sense, its influence is mainly in the cultural sphere where it pushes for its anti-traditional-values politics--abortion, LBGTQ+ issues, gun control, marijuana legalization. This program has been embraced by most people who think of themselves as free-market capitalists. And since this anti-traditional values program has been so successful since the 1960s, it has caused a backlash among American traditionalists whose sense of right and wrong is deeply embedded in the vestigial customary culture that the cultural Left sees as so oppressively constraining. Those on the Right who embrace both free-market capitalism and the preservation of traditional values are incoherent.

The cultural Left has been so effective precisely because most of those who compose the power and economic elite endorse that "liberal", anti-traditional program. The cultural elite and the economic elite are heirs of the classic 19th-century liberals in that they could not care less about the way capitalism destroys the old traditional ways of life. That's the price of progress. They think of modernization as a necessary, positive step in every country's development, and that free-market capitalism is the engine for everyone's becoming wealthier and healthier, and that traditional values and ways of life are the primary obstacle preventing a better, more prosperous life for the immiserated poor in the undeveloped countries. These neoliberal elites sincerely believe they are the real Progressives, and as such the real Left. 

For this elite, it's all about disruption, change, transformation. And so if there is a Left and Right that defines our political economic discourse now, it could be argued that the Left comprises those who embrace unconstrained capitalism and technological advancement as the creative-destructive engine of history, and the Right those who resist it. Some like fundamentalist Muslims and Christians are at the far-Right extreme, but couldn't it be argued that anybody who wants to restrain capitalist disruption is on the Right? What about Occupy?  What about anti-growth environmentalists? What about anti-transhuman humanists?

Couldn't it be argued that you are on the conservative Right now if you resist or want to restrain progress if by progress we mean whatever capitalism and open-ended technological development bring us? Some kind of realignment is called for here, and I'm with Sartwell in questioning whether Left and Right are helpful categories in any effort to promote that. So that's why I'm proposing as an alternative--Red and Blue, the Red party of Radical Irresponsibie Unconstraint, and and the Blue Party of Responsible Evolutionary Restraint.  

Near the end of his article, Sartwell says

Milton Friedman and Vlad Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Augusto Pinochet: They may well have disagreed about this and that. But they have agreed, or said they did, that the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and vice versa. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position.

I would say in a new alignment that Blues are not about pitting government against capital, but about finding the balance between them within a framework defined by the principle of subsidiarity. This is a conservative idea; it's a very Blue idea. Subsidiarity correlates with social democracy. The development of the social democracies in the West is the great success story that came out of the chaos of disruptive change that wracked the 19th Century and the first half of the twentieth. I believe that sooner or later the countries, like the U.S and U.K. that that lost social democracy to the Neoliberal ideologues since the late 70s will once again find their way back to it, not for ideological reasons, but for very Blue pragmatic reasons: It makes the best kind of political and economic sense. 

Sartwell also makes this point near the end of his article:

This spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power and wealth. There are alternatives, and the one I would suggest is this: We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth.

Sartwell is right to point out that the iron law of oligarchy operates along the whole spectrum, from the extreme Left to the extreme Right, and everywhere in between, from local street gangs to PTAs. Ruling cliques always emerge in every social configuration regardless of their political commitments or lack of them. But it's wrong to think we can get along without hierarchy. This is where I think movements like Occupy are a silly.

The key is to find balance, and the principle of subsidiarity should be our guide in organizing relations vertically in a way that finds the correct balance between top and bottom. I'd argue that It's the key to the Red-Blue realignment we need so badly now because subsidiarity doesn't fit neatly into conventional ideas of Conservative or Liberal. Small-government conservatives like it because of its bias toward local sovereignty, and Liberals like it because it allows for interventions by higher levels of the hierarchy when the lower levels lack the resources or competency to deal with extraordinary or intractable problems.

For those unfamiliar with the term, subsidiarity acknowledges the necessity of hierarchy, but insists that higher levels in a hierarchy exist to serve and support the lower levels. In this sense if flips the idea of hierarchy on its head. We see this principle in action all the time, whether we call it subsidiarity or not--for instance, when a disaster overwhelms the resources of city, the state government comes in to support it, and if it overwhelms the resources of the state, the  federal government steps in. It wants as few constraints as possible at the bottom, but to allow for judicious constraints from the top when the situation calls for it. 

The principle of subsidiarity provides the framework for resisting government overreach, and I've used it to make my case against top-down education reforms like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and now the Common Core State Standards. The vast majority of schools in the U.S. are doing just fine. There are some school districts or schools within those districts that don't have the resources to adequately provide for the educational development of the children in their care. They require extra resources and interventions from outside, but this can be done in targeted ways without disrupting the whole system the way these federal top-down programs do.

Insisting on some national standard is silly and non-productive. It serves the needs of bureaucrats, not the needs children and their families. It's a prime example of top-down over-reach. And it's interesting that both progressives and conservatives are opposing this overreach because it points to where there is common ground for realignment. For more on this see "Governing Principles for the Development of Local Humanistic Learning Communities."

The point is that subsidiarity provides a political framework that seeks a balance--it's not either/or, either anarchic libertarianism or oppressive top-down centralization. In the last 200 years we have learned that neither of those work well, and it's just a matter of time until once again we find the balance that my grandfather's generation found in the 30s when they were forced to abandon ideology and to focus on what worked and what didn't. 

See also "Finding the Balance between Centralization and Localism I" or click on the 'Subsidiarity" tag below.

[End of excerpt.]

I would add that in the same way that traditionalist conservatives who are also free-market capitalists are intellectually incoherent, so are those on the postmodern cultural Left who are anti-capitalist. Both are captured by an eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too logic that tries to assert values that are contradicted by the nihilism of their presuppositions. They are like the person who says that he does not believe in human freedom, but chooses to live as if he were free. Or they're like the jewel thief who justifies his larcenies as his personal social justice program to redistribute wealth. "Laws against theft reinforce the existing power dominance of the wealthy elite," argues the thief, "and so they must be transgressed. Ecrasez l'infame." These arguments might have a superficial cleverness, but they are fundamentally silly. And while people might make such assertions in perfect sincerity, they are incoherent and intellectually dishonest. 

It's quite possible to believe your own propaganda. Look how many did on J6. But there can be no society that moves toward true Justice unless a majority of the people in it are inspired by Justice as a transcendental. I think most normal people have experienced Justice in this transcendent sense, even if they wouldn't call it a transcendental. That's why the interpretive frame is so important--it determines the limits of what can be believed which in turn determines the limits of what one imagines as possible to be positively achieved. 

Am I saying that there is no substance to the social justice program of the cultural Left?  I'd say only to the degree that it aligns with our deeply felt intuitions about justice as a transcendental, and despite the logic of its arguments, their program overlaps with causes that are truly just. As I argued the other day, gay marriage is broadly accepted not because it's transgressive but because most people recognize its inherent justice. It stretches a traditional norm without abolishing it. But most of the arguments that I hear coming from those folks are rhetorically ineffective, if not downright alienating, because they don't draw on the inspiration of justice but rather on some head-trippy theory that revels in its transgressivity that nobody with any sense finds persuasive. The justice in anybody's cause can only be advanced by appealing to the innate feeling for justice that all decent humans possess. 

I would also add to my critique of Sartwell's critique of verticality, that it's not the verticality that's the problem, but the distance between the top and the bottom. The most creative, talented people should rise into positions of leadership, but they don't all have to become billionaires. When you have a company for instance where the highest paid workers make 350 times more than the lowest paid workers, something is deeply out of balance and requires the kind of intervention that subsidiarist social democracies can effect. That kind of intervention is incomprehensible to and so vigorously resisted by Libertarian and Neoliberal ideology because neither has a robust feeling for justice as a transcendental. 

As I said earlier in the week, Democratic economic policies would be popular on Main Street if they were proposed by anybody other than Democrats, so maybe the solution is for cultural values centrist party with center Left economic policies in the subsidiarist vein described above to emerge as an alternative. I also wrote that the Dems of the 2020s might be the Whigs of the 1850s, so I was interested to hear toward the end of Charlie Syke's podcast yesterday David Jolly describe the program for Serve America Movement, (SAM) for which he is the executive director.

Now I'm to the left of both Sykes and Jolly, both Never-Trumper former Republicans, but I like both men because they are reasonable pragmatists who are committed to American democracy. They are not culture-war ideologues. They want to solve problems, and they understand that the current party system is incapable of solving practical problems because one has become dominated by delusional crackpots, and the other by an elite postmodern Neoliberalism that most ordinary Americans find alienating. So it seems obvious that some kind of alternative has to emerge that represents where most Americans are in their cultural values--flexibly traditionalist--and so can draw on that majority to develop a coalition from the center Left and  center Right that can get something done. This seems to be what Jolly's SAM intends to be, and while I have no idea whether it has the legs to succeed--probably not--something like it might if the Dems fail this year and in '24.

At this point, even if the Dems win in the next two cycles, they won't do it decisively, which means we'll just keep limping along in this politically impotent bardo state. A part of me wonders if it wouldn't be better in the long run if the GOP would win in the short run so everyone can wake up to how truly awful they are. Only then will most Americans be motivated to embrace a new party that is culturally Normie, and center Left on policy. I've retained some hope that the Dems could be that party, but I'm becoming increasingly persuaded that their having been tainted, if not captured, by cultural and economic Neoliberalism since the 90s means that they've lost most ordinary Americans for good.

Cultural Normie + Economic Progressive = Political Winner

If I were a cynical political operative who wanted to construct a presidential candidate perfectly suited for this moment, I’d start by making this candidate culturally conservative. I’d want the candidate to show by dress, speech and style that he or she is not part of the coastal educated establishment. I’d want the candidate to connect with middle- and working-class voters on values and to be full-throatedly patriotic.

Then I’d make the candidate economically center-left. I’d want to fuse the economic anxieties of the working-class Republicans with the economic anxieties of the Bernie Sanders young into one big riled populist package. College debt forgiveness. An aggressive home-building project to bring down prices. Whatever it took.

Then I’d have that candidate deliver one nonpartisan message: Everything is broken. Then he or she would offer a slew of institutional reforms to match the comprehensive institutional reforms the Progressive movement offered more than a century ago.

--David Brooks

Why cynical? It would only be cynical if someone like Steve Bannon was proposing it. But why shouldn't such a candidate emerge who is authentic? If he or she did, with the right candidate, it would be a winning formula. This, I would argue was Bernie's formula. He really tried as best he could to avoid identitarian politics, but BLM attacked him in '16 for not being woke enough, and Clinton attacked him for being mediocre on gun control and too-pie-in-the-sky on economic issues.

But that was the key to his success in a rural state like Vermont. He appealed to the educated coastal types in Burlington with his economic progressivism, his impeccable civil rights record, and he appealed to his rural constituents with his common sense, down-to-earth approach on identitarian cultural issues by putting them on the back burner.

Sanders was always really the true American conservative, if by conservative we mean someone who wanted to preserve the American New Deal public/private partnership that brought us the the widespread prosperity from the 1930s to 1980. Bernie has always been about social justice, but in a traditional sense, not in a postmodern identitarian sense. And his critique of Neoliberalism and the corporate Democrats like the Clintons who abetted it was always on the money. 

The problem with ordinary working families is that most of them are not particularly cutting-edge when it comes to cultural issues. They are normies, which means they lean culturally conservative. They are persuadable, but their "evolution" on cultural issues has to resonate with their innate moral intuitions. But the Democratic Party has become so captured by its activist factions who are driven by counter-intuitive identitarian politics that too many normie Americas increasingly feel no longer at home there, and so are migrating out. 

Any independent candidate--or possibly a new third party--that can formulate a flexible, common-sense normie approach on cultural issues and a progressive approach on economic issues can own the political future, imo. I fear the Democrats have become too tainted by their association with Neoliberalism and postmodern Left culture war activists, and so have lost or are losing the normie Americans--even normie Americans of color. Something new has to emerge one way or the other.  

UPDATE 7/15: As if to bolster the timing of my argument, this from Politico about Ray Tuxeira leaving  Liberal CAP to go to AEI : 

Teixeira, whose role in the Beltway scrum often involved arguing against calls to move right on economic issues, insists his own policy views haven’t changed — but says the current cultural milieu of progressive organizations “sends me running screaming from the left.”

“My perspective is, the single most important thing to focus on in the social system is the economic system,” he tells me. “It’s class.”

...

To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP, and the rest of Washington’s institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms. It also makes people nervous about projects that could be accused of giving short shrift to anti-racism efforts.

“I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that’s a more important lens and doesn’t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you … I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions,” he says.

“I’d say they have been affected by the nature and inclination and preferences of their junior staff,” he says. “It’s just the case that at CAP, like almost any other left think tank you can think of, it’s become very hard to have a conversation about race and gender and trans issues, even crime and immigration. You know, ‘How should the left handle these?’ There’s a default assumption about how you’re supposed to talk about these things, even the language. There’s a real chilling effect on all of these organizations, and I think it’s had an effect on CAP as well.”

Like a lot of older and whiter veterans of liberal think-tanks and foundations, he also says he’s exhausted by the internal agita. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land,” he says. “The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”

If you just want to dismiss this as the blather of a disgruntled old white guy, you're missing the point. Identitarian politics on the Left is a loser for anybody who hasn't done the coursework in elite colleges and universities. Identitarian politics on the Right is a winner because it appeals to what most people grew up with. It's not about who's right or wrong in some academic sense; it's about how do we save democracy. 

And besides, I think the class argument is right and the identitarian argument wrong in the academic sense because the class argument unites the bottom 80% rather than divides them. Bernie, another old white guy gets this, but so does a young brown guy Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin. Listen to his interview on the Ezra Klein podcast.

Corporate culture is more receptive to identitarian arguments than Main Street culture. Why? Because they don't threaten the existing class and wealth structure in the American meritocracy. You need an effective class analysis and political strategy to get real changes along those lines. Identitarians don't really understand how they've been coopted by their own privilege for all their blather about it. Even if they came from non-elite social-economic backgrounds, their careers in elite cultural institutions have depended on their ability to talk the identitarian talk, which is the lingua franca of almost all elite Liberal cultural institutions. 

If the Democrats lose in the next two cycles, I think there will be serious talk about a new third party along the line described by Brooks above. We're in the 1850s, and the GOP has become the party of Southern reaction and the Dems are playing the role of feckless Whigs. Something different is called for if the Dems can't get it together. Getting it together means understanding that most American voters--especially black and brown voters--do not share the postmodern values of educated cultural elites.  Maybe the Dems will figure this out--I hope they do. But if they don't, it's time for something different.

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.

 

Crazy Always Wins...

...in a culture that has lost its mind.

This isn't a statement of hopelessness, because I believe that we will eventually recover our minds, even if it takes fifty or sixty years  to do it.

I haven't said anything about the mass shootings of the last few weeks because no solution seems possible until we have recovered our minds. The real problem is that most Dems, Never-Trump conservatives, and moderate Independents are sane, and sane doesn't have a chance against crazy when crazy is motivated, well organized, and well funded. In other words their institutions, norms, and rules don't have a chance when crazy becomes institutionalized, which it has done now in the GOP.

Most of those in Blue America, because they know nothing about guns and gun culture, have no idea what guns symbolize for Red America. Blue America just can't understand why common-sense gun control measures can't be passed. They don't understand that their common sense and decency is no match for the insanity that will stand in the way of any such measures. It doesn't matter that sane gun control measures poll well. If the Blues are for it, the Reds will be against it. Actual policy has no political salience, only Blue- and Red-team loyalties do. 

Guns have become fetish objects in the culture wars. They symbolize power and agency for a huge segment of Americans who feel they have neither. They've invested whatever is left of their identities and sense of dignity in their ownership, and to take their guns away is to take what's left of their dignity, and so they will use them to defend that dignity when they are made to feel disrespected, which is what any kind of sane gun control makes them feel. The NRA understands this, and hence its bumper sticker: "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands" 

It's too late now. It was criminal negligence on the part of the Republican congresses in the 2000s that that it didn't support the renewal of the assault weapon ban. Now there are so many assault weapons out there, that anybody who is determined to get one by extra-legal means and to use it will not be significantly impeded by such legislation. The assault weapon black market will grow and thrive, and in red states, and in red counties in any state, the police will do nothing to crack down on it. Such a ban will only reinforce the de-legitimzaton of Democrats in Washington and increase the motivation of the kind of people I described in the previous post to take power by any means necessary and to prevent Dems from ever getting it back again.

The problem is not that there are many sane, decent people who own guns, but that there are so many unstable Americans who do--or can get them so easily when they feel the "need" for one.  And so the only real remedy is to address the underlying causes of the identity loss and its ontological dizziness that has made America so crazy. This is partly a metaphysical question, but it's also a social political one caused primarily by the destructive effects of Neoliberalism on the American social fabric. The second flows from the first, but the most egregious negative effects can be remedied by a politics of decency that strives to support American families. 

I think that most Democrats understand this, but they get in their own way by having allowed themselves to become branded as "woke", which everyone outside the media and the universities finds at best irritating for its priggishness. It's not that 'woke' is technically wrong, but nobody likes a prig except other prigs, and so it makes Dems so unpopular at at time when they really, really need to be popular if we're to save our democracy. If there is any political solution, it would have to come from a political realignment that would require a new party to emerge comprising thoughtful social conservatives and communitarian (anti-Neoliberal) Progressives who were willing to agree to disagree about culture-war issues and start confronting the all the ways that Neoliberalism has destroyed the basic social infrastructure of working-class America. Obviously this is not something that will happen any time soon, but something like it is what's called for. 

There is not that much in economic policy differences that separates social conservatives on the Red Team like Patrick Deneen, Oren Cass, Sohrab Ahmari, and Erika Bachiochi from social Liberals on the Blue Team like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren when it comes to policies designed to help American families. Both factions understand how destructive Neoliberalism has been in the lives of most ordinary Americans, but they can't get together mostly because of differences about sex and identity politics. But that's part of what makes us so crazy now. Progressives have become the party of "woke" and Conservatives the party of "anti-woke". As I said above, nothing else has political salience. 

 

Mordor, the Shire, and Freedom in the Public Sphere

[This post first went up in 2012 as a further development of a post entitled "Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined", which focused on the way in which Neoliberalism has supplanted the older political idea of republican freedom with an idea of freedom as consumer choice. It relates to themes developed in "Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability".]

Maybe because The Hobbit is being released this weekend I have Tolkien on the mind, so let's take Mordor as the type of political system defined by hugeness, by domination and submission, and the Shire as the type defined by smallness, localism, face-to-face relationships, and self rule. In Mordor the people must submit to the will of the leader; in the Shire people live mostly by mores inherited from custom, but submit to laws and regulations they enact through debate and consensus. In Mordor, the space for the exercise of freedom is profoundly restricted, not in the interior sense, but certainly in the public sense. In the Shire, it is broad enough for people to exercise it both interiorly and publically. Nobody, I think it's safe to say, wants to live in Mordor.

In Mordor there is no public space for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. In the Shire, the space is there, even if most people choose to fill it with vulgar distractions. In the Shire it's possible for a community to self-correct, and reorganize its public life; in Mordor that is not a possibility. Having political and economic arrangements that provide a broad scope for the exercise of freedom does not guarantee that it will be exercised, but it's possible to talk about those arrangements as either creating or restricting the public space for its exercise. 

In contemporary America, there is still a rather broad space for the practice of deep, interior, creative freedom, even if it is rarely used. Consumerist ideas about freedom are a delusion that traps large swaths of the American population in collective patterns of compulsion, and their lives individually, and our lives together, would be healthier, more free, were not that the case. But these compulsions are reinforced by the structural requirements of the economy and the interests of the mass media, and both dominate the public sphere in ways that make it extraordinarily hard to resist. Nevertheless, there is nothing that prevents anyone from choosing a life that is resistant to or oblivious of all that.

 

***

In the early American republic, which was far more Shirelike than America is now, the ethos of economic sphere assumed that citizens were economically free, that they were self-employed farmers, small businessmen, and professionals. The franchise was limited to people with property because there was a fear then that if the vote were extended to salaried workers, their employers could compel them to vote as the employer dictated. (We saw employers using this tactic in the last election.) It was a commonplace that people could not be free in the political sphere unless they were free in the economic sphere. A similar logic applied to extending the franchise to women, since they were economically dependent on their husbands.

That simpler Jeffersonian world gave way to the economic warlordism of the Robber Baron era after the Civil War that turned much of America into Mordor. The new problem that the founders couldn't grasp was the way that the population, diversity, and economy would grow and change, and in doing so make their Jeffersonian imagination of America as a network of Tokienesque Shires obsolete. Bigness and huge concentrations of power and wealth became a problem by the turn of the century that no one could have envisaged one hundred years before. And so spirited Americans who understood how the scope of the new wage slavery was destroying freedom in the public sphere began to organize to push back.

The Progressive Movement emerged to pressure elected representatives to use the power of big government to break up monopolies, to regulate private-sector economic behaviors that negatively impacted the common good, and to provide social safety-net programs to ensure a minimum of economic security and dignity for those helpless to provide it for themselves. That balance between the public interest and free-market capitalism brought us the unprecedented prosperity of the post-WWII period.

Putting aside the question whether that prosperity and the consumerism that came with it was a positive or negative for the exercise of true freedom, the important thing was the consensus that a balance had to be struck between the interests of the market and the common good. That balance is what creates the public space for the exercise of freedom in the public sphere. It's precisely that balance that has been systematically destroyed since 1980 justified by a perverse appeals to liberty understood as negative freedom from the government so that positive freedom can be exercised in the marketplace. The laudable freedom-protecting principle of economic independence and self-reliance became perverted into celebrating the un-republican vice of unrestricted greed. The ideal was no longer the economically independent farmer or small businessman, but the plutocrat, the millionaire--and America became the place where anyone can become one. And shame on you if you haven't the ambition and drive to do so.

So that old lower-case 'r' republican imagination of America was destroyed in the late 19th century, but American conservatives still cling to it as if it were still a possibility. It's not. And the irony is that conservatives in voting for Republicans think that they are voting to retain the Shire but in fact are voting for the private-sector version of Mordor, one in which the government is dominated by plutocrats. In such a world we have the illusion of freedom so long as we have consumer choice, i.e., so long as we think of the exercise of freedom primarily in economic terms.

***

Thinking about what the space for republican freedom requires demands that we first understand how that space has collapsed in the post-war period. One strand, contributing to that collapse has been the replacement of the balance between the public and private spheres struck in the New Deal compromise with Libertarian/Neoliberal, market-centered, consumerist ideas about freedom. Freedom was no longer something we exercised in any robust way in the political sphere, it was something we came to think of almost exclusively in market terms. Freedom equals your ability to choose a Prius or a Hummer, to shop at Walmart or at Nordstroms.

Since market choices are consequential in our daily experience in ways that political choices are not, it was an easy sell. As long as we had market choices in the economic sphere, we felt free, and so why should anyone care about making positive choices in the political sphere? Politics is the domain of entrenched corrupt cronyism; the market is pure and self-correcting. Government just gets in the way, so the only political choices that have validity are the negative choices that diminish the power exercised in the political sphere and expand those exercised in the economic sphere. This is the core belief that has animated American conservatism since the 19th Century--to the degree that the public sphere grows, the private sphere diminishes. It's an naive belief, but it has extraordinary power because of the way it draws upon the 19th-century American mythos.

But the problem is not public vs. private sectors, but in keeping the two in a metaxis, a creative balance. Imbalance can lead, on the one hand, to too much government, as in the Mordor that was the Soviet Union. Or, on the other, imbalance leads to the Mordor of a weak government dominated by corporate interests that wildly exacerbate income inequality and reduce most people to serfdom or wage slavery. But in the U.S., half the country fears that any attempt to redress the balance by increasing public-sector controls leads to a Soviet Mordor. These fears have been reinforced by the dominance of an unbalancing Neoliberal market ideology that has dominated the political sphere since at least 1980. 

The effect of the post-Reagan era dominance of Neoliberal market ideology has been to destroy the popular consensus that representative government was an effective tool in the hands of the electorate to promote and preserve the public good. And the result has been to give a broad, unrestricted field for the economic warlords to emerge again and to wreak the havoc they are wont to wreak. And now we are facing a situation where the worst aspects of the economic sector--the few making serfs of the many--are merging with the worst aspects of the public sector--the security-obsessed surveillance state with Draconian police powers. (Habeas Corpus taken away in the Military Commissions Act still hasn't been restored.) We haven't seen these powers being abused on a wide scale yet, but the infrastructure for such abuse is very much in place. Both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in this surrender of the government to this ideology. 

 ***

The lesson of Tolkien’s trilogy is that republican freedom is personal and interpersonal, and it is exercised in concrete commitments that mostly happen on the local level, in the various Shires in which we all live, but we cannot be oblivious of the forces in history that seek to destroy those local and personal freedoms. 

And when humans are in such a situation in which their freedoms are so severely restricted in the public sphere, the only path to recovery is a freely chosen resistance, which often requires heroic levels of sacrifice. That is, the exercise of republican freedom requires the exercise of interior freedom by enough citizens who are willing to pay the price to keep the public sphere open. Frodo is a paradigm of the exercise of that kind of deep interior freedom.

Tolkien’s trilogy is on one level a story of great powers in violent conflict, but at a deeper level it’s the story of the suffering servant, the tzadik, the righteous man, Frodo, weak by the ordinary standards defined by power, freely accepts a burden and the stealth mission that went with it. The stakes were the preservation of a political space for ordinary people to live in freely. While so much of the story focuses on the great clash of armies, the struggle on that level was futile and nothing more than a subterfuge to keep the tyrant distracted. But the tyrant was vulnerable because it never occurred to him that anyone could do the unthinkable, that is, to 'freely' surrender the enormous power of the ring willingly.

Of course, Frodo needed a little help in the end, but that’s often the way it works. We hardly ever accomplish anything without the help of others. And no matter how good we think our intentions might be, they are never pure. Sometimes our exercise of freedom is simply the effort to put one foot in front of the other with only the faintest hope that someday we will reach our destination. But as we proceed along on our way, the exercise of our freedom is best expressed when in the service of others, in the creation of something that contributes to the common good, not just our own good. And that requires that we exercise it positively in the political and economic spheres, even if it is only to create a negative space for others to freely choose to fill it or not. 

A Few Thoughts on Ukraine

In observing events unfold in Europe over the last week, it struck me that there was a moment after 9/11 when the U.S enjoyed the world's sympathy as Ukraine enjoys it now. We squandered it, though, in the name of vengeance and Neoconservative, hubristic adventurism. And in doing so the U.S. squandered its credibility and the world's good will toward it.

Eighteen months later the streets of the world's capitals filled to protest the U.S.'s imminent invasion of Iraq as they've been doing nineteen years later to protest Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm not saying the situations are equivalent. What was most remarkable was the shift within that eighteen-month period from the U.S. being the good guys to being the bad. At least it's possible for us to be the good guys--we have that potential, even if under blundering, "we-don't-do-nuance", Republican leadership we almost always never realize it. Russia under Putin has never been and can never be the good guys. But for us, there was a lost opportunity then, and we've been paying the price ever since. Iraq was such a foolish disaster on so many levels.

Events since then in the U.S. have further eroded the world's confidence in the U.S. to be a beacon of sane order and democratic values. I'm not surprised at all that Europeans and the Ukrainians themselves didn't trust the U.S.'s warnings about the impending invasion. Liberals should not assume that even though we have with the Democrats' current control of government a short interregnum of sanity, that after Trump the world reverts to its pre-Trump relationship with us. Already the world is making plans for when this sane interregnum is likely to end in the next few years. Already what Americans say or think is not something to be taken seriously in the way that it was. The world looks at America as a fragile democracy, a society in a death spiral that has all but lost its mind with a government that cannot be relied on. 

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.

----------

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. 

Young Socialist Intellectuals

Freddie deBoer in today's NYT talking about the mayoral election in Buffalo--

What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.

...

Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.

Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.

Well, of course. The Democratic Party is dominated by the interests of technocratic elites in the economic top 20%, and those elites, being who they are, might feel guilty about their "privilege" in a way that Republicans do not, but not so guilty that they're willing to give it up. And, you know, inflation has got them worried, and Biden's BBB, seems a little too aggressive. And yada, yada, yada. For this reason, nothing bold is possible with the kind of timid people who call themselves moderate Democrats. Nice, decent, sane people, but, you know, they gotta think about what's best for their families. 

To expect ordinary people to support bold initiatives is a path to guaranteed disappointment. That's the downside of democracy. So I admire deBoer's tempered idealism and his willingness to commit to the long term, but I don't think that he'll ever succeed because of one the principal flaw in the socialist agenda--it's fundamentally uninspiring. I used to hang out with old-school Marxists in the '70s--nice, sincere, earnest people--but they were, so, so boring. All logos, no mythos. The New Left, of course, rejected the old-school style, but that faded away because, except for a few like Tom Hayden and Bernie Sanders, it lacked the old-school commitment and analysis.

Ordinary people are capable of embracing bold programs only if they are inspired to do it, and the arguments of most socialists never get beyond a rather crude utilitarian logic and vague ideas about fairness. And while deBoer might see this as a  multi-decade persuasion project, we don't have decades. Technocapitalism is foreclosing such a future unless socialists, the kind who write for Jacobin, wake from their materialistic, utilitarian slumber. They've got some legitimate logos; they need some inspiring mythos. 

If we lived in a society whose ontology was not so implacably materialistic, we might have a chance to realize a bold progressive agenda, but we don't. If we lived in a balanced, sane, humane society, one that integrated the spiritual and the material, we would be able to find our way to some kind of Socialist social organization in coming decades because it would be the only humane solution. Why? Because it's likely by the end of the century that AI and robotics will create sufficient wealth for everyone, but not enough work for people to earn their share of it. 

In such a world, socialism would be a practical, humane solution to redistribute the abundance the machines will do most of the work producing. But that would require that as a society we retain our humanity, and it's an open question whether we will be able to do that. And then there's another problem, even if we were to endorse a generous UBI, what do people who don't work do with all that time on their hands? What do they do to give their lives meaning and purpose?

***

As I've been arguing in my posts about "The Crisis of the Liberal Order", the resistance of Main Street to socialism is not programmatic but cultural. It feels un-American because self-reliance is so fundamental to American cultural identity. DeBoer kind of recognizes this, but if I am correct, the kind of long-term persuasion project about which he speaks will continue to fail because it assumes that the good society can emerge from within the materialistic ethos that grounds his Marxist presuppositions.

Old-school Marxism retained some mythos in its Jewish/Christian eschatology without the spiritual part, and so was half right, but half right doesn't get it done. The spiritual part is essential. But unlike old-school Marxists, this postmodern generation is skeptical of all grand narratives, so it doesn't even believe in the eschatological part anymore. They've got nothing to work with except a vague idea about economic justice as, you know, being desirable-ish. 

The young Marx kind of gets the need for more than that when he wrote:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” ***

Yes, and everyone will have his own blog and podcast.

It's very Maslovian--once one's material needs are taken care of, the human being can then meet his "Being Needs". I'm all for it, but I don't think we get to that unless the Being Needs get taken care of more adequately first. And Being Needs are not just about having interesting hobbies; it's where 'mythos' plays its part in inspiring and shaping human aspiration. And that requires a retrieval of an understanding of the human as both a material and a spiritual being, whose spiritual needs are equally as important as his material needs. Man does not eat by bread alone. It used to be a truism, but it no longer is. Religion is an opiate only if it enervates; not if it inspires.

Some of the folks at Jacobin might say that this is unfair, that they, especially the more Frankfurt-y among them, acknowledge that human beings have a spiritual dimension. The Frankfurters because of their interest in culture were also interested in an honest interrogation of religion. They saw religion as both the matrix of superstition and repression, while at the same time as the repositories of the highest hopes and aspirations of humanity. True and True, but do young American socialist see religion in any but the first sense? And when they talk about spirit, isn't their imagination of it shaped primarily by the materialism that is hegemonic among conventional American intellectuals? Do they believe anything other than that the human being is first a material being who has this excrescence from matter they call spirit but understood only in some biologistic sense? This is far too limiting. There's no mythos in it.

The retrieval of religion about which I speak, if it is to work, must understand the human being who has spiritual aspirations in a much more fundamental sense. It maintains the spirit/matter polarity, but with the spiritual as playing a more leading role. I think of the human project as an eons-long work whose spiritual task is to transform the material as in tikkun olam, i.e., for the sake of repairing the world. Look it up. That could be inspiring if it was something that people could bring themselves to believe. 

I wonder if many Jacobin writers or readers could embrace a tikkun olam "philosophy" of history. Maybe some could, or find it at least quaintly interesting. But the socialism as imagined by most of the young socialists deBoer addresses remains fundamentally materialist in its presuppositions and at its best leads maybe to a more egalitarian, more mechanized version of Huxley's Brave New World--or Pixar's WALL E. It's a world where any idea of deep spiritual aspiration is long forgotten because repressed as too disruptive. Here, take a bit of soma, play your games. Be equally as happy as everyone else. Mission accomplished--we're at the end of history.

So what happens if the socialist dog catches the car? Then what? To say that you'll worry about that later is to miss the point. There is no later unless you answer the question now.

Socialism as it is currently imagined on the American cultural Left is a vision of future human possibility that is far too restricting and depressing. Nobody with any sense would want to live in such a future. Something broader, richer, more open-ended, and more inspiring needs to be imagined in progressive politics, and until it does, deBoer's hopes of ever being persuasive will never be realized. The socialist organization of society will only come about if it is built on a broadly accepted ontology that includes a spiritual substrate. 

And we desperately need an inspired Progressive vision for a human future, because without it the bad guys win, and in a hundred years we're in something like Jodie Foster's Elysium. And the reason is very clear--technocapitalism, if left unchecked, does not now or ever will care about human 'being needs", and as long as technocapitalism is the unimpeded driving force of world civilization, those needs become evermore less likely to be realized by either the haves or the have nots. The haves on Elysium, like the Alphas and Betas in Brave New World, don't care about them anymore, and the have-not proles remanded to the desert of the real back on earth don't have the time or the energy for their pursuit. 

***Postscript: From Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right--

Whether the world is made of matter, spirit or green cheese is not a question over which Marx lost much sleep. He was disdainful of such large metaphysical abstractions, and had a brisk way of dispatching them as idly speculative. As one of the most formidable minds of modernity, Marx was notably allergic to fancy ideas. Those who regard him as a bloodless theorist forget that he was among other things a Romantic thinker with a suspicion of the abstract and a passion for the concrete and specific. The abstract, he thought, was simple and featureless; it was the concrete that was rich and complex. So whatever materialism meant to him, it certainly did not revolve on the question of what the world was made out of. [Marx, in other words, at his best was a right-brain thinker.]

...

In a boldly innovative move, Marx rejected the passive human subject of middle-class materialism and put in its place an active one. All philosophy had to start from the premise that whatever else they were, men and women were first of all agents. They were creatures who transformed themselves in the act of transforming their material surroundings. They were not the pawns of History or Matter or Spirit, but active, self-determining beings who were capable of making their own history. And this means that the Marxist version of materialism is a democratic one, in contrast to the intellectual elitism of the Enlightenment. Only through the collective practical activity of the majority of people can the ideas which govern our lives be really changed. And this is because these ideas are deeply embedded in our actual behaviour. [The goal for all human beings, in other words, is to become intrinsically motivated to actively transform the world. This is a spiritual task in the mode of tikkun olam.]

...

Human bodies are lumps of material, but peculiarly creative, expressive ones; and it is this creativity that we call “mind.” To call human beings rational is to say that their behaviour reveals a pattern of meaning or significance. Enlightenment materialists have sometimes been rightly accused of reducing the world to so much dead, meaningless matter. Just the reverse is true of Marx’s materialism.

...

If you want an image of the soul, remarked the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, look at the human body. Happiness for Marx, as for Aristotle, was a practical activity, not a state of mind. For the Judaic tradition of which he was an unbelieving offspring, the “spiritual” is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants and protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not the opposite of mundane, everyday existence. It is a particular way of living it.

Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (p. 96-104). Yale University Press. 

Most contemporary Marxists are materialists not in Marx's Romantic understanding of it, but in a way that has been colonized by Positivism. We need more of Marx the Romantic and less what he has been turned into by the totalist regimes that have vulgarized him. But, for me, even Eagleton's Marxist materialism doesn't go far enough--it needs more of the mythos dimension, but his is a place to start. Although I doubt that Eagleton would go as far as I do in embracing the kind of Christian Neoplatonic mythos, his "materialist" reading of the gospels provides some significant overlap.

But in America, whatever use we make of Marxist ideas is better off if Marx is not credited with them. It's not something that Americans are ever going to be "comfortable" with.

The Return of the Bobos

A few thoughts on David Brook's Atlantic piece, "How the Bobos Broke America". It's interesting but not particularly helpful.

For the most part, I think it accurately correlates with my own perception about how class works in the U.S., but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that I have been writing about in the posts that have appeared here in the last several weeks. It's mostly just another version of describing the latest arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic--in other words, not much more than describing how one faction of Social Darwinians has replaced another. And so the world turns.

The question that most preoccupies my thinking is whether it's possible for us as a society to transcend the logic of evolution without grace, which manifests in the American Liberal social imaginary in what I've been describing as Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is simply the ideology that justifies what most people think of as natural, healthy human behavior--seek glory in your achievements, grow as rich and prosperous as you can, spread your genes as widely as possible, and triumph over your enemies. But it boils down 'to eat or be eaten'. Raw capitalism thrives within an ethos defined by such an ideology--it is as pure a manifestation of Social Darwinism as you're ever likely to find. 

The best human beings as individuals are capable of transcending this way of "being natural". We see it all the time. The question is whether societies are. I believe they are capable of it, of at least slowly evolving out of it. But the first step is to believe it's possible so that at least we can organize around our aspiring toward it. That would require our transcending the values presuppositions of the Liberal Order, presuppositions that privilege the secular and the materialistic. From the beginning, the most trenchant criticism of modernity and its Liberal ethos has been that it quashes any kind of spiritually noble aspiration, channeling human aspiration instead toward the fulfillment of crude appetites, aka, the pursuit of happiness. In other words, Liberalism has always implicitly accepted the logic of Social Darwinism avant la lettre. Hobbes was its earliest theoretician of note. 

At this point in our development, Social Darwinism shapes the social imaginary of the cultural left as much as it does the right. Left and Right are just competing tribes in a contest for survival. There are "nice" Social Darwinians and "mean" ones. The nice ones want to find ways of mitigating the worst effects of the Social Darwinian game on its losers, and they're mostly on the Left. The mean ones couldn't care less about the losers, and they're mostly on the Right. But the problem lies in the rules of the game itself. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives question the validity of the rules, and neither do moderates like David Brooks. 

But I fear that the U.S is like the USSR in the '80s. We're teetering and about to collapse from our own dead weight. The Tucker Carlsons of the world are just the hyenas who are waiting for the sick elephant to die, and doing what he can in the meantime to hasten the process. 

The average educated, affluent Liberal cannot appreciate that we're near collapse because for him the Liberal meritocracy is as good as it gets.The system has worked well for him, and all it needs is a few tweaks here and there. Such Liberals are concerned that the system be fair, but they don't understand that a meritocracy can never be fair. Fairness is just their way of fooling themselves that that they can participate  in a system that is fundamentally corrupting in good conscience.

Liberals often talk about their being an epistemological crisis--and it's true, there is one--but they're less likely to appreciate that it's rooted in a metaphysical crisis, which in turn leads to a moral or ethical crisis. Liberals don't understand that so much of their posturing about fairness and justice is like a group of drug dealers debating among themselves whether there is an environmentally friendly way to exploit their users.

Liberals in the order bequeathed to us by Hobbes have no real moral imperative except to be Nice. We all do better if we don't tear ourselves to pieces in the war of all against all. But there is something so emasculating about "being nice" in this way. Hobbes understood the price, which was the alienation that comes with the surrender of one's freedom to the State, so is there any wonder that factions within the Liberal Order, especially those benefitting least from it, might consider being not nice is more authentic, more free, more noble? 

***

I like David Brooks. He's a serious, decent guy, and he's often insightful. But as I've been arguing for years, Liberals, and Brooks is very much a Liberal, don't have the spiritual and cultural resources to transcend the contradictions of the society Liberalism with its capitalist engine has created, and American society is Liberalism on steroids, and insofar as it is driven by the logic of capitalism, it is Social Darwinism on steroids. There are no real constraints anymore on the worst excesses of capitalism except to hope that people be "nice". The churches used to provide some constraints, but they've become more a part of the problem than a solution insofar as they are among the major promoters of our current tribal warfare. (The churches for the most part have become an embarrassment. They've given Christianity a bad name.) 

Brooks, among the members of the class he purports to represent, has historically been more friendly to religion and more critical of the secularist and materialist presuppositions that play such a large role in shaping its ethos. And as such he has represented a version of Liberal cultural conservatism within the broader Liberal ethos as an op-ed columnist at the NYT or the reasonable moderate conservative on PBS. I've wondered sometimes if his University of Chicago roots has meant his concern for religion is more in the vein of the Straussian noble lie, but I have come to believe that he is sincere in his aspiration for Americans to find a higher collective moral purpose.

Brooks has long played the role of describing the manners of his class. What is the "higher selfishness", except a spiritualized version of Social Darwinism peculiar to his liberal Bobos? He's right to point out that there's nothing higher about it at all. But he does this while on the one hand standing on ground defined by the older Judeo-Christian values he sees as intrinsic to the American character, while on the other standing on the ground defined by capitalism, which has been the historical-cultural force most destructive of Judeo-Christian values.

And so for that reason he's always struck me as that kind of incoherent religious conservative that wants to embrace the creative/destructive energies of capitalism while at the same time preserving the traditional religiosity, customs, and decency mores of Middle America. I say incoherent because the destructive powers of consumer capitalism have obliterated 'traditional' America, and the loss of 'traditional America' is really what bothers the tribalists that constitute Brooks's Red class hierarchy in his Atlantic article. Brooks seems to want to blame Red-Team insanity at least in part on the sins of Blue-Team arrogance, but this is just wrong.

The Bobos who sit atop the Blue-Team class hierarchy are simply those who have best adapted to the kind of culture/society that the creative/destructive powers of capitalism have created. They didn't cause it, and they're not to blame. They were just clever enough or lucky enough to go with the flow. The people in the Red-Team hierarchy are simply resentful of those who sit atop the Blue-Team hierarchy because the cosmopolitan Blues won, and now their traditionalist Red politics are all about finding a way for them to win back what was lost. This is what makes their politics so stupid and destructively revanchist--because it is so out of tune with and poorly adapted to the kind of society that late capitalism has created. 

There's no stuffing the toothpaste back into the tube, and that's what these revanchists want to do, and Brooks seems to be at least mildly sympathetic to the revanchist cause in this respect. He, too, wishes that somehow we could find a way to return the toothpaste from whence it came, and he seems to think that if Blues could compromise a little or try to empathize with the concerns of Red America, it might help. He praises Biden for not making things worse, and fair enough. But, really, we're past that. Moderation might have some role in damage control and in buying some time, but there are no real solutions to be found by compromising with people who are living or long to live in a delusional dreamworld. The problem is with the Liberal Order itself. 

So Bobos are not to be blamed for being intelligently adaptive to the underlying reality. This does not make them in any way morally superior; they are just better players of the Social Darwinian game. Blue elites are just doing what any red-blooded Social Darwinian should do in a society based on Social Darwinian presuppositions. The Blues are flourishing in the world that Capitalism created, and the Reds, threatened with extinction, are freaking out and doing whatever they can to claw and scratch to survive. There is no virtue whatsoever in their revanchist program. Not a shred of it. But virtue, if by it we mean counter-instinctual practices that cultivate what is truly good in the human soul, is not something that the Liberal Order has ever cared much about.

As I alluded to above, my basic argument for years now is that the Liberal Order is in decay, and that Liberalism does not have within its philosophical/ontological presuppositions the resources to solve the problems that Liberalism has created. Does that mean that some progressive imagination of a human future is impossible? No, of course not. And in my clumsy way here on this blog I've been trying to suss out what that future human possibility might look like. I don't know what it will look like. But at this point I can say with some degree of certainty, that things cannot go on as they are going. Something has to give, and either something truly new, something with originary power arises from within the culture that offers a way forward, or the bad guys--the revanchists and the more ruthless among the techno-capitalist Social Darwinists--win. 

***

So thinking about Brooks's article leads me to what I really want to talk about: If the future of America is to be determined by which Social Darwinian faction wins, who cares? Well, I do because I persist in believing that the American experiment was an important step forward in the human evolutionary project, and the Blues are, imo, more likely to be receptive to new ideas about moving forward. The Blues are right for all the wrong reasons.

I think the American future will be determined by either the reactionaries on the Red team winning or by our finding another way. I believe that the Blue team is the more likely one to find a positive way forward because it has more flexibility, but it will require that it retrieve elements from within the Judeo-Christian tradition that Liberalism jettisoned as irrational and barbaric. The American experiment was very much animated by an anti-traditional values liberation project, but it threw the baby out with the bath water, and the experiment will fail if it does not find a way to renew itself by drawing on these rejected older, deeper "irrational" resources. I think that Blacks and Hispanics are closer to those sources because they still live in communities where their religious traditions still have vitality. 

Most Blues are not hard-core atheists. They are agnostic or vaguely spiritual in a New Agey way. And many retain the moral habits of the religious communities into which they were born even if they no longer go to church. There is an infrastructure there to work with.

I think that the metaxis that leads us out of this impasse lies in integrating what's best in the modern project--critical consciousness, a respect for the individual conscience, a genius for innovation, an experimental spirit that guides the quest to better understand the Real--with what's best in in the "irrational" premodern--a sense of the sacred and sacramental, a feeling for connection with the cosmos, a renewed sense of the deepest possibilities for the human being as becoming divinized, i.e., each of us becoming what we are as created in the image and likeness of God. 

If it fails, I fear the reactionary critics of modernity and Liberalism will be proved correct. They were right to insist that societies, because of the persistence of Original Sin--what I call evolution without grace--are incapable of moral progress. They were right to insist that the idea of egalite is palpably ridiculous because talent and wealth have always and everywhere been distributed in ways that make equality impossible. They were right to insist that the idea of human freedom--liberte--is palpably ridiculous because the Grand Inquisitor was right: most people don't want to be free; they want to be told what to think and how to behave because the burden of accepting true existential freedom is too heavy for average humans. 

And the reactionaries were right to insist that the idea of fraternite is palpably ridiculous because most humans don't know who they are unless they have an enemy, someone in opposition to whom they can define themselves. They cannot feel any sense of nobility of purpose unless they can risk everything in a war fighting loyally and courageously for their tribe.

But more than that, humans need an enemy onto whom they can project all their unresolved irrational resentments and hatreds. This is why world peace is a structural impossibility, and world government and the aspiration for global world orders is insanely naive. We will always have--must have--wars because from time to time these irresolvable hatreds must be purged with blood sacrifice. If we don't project these hatreds onto the Other over there, we project them onto one another over here, and we have the interminable war of all against all. Most humans are primitive and irrationally stupid in this way, and to wish them capable of anything more leads to chaos and greater suffering for all. This is just the human condition if you look at it clearly and with any knowledge of history. 

These reactionaries would say that democracy was doomed from the beginning, that the ancients knew what Liberals refuse to acknowledge, that the 'demos' are too selfish, ignorant, and too easily manipulable to rule themselves. They need an elite, the 'aristos' to to rule them. It was stupidly wrong to destroy the old class/caste system that replaced the aristos with the demos. In any society, there will always be winners and losers--it's naive to think otherwise--but better that there be order than chaos in which almost everybody is a loser.

And the reality is that the demos are happier and less resentful so long as they have a place in the hierarchy and know their role. They don't really want the burden of true freedom, and they are happier when ruled by those whom they see clearly as their 'betters'. And in a Christian society those betters--the aristos--have a responsibility to make sure that the demos are well provided for, not something your typical amoral Social Darwinian capitalist elite ever thought necessary. And besides, the most important things in life, the things that bring true happiness--love, family, friends, piety--are available even to those in the lowest ranks. All these deep goods Liberalism and capitalism have made less available. And now these people, these demos, are now so deeply alienated and unhappy that all they want to do now is tear down the system that has abused them so terribly materially and spiritually.

***

But I still have hope that the reactionaries will be proved wrong. There is a another way of looking at Liberalism and the American experiment, and it's one I still believe we can be inspired by. It assumes that there is a quorum of people in America who have a basic decency, whose values are  not completely circumscribed by the Social Darwinian logic of late capitalism and more importantly that they have the suppleness of heart to respond if something better should be presented to them in a way that makes sense and can inspire.

My reasons for hope assume that the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were inchoate articulations of a future human possibility, even if humans at the time of their writing were not yet spriritually or morally mature enough to realize it. These documents were prophetic rather than realistic for their contemporaries; they were aspirational for a future order rather than descriptive of what was possible at the time they were written.

But it's precisely the aspiration toward something that seems so impossible that makes them so interesting. These ideals born at the inception of the Liberal Order during the Enlightenment are seeds, which if cultivated provide a way of growing out of the Social Darwinian logic the Liberal Order that it has come to promote until now without constraint.

That the aspirations of the French and American  Declarations have not yet been realized does not mean that they never can be. If we are to break out of the current impasse, we must be renewed by their ideals. We just have to reassess and think about a more realistic route to get there, and that would require in the U.S., among many other things, an overhaul of the U.S. Constitution to bring it more in line with the ideals articulated in both Declarations.

The American constitution was written by the realists, not the idealists. As such, it tips its hat with a roll of the eyes to the Declaration and gets down to the real business of governing men as they are not as we would wish them to be. And at the time, it was written to protect the interests of both the Southern and Northern oligarchs who assumed that they were the aristos who would continue to rule the demos. That might have been realistic in the late 1780s; it no longer is.

The Constitution is a patchwork of compromises that reflected the competing interests of the Social Darwinian factions of its day. It no longer serves our purposes. And at this juncture in our history, the Constitution is both a symbolic and practical cause of the gridlock that paralyzes us at a time when we must be nimbler and more adaptive. Fetishizing the Constitution by both Conservatives and Liberals is one of the biggest obstacles to any real solutions. 

So while a Democratic Republic with a quorum of sane, decent, well-informed human beings should in theory be nimbler and more adaptive, ours is not because hamstrung by the imagination of it by its 18th Century founders. And so our institutional paralysis is due primarily to the senate and to a supreme court, the former stuffing the latter with Federalist Society types whose imaginations are stuck in the 18th Century. Whether their rationale is sincere or cynical, the practical effect is to reinforce the interests of wealthy elites who justify their predations with a Libertarian ideology. As the worst "thought product" of modernity, Libertarianism provides the ideological justification for what is worst in the American character. Libertarianism is simply the Social Darwinist pig gussied up with a little makeup.

So my impossible hope for a better American future also assumes that this quorum of decent Americans is capable of being realistic about what's worst in human nature while also creating new institutions, customs, mores that aspire to what's best in the American character. In order to achieve this, Americans need to integrate the ideals articulated in the Declaration with an understanding of the human being that draws upon its Judeo-Christian roots. These are roots that made writing the Declaration a possibility in the first place. 

It assumes, therefore, that a broad enough swath of Americans can retrieve the idea that we all have an inherent dignity before one another and before God--egalite--and that we have all have the capacity to choose--liberte--to become the best versions of ourselves, creatures that are born to aspire to become divinized because created in the image and likeness of God. It assumes that because we all have this potential for divinity that we have the obligation to help one another to realize it, that none of us can do this alone, that we fail as humans so long as we only care about saving our own individual eternal asses--fraternite. And not only do we have a responsibility to one another but to the earth because that's where this drama unfolds. No earth, no human future. The idea of colonizing other planets is ridiculous if it's motivated only by extending our Social Darwinian sickness of soul.

A democratic republic is the best way to organize a society that promotes these objectives. But it can only work if there is an aspirational idealism that operates as a counterforce to the Social Darwinism that otherwise seems so natural. Such an idealism must be broadly accepted by all people of good will who are committed enough to it to fight for it when the revanchists allied with elite cosmopolitan Social Darwinians on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Congress do everything they can to mock it and break it down and find ways to co-opt it for their own greedy, power-mad purposes.

Again, these ideals are not something that we just invent out of whole cloth. They are archetypes that lie dormant in the collective unconscious awaiting our awakening them. It's a special part of our heritage in the Judeo-Christian West, but it's there for everybody. It's just been forgotten, washed away by the flood that roared through American society starting with industrial capitalism and abetted by a soul-flattening materialism that seemed the only plausible metaphysics after Darwin.

We can recover what was lost and reimagine it in a new post-secular key.. Otherwise, I fear, the reactionaries will be proved right.