After the Future

Liberalism + Whatever

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

--Ross Douthat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Progressive Fever Dreams

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

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

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

--Corey Robin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also "Young Socialist Intellectuals".

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.

Bin Laden Toppled More than the Twin Towers

“We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

Bin Laden did not win the war of ideas. But neither did we. To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end. When President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it is “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.” Bush was correct; al-Qaeda could not dim the promise of America. Only we could do that to ourselves.

Carlos Lazoda

Spencer Ackerman makes a similar if more detailed argument in Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Destablilized America and Produced Trump. Read it if you still need to be convinced that when all is said and done bin Laden's attack succeeded beyond his most optimistic expectations. Yes, he was eventually caught and killed, but he succeeded because he could count on the U.S. to respond as stupidly as possible to the 9/11 attack. Bin Laden toppled more than the Twin Towers, he toppled what was left of our collective sanity, and there's a good chance that might in turn lead to the toppling of America as an open society and liberal democracy. This isn't over.  

One of the most effective tactics of the warriors of the Near East dating back to ancient Greek and Roman times (and earlier) was feigned retreat and then counterattack. Genghis Kahn used the same tactic. I'm too lazy to look up a particular historical example, but they are numerous. Let's say the Parthian light cavalry confronts a Roman army. They play to the Roman ego by pretending to panic and hightail it. The Romans are elated and give chase until the find themselves in a trap. The Parthians turn around in a place where they have all the advantages and then decimate the Romans with their archers or some other ambush-like counterattack. Disaster ensues.

You play to the overconfidence of the foe, or you insult their manhood, ego, the need for vengeance, or use some other ploy to cloud their better judgment, and sure enough they respond with expected stupidity. Anybody who points out that maybe giving chase isn't such a good idea is pushed to the fringes--not a real patriot, a coward. So disaster inevitably ensues. You'd think Westerners would have learned by now. But Bin Laden knew that was unlikely. As Lazoda puts it quoting Richard Clark--

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

In other words, American complacent cluelessness was followed by fanatical vindictiveness. It's as predictable as poking a hornets' nest. The American reaction to 9/11 showed little more intelligence or shrewdness than an insect's. That kind of predictable stupidity is easy for a shrewd adversary to manipulate. 

Lance Morrow recently wrote an astonishingly stupid Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled "You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity". He gives as an example Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also talks about the stupidity of the Democrats twice trying to impeach Trump likening the Democrats to Wile E. Coyote to Trump's roadrunner. This is the guy who wrote in Time magazine a few days after 9/11 " A Case for Rage and Retribution". Here's the nut of it:

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage... Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred... This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started."

I don't know if Bin-Laden had a chance to read this article, but if he did, it would have been a very strong indicator to him that he'd succeeded.

One of the chief characteristics of "stupid" is not to recognize it in oneself. For someone like Morrow everyone else is stupid, never him. Let's get after them chickenshit heathen Parthians and teach them a lesson. But what's really, truly astonishingly stupid is to fall for their ploy over and over again.

Conservatives like Morrow are prodigies of projection--they never quite grasp that the stupidities that they see in others are projections of their own. Whenever you hear someone on the Right accuse the Left of something nasty, criminal, or stupid, they are almost always talking about themselves. The more unhinged the accusations, the more deeply rooted the projection. It would never occur to Morrow that it is he and the hate- and vengeance-driven minions on the Right who most resemble the benighted Mr. Coyote. As Morrow says, stupid is as stupid does. 

Update 9/12/21: "See also After 9/11 the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong" by Garrett Graf. An excerpt:

Rather than recognizing that an extremist group with an identifiable membership and distinctive ideology had exploited fixable flaws in the American security system to carry out the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched the nation on a vague and ultimately catastrophic quest to rid the world of “terror” and “evil.” [See my  post on "Naive Idealism"]

At the time, some commentators politely noted the danger of tilting at such nebulous concepts, but a stunned American public appeared to crave a bold response imbued with a higher purpose. As the journalist Robert Draper writes in To Start a War, his new history of the Bush administration’s lies, obfuscations, and self-delusions that led from Afghanistan into Iraq, “In the after-shocks of 9/11, a reeling America found itself steadied by blunt-talking alpha males whose unflappable, crinkly-eyed certitude seemed the only antidote to nationwide panic.”

Cixin Liu: Democracy and Culture

In a 2018 New Yorker profile of the Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, Jiayang Fan writes--

I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country [China] a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when the Trisolarans, preparing to inhabit Earth, have interned the whole of humanity in Australia:

The society of resettled populations transformed in profound ways. People realized that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government. . . . Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell.

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. 

And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,” he said. “I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don’t know.” The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, “Here’s the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done.”

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of “The Three-Body Problem”: “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”

The most interesting part of this excerpt is the sentences I've highlighted in the last two paragraphs, "The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice". And then her assertion that her "belief in individualism and democracy are principles to be upheld against all outcomes". 

Fan betrays the cluelessness of cosmopolitan elites that I described in my post last week about the military and foreign policy establishment. It is not ironic or inconsistent at all that Liu can see the danger that democratic governance would pose to Chinese society while at the same time embracing life as it's lived in a liberal democratic society.

Liu's view is more complex, and he is right about Fan if indeed he sees her as brainwashed. She is a 'type', even if she doesn't think she is. She thinks of herself, I'm sure, as an independent, critical thinker. She writes for The New Yorker! But she's just mouthing the cosmopolitan Liberal talking points. Her editor doesn't pick up on it, because he or she is also brainwashed, i.e., captured by his or her unconscious presuppositions.

It is obvious to me that Liu is not contradicting himself in saying that democracy is not right for China now even though it is for many Western societies. That doesn't mean that a Liberal Democracy will never be right for China. It has to find its own way, it has to grow from the seeds that we see were sown there in Tiananmen or in Hong Kong. The problem for the Chinese, as for all societies, is to live in the tension between the realities on the ground and one's idealistic aspirations. One might see that as dancing in one's chains. Not a bad metaphor for the human condition in general.

As I wrote in my Bobos post recently, I believe that the French and American declarations were a profound evolutionary step forward for humanity.  And while I also believe that the Liberal Order to which those declarations gave shape is currently near collapse, that doesn't mean that we stop evolving.

I believe that we will find a way to preserve what was best in the Liberal Order, particularly its ideals regarding liberte, fraternite, egalite. I believe these ideals are universal and transcultural, but I also believe that even the Western societies in which those ideals were first articulated were not politically or morally mature enough to realize them except in a very preliminary way. We are seeing in the U.S. slow collapse of the constitutional framework designed as a first attempt to realize those ideals. It was bound to fail sooner or later because its contradictions and shortcomings were just too profound. But there have been and will continue to be repeated attempts to overcome these contradictions. What number of republics is France up to? I've lost count. 

The ideals that shaped the Liberal Order are seed ideas, and they germinate and grow in different ways in different soil conditions. The country that soon after the articulation of the ideals in the Declaration became the slave state known as the U.S.A. was simultaneously an interesting embodiment and a mockery of those ideals. And the country that soon after became France's First Republic very quickly unraveled into a military dictatorship. And France ping-ponged through the next 150 years between right and left in its own peculiar French way.  

Indeed, it's very much an open question whether whatever level of its realization of these ideals the U.S. has achieved will survive in the U.S. to the end of the decade. But even if we regress into an era of dark, fascistic politics, which is a real possibility, I believe that the political DNA of these ideals is strong enough that it will eventually restore the U.S. to its better self.

How much stupidity and suffering we must endure between now and then remains to be seen. But perhaps we need to wander in the wilderness for a while in order that it might become clear to everyone that the ridiculously obsolete U.S. Constitution has to go so that a new one, better adapted to realities in the 21st Century and beyond, can be formulated. I have lost all patience with the U.S. Constitution fetishizers, whether they are Liberals or Conservatives. 

But the important point is that neither American or French society was ready in the late 18th century to become a truly open, egalitarian democracy, and neither has truly become one today. But each in its a few-steps-forward-then-a-step-backward way has made progress. So the mistake is to think that because we do from time to time take a step backward that progress isn't possible.

So the mistake, therefore, is to think that the ideal is wrong because societies cannot embody it immediately--or permanently. This is the mistake made by eastern European autocrats or the Chinese who believe that Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere delusional. But it is also a mistake that Neocons and others in the foreign policy establishment, for whom Anne Applebaum is a representative type--make in thinking that a Liberal Democracy can be imposed by force or fiat in Iraq or Afghanistan--or China. And so it's also the mistake made by all cosmopolitan elites--for whom Jiayang Fan is a representative 'type'-- who are smugly complacent in thinking that their embrace of Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere better, and so therefore any society that doesn't embody its ideals is deserving of their opprobrium. That in Fang's words, "democracy and individualism [are] principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes." This is rank, naive Jacobinism. 

The seeds of these ideals are have been strewn everywhere, and if there are places, like China where they have sprouted and then been stamped out, other seeds will keep sprouting and there will be a time when the conditions will favor their flourishing. The Chinese are famous for the ability to take the long view, not something Western utilitarian Liberals are capable of. The Western sense of justice or fairness requires that if some have it now, then so should everybody. Immediately. "Regardless of outcomes". Regardless of how much suffering and chaos the effort to impose it causes. Regardless whether this effort has any reasonable chance of success. This seems to be Fan's view--and the view of most liberal media types. If North Atlantic societies can have Liberal Democracies, why can't China? Why can't Afghanistan? 

Because that's just not how it works on planet earth.

So the challenge is, as always, to live in a metaxic tension between the harsh realities on the ground and the ideals we aspire to in a hoped-for future. The ideals cannot be imposed, they can only be grown, and they grow in the space between the current reality and the unrealized ideal. The mistake is to refuse to live in the discomfort of being neither here or there, i.e., to be naively idealistic like the Neocon Right and Jacobin Left, on the one hand, or to be so cynical as to believe that progress is impossible, that humans are too evil, that life on earth can only be a Social Darwinian eat-or-be-eaten agon. 

The latter seems to be kinda/sorta Liu's vision, and perhaps that is what Fan is really reacting to. It's a little more complex for Liu, but at least in The Three Body Problem the values frame irredeemably Social Darwinist. It's a battle between two factions for whom Social Darwinist assumptions completely circumscribe the antagonists whether on earth or on Trisolaris. On earth there are the Naive Idealists whose disappointment in humanity has made them profoundly cynical about humanity. They have come to be believe that humans as a species are not worthy of survival and so work in collaboration with the invading Trisolarans.

Then there is Team Human who understandably see these collaborators as traitors. Team Human, of course, is represented by an international coalition of scientific, military, and security elites because what other humans really count, right? In any event, for these elites the only imperative is the survival of the human species in the face of threat from the alien invaders who are more advanced civilizationally, i.e.,scientifically (does anything else really matter for Liu?). For them survival and continued evolution of the species is an end itself that justifies any means to preserve it. 

But if within an exclusively Darwinist values frame humans as a species have no more cosmic significance than any other species, who really cares about what happens to humans in the future? (The Trisolarans aren't due to arrive for another 450 years!) If there isn't more to fight for--some spiritual ideal, for instance--than simply surviving, is the fight and the human species being fought for worth the trouble? Why not just allow the superior Trisolarans or, more relevant to our current situation, the more faster evolving AI-driven machines to win? Humans had their run, let whoever comes next take the field.

I haven't read the other books in Liu's trilogy, but I suspect he'd say that the continued human evolution through scientific exploration is justification enough for human survival. There seems to be an unconscious Fichtean idealism, and in that what I see as a parodic spiritual impulse, in Liu's vision of ever-increasing scientific and technological development. He might argue that the very fight for survival against the Trisolarans pushes the human race to greater levels of innovation and discovery, that is, to a higher civilizational level. Humans evolve to higher levels of civilization precisely because of the threat to their survival posed by a superior civilization. It's not just species survival that matters, but civilizational (scientific/technological) advancement. That's what justifies human species survival. 

But I'm not going to parse out what's wrong with the logic here because in the end all Liu is really talking about is China vs. the West, isn't he? And if all he really cares about is nationalistic vanity disguised as species vanity, it's not very interesting, at least to me. I'm not denying its motivating power of survival and the need to dominate, but hopefully there is more to being human worth fighting for. 

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. 

Filibuster Bust

“I predict to you your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded, autocracy or democracy, because that is what is at stake.” --Joe Biden

If this seems hyperbolic, then you really haven't a clue about the significance of the moment. It's understandable--we all tend to not understand the moment when we're living through it. We all tend to think that what's happening today is no different from what happened yesterday. We all tend to have experiences and miss their meanings. But I am encouraged to see that Joe Biden does seem to understand the moment and that he will be willing to do what's called for to save the country from the forces that seek to subvert what is best in it. I had my doubts about him when he was a candidate, but it's clear there is no other person better suited to deal with the question about whether the American democracy will survive. 

And it's for this reason that he understands that the filibuster must go. To hold on to it is to understand today as no different from yesterday; it's a failure to read the moment. I don't know if that's Joe Manchin's problem or whether he just loves being in the limelight for all the wrong reasons, but I hope the voting rights bill will force him to cave on this sooner or later.

But while the voting rights act might be the immediate cause for getting rid of the filibuster, we need to get rid of it  because we need a system that is more flexible and accountable. Flexible because gridlock is no longer an option. Problems need to get solved, and the filibuster obstructs solutions for trivial reasons. Accountable because right now the system is tied up by a minority that doesn't get the blame when it prevents the majority from getting done what it was elected to do.

As in the 1930s, we need to have a flexible, more experimental approach to solving problems. We need a simpler, more transparent system that allows experts to propose solutions that get an up or down vote. If it doesn't work, then let those who voted for the bad solution be held accountable and let someone else come in to fix it.

Progressives are right on the substance of almost every real political issue that we're facing today from climate change to reasonable gun control to Covid precautions to income inequality. I think there's a role for thoughtful conservative policymakers to join the debate and critique progressive policy proposals, but conservatives have otherwise no constructive role to play, and the Republicans have become a policy-averse party of cultural grievance trolls and have as such de-legitimated themselves as a governing party. Its role in obstructing policy must be severely limited until it restores itself as being legitimately engaged in real political issues rather than in the nonsense they get their base all riled up about. The quickest way to do that is to remove the filibuster as the purely obstructive tool it has become.

People who argue that the Democrats will rue the day when the Republicans take power in '22 or '24 are wrong because if the Republicans win, it won't matter whether the filibuster is in place or not. It will be too late to save the country if its electorate is so cluelessly ignorant that it could restore to power a party that has so egregiously and persistently disgraced itself. If restored, the Republicans will consolidate power in ways that will dwarf in significance whatever role the filibuster plays now. I think that's when it's likely that secessionist scenarios start to play out.

The Democrats have this one chance now to save the country from GOP insanity and its breaking apart, and if they don't take it, they will almost certainly lose in the next two cycles. This is not a time to play defense, but to push as hard as possible starting with preserving voting rights and then moving on to infrastructure to solve real problems while they have the chance. If they succeed, they still might lose, but if they fail, they will certainly lose. 

From Edsall's Column This Morning:

Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, put it this way in an email:

We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.

President Obama, Grofman wrote,

responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.

The result, according to Grofman, was that “white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”

At the same time, though, and here I will quote Grofman at length:

More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”

He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president. What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.

In the end, Grofman said,

Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.

Yes, the Republicans are to blame, but so are the Democrats. I'll say it again: The Dems losing the working class in the 90s during the Clinton administration was political malpractice that has led us to this point. Their nominating guys like Gore, Kerry, and Hillary was political malpractice. Obama's choosing guys like Rahm Emmanuel, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner and other Wall Street types as chief advisors was political malpractice, a complete misreading of the moment. 

The Republicans have crossed into an area of crazy and/or bad-faith cynicism that utterly de-legitimates them, but the Dems, who should know better, have been clueless and ideologically blinkered in their own destructive, self-serving way. That being said, the Dems seem to be in a position to learn from their mistakes and to make, finally, at this late date the necessary adjustments. It remains to be seen whether first they have the will to do it, but even if they have the will, it's an open question whether it's too late for them to use it. (Source)

Obamanation

Many Americans who had welcomed Obama concluded that the game was rigged for the rich and well connected. While he sat through agonizing meetings in his first 100 days, outside the White House the Tea Party rose up like a vicious storm. Democratic Party suffered a massive defeat in the 2010 midterm elections, resulting in Republican obstruction for the rest of his presidency and a decade of gerrymandered statehouses, I was quick to fault Obama and his technocrats for failing to grasp the moment.

Ten years later, I’m more forgiving....

If our condition is a kind of democratic collapse—an erosion of institutions, an implosion of civic trust, an explosion of lies—then there isn’t a politician who has stood against it more wholeheartedly and eloquently than Obama. With every year, the faults of his presidency fade and his stature rises. When he was young and tempted by cynicism, he clung to “the American idea: what the country was, and what it could become.” He still clings to it today. He’ll be the last of us to let it go.

George Packer

I agree with everything Packer says here in this insightful review of Obama's new memoir. Packer writes --

These early dilemmas in Obama’s presidency echo his youthful conflict between, in Michelle Obama’s words, “the world as it is, and the world as it should be.” His taking pride in “good process” and settling on politically thankless policies that dissatisfied even his ardent supporters while winning over none of his opponents could be seen as an idealist’s learning to govern in the world as it is, acquiring wisdom the hard way....

“I was a reformer, conservative in temperament if not in vision,” he writes. But perhaps those early months actually reflected an inexperienced young politician confronted with unprecedented difficulties—not so much the world as it was, but the president as he was.

I, like many others, thought that this kind of "conservative reform" was not what the moment called for, but rather a radical departure from the ethos defined by the Neoliberal "Washington Consensus". If Ronald Reagan could change the rules so radically in 1980, Obama could have at least tried to do it in 2008. But it became clear very quickly from Obama's appointments that he had no stomach to redefine the rules. He got behind efforts to reform healthcare. What he came up with was better than nothing, but did it in a way that only a Neoliberal technocrat could approve, and its flaws provided abundant low-hanging fruit for Obama's political opponents to pick and throw at him. Nevertheless, would it have been better had McCain or Clinton won in '08 instead? Hardly. Was there anybody on the scene at the time who could have done better? Who?

But rewriting the rules was what was called for, and the financial crisis presented the opportunity. Obama as a campaigner showed that he understood that, but once in the Oval Office, he was understandably overwhelmed. And so, alas, he leaned on the people who wrote the old rules and were therefore most responsible for creating the mess in the first place. It was the safer, more conservative thing to do.

It was disappointing, but to have realistically expected more of him is unfair. Nevertheless, whether fair or possible or not, his inability to do more has had consequences. Obama is refreshingly honest and intelligent enough to recognize the truth of this. Excerpts that I've read from the book make this abundantly clear. He wonders if he could have done more, but takes solace in that he ran a good process. But running a good process is not what the moment called for. 

Obama was handed a hot mess from the Bush administration, whose mistakes were far more egregious and far more responsible for the rise of Trump. But even if we don't have enough perspective yet to know to what degree the Obama years played their role in bringing on the Trump years, it's clear that his focus on "good process" did little to impede forces already growing in destructive power. Perhaps that should be his gravestone epitaph--"A thoughtful, complex man who ran a good process". That being said, Obama is a remarkably astute public figure, and I have hopes that he might have a more consequential post-presidency than his presidency. 

We'll see if Biden can do what Obama failed to do. But even if he is a far more talented politician than I give him credit for,  I fear it's too late, that we are truly in democratic collapse. There are days, and today is one of them, when I think the situation Biden faces is not unlike that of Gorbachev faced in the 80s before the break up of the USSR. Like the USSR then, the structure in the U.S. is so rickety now after Trump that there's little that can be done to prop it up. All the king's horses, and all the king's men, etc.

Perhaps people like Barr, McConnell, and Graham understand this better than most--that since we are in democratic collapse and there's no saving democracy, why pretend that democratic norms and practices matter? The only thing that really matters is who emerges on top when the whole thing finally collapses. If it's the Christian nationalists who come out on top, expect a secession crisis.

But I'm with Packer when it comes to Obama's vision for America's better possibilities even when I'm most pessimistic about what is in fact possible.  It's an America that's worth fighting for, but it's hard to see how that can succeed so long as it is joined at the hip to a Red America that has truly lost its mind. 

Stay of Execution

Nobody feels a greater sense of relief than I do that Biden has won this thing, but as I pointed out in my post yesterday, the madman might be gone, but the madness remains. And that's why all the happy talk about Biden being the man to unite the country is nonsense. He will be no more able to deal with Conservative media's fanning the culture war flames or Mitch McConnell's obstructionism than Obama was. 

Don't get me wrong. It's hugely important that the country has voted Trump out, but a path to resolving the underlying economic and cultural structures that gave rise to Trump are still firmly entrenched, and Biden's famous empathy and schmoozing ability isn't going to change that. 

I've been reading David French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, and I recommend it and Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right for anybody who wants a fair, sympathetic representation of why Red America is so fearful and angry. Both books go a long way toward explaining why so many Americans are so ripe to be demagogued by a cynical con man like Trump. But, as much understanding and sympathy as you might find for Red America by reading these books, the bottom line remains that Red America is so ripe to be demagogued. As George Packer said in the quote I excerpted yesterday:

Even as “freedom-loving people” came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government.

Had that number been 35% of the electorate, it could be managed, but not when it is 48%. 

So Biden's election warrants a sigh of relief, not jubilation. It feels rather like a temporary stay of execution to me rather than a pardon. Perhaps it buys us some time to find a solution. I hope so, but such a solution is not visible to me at so long as the Republicans hold the Senate. There is going to be a lot of talk about healing the partisan divide and bridging the nations's fissures, but none of that is possible unless there are significant changes on a deep structural level. And those changes are not possible so long entrenched power in this country uses culture-war issues to keep the body politic gridlocked by arguing about issues that simply cannot be resolved in the political sphere. 

There is nothing so stupidly self-destructive as indulging in identity politics and culture wars that flow from them. And I'll agree with French to this extent--the stupidity is just as much a problem for the Left as for the Right. But the Left is better equipped to deal with the underlying structural issues that can be and must be faced and resolved in the political sphere. 

I've been arguing for years that we need to agree to disagree about culture war issues so that the 99% can actually solve practical problems that are politically solvable as opposed to metaphysical problems that just are not. Maybe Biden has the ability to persuade most Americans to put culture-war issues aside, but I doubt it. Nothing benefits the interests of the 1% more than to keep us divided and conquered, and the 1% has conservative media and the McConnell-minted "originalist" courts to insure that the stasis of our divisions remains firmly in place. Stasis and gridlock serves powerful entrenched interests, not the rest of us.

Whence the Republicans?

The Republican Party as currently constituted is a minority party representing a demographically narrow segment of the American electorate. It needs stasis — institutional and constitutional — to survive. Democrats do not. Just the opposite, they need a political system that can grow with and respond to change within our society. Progressive government is necessarily active government. And if we can speak of original intent, it was not the intent of the founders of this country to have a static government, a static constitutional order, or — for that matter — a static society.

The question of whether Democrats will abolish the filibuster or expand the courts or create new states, should they win power, is actually a question of whether Democrats will bring dynamism to the American political system. The prospect is daunting. But if they have any desire to reverse the damage of the past four years — if they want to return to something like normalcy — then the path to stability begins with transformation.  

--Jamelle Bouie

What kind of future does the Republican Party have? A lot depends on what happens in the next week--perhaps especially in the senate. There are so many moving parts, and none of us has his or her arms around enough of them to really understand what is happening to us now. I think that the presumption is that while this is an unusual election in many respects, it will go more or less normally--Trump will fuss and fume, but he will lose, and he will leave. Things will return to normal again with Uncle Joe. If the Senate remains Republican, we will go back to the same old gridlock, the same old commitment by the Republicans to say No to everything, especially taxes and regulation

But this "normal", while we have become accustomed to it since the Gingrich/Clinton 90s, is no longer tenable, because stasis is no longer a possibility. We have a Republican Party committed to this untenable stasis and in doing so has lost its mind. Its justification for supporting Trump has become the reductio ad absurdum of the Republican commitment to obstruction and stasis. Better chaos, better the destruction of cherished institutions and traditions, better to support Caligula than to give an inch to the evil, demoniac Democrats. 

This kind of crazy sees evil where's there's only a difference of opinion. There's an episode in The Office in which Dwight Schrute is being pranked by Jim about vampires, and Dwight responds: " I don't have a lot of experience with vampires, but I have hunted werewolves. I shot one once, but by the time I got to it, it had turned back into my neighbor's dog." (See also "Dwight Schrute was a Warning".)

It's a good gag, but it's a telling one about a kind of mentality that is ruled by various specters of fear. Even when the evidence is clear that there was no basis for it, this mentality will fabricate ways to justify its delusionally destructive behaviors. It becomes a self-reinforcing system in which people get locked. Dwight was truly crazy because he inhabited this mentality with little support from those around him. But there's another kind of crazy when you accept an insane idea born of paranoia because everyone you know believes it. That's what the majority of sane Americans are faced with after next week--a significant minority, at least a 100 million people, who are captured by a collective, fear-driven delusion. 

If Republicans lose both the Senate and the White House, there will be little soul searching among them. There is little reason to think that they will snap out of their collective delusion. Theirs is not unlike the collective insanity of southern Democrats in the run-up to the Civil War. Even the eventual calamity of defeat didn't snap them out of it. The delusional thinking promoted by the Lost Cause fantasy required that southerners continue to see Yankees as werewolves rather than as neighbors with different opinions. 

The connection between the mentality of the slave power before the Civil War and the current mentality of the Republican Party is a theme I've developed in several posts, perhaps best here. But it's something a recent book by Heather Cox Richardson lays out in greater detail in How the South Won the Civil War. She explains how paranoid oligarchs from the antebellum south continued their paranoid politics after the war through a one-party system under the auspices of the Democratic Party until the 1960s, how they spread their noxious worldview into the west, and how through the Senate they came to dominate in Washington. It was nuts and evil then, and it's nuts and evil now. And as in the 1850s it's threatening to destroy us now. And it's particularly tragic how normal, decent people get caught up in it and are crazed by it. I don't think the people are evil; I think the mindset that has captured them is. 

The only way for sanity to reassert itself is if the Dems win both the White House and the senate. If they do, they must say No to the normalcy of the last thirty years. They must do exactly what the Republicans most fear--abolish the filibuster, expand the court, and add some states. In other words they must use raw power the way the Republicans have done.

I believe most Democrats, especially the moderate, institutional types who get elected senators or presidents, do not want to take such drastic measures, but, as in the 1850s, the sane are being forced into a corner by the insane. Paranoids assume the worst in those who are willing to negotiate. But treating a non-enemy as an enemy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So that's the situation we're in now. The Dems have got to use extreme methods to fight the extremism of right-wing collective insanity. 

Republicans' paranoia justifies for them their raw use of power, and so of course the Democrats' use of it will only increase their paranoia by "proving" their fears correct. But there's nothing the Dems can do that will alleviate Republican fears, and so they cannot be governed by concerns that their acting boldly will make things worse. As in the 1850s, compromise cannot work with people who are captured by this kind of hysteria. Politics cannot cure the soul-sickness that leads them to embrace Trump, but it can address the underlying economic and structural issues that aggravate it. The churches should be the ones to provide a cure, but they are too sickened themselves to be of much help. 

I don't know if there is any solution in the long run except inevitably to break the country up. I've written about this before here. Taylor French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation recognizes the pressures building toward such a break up similarly to the way I do, but he makes the case for a path to reconciliation by embracing cultural pluralism. I've been preaching from that text for years, but I don't see it happening.

French is a sane, religious conservative, until recently a life-long Republican, but now a Never Trumper who fairly and sympathetically presents both sides of the cultural divide. But I doubt his sanity and decency will prevail among most people who still identify as Republicans. And the cultural Left is too myopic to go along with such a program. The Never Trumper Republicans have no real constituency except Independents and moderate Democrats. Perhaps some kind of realignment along those lines is possible. I doubt it, but it's worth trying. We'll see. 

But in the meanwhile, if Democrats get into power in the White House and senate, they must boldly use their power to make significant positive changes responsive to real problems in a dynamic, pluralistic society, because if they don't, destructive negative changes will be inevitable. Stasis simply is no longer a possibility.

Quote of the Day: Richard Rorty

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

From a link in "Why They Loved Him" by Farah Stockman

The American "pragmatist" philosopher Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, wrote this in Achieving Our Country, published in 1998. 

If the goal is to help those whose lives have been disrupted by the globalization unleashed by Neoliberals like Bill Clinton, then building a wall on the Mexican border or starting a trade war with China make little practical difference. It's what such actions symbolize that matters. Former blue-collar Democrats see Mexico and China as the places where all the jobs went, and if Trump is the only one who wants to hit back at them--even if only symbolically--they understandably find him very attractive as a champion for their cause.

Joe Biden, weathervane that he is, voted for NAFTA. But it's precisely his essence as a political weathervane that will impel him to turn left on this issue. How far remains to be seen. He will, of course, be cross-pressured by Wall Street and corporate interests. But perhaps because his presidency will be his last act, he will do the right thing this time rather than the politically expedient thing. We'll see. 

Stephanie Kelton, Big Gummint, Central Banks, and the American Future

An MMT view of the monetary system changes the way we think about what it means for currency-issuing nations to “live within their means.” It asks us to think in terms of real resource constraints—inflation—rather than perceived financial constraints. It teaches us to ask not “How will you pay for it?” but “How will you resource it?” It shows us that if we have the technological know-how and the available resources—the people, the factories, the equipment, and the raw materials—to put a man on the moon or embark on a Green New Deal to tackle climate change, then funding to carry out those missions can always be made available. Coming up with the money is the easy part. Managing the inflation risk is the critical challenge. More than any other economic approach, MMT places inflation at the center of the debate over spending limits. It also offers a more sophisticated array of techniques for managing inflationary pressures than what we have today.

Kelton The Deficit Myth (pp. 234-35). 

I've been reading Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth, and it's one of the best things out there to clarify why Bernie was right and why the Clinton/Obama/Biden/Pelosi wing of the party was wrong--not to mention all Republicans of the Paul Ryan ilk. The federal deficit isn't really a deficit, and anybody who uses the term "deficit spending" pejoratively to justify cutting entitlements or to resist spending on programs like Medicare for All is either ignorant or cynical.

Every time some smart-ass journalist asks a Sanders or a Warren how they are going to "pay for it", they are asking a political, not an economic question. It's political because most Americans think that the federal budget is essentially the same as a business or family budget where expenses have to be covered by revenues. It's just not how it really works. But politicians need  to justify their programs in terms that economically unsophisticated Americans can feel comfortable with. So they feel compelled to come up with some pretext to justify their program by analogy to the household budget. 

The Republicans might come up with some ridiculous pretext to justify their tax cuts by saying that they will stimulate the economy, which in turn will increase tax revenues that will pay for them. But it's been proven time and again with Reagan, Bush, and now Trump that these cuts only increase the so-called deficit. But each time the Republicans want their tax cut, they bring out their demonstrably false trickle down argument. But even so, the problem with the Republican tax cuts is not that they increase the deficit, but that they aggravate egregious concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of so relatively few.

But even Democrats buy into the 'deficit myth'. Bill Clinton did when he worked so diligently to balance the budget by cutting entitlements, and even now we see the influence of this myth when Nancy Pelosi insists on  "PAYGO". The U.S. is not in debt to the Bank of China, as Obama once said. The U.S. is not Greece or Venezuela or Bangladesh. As long as the U.S. has a vibrant productive economy and it has what Kelton calls monetary sovereignty, the government cannot run out of money or default--unless it chooses to, by for instance not raising the debt limit. Everybody--Democrats included-- who thinks that we have a defecit problem or that we are burdening future generations with debt is buying into an ideology that makes no sense after the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system in 1971.

Since then, the U.S. and other countries with fiat currencies can print as much money as they want, and the only limiting factor is inflation. That's a real limiting factor, but running "deficits" is not inflationary if managed competently. China isn't going to call in its chits, and the government isn't going to default so long as the U.S economy remains vibrant and productive. There are no economic reasons for Social Security to run out of money or for not funding universal healthcare or a robust program to renew the national infrastructure. The obstacles for achieving all these things and more are political not economic. The challenge is not lack of money, but lack of imagination and political will. 

For many Fiscal Puritans, the phrase "fiat currency" connotes an immoral profligacy. You can't just create money out of thin air, right? Money has to be grounded in something, like gold. Just letting it be whatever a government wants it to be is just wrong. This kind of Fiscal Puritanism runs strong in the American collective psyche, but it is the primary cause of the aforementioned lack of imagination that insists on focusing on delusional moralistic problems rather than real ones. Running the federal government like a business is a false analogy; it simply does not reflect how the economy works in countries with strong economies like the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, the U.K. and others that have monetary sovereignty. 

I am not going to rehearse all Kelton's arguments here, but there is no more withering, easily understood critique than hers to be found of the Neoliberalism that has dominated the elite thinking of the Washington Consensus whose destructive ideology has played a major role in creating the conditions that allowed for the rise of Donald Trump.

I have some hope that in the post-Trump reconstruction of American political institutions that we will find a way to reset to pre-Reagan when there was actually a consensus built around the legitimacy of the New Deal. We actually had a social democracy there for a while, but after 1980 the Neoliberals came to dominate elite thinking, and everything went badly wrong. It is astonishing how many smart people who should have known better--and who I think wanted to act in good faith--could be taken in by the Neoliberal con. Hopefully books like Kelton's and the emergence of the Sanders/Warren/AOC wing of the party will change that permanently. 

The challenge for them is rhetorical rather than technical: how to persuade most Americans that deficit spending is ok. That's a heavy lift because it just seems wrong. It's counter-intuitive, and it goes against everybody's common sense and experience about how money works in their personal lives. If we as individual households, businesses, and even state and local governments have to balance our expenditures with revenues, why shouldn't the federal government? If it doesn't, it should. . .  right? That's one point of resistance. The other is Americans' mistrust of big government and their discomfort with giving it too much power. This is a legitimate concern, but big gummint--bigness in general--is here to stay. The question is whether in the future ordinary Americans can make bigness work in their interests rather than in the interests of the oligarchs. 

***

Anybody who has read this blog over the years knows that I like to frame issues in loosely dialectical terms, as presenting polarities and then seeking to reconcile them. The fundamental polarity at work in the American political psyche pertaining here is Jefferson vs. Hamilton. The Jeffersonian impulse was carried mainly by Democrats through the 19th century, and the Hamiltonian impulse was carried by the Federalists, then the Whigs, and finally by the Republicans. None of us is completely Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, but we lean one way or the other with recessive traits of the other manifesting from time to time. Yankees lean toward Hamilton; Southerners toward Jefferson.

Jeffersonians define freedom primarily in terms of freedom from big government and big concentrations of wealth and power in institutions like central banks. Hamilton wanted the U.S. to be a world economic and military power, and he saw a strong central government and a central bank as playing a critical role in effecting this rise to power. Hamilton won early on, but the Jeffersonians dominated the decades in the early 19th Century running up to the Civil War--although among Southerners Hamiltonian recessive traits emerged with their support for the war with Mexico and their fantasies of imperial expansion into the rest of Latin America. The Hamiltonian legacy was developed by his Whig heirs Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

I think of Lincoln, a Whig-turned-Republican, as a Hamilton-dominant politico with recessive Jeffersonian traits. His greatness lies in his efforts to reconcile both, as so beautifully articulated at Gettysburg, but after him, the Republican Party became the vehicle for Hamilton-dominant thinking between the Civil War and WWI. Equality ideals were forgotten as Social Darwinism took hold in the North and Jim Crowe in the South.

By the second decade of the 20th Century, the heretofore Jeffersonian southern Democrats like Woodrow Wilson morphed into Hamiltonians in supporting the WWI and in bringing back the one thing truly anathema to Jeffersonians--the central bank. The Federal Reserve was created on his watch in 1913. By the time FDR took office, the only members of the Democratic party interested in invoking Jefferson were southern segregationists who looked for any pretext to stymie the federal government from interfering with their post-reconstruction apartheid system. In the late 19th Century Republican phase, the U.S. became a world economic power; in the post-Wilson Democratic phase, it became both a world economic and military power. The Party of Jefferson had become assimilated into the Party of Hamilton. 

There were, of course, the cranks like those in the John Birch society who were ok with the big business part of the Hamiltonian legacy, but were appalled that big gummint accompanied it. They were Jeffersonians of convenience like the Southern oligarchs. They hated a big government that would restrict them with regulations and anti-trust laws from doing as they please. They were the country-club Hamiltonians who saw FDR as a traitor to his class. But nobody in the power establishment took those cranks seriously until Ronald Reagan made it ok to be a Neoliberal. And we came to see that crankiness normalized through the efforts of the Koch Brothers and others who fund right-wing think tanks whose sole goal is to give a kind of intellectual legitimacy to ideas that are crudely designed to justify the dominance of the 1%.

Jefferson's vision for America was obsoletized by the Industrial Revolution and by the emergence of the U.S. as a world military power after WWI, and yet his influence lingers in positive and negative ways. We are Jeffersonians when we feel inspired by the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. We are Jeffersonians when we feel uncomfortable not just with how the central U.S. government has grown into this massive surveillance state with hundreds of military bases throughout the world, but also with the way Wall Street and huge concentrations of corporate power and wealth have come to dominate the economic sphere. And we are Jeffersonians when we are appalled at how huge concentrations of corporate power meld with political power.

But we are Jeffersonians in the negative sense when we think naively that our freedoms only thrive to the degree that big government stays out of our lives. Bigness in the private and public sectors is a real problem, but you deal with it by making it accountable, and big government is the only means to keep huge, amoral corporate powers in check. And that requires a vigilant citizenry, not the morally complacent citizenry that lets a quasi-authoritarian crackpot like Trump get elected. 

We need to keep those positive aspects of the Jeffersonian imagination of America alive, but we need to realize that we live in a world that is shaped primarily by forces that Hamilton celebrated and are now out of balance. The question before us now is how to effect a political coincidentia oppositorum, i.e., to achieve Jeffersonian ideals using Hamiltonian means. In other words bigness is here to stay, and to wish it away is delusional, and to the degree that bigness leads to greater levels of inequality and unfreedom, it must be resisted by harnessing it. For me the question is whether a new leadership can emerge from the Trump chaos that has an imagination of an American future that embodies what is best about both the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian legacies. 

The challenge is to manage bigness in such a way that the huge concentrations of wealth and political power don't accrue to the 1%--or the 20% for that matter. The challenge before us is to harness American economic power to enact policies that solve the problems of inequality and concentrations of wealth and power--not just in this country, but throughout the world. Going forward, the only real solutions are global solutions.

That might seem kind of unrealistic because it seems to require a mentality and an imagination of future possibility that is so not  who we are now. But if we live in this Hamilton-dominant imagination of America at the moment, I believe that our recessive Jeffersonianism--the most positive aspects of it articulated in the Declaration--can emerge as a balancing, integrating factor. Right now we are in chaos; we are anything but integrated and balanced. The thing to be feared is that we will embrace any kind illiberal order as an alternative to the chaos, but that just creates other imbalances that kick the basic problem down the road.  

If there is not an aggressive assertion of political will from progressives, the illiberal Right will win by default. Obama was a decent president, but he was a timid technocrat, and his timidity and his acquiescence to the Washington Consensus aggravated the conditions that promoted Trump's emergence. If Biden is another Obama, expect someone to emerge on the Right who will have learned from Trump. He willl have learned how easy it is to do egregiously illegal, unconstitutional things that can be tied up in the courts for years while he bends government institutions to his authoritarian will. If the courts finally decide against him, he will ignore them as Andrew Jackson did. It doesn't matter what the courts decide if the executive branch won't enforce it. But there's a good chance courts will support a post-Trump authoritarianism because Mitch McConnell has been stacking the federal courts with right-wing ideologues. 

For now at least I'm going to allow myself to embrace the more optimistic possibilities for an American future, and hope that Trump's absurd, chaotic presidency has created a sense of urgency that make something new possible, and that out of his chaos something new and better can be born. I believe something better is possible even if such a possibly poses an enormous challenge to our collective political imagination.

As Kelton's book points out, we have the resources, the Hamiltonian means, to do very good things. The only question is whether we will be hamstrung by, on the one hand, a tight-assed Fiscal Puritanism, the kind we see on display with Mitch McConnell and the Republicans who just hate the idea of extending unemployment benefits during a pandemic; and on the other hand, by a widespread moral lassitude and ignorance among ordinary Americans that allowed a ridiculous figure like Trump to take the White House in the first place. 

State of the Race 3

It's looking more and more like it's going to be Bernie, and it's looking more and more like the establishment types are in full freak out. I think it's fine to go after him with all guns firing between now and Super Tuesday, but I hope that the establishment types are savvy enough to get behind him if he emerges after Super Tuesday with a significant lead. 

I don't know what's going to happen if Bernie goes up against Trump. Nobody does. Whatever matrix we've had to explain how things usually work no longer has any validity. The "experts" who are predicting that Bernie will lose don't really know. It's just more prudent to say it's 50/50. Conventional wisdom is worthless in our current situation. People want a return to normalcy, but normalcy is no longer a possibility. The best antidote to Trumpism is something like Bernie-ism. It's certainly not back-to-normal-ism.

And so if there's one generalization I think it's safe to maintain, it's that the more establishment the candidate, the more clueless, and the more clueless, the less likely to win. That's the most positive thing that can be said about Bernie. He's the most anti-establishment candidate in the Dem field. And so if establishment Dems in the Hillary/Biden wing of the party hate Sanders, that's just a sign about how out of touch they are.

So that's why if after Super Tuesday Bernie has a significant lead, they better get on the Bernie train and make the best possible case for his candidacy rather than prolong the civil war. Do I think they'll do it? No. And that's what makes me most pessimistic about Bernie's candidacy. It's not about him; it's about them.

Bernie probably understands that it's a liability for him to be called a socialist, but it's worse for him if he backs away from it. Bernie's task--and the task of all Democrats--should be to define Democratic Socialism on their terms and not accept how it will be characterized by the Libertarians in the Business Class. A Democratic Socialist is for social democracy, and social democracy is what we had in this country until Libertarians in the GOP and Neoliberals (like Clinton) in the Democratic party dismantled it. Democratic Socialism is the New Deal. It's Denmark, not Cuba. 

And please, media types, stop thinking you're so smart by asking how Bernie is going to pay for it all. Nobody with any sense believes that he's going to get what he is running on, even Medicare for All. This is not an election about being practical; it's about laying out a vision for the future of the country. And that future is mostly about what young people want, and they don't want more of the same. And for good reason. 

And Bernie is right when he questions why it's ok to build huge deficits to benefit the wealthiest as Reagan, Bush, and Trump have done, but not for programs that actually benefit real people. It's not about what's practical; it's about what there's the political will to do. So it's first about getting the right people in office, and then it's about the hard work of building a consensus and the political will to solve real problems, chief among them the ridiculous inequity in our wealth distribution. This gross injustice is the responsibility of both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats who effected it by dismantling the New Deal, i.e., the social democratic, framework that kept things more equitable during our trente glorieuses.

Sorry Pete and Amy. The old people and editorial boards love you, but the old people and establishment media aren't the future. I don't know if Bernie is the answer or whether he'll succeed, but he has a better chance of it than either of you do. 

BTW--Check out this post I wrote some years ago: Socialism vs. Neoliberalism

A Centrist Way Out of the Impasse? Not Likely

From Morton Kondracke:

If voters are furious with Washington now, they’ll be positively revolutionary in 2020 if none of the nation’s problems get addressed. And if America’s adversaries — Russia, China and Iran — continue to take advantage of the weakness our divisions exude, Trump and Cruz will be back.

The upshot of all this is that the next four years represent the last chance for mainstream politicians — of both parties — to prove they can govern. If they can’t, they’re gone — and ideological firebrands will be in charge of both parties.

And the corollary of that is, for their own sakes as well as the country’s, they’d better negotiate, compromise and get stuff done.

Clinton, assuming she’s elected, should immediately assemble GOP and Democratic leaders and say, “I pledge to stand up to my left wing and risk a 2020 challenge if you find the courage to resist threats from your right. We’ve got to work together — or else."

Job No. 1 should be to do what neither party has done for the past 20 years — ease the plight and address the needs of working-class families battered by the downside forces of globalization, technology and slow growth. That’s the cohort Trump has been inciting with calls for protectionism and nativism.

Clinton and GOP leaders could immediately resuscitate the deal that was being negotiated last year by Ryan, incoming Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and GOP Sen. Rob Portman: a substantial cut in the corporate tax rate, a tax holiday for corporations repatriating profits held abroad and public-private investment in a well-planned and administered infrastructure-building program. It could get growth going.

Thereafter, Republicans should agree to Clinton proposals — also supported by the so-called “reformicon” movement in the GOP — to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, the child tax credit and the child-care tax credit, plus measures to reduce the cost of college. And Clinton should agree to a tax-reform proposal that lowers individual rates and caps or eliminates most special-interest loopholes.

Bracketing any discussion of the merit of these particular policy proposals, finding a way to compromise on them is extremely unlikely because Republican legislators don't have a base of support that will allow them to compromise. They stay in office only if they continue to obstruct.

I think that the only legislative solution to break the impasse is for one side or the other--the  the Tea Party Right or Sanders/Warren Left--to win the White House and both houses in Congress. In Scenario 1 the Tea Party Right would win, and that would be truly frightening and world destabilizing. Eventually this movement self-immolates along the lines I wrote about yesterday, but as it goes up in flames there will be significant collateral damage both here and throughout the world. The Bush years will seem by comparison a model of constraint and sobriety. Whatever the legitimacy of the the grievances of the rank-and-file Trump supporters and Tea Partiers, their leadership is demented, even more demented than Dick Cheney and John Yoo. 

In Scenario 2 the Sanders/Warren Left would to win, and that would create a space for some sanity to prevail, because, despite what Kondracke might think, they are not led by "ideological firebrands", even if some of its rank-and-file are. It is led, in fact, by sensible conservatives who want to return to something like the pre-Reagan, pre-Neoliberal, social democratic status quo ante.

Their "Left" agenda would be resisted by ideological cranks on the far Right, as it always has been. But I believe that there are many people now who might be described as populist centrists who are attracted to Trump and the Tea Party extremes not because they share their ideology, but because it provides for them the only outlet for their anger and resentment. Straight shooters like Sanders or Warren could win them over and in doing so siphon off much if not most of the unstable combustibles that are in the bomb waiting to explode on the extreme Right. I believe had Sanders been the nominee and won in this cycle, he could have made the case to the American people to help him to break the impasse by giving him the House in 2018. Someone like Hillary could never do that. 

And so in the short term, Kondracke's compromise scenario is not going to happen. There will be no compromise after Clinton takes the White House. And who knows how much worse things will get by 2020. And if Clinton runs again, and she probably will, that precludes Scenario 2, unless someone like Warren successfully challenges her in the primaries, and that's not likely. So Clinton winning n 2016 makes her running again in 2020 likely, which in turn makes Scenario 1 more likely beginning in 2021.

If by some horrific turn of events Trump manages to win on Tuesday, then we get a head start on Scenario 1.