Agree on almost everything. But my guess is that the Democratic party needs to have a cathartic fight between the left that invented DEI and the center that somewhat embraced it (though i did not). We cannot live within the same party unless one side or the other changes drastically. Compromises between the two sides will lead back to nowhere. If the left wins, then I will leave the party altogether. And if the center wins, many of the left will do the same. Where that leads I do not know. But the open and brutal fight must take place nevertheless. I began having this fight with my woke friends over 5 years ago. It is not pretty.
don't you think that an argument could be made that instead of focusing on the "brutal" boxing match, we could focus on preserving the ring within which the match might take place at all?
ahhh ok. Such imagery is helpful (to me) to frame the argument, but I can be more direct. What I am saying is that I do not feel that a brutal fight between the left and the center left (if I'm understanding you correctly - maybe not) is going to get us anywhere, and especially not closer to preserving, say, the rule of law.
I've been thinking a lot about this intra-left battle lately. The problem as I see it is that those of who are anti-woke or post-woke are, by and large, communicating with the woke left with the same high-handed attitude that we communicate with Trump voters--i.e. we're right, you're wrong, we're smarter, you don't get it, you're the problem, you're grifters and status seekers, get over yourself. And the woke left treats us exactly the same way or worse, accusing us of racism, sexism, internalized oppression, etc and engaging in cancellation/mob justice campaigns to shut us down.
Until people on the left can engage respectfully and open-mindedly, we'll remain divided, all to the benefit of MAGA.
Yes, I have found the discussions fraught--in part because I felt betrayed by my friends who became woke. We used to be on the same side, basically, then we weren't. i don't claim they are dumb--some of them got better grades than i did. But I do hope they were just taken in by living in a milieu (an elite college) where only one set of thoughts was respected. And no one likes being told they were duped!
And what of the dupers? I cannot even talk with many of them. I am their worst enemy, and they know it. My world view is opposed to theirs. It gies all the way down to basics. I have no illusion that they would listen to me or I to them. But that is not political. it is just very basic ways of thinking. too bad.
I am curious, if you are willing, to hear a little more about how this fight will move us towards renewed trust. Not arguing, really just wondering.
(It's funny, because I keep wanting to put it in metaphorical terms, and then erasing them b/c I know you don't want to speak in metaphors LOL.)
To me, what makes it all so difficult is that there are shards of truth in every argument, often encased in a lot of nonsense, contradiction, hyperbole, self-righteousness, cherry-picking, etc. As a society, we have no real forum for true debate. If I could see all of the arguments laid bare, pitted against one another (instead of reading this, and then reading that, and having to construct a vision from all of the disparate pieces), I think that would be enormously helpful. You could really see, live, the holes in people's arguments.
Maybe that's the kind of gladiator situation you're referring to. A real battle of ideas that would yield something new, rather than just listening to people talking from their own corners TO their own corners (back to the boxing metaphor, I can't help myself.) But maybe not - just curious!
Thanks for engaging. No process starts without engagement.
And there's nothing wrong with metaphors, IMO, just so they are used to clarify, not fuzz up the meaning. We don't want to forget the shadows on the wall in The Republic,
I wish I had more answers. But this is a forum for debate among people who are serious enough to read Persuasion (and pay for it, I hope). Earlier this week, in another such forum I called out DEI as fraudulent--and explained why. No one respond to that. But maybe some day someone will. Just keep telling it like you see it.
"A real battle of ideas that would yield something new, rather than just listening to people talking from their own corners TO their own corners"
A good summation of what so often passes for debate these days!
It's interesting to observe the same challenge being faced by political parties on both sides of the Atlantic - the left wing Democrats in the US and the theoretically right wing Conservatives in the UK. Both had disappointing elections and both are now engaged in soul searching in the hope of discovering what path to take going forward.
In both cases, there are those who say the message was correct, but it just wasn't articulated well enough: and there are those who say that the voters rejected the message, so that is what needs changing.
My guess is that engaging with the electorate, especially with the sort of people who used to vote for you but decided to do something different this time, might be a good way to find the answers.
If you listen to the ideologues rather than the voters, you can look forward to 8 years of President Vance.
I think democracy in the USA is very resilient and faces no real threat. Also, I think there's an obvious successor to Donald Trump in the GOP. I'm not sure the Democrats have an obvious candidate (it surely can't be Kamala Harris).
Same here in New Zealand. Educated people who traditionally wield delegated power, on trust to the rest of us, went to university for 50 years. They came out with a received worldview that was limited to what the rest of us saw as weird s**t. Instead of acting in what we saw as being in our interests, over decades they acted to heedlessly impose their bright shiny new worldview. Not cool. This is not democracy.
The present political situation is akin to ‘creative destruction’ in business. It wasn’t pretty for Xerox or Kodak then, and it isn’t pretty for elites now. But they are bankrupt.
That is why this is reinvigoration and not merely destruction, although some destruction is inevitable. The chaotic quality includes a ferment of new possibilities. Thankfully, without the tumbrils ferrying woke jacobins.
What amazes me is how much modern politics stirs up so much hatred on both sides completely overwhelming the fair minded rational side of the mind (and heart). Before the Kennedys and the 60’s most people thought the important issues in their lives had to do with their individual strivings. The national news was 15 minutes long. Yeah during the depression and World War II national issues were huge, but after that people settled down and put their energies into their lives. They distrusted, as they should, government to get things done. They knew most politicians were not to be trusted, making ridiculous promises and grabbing fantastic amounts of money to share with their buddies. The most important part of democracy, the part that worked reasonably was that everyone should push for what they wanted and between those conflicting wishes and needs compromises were possible.
When politics turns into groups out to save the world, to high idealism to belief that they represent the good and their opponents are the villains, compromise become impossible and you land up with the polarization and hatred of modern America. Yes, during the good old days the problems of blacks in the south were not part of the concerns of the rest of the country and certainly it was a good thing that that changed, But unfortunately that kind of changing the world politics has led to trillions of dollars spent, accomplishing very little, and incredible stupid rigid political parties demanding unanimity as if a war is going on. The first casualty of war is truth. And idiotic righteousness. The reason the scenario describes above leads nowhere is because it does. It leads to a constant posturing, fear of saying what you truly believe lest you be cast aside, and will be turned on by the ravenous thought police on both side. We are capable of more. Turn off the news. Ever since they became 24 hours instead of 15 minutes they have made their money finding ever new issues to heat up and keep viewers watching and hating each other. Extremism is the golden calf. Boredom from news broadcasts leads to cancelled broadcasters. Find your thrills and chill in a good book or movie. Excitement should be found there or at a carnival not from our absurd political controversies. I’d like nothing more than to return to boring 50’s. Yes there was McCarthy. And some people read the National Enquirer. Human nature is human nature but that was on a far smaller scale than the wreckage of what has happened to our media and the lives that have been destroyed by all this righteous thinly disguised hatred.
Alternatively, don't have a fight. Memory hole the conflict. Focus your energies on the enemies on right, those are way more consequential and anyone who can see that should be your ally. Most people I've come across would rather see the world burn than speak the words "I was wrong", so it's probably better to let people pretend they were always on your side. And right now the lib-left (schisms don't matter) are in the awesome position where they have an enemy that is genuinely evil, vulgar, and about to cause a lot of material harm to Americans. That's a game Democrats should be able to win.
Sorry, either we put DEI and the like firmly behind us or it will become part of a rallying cry against Trump et al. And if it is, then most Americans will not trust us.
Whatever thing you don't like about the party can become less relevant by diverting the energy spent infighting to building on what you agree with each others on.
My favorite aspect of this debate is all the people who are SURE that Elon's moves will be harmful, that tariffs will be a disaster, that USAID spending was worthy and important, that DEI is not a make-work program for privileged liberal arts majors.
They're certain about all these things based on information gleaned from a media apparatus which has been proven to be dishonest again and again about the biggest issues, and despite the fact that they've been WRONG repeatedly for years.
At what point does partisanship diminish and confirmation bias recognize itself and humility encroach? I keep listening to rich midwits opine about politics through their classist lens, morally certain that they're correct and that others aren't just mistaken, but stupid or immoral or malign. It's quite a display!
As anyone with knowledge about organizations knows, the best way to downsize is via a carefully studied approach. A fast and furious destruction will only leave chaos in its wake.
My understanding of organisations is that cultures are hard to change. To be effective you either do a ‘hostile internal takeover’, which means sacking the individuals who are the maintainers of the status quo root and branch, or you work for 20 years with careful hiring and policy shifts to quietly nudge the culture, like a giant aircraft carrier, to point in your preferred direction.
This is absolutely not the best way to downsize. It’s an idealistic image of what one would like the process to be, but it’s hardly effective. You go scorched earth, because then you can rebuild from the foundation. You have to clear out the rot - it does not leave willingly, and will kick and scream every step of the way if you allow the process to drag out.
I think many of us critique the steps leasing up to your utilitarian assesment of Musk doing good or bad: we worry about ilegality and institutions. Your view is simple Machiavelian: the end justifies the means. Not seeing the dangers of this position is naïve, to say the least.
Well I certainly remember being relieved that a few dozen more I-beams had "Made in USA" stamped on them when I lost my job at the fab shop last time around.
I come from a small city in Massachusetts, where GE had its flagship operation. GE was central to the life of the city. Until it wasn't. Little by little, division by division, they moved the jobs out of the city, the population fell, and one business after another shut down. And they left PCBs behind that are still being cleaned up.
It's a familiar story, of course, repeated again and again and again. And at the time, I was astonished that no one in political power was inclined to tell it. There were films and books and essays, but there was no real willingness to frame it as a real issue. Ever. The idea was that globalization was inevitable and that ultimately, everyone would benefit. Or something like that. Not even an idea, really, but a "message." With Ronald Reagan, it became all about the "message." And then with Bill Clinton, brilliant as he was. If everything was so sunny and upbeat, why were so many people suffering? I remember feeling, decades ago, that someday, something would have to give. Every politician was delivering the message, in increasingly alienated language.
Richard Rorty saw it coming: "Members 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… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet." He wrote that in 1998. The one thing he didn't and couldn't see was that the alleged strongman would have a broad-based appeal that extended beyond race or gender or sexual preference.
So when I see the words "We’ve got the right message" coming out of the mouth of the new DNC chair, I can see further failures ahead. There is no such thing as "the right message," as you say. And I think that many voters have made one thing crystal clear: they do no want to be pitched at or sold anything, because they know it means they're going to be disregarded again. And sadly, in this country, 77 million of them have put their faith in the wrong person.
Beyond that, I think it's always difficult to find a way forward when the models of the past still feel so present and, as you say, so many of them are worth preserving.
".. sadly, in this country, 77 million of them have put their faith in the wrong person."
I think the choice may have been between the 'wrong person' and someone even worse. Nevertheless, looking at the US election from the perspective of the UK, I was envious that you had a real choice. The direction the country would take would be different depending on the decision the voters made. There was no such sense of agency here in the UK for our elections last July.
There has been a palpable lifting of the mood in the UK since the election of Donald Trump. This isn't because most Brits had a favourable view of him, but because we felt that the whole 'woke' agenda - DEI, trans activism, eco-alarmism and the like - was now going to be consigned to the dustbin of history (hopefully never to be recycled).
Agree with much of your thoughts. But we don’t yet know if the 77 million put the wrong person in office. It’s so early, we have a ways to go, and this may well work out in the end for the most part. Maybe not perfect, but something needed to be done. All the best to everyone here. A vast majority seem extremely reasonable and able to “discuss”. That’s more than we can say about our congress and our elite colleges. 😊
I’ve thought about what you say. I don’t like having a president with no respect for the rule of law, who worships power and people who wield it (Vladimir Putin in particular), who never admits to any failings, who is - to put it mildly - thin-skinned, reckless and erratic. No matter how well it works out. Results are important, but so are the means of getting them. I think he sets a terrible example for the country and the world.
However, I think it’s a truly terrible idea to lecture people who voted for him. In fact, it plays right into his appeal. The only thing to do is to listen and talk and understand.
Hi. I’ve lived in New York for many years now, but I think that Silvio O. Conte, a liberal Republican and a veteran congressman, was still serving. Did he campaign on the issue? I don’t know. Corporations moving jobs south or offshore was presented as an unstoppable force. I think he and his predecessors tried to move new corporations into the plant - General Dynamics, followed by someone else - but it was never the same.
As a reminder the South was and is part of the United States. Companies that move jobs from - for example - the Northeast to the South or create new jobs in the South do so because of what management views as a more favorable business climate in the South. Right to work laws are only part of an overall business climate. I don't know if anyone has actually run the statistics, but I suspect that when adjusting for cost of living an industrial worker in the South does as well as his or her counterpart in the Midwest or Northeast.
Change is(almost) always hard. One thing ive learned is that if one doesnt take an active role in that change, itll happen regardless.
If we arent willing to defend something we feel we possess, we dont deserve to keep it. The mushy populace takes everything they have for granted, bc the majority of them did absolutely nothing to create, or even keep, what they have. We are/were the benefactors of a social system that allowed us exist as it saw fit. The comfortable life we have comes at a humanitarian cost weve long turned a blind eye to. We really arent any different than the new social order taking control of our lives, we too gladly took what we wanted and damn the consequences we placed on others. But there are consequences for ourselves too. Like a huge population of useless consumers that cant add any value to their own lives, let alone anyone elses.
Trumps brilliance is in realizing he can take what he wants from a population that didnt earn, and wont defend, those things hes taking. He called the bluff of the american dream, and won. And STILL, people just stand there in slack jawed confoundment, wondering how this all happened. Any people who actually valued their lives and livelihood wouldve fought staunchly from the beginning.
So dont look here, to eloquent and intelligent writers, for the answers to why and how. The answers all around you, and most likely, in your hand.
Honestly i cant understand why we're still talking about why and how, and not what do we do next. Leave it to future historians to tease out the causes. Our role is to take control of the inevitable change thats taking place right now, while we're still trying to figure out wtf happened.
On the plains of hesitation...
How ironic that the things we love and worship, our comfort and ease, our more than reasonably priced products, our "phones"(and everything those phones stands for), our wasteful and useless lives, are the very causes of our inability to defend ourselves against the wolves.
Ill end with what i felt was the shining gem in this article, the call to exercise rigorous honesty. Though most people are incapable of that, it is absolutely the key to a future we dont despise. But it is something you can do, right now, and thats more than most of these types of articles offer.
The problem across the western world is a political class which has become disengaged from the people it seeks to represent. It has stopped governing by consent and come perilously close to ruling by decree (we have it particularly bad in the UK). Particularly in the cases of the working class and aspirant middle class, 'woke' social justice policies have zero traction. Put very simply, what matters most to the modern left doesn't figure at all in the concerns of everybody else.
One consequence of this failure to connect is the sense that politicians are not listening, don't understand, and probably don't care. Voters feel that their voices are not being heard. Any political movement that looks like it is putting the concerns of voters at the centre of its offering will enjoy success.
Populism isn't about the dangerous rise of demagogues and a threat to democracy, it is about democracy reasserting itself. The threat is to the political parties who felt it was OK to stop listening to the electorate, sometimes even being openly contemptuous of them, and to the structures that maintained them in office despite their manifest unsuitability.
Trump is cutting through the nonsense. I hope we follow his lead here in the UK (though we've still got four and a half years of our deeply unpopular government to endure).
I think you are right in so many ways about the diagnosis; I"m just worried about the cure. I am really worried that what people see as an efficiency-creating machine will go much, much farther than many suspect. It's just hard, through all of the rhetoric and various influences, to see and feel a true and genuine care and concern "for the people."
I think any plan to reduce the size of government has to be fairly brutal. Otherwise, all that happens is that the speed at which government grows gets a bit slower, but it still grows. Bureaucracies have a way of perpetuating themselves which is why it almost always needs an outsider to effect real change.
Does Trumpism have "a true and genuine concern for the people" at its core? I don't know, but I'm absolutely certain that the alternative didn't.
that's so interesting. I don't really agree, but I DO agree that the party has become bloated with hollow rhetoric and doesn't really allow that care and concern to really come through. I guess the truth is that it's really a case by case situation: you could never convince me that, say, Tim Walz is a cold-blooded politician out for himself. Or some of the amazing people I have worked with and known over the years. But as a party writ large, there is a serious problem at the center.
I don’t see the wave of rejection of the woke as being ‘efficiency creation’ at its core. The dynamic exists here in New Zealand as well, and in other countries. I think the simplest framing is that woke elite have abused trust (politicians, bureaucrats, judiciary, education system, media) and there is a mood for changing those elite projects out.
The anger and disgust mean that the destruction which will be wrought will not be clean. It “will go much, much farther than many suspect”. This is very undesirable, but the woke have walked our communities off a cliff. We are Wile E. Coyote looking down.
We in the western world have entered a transitional phase. The tendrils of a new order will emerge from the mess.
Yes, I think what I was referring to about "efficiency creation" was the whole DOGE agenda, which probably wouldn't have seemed so desirable to so many if that abuse of trust hadn't felt so visceral. I love the Wile E. Coyote image, and have used it myself - it feels the most apt. I am really worried, though that — to use a well-worn cliche — we're in a baby/bathwater situation. One that will be, as you said, not clean (speaking of baths, I guess).
My sense is that there's a monumental disconnect between the new order that Trump & Co. is actually bringing forward and the one most people thought they were voting for. Do you agree?
Sort of. Brexit voters were ‘voting against their best interests’ too. And they really were. But beyond that, and what I think triumphed, was that they were voting against the established order that they saw as having betrayed them.
I’m from New Zealand, so I’m looking from the outside America and do not have the visceral present experience that you have. I do realise that you are a highly educated and politically aware American, so if you can forgive my presumption…
My sense is that the core of the positivity for Trump & Co is more in the trust and expectation that he will smash stuff. Where the vote had been for Biden on the basis of ‘anybody but Trump’, the vote for Trump this time was more of an ‘anybody but the woke establishment’.
Sure there will be a positive hope that T & C will make things better, but I think this is weaker than the confidence that he will make the coasts suffer.
The Democrats have become a symbol for an ossified and remote culture that is associated with all that is wrong in America.
The loss of jobs to globalisation with no countervailing programs to pick up the pieces in the rust belt, other than the preachy “Move to where the jobs are and retrain yourself”. The opioid crisis. The “flyover states” with their “deplorables” (latterly the “garbage”).
The utterly complicit Republicans meanwhile have hugely gained by somehow being rescued from being seen as part of the reviled establishment. The Democrats are the ones left holding the baby that may be headed for the drain.
Brexit voters, and I was one, were not "voting against their best interests". For us, it was never an argument about economics, which was the way that the Remain campaign wanted to frame it. The argument was about who should be making our laws, deciding on who can or can't come into the country - basically all about democracy and control.
I'm not sure how well the Brexit position is understood outside of Europe. The EU is not simply a trading bloc, which is in fact the minor component of its purpose. It is in fact a post-nationalist project with a trading bloc appended to it. Post-nationalism isn't especially popular in Europe, and being excluded from the trading bloc is used as the whip to keep truculent natives in line.
The tide is turning within the EU. Nationalists are making gains, and the EU project is in peril. I for one hope it crashes and burns.
Totally mate, you are right. I phrased myself poorly.
I put those words in quotes, to highlight that this was not the view of Brexiteers.
But I was clumsy with my follow on. I do think voting for Brexit was a vote for lower GDP growth, but that was not the point. As you say, that vote was about sovereignty. It was about who makes the laws, who can enter the country and democracy and control.
I think the European Common Market was and is a Good Thing. (Despite you Pommie bastards shutting us loyal kiwis from the dominions, who fought with you in the Boer War, two world wars and Malaya, out of your market for our beef, lamb and butter when you joined the then EEC. I’ll bet you haven’t had a decent Sunday roast since!)
But the frankenparliament in Brussels, and Schengen, not so much.
I understand the desire for sovereignty and control underlying a Brexit vote but how did that turn into massive immigration in a short period of time, thereby resulting in a huge increase of the number of non-British born residents? (Or am I misunderstanding/is that an invalid summary?)
Yes, I think what you're pointing to is related to that other recent Persuasion article about Arlie Hochschild's concept of the 'deep story." I read her book just after the 2016 election, and found her framing to be enormously, well, persuasive.
She says, "a deep story is not a matter of what you say you believe or your party affiliation. It's a matter of how you feel."
And I think that looking at the situation through the lens of "interests" (as I seem to have in the comment that prompted your response) is absolutely not up to the challenge of explaining anything, or at least explains very little.
I agree with you completely that culturally - at least as much as anything policy-related - Democrats created a GAPING hole that the Republicans just waltzed right through. Maybe even more than that: we teed them up with such a slow-moving softball that they had time to stop twisting their moustaches out there on the bench, grab a bat, walk up to the plate, plant their feet, and knock it—if not out of the park, then at least out of the reach of our fielders, most of whom were standing around, on their phones, making witty comments to each other on twitter.
This is my day for really botched metaphors, but I hope at least the point comes through. Point is: yeah. And it's not, I think, just a strategic error: it's an error that reveals a truth that we are now scrambling to correct. We kind of lost our soul, perhaps like a rock star that loses touch with what brought them to music in the first place.
It's not like populism is a new faction, either. Historically, they were the base of the Democratic Party here in the US and were first recognized in American politics during the presidential election of Andrew Jackson (hence the moniker "Jacksonian populists"). They were around before that, of course - Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts had strong populist overtones.
During the Cold War, however, their coalition splintered, with some shifting over to the Republican Party. And what we're now seeing is the old dynamics reasserting themselves, as the issues of the day shift and the populists find fresh motivations to "get the band back together again".
Well, from reading other comments, I guess I get to be the contrarian who crashes this love fest, which I consider an orgy of nihilistic piety and solipsistic self-congratulation of the first order. We do not find ourselves in a political moment so unique that history cannot guide us--and we don't need to descend into a prolonged moment of navel gazing to recognize it. I work with the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, which seeks to bridge the divide between more liberal urban communities and more conservative rural mindset, in the hopes of discovering previously unrecognized common ground. And what one quickly discovers is that the right has organized in rural and working class communities in such a way that the nessage is clear: the left not only doesn't understand you or care about you, they hate you and everything you stand for. If the left has a problem, it's the problem of a lot of educated folks--thinking that their view of things is self-evident. Engagement is and always was the answer. There doesn't need to be a "battle to the death" between progressives and centrists; what an utterly fatuous notion. Instead we have to recognize that we have not worked hard enough to make our vision of a just and prosperous society a reality. We need to listen to the voters we are not reaching and respond to their concerns, especially their fears, without labeling them as uninformed, racist, sexist, etc. This is a scary time. Social change isn't just progressing, it's accelerating, while a great many people find their circumstances stuck in the mud. They may point to solutions with which we disagree, but their concerns aren't far-fetched. That sense of solidarity can help guide as past this ridiculous idea that we've got it all wrong and need to descend into meditative groupthink or battle to the death to discover the path to the future. Thirty years ago the philosopher Richard Rorty identified the two groups most responsible for social progress were agents of love (guardians of diversity) and agents of justice (defenders of universality). You may recognize these positions as those of the progressive and liberal left, respectively. The progressive left embraced guarding diversity while turning its back on guarding universality, and that was a mistake, because it abandoned justice for power, a power we obviously couldn't claim and don't have. But the way forward lies in the same old tactics of organizing, mobilizing, and persuasion. The last will be the hardest because the left is notoriously bad at messaging (part of that presumption of self-evidence I mentioned above). But that doesn't mean by sinking into deep mediation we'll come up with something better. Or change history.
“If the left has a problem, it's the problem of a lot of educated folks--thinking that their view of things is self-evident.” This is exactly it. For some reason, the learned are conflating knowledge and know-how with wisdom and understanding. To someone who grew up working class, it's like they can't see past their learning — what they are absolutely certain about — to what's really there. It's a very bewildering reality to have to grapple with.
One take: you can abandon a posture of confidence and strength for only so long.
Progressive politics became driven by a posture of weakness: self flagellaton, group identity, historical guilt, bloated largess, and the incessant compulsion to take care of the "huddled masses," both economically and linguistically.
They became exactly what they professed to despise: the progressive patriarchy. Big Guilty Daddy.
This posture of weakness eventually folds in the face of the managerial classes. It's too expensive and demoralizing. The Voting Cohort works too hard for that nonsense.
Labour in the UK under Tony Blair won in 1997 after nearly two decades in the wilderness by recognizing and delivering on what they needed to make themselves electable. Thatcher described New Labour as her greatest political achievement.
The electoral gap between Democrats and Republicans is much narrower, despite the fact that inflation has hammered the blue-collar working poor who used to be the natural heartland of the Democratic party.
Blue-collar workers who didn't say "Defund the police" or lambast "both-sidesism" or engage in pearl-clutching over the "deplorables" who voted for Trump #1. Workers who didn't understand why America spent blood - their blood - and treasure in forever wars that yielded no positive strategic outcome while allies coasted along without paying their fair share.
Blue-collar workers who in survey after survey demonstrate centrist, inclusive views about people of all creeds, colors and sexual orientations.
Workers who want leaders who recognize that the last few years have been tough if you're trying to get by on a blue-collar wage and who are focused on getting their living costs down and their after-tax incomes up.
Didn't work, didn't work? Trump *lost* in 2020 and various forms of resistance did in fact work at the time. Those were the guardrails that held.
The mistake was (particularly on the side of the pandering and craven Dems) pretending that "the right side of history" had won in defeating him. All that stuff in The Identity Trap? It was ignored and the only remaining political party in the nation was asleep at the wheel. Now there is no resistance and no guardrails (and yes, you and Persuasion rolling over like you seem to be doing is part of that failure). You are right though, that failure meant we could never go back to the way it was.
As an aside it gets real tiresome when you elites talk endlessly about the working class amongst themselves (and yes, the natcons and you supposedly liberal squishes are all elites of the social capitalist/PMC/whatever type) as if you understand us.
It strikes me the court of public opinion ruled over by the educated elites was supposed to ensure that smart ideas crowded out the dumb ideas. Then they started spewing dumb ideas of their own while getting caught red-handed suppressing the dumb ideas of their ideological rivals.
Well, the dumb ideas are getting their day in court. How it shakes out is anybody's guess, but we'll get no relief till the elites learn to distinguish between good and bad ideas again.
The free expression of ideas doesn't always mean the smart ideas crowd out the dumb ones.
It's a little-known fact that following the development of the printing press in Europe, the best-selling book after the Bible for 150 years was Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of the Witches. The author, Heinrich Kramer, had been described as "senile" and "crazy" by his local bishop. Blaming "modern" witches for climate anomalies and storms that culminated in the Little Ice Age, his book revived witch-hunting in secular courts after a thousand-year hiatus. At least 60,000 were killed, 80% of them women.
Many wonder what will come of our latest disruptive communications technologies and social media. The last major disruptor led to censorship, persecution and 12 million deaths in the European Wars of Religion.
Keep it up Yascha. You are one of the only left-of-center intellectuals advocating honest and difficult self reflection in this awkward moment. This should be the top priority for democrats and their supporters. Sadly, your assessment is correct and the denial is only serving to feed hysteria and amplify divisions. The confusion and lack of answers clearly has certain roots in the collapse and dysfunction of the various traditional media outlets and their failure to follow your example with a serious introspection and honest reporting. A couple observations in this regard:
1) Reporting from left-of-center seems to be hell bent on ignoring many the most interesting questions of our time. As one example there seems to be a VERY large number of previously loyal democrats who agree with the most grievous claims against Trump, but who nevertheless feel that we are better off having dismissed the entrenched apparatus that has been running the country for the last 4 years. That's a fascinating story that is being ignored completely and would surely yield helpful insights to the questions you raised. Instead of ignoring the stories that make us feel uncomfortable we should be seeking and embracing the most disturbing stories and questions.
2) A lot of otherwise clear thinking gets stymied by our all-too-human craving for order and symmetry. When faced with criticism of the left the default response all too often reverts to "what about [the same problem perpetrated by the other side]?". This tit-for-tat approach causes us to repeatedly bark at each other and then settle for simple narratives just when we should be digging deeper. Unjustified imposition of symmetry ignores destabilizing imbalances and distorts our understanding even when we tell ourselves we genuinely seek answers. For example many claim that the source of our problems is that the only the most extreme voices and beliefs are being amplified in internet and media spaces. While this is definitely the case it's not necessarily symmetrical in nature. It seems pretty clear that a lot of breathtakingly extreme ideas have recently enjoyed sweeping popularity and acceptance to the left of center while true right wing extremism continues to be a fringe phenomenon.
You begin your post in a spirit of objective enquiry but then jam in some of your familiar bêtes noires towards the end -- that identitarianism was the undoing of the Democratic Party; that non-white minorities have moved towards Trump and the GOP, a clear reference to your earlier contention that Trump represents aspirational populism; the dogmatism of the "meritocratic" class, etc., -- while omitting the psephological fact that as many as 8 million fewer voters turned out last November than four years earlier, the majority of whom would have voted for Harris. (On this last point you may of course correct me if I have it wrong.)
But whatever the underlying causes you are right about the general affect, that feeling of menace and pessimism that is everywhere, at least among people like yourself and those of us who read your work and are capable of self-reflection. And the eight million no-shows, or whatever is the true number, who didn't come out for the Democratic Party, is itself a sign of some deeper malaise than mere apathy.
So your three questions are good ones and you are modest enough to admit that you don't have the answers. Yet to help you (and others who think about these things) along with crafting some answers may I suggest you widen your historical aperture a bit more. The use of the term "ancien régime" would seem to suggest that Trump especially (but also Modi, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsanaro, Meloni (more stealthily)) are the Jacobins. If so there will be overreach and widespread revulsion and we can expect a Thermidorian move back to moderation.
I think that parallel is wrong. The Jacobins with their hordes of sans-culottes were true revolutionaries. There is not a shred of newness to anything that the illiberal, authoritarian governments of our time stand for. What I am saying is that we are in the midst of a huge reactionary rather than revolutionary movement everywhere, a reaction against cosmopolitanism in our culture and the activist welfare state in our economics. In short, this is a counter-liberal movement (a point that you too have made). The better parallel is with the counter-enlightenment of the 19th century.
I think this echo of history has the woke as the Jacobins, myself. They are now in the tumbrils, metaphorically. We will now have the chaos of the Thermidorian Reaction. Let’s hope that this is not followed by Napoleon’s empire.
Excellent summary. The ruling class has redefined "democracy" to mean "things go our way." Actual democracy, when they don't win, is rebranded and pejorated as "populism."
I can’t help believe that Liberals (of which I am one) need to look in place that they don’t usually go: culture. Culture matters. I attended the archetype Liberal college, Brown, as an Undergraduate. Famously, the school had and still has very little in the way common course demands. It is the ultimate exercise in undergraduate self realization. The net effect was that while people can and did form communities around common attributes (ethnic or racial identities, academic disciplines, or sports teams), there was no common Brown Culture other than a strong desire to preserve individual identity. Indeed, the danger of a place like Brown was that it was easy to find oneself lost and alienated. For that lost person, there was not a sense that it was part of our responsibility to look out for each other merely by virtue of being members of the Brown community.
Western Liberal Democracies have become a bit like that. People may find community in their individual groups. They don’t find it in their countries - unless one is some sort of “yuch” super patriot - which generally gets frowned upon by Liberals as either too sentimental or too close to a dangerous nationalism. It’s not surprising that the most intense support for MAGA comes from small town American where maintaining a common culture is essential to survival and happiness
Coming out of the horrors of the Depression and World War II, people in Western Democracies did have a sense of national common culture. This gave citizens a common senses of happiness and satisfaction that is now missing. It did come with a level of conformity that was stultifying. The greatest opportunity for Liberals is to rebuild America’s common culture in a way that has been modernized. Policy initiatives can come after that. The problems in this country are not necessarily because we haven’t figured out the right tax credit program. It is because we don’t have a sense of citizenship that goes too much farther than our own individual indenting.
Right now we are being led by a person who is from a policy perspective, a mess. I have not idea really what policies he might or might not favor three years from now.. He has though filled a vacuum and provided a sense of common culture. This culture is perverse and destructive and not worthy of our history, but it is filling a void left by both right and left leaning Liberals.
Populism is alluring but I’m frightened of it. It’s the threat of violence. The rules based order of the modern democratic world seems to have worked pretty well for the nations that participated and even for those that didn’t. I just can’t think of something other than it as desirable. I think taking down the current systems will lead to disorder and chaos. We don’t have to imagine Europe at war with itself, powerful nations dividing up the globe, we just have to read a history book.
Populism doesn't necessarily mean anarchy or fascism (although it can lead to both). Historically, it's been a very blue collar/working class movement that demanded better treatment from the government and/or white collar factions. Here in the US, populists were very involved in the union movement and the New Deal, for example.
(It's easy to vote for higher taxes when there's no chance you'll be successful enough to pay them yourself, after all.)
Whom they ally with can be kind of a wild card, though. Depending on the country and era, they can end up on the Right or Left, and have backed everyone from progressives to fascists, socialists to dictators. Pretty much whomever seems most open to helping the working class.
Agree on almost everything. But my guess is that the Democratic party needs to have a cathartic fight between the left that invented DEI and the center that somewhat embraced it (though i did not). We cannot live within the same party unless one side or the other changes drastically. Compromises between the two sides will lead back to nowhere. If the left wins, then I will leave the party altogether. And if the center wins, many of the left will do the same. Where that leads I do not know. But the open and brutal fight must take place nevertheless. I began having this fight with my woke friends over 5 years ago. It is not pretty.
don't you think that an argument could be made that instead of focusing on the "brutal" boxing match, we could focus on preserving the ring within which the match might take place at all?
Explain, please. We need to give up euphemisms.
ahhh ok. Such imagery is helpful (to me) to frame the argument, but I can be more direct. What I am saying is that I do not feel that a brutal fight between the left and the center left (if I'm understanding you correctly - maybe not) is going to get us anywhere, and especially not closer to preserving, say, the rule of law.
The fight may not get us to a good place. But without it, we will be nowhere. We will not regain trust.
As for the rule of law, for the foreseeable future, that is up to the Supreme Court. A weak reed, you may say, but that is what we have.
I've been thinking a lot about this intra-left battle lately. The problem as I see it is that those of who are anti-woke or post-woke are, by and large, communicating with the woke left with the same high-handed attitude that we communicate with Trump voters--i.e. we're right, you're wrong, we're smarter, you don't get it, you're the problem, you're grifters and status seekers, get over yourself. And the woke left treats us exactly the same way or worse, accusing us of racism, sexism, internalized oppression, etc and engaging in cancellation/mob justice campaigns to shut us down.
Until people on the left can engage respectfully and open-mindedly, we'll remain divided, all to the benefit of MAGA.
Yes, I have found the discussions fraught--in part because I felt betrayed by my friends who became woke. We used to be on the same side, basically, then we weren't. i don't claim they are dumb--some of them got better grades than i did. But I do hope they were just taken in by living in a milieu (an elite college) where only one set of thoughts was respected. And no one likes being told they were duped!
And what of the dupers? I cannot even talk with many of them. I am their worst enemy, and they know it. My world view is opposed to theirs. It gies all the way down to basics. I have no illusion that they would listen to me or I to them. But that is not political. it is just very basic ways of thinking. too bad.
Indeed.
I am curious, if you are willing, to hear a little more about how this fight will move us towards renewed trust. Not arguing, really just wondering.
(It's funny, because I keep wanting to put it in metaphorical terms, and then erasing them b/c I know you don't want to speak in metaphors LOL.)
To me, what makes it all so difficult is that there are shards of truth in every argument, often encased in a lot of nonsense, contradiction, hyperbole, self-righteousness, cherry-picking, etc. As a society, we have no real forum for true debate. If I could see all of the arguments laid bare, pitted against one another (instead of reading this, and then reading that, and having to construct a vision from all of the disparate pieces), I think that would be enormously helpful. You could really see, live, the holes in people's arguments.
Maybe that's the kind of gladiator situation you're referring to. A real battle of ideas that would yield something new, rather than just listening to people talking from their own corners TO their own corners (back to the boxing metaphor, I can't help myself.) But maybe not - just curious!
Thanks for engaging. No process starts without engagement.
And there's nothing wrong with metaphors, IMO, just so they are used to clarify, not fuzz up the meaning. We don't want to forget the shadows on the wall in The Republic,
I wish I had more answers. But this is a forum for debate among people who are serious enough to read Persuasion (and pay for it, I hope). Earlier this week, in another such forum I called out DEI as fraudulent--and explained why. No one respond to that. But maybe some day someone will. Just keep telling it like you see it.
"A real battle of ideas that would yield something new, rather than just listening to people talking from their own corners TO their own corners"
A good summation of what so often passes for debate these days!
It's interesting to observe the same challenge being faced by political parties on both sides of the Atlantic - the left wing Democrats in the US and the theoretically right wing Conservatives in the UK. Both had disappointing elections and both are now engaged in soul searching in the hope of discovering what path to take going forward.
In both cases, there are those who say the message was correct, but it just wasn't articulated well enough: and there are those who say that the voters rejected the message, so that is what needs changing.
My guess is that engaging with the electorate, especially with the sort of people who used to vote for you but decided to do something different this time, might be a good way to find the answers.
If you listen to the ideologues rather than the voters, you can look forward to 8 years of President Vance.
Why do you support the destruction of our democracy?
Unlike us in the UK, you had a real choice in your election. You'll most likely have a real choice in your next one 4 years hence too.
That's the reinvigoration, not the destruction, of democracy.
The next one??? So you’re saying that you think there will be a next one. If only I had your blithe confidence.
I think democracy in the USA is very resilient and faces no real threat. Also, I think there's an obvious successor to Donald Trump in the GOP. I'm not sure the Democrats have an obvious candidate (it surely can't be Kamala Harris).
Explain, please.
Same here in New Zealand. Educated people who traditionally wield delegated power, on trust to the rest of us, went to university for 50 years. They came out with a received worldview that was limited to what the rest of us saw as weird s**t. Instead of acting in what we saw as being in our interests, over decades they acted to heedlessly impose their bright shiny new worldview. Not cool. This is not democracy.
The present political situation is akin to ‘creative destruction’ in business. It wasn’t pretty for Xerox or Kodak then, and it isn’t pretty for elites now. But they are bankrupt.
That is why this is reinvigoration and not merely destruction, although some destruction is inevitable. The chaotic quality includes a ferment of new possibilities. Thankfully, without the tumbrils ferrying woke jacobins.
Great assessment
What amazes me is how much modern politics stirs up so much hatred on both sides completely overwhelming the fair minded rational side of the mind (and heart). Before the Kennedys and the 60’s most people thought the important issues in their lives had to do with their individual strivings. The national news was 15 minutes long. Yeah during the depression and World War II national issues were huge, but after that people settled down and put their energies into their lives. They distrusted, as they should, government to get things done. They knew most politicians were not to be trusted, making ridiculous promises and grabbing fantastic amounts of money to share with their buddies. The most important part of democracy, the part that worked reasonably was that everyone should push for what they wanted and between those conflicting wishes and needs compromises were possible.
When politics turns into groups out to save the world, to high idealism to belief that they represent the good and their opponents are the villains, compromise become impossible and you land up with the polarization and hatred of modern America. Yes, during the good old days the problems of blacks in the south were not part of the concerns of the rest of the country and certainly it was a good thing that that changed, But unfortunately that kind of changing the world politics has led to trillions of dollars spent, accomplishing very little, and incredible stupid rigid political parties demanding unanimity as if a war is going on. The first casualty of war is truth. And idiotic righteousness. The reason the scenario describes above leads nowhere is because it does. It leads to a constant posturing, fear of saying what you truly believe lest you be cast aside, and will be turned on by the ravenous thought police on both side. We are capable of more. Turn off the news. Ever since they became 24 hours instead of 15 minutes they have made their money finding ever new issues to heat up and keep viewers watching and hating each other. Extremism is the golden calf. Boredom from news broadcasts leads to cancelled broadcasters. Find your thrills and chill in a good book or movie. Excitement should be found there or at a carnival not from our absurd political controversies. I’d like nothing more than to return to boring 50’s. Yes there was McCarthy. And some people read the National Enquirer. Human nature is human nature but that was on a far smaller scale than the wreckage of what has happened to our media and the lives that have been destroyed by all this righteous thinly disguised hatred.
Alternatively, don't have a fight. Memory hole the conflict. Focus your energies on the enemies on right, those are way more consequential and anyone who can see that should be your ally. Most people I've come across would rather see the world burn than speak the words "I was wrong", so it's probably better to let people pretend they were always on your side. And right now the lib-left (schisms don't matter) are in the awesome position where they have an enemy that is genuinely evil, vulgar, and about to cause a lot of material harm to Americans. That's a game Democrats should be able to win.
Sorry, either we put DEI and the like firmly behind us or it will become part of a rallying cry against Trump et al. And if it is, then most Americans will not trust us.
Whatever thing you don't like about the party can become less relevant by diverting the energy spent infighting to building on what you agree with each others on.
Love your work. No BS, you tell it like it is and in a way—to our collective detriment—few others do. Thank you.
My favorite aspect of this debate is all the people who are SURE that Elon's moves will be harmful, that tariffs will be a disaster, that USAID spending was worthy and important, that DEI is not a make-work program for privileged liberal arts majors.
They're certain about all these things based on information gleaned from a media apparatus which has been proven to be dishonest again and again about the biggest issues, and despite the fact that they've been WRONG repeatedly for years.
At what point does partisanship diminish and confirmation bias recognize itself and humility encroach? I keep listening to rich midwits opine about politics through their classist lens, morally certain that they're correct and that others aren't just mistaken, but stupid or immoral or malign. It's quite a display!
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/our-flailing-elites
As anyone with knowledge about organizations knows, the best way to downsize is via a carefully studied approach. A fast and furious destruction will only leave chaos in its wake.
My understanding of organisations is that cultures are hard to change. To be effective you either do a ‘hostile internal takeover’, which means sacking the individuals who are the maintainers of the status quo root and branch, or you work for 20 years with careful hiring and policy shifts to quietly nudge the culture, like a giant aircraft carrier, to point in your preferred direction.
This is absolutely not the best way to downsize. It’s an idealistic image of what one would like the process to be, but it’s hardly effective. You go scorched earth, because then you can rebuild from the foundation. You have to clear out the rot - it does not leave willingly, and will kick and scream every step of the way if you allow the process to drag out.
I think many of us critique the steps leasing up to your utilitarian assesment of Musk doing good or bad: we worry about ilegality and institutions. Your view is simple Machiavelian: the end justifies the means. Not seeing the dangers of this position is naïve, to say the least.
Well I certainly remember being relieved that a few dozen more I-beams had "Made in USA" stamped on them when I lost my job at the fab shop last time around.
What will your take be if those people are proven correct?
For USAID spending as "worthy and important:"
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-usaid-helped-us-defeat-the-iraqi-insurgency-aid-humanitarian
I absolutely agree, on every count.
I come from a small city in Massachusetts, where GE had its flagship operation. GE was central to the life of the city. Until it wasn't. Little by little, division by division, they moved the jobs out of the city, the population fell, and one business after another shut down. And they left PCBs behind that are still being cleaned up.
It's a familiar story, of course, repeated again and again and again. And at the time, I was astonished that no one in political power was inclined to tell it. There were films and books and essays, but there was no real willingness to frame it as a real issue. Ever. The idea was that globalization was inevitable and that ultimately, everyone would benefit. Or something like that. Not even an idea, really, but a "message." With Ronald Reagan, it became all about the "message." And then with Bill Clinton, brilliant as he was. If everything was so sunny and upbeat, why were so many people suffering? I remember feeling, decades ago, that someday, something would have to give. Every politician was delivering the message, in increasingly alienated language.
Richard Rorty saw it coming: "Members 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… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet." He wrote that in 1998. The one thing he didn't and couldn't see was that the alleged strongman would have a broad-based appeal that extended beyond race or gender or sexual preference.
So when I see the words "We’ve got the right message" coming out of the mouth of the new DNC chair, I can see further failures ahead. There is no such thing as "the right message," as you say. And I think that many voters have made one thing crystal clear: they do no want to be pitched at or sold anything, because they know it means they're going to be disregarded again. And sadly, in this country, 77 million of them have put their faith in the wrong person.
Beyond that, I think it's always difficult to find a way forward when the models of the past still feel so present and, as you say, so many of them are worth preserving.
Thank you.
".. sadly, in this country, 77 million of them have put their faith in the wrong person."
I think the choice may have been between the 'wrong person' and someone even worse. Nevertheless, looking at the US election from the perspective of the UK, I was envious that you had a real choice. The direction the country would take would be different depending on the decision the voters made. There was no such sense of agency here in the UK for our elections last July.
There has been a palpable lifting of the mood in the UK since the election of Donald Trump. This isn't because most Brits had a favourable view of him, but because we felt that the whole 'woke' agenda - DEI, trans activism, eco-alarmism and the like - was now going to be consigned to the dustbin of history (hopefully never to be recycled).
Here in New Zealand too, with palpable dismay on the part of local woke Substackians.
It must be terrible for them, especially after the recent loss of Saint Jacinda.
Thanks for that Rorty quote. I’ve always been a big admirer of his philosophical pragmatism but was unaware (or had forgotten!) he wrote that.
Yes, he was great. That quote really made the rounds in 2016.
Ah yes, I believe I was wilfully in hiding at the time!
Agree with much of your thoughts. But we don’t yet know if the 77 million put the wrong person in office. It’s so early, we have a ways to go, and this may well work out in the end for the most part. Maybe not perfect, but something needed to be done. All the best to everyone here. A vast majority seem extremely reasonable and able to “discuss”. That’s more than we can say about our congress and our elite colleges. 😊
I’ve thought about what you say. I don’t like having a president with no respect for the rule of law, who worships power and people who wield it (Vladimir Putin in particular), who never admits to any failings, who is - to put it mildly - thin-skinned, reckless and erratic. No matter how well it works out. Results are important, but so are the means of getting them. I think he sets a terrible example for the country and the world.
However, I think it’s a truly terrible idea to lecture people who voted for him. In fact, it plays right into his appeal. The only thing to do is to listen and talk and understand.
The story of your town and so many others is told by Les Leopold, Wall Streets War on Workers.
Thank you
Just curious, who is your House rep, and do they campaign on these issues?
Hi. I’ve lived in New York for many years now, but I think that Silvio O. Conte, a liberal Republican and a veteran congressman, was still serving. Did he campaign on the issue? I don’t know. Corporations moving jobs south or offshore was presented as an unstoppable force. I think he and his predecessors tried to move new corporations into the plant - General Dynamics, followed by someone else - but it was never the same.
As a reminder the South was and is part of the United States. Companies that move jobs from - for example - the Northeast to the South or create new jobs in the South do so because of what management views as a more favorable business climate in the South. Right to work laws are only part of an overall business climate. I don't know if anyone has actually run the statistics, but I suspect that when adjusting for cost of living an industrial worker in the South does as well as his or her counterpart in the Midwest or Northeast.
Change is(almost) always hard. One thing ive learned is that if one doesnt take an active role in that change, itll happen regardless.
If we arent willing to defend something we feel we possess, we dont deserve to keep it. The mushy populace takes everything they have for granted, bc the majority of them did absolutely nothing to create, or even keep, what they have. We are/were the benefactors of a social system that allowed us exist as it saw fit. The comfortable life we have comes at a humanitarian cost weve long turned a blind eye to. We really arent any different than the new social order taking control of our lives, we too gladly took what we wanted and damn the consequences we placed on others. But there are consequences for ourselves too. Like a huge population of useless consumers that cant add any value to their own lives, let alone anyone elses.
Trumps brilliance is in realizing he can take what he wants from a population that didnt earn, and wont defend, those things hes taking. He called the bluff of the american dream, and won. And STILL, people just stand there in slack jawed confoundment, wondering how this all happened. Any people who actually valued their lives and livelihood wouldve fought staunchly from the beginning.
So dont look here, to eloquent and intelligent writers, for the answers to why and how. The answers all around you, and most likely, in your hand.
Honestly i cant understand why we're still talking about why and how, and not what do we do next. Leave it to future historians to tease out the causes. Our role is to take control of the inevitable change thats taking place right now, while we're still trying to figure out wtf happened.
On the plains of hesitation...
How ironic that the things we love and worship, our comfort and ease, our more than reasonably priced products, our "phones"(and everything those phones stands for), our wasteful and useless lives, are the very causes of our inability to defend ourselves against the wolves.
Ill end with what i felt was the shining gem in this article, the call to exercise rigorous honesty. Though most people are incapable of that, it is absolutely the key to a future we dont despise. But it is something you can do, right now, and thats more than most of these types of articles offer.
The problem across the western world is a political class which has become disengaged from the people it seeks to represent. It has stopped governing by consent and come perilously close to ruling by decree (we have it particularly bad in the UK). Particularly in the cases of the working class and aspirant middle class, 'woke' social justice policies have zero traction. Put very simply, what matters most to the modern left doesn't figure at all in the concerns of everybody else.
One consequence of this failure to connect is the sense that politicians are not listening, don't understand, and probably don't care. Voters feel that their voices are not being heard. Any political movement that looks like it is putting the concerns of voters at the centre of its offering will enjoy success.
Populism isn't about the dangerous rise of demagogues and a threat to democracy, it is about democracy reasserting itself. The threat is to the political parties who felt it was OK to stop listening to the electorate, sometimes even being openly contemptuous of them, and to the structures that maintained them in office despite their manifest unsuitability.
Trump is cutting through the nonsense. I hope we follow his lead here in the UK (though we've still got four and a half years of our deeply unpopular government to endure).
I think you are right in so many ways about the diagnosis; I"m just worried about the cure. I am really worried that what people see as an efficiency-creating machine will go much, much farther than many suspect. It's just hard, through all of the rhetoric and various influences, to see and feel a true and genuine care and concern "for the people."
I think any plan to reduce the size of government has to be fairly brutal. Otherwise, all that happens is that the speed at which government grows gets a bit slower, but it still grows. Bureaucracies have a way of perpetuating themselves which is why it almost always needs an outsider to effect real change.
Does Trumpism have "a true and genuine concern for the people" at its core? I don't know, but I'm absolutely certain that the alternative didn't.
that's so interesting. I don't really agree, but I DO agree that the party has become bloated with hollow rhetoric and doesn't really allow that care and concern to really come through. I guess the truth is that it's really a case by case situation: you could never convince me that, say, Tim Walz is a cold-blooded politician out for himself. Or some of the amazing people I have worked with and known over the years. But as a party writ large, there is a serious problem at the center.
I don’t see the wave of rejection of the woke as being ‘efficiency creation’ at its core. The dynamic exists here in New Zealand as well, and in other countries. I think the simplest framing is that woke elite have abused trust (politicians, bureaucrats, judiciary, education system, media) and there is a mood for changing those elite projects out.
The anger and disgust mean that the destruction which will be wrought will not be clean. It “will go much, much farther than many suspect”. This is very undesirable, but the woke have walked our communities off a cliff. We are Wile E. Coyote looking down.
We in the western world have entered a transitional phase. The tendrils of a new order will emerge from the mess.
Yes, I think what I was referring to about "efficiency creation" was the whole DOGE agenda, which probably wouldn't have seemed so desirable to so many if that abuse of trust hadn't felt so visceral. I love the Wile E. Coyote image, and have used it myself - it feels the most apt. I am really worried, though that — to use a well-worn cliche — we're in a baby/bathwater situation. One that will be, as you said, not clean (speaking of baths, I guess).
My sense is that there's a monumental disconnect between the new order that Trump & Co. is actually bringing forward and the one most people thought they were voting for. Do you agree?
Sort of. Brexit voters were ‘voting against their best interests’ too. And they really were. But beyond that, and what I think triumphed, was that they were voting against the established order that they saw as having betrayed them.
I’m from New Zealand, so I’m looking from the outside America and do not have the visceral present experience that you have. I do realise that you are a highly educated and politically aware American, so if you can forgive my presumption…
My sense is that the core of the positivity for Trump & Co is more in the trust and expectation that he will smash stuff. Where the vote had been for Biden on the basis of ‘anybody but Trump’, the vote for Trump this time was more of an ‘anybody but the woke establishment’.
Sure there will be a positive hope that T & C will make things better, but I think this is weaker than the confidence that he will make the coasts suffer.
The Democrats have become a symbol for an ossified and remote culture that is associated with all that is wrong in America.
The loss of jobs to globalisation with no countervailing programs to pick up the pieces in the rust belt, other than the preachy “Move to where the jobs are and retrain yourself”. The opioid crisis. The “flyover states” with their “deplorables” (latterly the “garbage”).
The utterly complicit Republicans meanwhile have hugely gained by somehow being rescued from being seen as part of the reviled establishment. The Democrats are the ones left holding the baby that may be headed for the drain.
Brexit voters, and I was one, were not "voting against their best interests". For us, it was never an argument about economics, which was the way that the Remain campaign wanted to frame it. The argument was about who should be making our laws, deciding on who can or can't come into the country - basically all about democracy and control.
I'm not sure how well the Brexit position is understood outside of Europe. The EU is not simply a trading bloc, which is in fact the minor component of its purpose. It is in fact a post-nationalist project with a trading bloc appended to it. Post-nationalism isn't especially popular in Europe, and being excluded from the trading bloc is used as the whip to keep truculent natives in line.
The tide is turning within the EU. Nationalists are making gains, and the EU project is in peril. I for one hope it crashes and burns.
Totally mate, you are right. I phrased myself poorly.
I put those words in quotes, to highlight that this was not the view of Brexiteers.
But I was clumsy with my follow on. I do think voting for Brexit was a vote for lower GDP growth, but that was not the point. As you say, that vote was about sovereignty. It was about who makes the laws, who can enter the country and democracy and control.
I think the European Common Market was and is a Good Thing. (Despite you Pommie bastards shutting us loyal kiwis from the dominions, who fought with you in the Boer War, two world wars and Malaya, out of your market for our beef, lamb and butter when you joined the then EEC. I’ll bet you haven’t had a decent Sunday roast since!)
But the frankenparliament in Brussels, and Schengen, not so much.
I understand the desire for sovereignty and control underlying a Brexit vote but how did that turn into massive immigration in a short period of time, thereby resulting in a huge increase of the number of non-British born residents? (Or am I misunderstanding/is that an invalid summary?)
Yes, I think what you're pointing to is related to that other recent Persuasion article about Arlie Hochschild's concept of the 'deep story." I read her book just after the 2016 election, and found her framing to be enormously, well, persuasive.
She says, "a deep story is not a matter of what you say you believe or your party affiliation. It's a matter of how you feel."
And I think that looking at the situation through the lens of "interests" (as I seem to have in the comment that prompted your response) is absolutely not up to the challenge of explaining anything, or at least explains very little.
I agree with you completely that culturally - at least as much as anything policy-related - Democrats created a GAPING hole that the Republicans just waltzed right through. Maybe even more than that: we teed them up with such a slow-moving softball that they had time to stop twisting their moustaches out there on the bench, grab a bat, walk up to the plate, plant their feet, and knock it—if not out of the park, then at least out of the reach of our fielders, most of whom were standing around, on their phones, making witty comments to each other on twitter.
This is my day for really botched metaphors, but I hope at least the point comes through. Point is: yeah. And it's not, I think, just a strategic error: it's an error that reveals a truth that we are now scrambling to correct. We kind of lost our soul, perhaps like a rock star that loses touch with what brought them to music in the first place.
I am thoroughly enjoying your botched metaphors.
This is a very interesting multi-threaded chat, and I appreciate the opportunity to discuss these things with you.
Right now, my wife calls. She Who Must Be Obeyed… happy wife, happy life.
I will return!
It's not like populism is a new faction, either. Historically, they were the base of the Democratic Party here in the US and were first recognized in American politics during the presidential election of Andrew Jackson (hence the moniker "Jacksonian populists"). They were around before that, of course - Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts had strong populist overtones.
During the Cold War, however, their coalition splintered, with some shifting over to the Republican Party. And what we're now seeing is the old dynamics reasserting themselves, as the issues of the day shift and the populists find fresh motivations to "get the band back together again".
Well, from reading other comments, I guess I get to be the contrarian who crashes this love fest, which I consider an orgy of nihilistic piety and solipsistic self-congratulation of the first order. We do not find ourselves in a political moment so unique that history cannot guide us--and we don't need to descend into a prolonged moment of navel gazing to recognize it. I work with the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, which seeks to bridge the divide between more liberal urban communities and more conservative rural mindset, in the hopes of discovering previously unrecognized common ground. And what one quickly discovers is that the right has organized in rural and working class communities in such a way that the nessage is clear: the left not only doesn't understand you or care about you, they hate you and everything you stand for. If the left has a problem, it's the problem of a lot of educated folks--thinking that their view of things is self-evident. Engagement is and always was the answer. There doesn't need to be a "battle to the death" between progressives and centrists; what an utterly fatuous notion. Instead we have to recognize that we have not worked hard enough to make our vision of a just and prosperous society a reality. We need to listen to the voters we are not reaching and respond to their concerns, especially their fears, without labeling them as uninformed, racist, sexist, etc. This is a scary time. Social change isn't just progressing, it's accelerating, while a great many people find their circumstances stuck in the mud. They may point to solutions with which we disagree, but their concerns aren't far-fetched. That sense of solidarity can help guide as past this ridiculous idea that we've got it all wrong and need to descend into meditative groupthink or battle to the death to discover the path to the future. Thirty years ago the philosopher Richard Rorty identified the two groups most responsible for social progress were agents of love (guardians of diversity) and agents of justice (defenders of universality). You may recognize these positions as those of the progressive and liberal left, respectively. The progressive left embraced guarding diversity while turning its back on guarding universality, and that was a mistake, because it abandoned justice for power, a power we obviously couldn't claim and don't have. But the way forward lies in the same old tactics of organizing, mobilizing, and persuasion. The last will be the hardest because the left is notoriously bad at messaging (part of that presumption of self-evidence I mentioned above). But that doesn't mean by sinking into deep mediation we'll come up with something better. Or change history.
“If the left has a problem, it's the problem of a lot of educated folks--thinking that their view of things is self-evident.” This is exactly it. For some reason, the learned are conflating knowledge and know-how with wisdom and understanding. To someone who grew up working class, it's like they can't see past their learning — what they are absolutely certain about — to what's really there. It's a very bewildering reality to have to grapple with.
One take: you can abandon a posture of confidence and strength for only so long.
Progressive politics became driven by a posture of weakness: self flagellaton, group identity, historical guilt, bloated largess, and the incessant compulsion to take care of the "huddled masses," both economically and linguistically.
They became exactly what they professed to despise: the progressive patriarchy. Big Guilty Daddy.
This posture of weakness eventually folds in the face of the managerial classes. It's too expensive and demoralizing. The Voting Cohort works too hard for that nonsense.
“The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.”
(Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality)
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
WB Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’ (an eery masterpiece written in the aftermath of WWI and societal collapse)
Yeats was a bit down in the dumps. And fair enough too, given that time.
I prefer the simpler Anglo idea that “It’ll all work out in the end.”
Humility. It's a good place to start.
Labour in the UK under Tony Blair won in 1997 after nearly two decades in the wilderness by recognizing and delivering on what they needed to make themselves electable. Thatcher described New Labour as her greatest political achievement.
The electoral gap between Democrats and Republicans is much narrower, despite the fact that inflation has hammered the blue-collar working poor who used to be the natural heartland of the Democratic party.
Blue-collar workers who didn't say "Defund the police" or lambast "both-sidesism" or engage in pearl-clutching over the "deplorables" who voted for Trump #1. Workers who didn't understand why America spent blood - their blood - and treasure in forever wars that yielded no positive strategic outcome while allies coasted along without paying their fair share.
Blue-collar workers who in survey after survey demonstrate centrist, inclusive views about people of all creeds, colors and sexual orientations.
Workers who want leaders who recognize that the last few years have been tough if you're trying to get by on a blue-collar wage and who are focused on getting their living costs down and their after-tax incomes up.
Didn't work, didn't work? Trump *lost* in 2020 and various forms of resistance did in fact work at the time. Those were the guardrails that held.
The mistake was (particularly on the side of the pandering and craven Dems) pretending that "the right side of history" had won in defeating him. All that stuff in The Identity Trap? It was ignored and the only remaining political party in the nation was asleep at the wheel. Now there is no resistance and no guardrails (and yes, you and Persuasion rolling over like you seem to be doing is part of that failure). You are right though, that failure meant we could never go back to the way it was.
As an aside it gets real tiresome when you elites talk endlessly about the working class amongst themselves (and yes, the natcons and you supposedly liberal squishes are all elites of the social capitalist/PMC/whatever type) as if you understand us.
I think Yascha is stuck in the now. The GOP approval rating four years ago was even worse than the Democrats' today.
Right now Trump looks triumphant because he gets to dictate events. Over the next several months he will have to respond to the world.
(At this time in 2021, GOP "resistance" was Kevin McCarthy reading Green Eggs and Ham on camera to protest a decision made by the publisher.)
It strikes me the court of public opinion ruled over by the educated elites was supposed to ensure that smart ideas crowded out the dumb ideas. Then they started spewing dumb ideas of their own while getting caught red-handed suppressing the dumb ideas of their ideological rivals.
Well, the dumb ideas are getting their day in court. How it shakes out is anybody's guess, but we'll get no relief till the elites learn to distinguish between good and bad ideas again.
The free expression of ideas doesn't always mean the smart ideas crowd out the dumb ones.
It's a little-known fact that following the development of the printing press in Europe, the best-selling book after the Bible for 150 years was Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of the Witches. The author, Heinrich Kramer, had been described as "senile" and "crazy" by his local bishop. Blaming "modern" witches for climate anomalies and storms that culminated in the Little Ice Age, his book revived witch-hunting in secular courts after a thousand-year hiatus. At least 60,000 were killed, 80% of them women.
Many wonder what will come of our latest disruptive communications technologies and social media. The last major disruptor led to censorship, persecution and 12 million deaths in the European Wars of Religion.
There's a name for that, actually. The Overton Window is the range of ideas and policies deemed "mainstream" and "socially acceptable.
Keep it up Yascha. You are one of the only left-of-center intellectuals advocating honest and difficult self reflection in this awkward moment. This should be the top priority for democrats and their supporters. Sadly, your assessment is correct and the denial is only serving to feed hysteria and amplify divisions. The confusion and lack of answers clearly has certain roots in the collapse and dysfunction of the various traditional media outlets and their failure to follow your example with a serious introspection and honest reporting. A couple observations in this regard:
1) Reporting from left-of-center seems to be hell bent on ignoring many the most interesting questions of our time. As one example there seems to be a VERY large number of previously loyal democrats who agree with the most grievous claims against Trump, but who nevertheless feel that we are better off having dismissed the entrenched apparatus that has been running the country for the last 4 years. That's a fascinating story that is being ignored completely and would surely yield helpful insights to the questions you raised. Instead of ignoring the stories that make us feel uncomfortable we should be seeking and embracing the most disturbing stories and questions.
2) A lot of otherwise clear thinking gets stymied by our all-too-human craving for order and symmetry. When faced with criticism of the left the default response all too often reverts to "what about [the same problem perpetrated by the other side]?". This tit-for-tat approach causes us to repeatedly bark at each other and then settle for simple narratives just when we should be digging deeper. Unjustified imposition of symmetry ignores destabilizing imbalances and distorts our understanding even when we tell ourselves we genuinely seek answers. For example many claim that the source of our problems is that the only the most extreme voices and beliefs are being amplified in internet and media spaces. While this is definitely the case it's not necessarily symmetrical in nature. It seems pretty clear that a lot of breathtakingly extreme ideas have recently enjoyed sweeping popularity and acceptance to the left of center while true right wing extremism continues to be a fringe phenomenon.
Like I said...keep up the great work
You begin your post in a spirit of objective enquiry but then jam in some of your familiar bêtes noires towards the end -- that identitarianism was the undoing of the Democratic Party; that non-white minorities have moved towards Trump and the GOP, a clear reference to your earlier contention that Trump represents aspirational populism; the dogmatism of the "meritocratic" class, etc., -- while omitting the psephological fact that as many as 8 million fewer voters turned out last November than four years earlier, the majority of whom would have voted for Harris. (On this last point you may of course correct me if I have it wrong.)
But whatever the underlying causes you are right about the general affect, that feeling of menace and pessimism that is everywhere, at least among people like yourself and those of us who read your work and are capable of self-reflection. And the eight million no-shows, or whatever is the true number, who didn't come out for the Democratic Party, is itself a sign of some deeper malaise than mere apathy.
So your three questions are good ones and you are modest enough to admit that you don't have the answers. Yet to help you (and others who think about these things) along with crafting some answers may I suggest you widen your historical aperture a bit more. The use of the term "ancien régime" would seem to suggest that Trump especially (but also Modi, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsanaro, Meloni (more stealthily)) are the Jacobins. If so there will be overreach and widespread revulsion and we can expect a Thermidorian move back to moderation.
I think that parallel is wrong. The Jacobins with their hordes of sans-culottes were true revolutionaries. There is not a shred of newness to anything that the illiberal, authoritarian governments of our time stand for. What I am saying is that we are in the midst of a huge reactionary rather than revolutionary movement everywhere, a reaction against cosmopolitanism in our culture and the activist welfare state in our economics. In short, this is a counter-liberal movement (a point that you too have made). The better parallel is with the counter-enlightenment of the 19th century.
I think this echo of history has the woke as the Jacobins, myself. They are now in the tumbrils, metaphorically. We will now have the chaos of the Thermidorian Reaction. Let’s hope that this is not followed by Napoleon’s empire.
If you really want to understand why the ancien regime is losing legitimacy, here is a decent place to start:
https://milesmcstylez.substack.com/p/populists-are-trying-to-save-democracy
Excellent summary. The ruling class has redefined "democracy" to mean "things go our way." Actual democracy, when they don't win, is rebranded and pejorated as "populism."
I can’t help believe that Liberals (of which I am one) need to look in place that they don’t usually go: culture. Culture matters. I attended the archetype Liberal college, Brown, as an Undergraduate. Famously, the school had and still has very little in the way common course demands. It is the ultimate exercise in undergraduate self realization. The net effect was that while people can and did form communities around common attributes (ethnic or racial identities, academic disciplines, or sports teams), there was no common Brown Culture other than a strong desire to preserve individual identity. Indeed, the danger of a place like Brown was that it was easy to find oneself lost and alienated. For that lost person, there was not a sense that it was part of our responsibility to look out for each other merely by virtue of being members of the Brown community.
Western Liberal Democracies have become a bit like that. People may find community in their individual groups. They don’t find it in their countries - unless one is some sort of “yuch” super patriot - which generally gets frowned upon by Liberals as either too sentimental or too close to a dangerous nationalism. It’s not surprising that the most intense support for MAGA comes from small town American where maintaining a common culture is essential to survival and happiness
Coming out of the horrors of the Depression and World War II, people in Western Democracies did have a sense of national common culture. This gave citizens a common senses of happiness and satisfaction that is now missing. It did come with a level of conformity that was stultifying. The greatest opportunity for Liberals is to rebuild America’s common culture in a way that has been modernized. Policy initiatives can come after that. The problems in this country are not necessarily because we haven’t figured out the right tax credit program. It is because we don’t have a sense of citizenship that goes too much farther than our own individual indenting.
Right now we are being led by a person who is from a policy perspective, a mess. I have not idea really what policies he might or might not favor three years from now.. He has though filled a vacuum and provided a sense of common culture. This culture is perverse and destructive and not worthy of our history, but it is filling a void left by both right and left leaning Liberals.
Loss of “sense of citizenship” is great indeed. Very heavy in its utter absence.
Populism is alluring but I’m frightened of it. It’s the threat of violence. The rules based order of the modern democratic world seems to have worked pretty well for the nations that participated and even for those that didn’t. I just can’t think of something other than it as desirable. I think taking down the current systems will lead to disorder and chaos. We don’t have to imagine Europe at war with itself, powerful nations dividing up the globe, we just have to read a history book.
Populism doesn't necessarily mean anarchy or fascism (although it can lead to both). Historically, it's been a very blue collar/working class movement that demanded better treatment from the government and/or white collar factions. Here in the US, populists were very involved in the union movement and the New Deal, for example.
(It's easy to vote for higher taxes when there's no chance you'll be successful enough to pay them yourself, after all.)
Whom they ally with can be kind of a wild card, though. Depending on the country and era, they can end up on the Right or Left, and have backed everyone from progressives to fascists, socialists to dictators. Pretty much whomever seems most open to helping the working class.