Regrets, I have a few

I should have done it my way

In the wake of a defeat the blame for which has been placed not unfairly at the feet of the media, intellectuals, and elites in general, I’ve been taking stock of my work from the past couple of years. As a minor and junior member of that class, how’d I do? I think the answer is, “Okay.” I’m proud of the analysis I did of Silicon Valley’s right turn and the intra-tech industry class war politics it represented; I think I got that right. I’m also glad I never underrated Trump’s chances. I think I wrote not just about the threat Trump posed but the positive appeal he had for alienated constituencies. I tried my best to synthesize the economic and cultural issues into a coherent theory of the case. And I gave the Democratic party some very harsh criticism when it deserved it. But there I could’ve done a lot better. In this and other situations, I was a follower, not a leader. Only after it became painfully evident Biden was unfit to run again, and others took the lead, did I start to vociferously assail his decision to run again.

I don’t think anything I could’ve done would’ve changed the result, but in this line of work, you have to act as if what you write matters—without crossing the line and becoming too self-important, of course. And I missed an opportunity to raise a relevant issue in a prominent place. Around the time my book came out, I was asked by an editor at a major American newspaper if there were any relevant analogies between the 1992 election and this one, particularly between George H.W. Bush and Biden. I said I didn’t think so, but in retrospect, there were obvious ones: here was an incumbent facing a restive electorate and saying, “We’re America. We’re great. Everything’s fine.” H.W. was also yesterday’s man: a WASP patrician in a populist world, a Cold Warrior used to stable geopolitical realities and not fully understanding a new, fragmented media landscape. H.W. even called that year and the talk shows that dominated it, “weird.” He just didn’t get it. And I could see some of this same hidebound attitude in Biden’s handling of the catastrophe in Gaza: he was looking still at the idealized Israel of years past, not the disturbingly fascist society it has become. Partly I was tired after the book, partly I was a little lazy and decadent, but partly I’d been lulled into a false sense of security. This was where the real intellectual malpractice began perhaps. I’d written a book the major premise of which was that America’s political establishment was incapable of dealing with the crises that the country was facing but then somehow convinced myself this political leadership, as past-looking and literally geriatric as it was, might do okay.

How could I have let myself fall asleep on the job? Well, part of the reason was the lack of a disaster in 2022. It’s funny: looking back at my writing before the midterms I’m not in a good mood. My assessment of the situation in the summer of 2022 sounds like 2024:

A pessimist might now see in all the upheaval of the past fews years the last paroxysm of American liberalism: unable to cope with the right wing’s assault, it spent its energy in desperate and ultimately futile ways. I don’t think one can argue that the American left, understood broadly as encompassing every tendency from the most radical socialist to the mildest liberal democrat, is in good shape. The seizure of the Courts and state legislatures, the gutting of basic civil liberties and the administrative state, the continued defections of lower middle class and working class voters to the G.O.P., the cynicism, calcification, and inflexibility—as well as just the sheer age—of Democratic leadership, all have delivered terrible blows to the friends of progress in the United States.

The front in the culture war appears to be giving way and the feared reactionary break-out looks to be upon us, overwhelming even what appeared to be long-settled accomplishments of basic social liberalism. The new aggressive of tide of right-wing opinion around transgender and gay rights and with it the appearance of mobs in the suburbs and countryside braying for blood is deeply disturbing. Inflation limits the public appetite for expansive fiscal policy. American society seems more frayed, fearful, and tense than I can ever remember. It seems no one and nothing, not the strictures of the activist “woke” left, not the tribunes of the socialist left, not old fashioned establishment liberalism, is able to lead and rally the country’s popular and democratic forces.

Of course, many of these changes, like the striking down of Roe, are broadly unpopular and the Right may have overplayed its hand this time. Perhaps an electoral backlash to the backlash is brewing and a quick counter-attack will stanch some of the bleeding. But relying on the shift in public opinion as it were some natural process is not a political strategy. That is the same sort of disastrous complacency that lead to the belief that demographic changes would deliver Democratic victories. Politics doesn’t work that way. It’s not reducible to clear essences, but is fluid and delivers apparent paradoxes, like Trump running in 2016 on unalloyed racism and anti-immigrant sentiment and then making serious inroads among minorities in 2020.

So, it was partly the “deliverance” of 2022, but it was partly also that I believed the Biden administration and the Democrats got that the neoliberal consensus of the past 30 years or so needed to be abandoned and replaced with a broader effort to ensure American prosperity. I believed in Biden’s commitment to American labor. I saw that in many ways, he was the most progressive president in my lifetime. But perhaps this was all too little, too late. I was uncomfortable with the line taken by the technocratic elite that the inflation situation was not that serious and the economy was doing great—I knew it was giving Bush I vibes—but I didn’t criticize it enough. I wish I had drawn attention to things like Thomas Ferguson and the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s paper that showed that inflation was seriously eating away at workers’ real wages. (Hat tip to

Tim Barker

here.) This line of critique would’ve required no huge departure from where I already had arrived: My own work was telling me to not have much faith in the old way of doing things, but I still gave it too much credit.

I think there’s also a deeper intellectual defect of my own here: I was far too credulous about the establishment in general. In part, this is a reflective and considered stance, but it also expresses some undigested biases and prejudices on my part. I think there’s a tendency among some left-wing intellectuals and critics to mindlessly assail the existing state of things without considering their reasons for existing. I try to resist the oppositional impulse that views all mainstream politicians and institutions as parasitic self-dealers or useless remnants of previous iterations of society. Instead, I try to think about how they might reflect real, existing social forces and needs. This is honestly a bit of a conservative reflex. It might sound like a Burkean impulse to leave well enough alone, but I hope it’s a kind of Hegelian belief that the real is rational and that the state and civil society are ultimately expressions, albeit with unfortunately irrational residues, of an ordered and self-regulating Idea. I believed the institutions of liberal democracy were still functioning to some degree and gave representation and form to the various conflicting interests in society. That was perhaps a difficult mistake to understand considering we live in an age of institutional breakdown and that I also thought the rise of Trump augured an extremely dire situation for the country. It is also even harder to hold on to in the wake of the current administration’s constant support for the ugliest sort of ethnonationalist regime in the Middle East, a terrible betrayal of their putative stance on the side of democracy and liberalism. I should’ve balanced Hegel with more Marx and brought more attention to the contradictions in the system.

Another conservative reflex: a tendency to “always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse.” I still think this is right: Trump and the Republicans in general are worse, on every conceivable issue, from Israel-Palestine to the economy. But my reaction to Bernie in 2016 was that he was where my heart was, but that the threat of Trump required a degree of hardnosed pragmatism. I didn’t see Bernie as a dangerous populist mirror image of Trump like a centrist might, but as a deeply admirable idealist who would go down in defeat. After Trump had been vanquished, we could go back to the work of advancing social progress. This theory of the case was somewhat confirmed by Biden’s victory, Bernie’s inclusion in that coalition, and the Biden administration’s left shift on economics. However, I wasn’t willing enough to see that there are political opportunities as well as dangers in shifting and chaotic situations.

All-in-all, I wasn’t critical enough of my own “side” and fixated a bit too much on the enemy, whom I could not hope to change anyway. Extrapolating from my own observations and work, there are times when I really should’ve known better. Part of this is a lack of imagination and intellectual power, and those limitations I might just not be able to overcome, but frankly, it was partly a failure of courage: I was afraid of making bold claims and predictions that might prove to be errors. But as Hegel said, the fear of error is error itself. I also shied away sometimes from positions that might make me unpopular with friends and allies. When I did wade into those waters, it was often an unpleasant experience. But the name of the newsletter is Unpopular Front, after all.