I would imagine I speak for most of your readership when I say that your work in the Age of Trump has not only been good, it has accomplished the far more difficult feat of being unique, so don't beat yourself up too much.
As for describing the world continuing before us though, in some ways I think your erudition might be a fatal weakness, which kind of goes for all of us. Educated left-of-center people with a nostalgia for a bygone world of letters and ideas (which is to say the donor/staffer/volunteer base of the Democratic Party) have a hard time even having a theory of mind for what the average person's mediated existence through screens is like now.
Will Stancil is annoying, but he's onto something. Beats me where we go from there.
The volunteer base of the Democratic Party is not center-left and highly educated. In many parts of the country it’s moms. Black moms, white moms, straight & queer moms of average education. If Democratic leadership listened more to the voices of this base - who know for certain, as their college grad kids move back home due to lack of housing and stable employment, that the economy isn’t fantastic - we might not be where we are today.
No comments yet? I'm usually not first. You probably took far more things into consideration than most thinkers on the left. I do believe that we (intellectuals for lack of a better word) should remain firm in our conviction that social changes are rooted in reality. We should not apologize for looking to Hegel and Marx as upholders of connections throughout society.
It's good to review your work and try to assess it honestly.
But we are at a phase in the nation's history when every election is a coin-toss away from the other outcome. 100k votes make Hillary the winner in 2016; a similar margin makes Kamala the winner this year (they have to be distributed correctly to get the EC to work, but still.) And Biden's victory in 2020 is not that different, even if his popular margin is bigger.
Given that so little distinguishes a second Trump regime from a Harris regime, I don't know how much we can really learn from refighting the last few years.
Trump has benefited from luck at many turns (as well as benefitting from Leonard Leo's capture of the Supreme Court). His luck will run out. Had his luck run out a bit earlier, you might be drawing very different lessons about the last few years.
I wouldn’t necessarily call a rigged Supreme Court “luck.” Same with other aspects of our calcified democracy, which alone among developed democratic governments holds on to counter-majoritarian institutions like the electoral college; lifetime high court appointments; a powerful upper legislative chamber designed to protect elite interests; and a constitution that’s nearly impossible to amend.
"I wouldn’t necessarily call a rigged Supreme Court “luck.”"
We're in agreement. That's why I distinguished the rigged SC from the luck cases.
I also agree that there are other structural flaws in our system that have benefited Trump.
But with some of those structural flaws, there is also an element of luck: recall that in 2004, Kerry came very close to winning the EC without winning the popular vote. Had that happened, we might be talking about how the EC favors Democrats. Even this year, the gap between the popular victory and the EC victory was relatively small (unlike in 2016).
I would diagnose this as people getting into our heads, and our own powerlessness.
Would you have been hesitant to speak out if any critics of the main power structure of the Democratic Party had not been brow-beaten for over 8 years?
Immediately, when people DID speak about Biden the brow-beating commenced again. The only thing that got us out of that fix with Biden was--surprise, surprise--very, very, VERY rich and famous people who have the Democratic Party stamp of approval.
There are some views that almost can't be heard by partisan Democrats. It's like conversations have to be scripted in a certain way or they immediately derail.
Such conversations as 'who should represent the Democrats during the next election' or 'what should we do now that the anointed candidate absolutely can't beat the psycho the other side is running' seem like pretty important conversations to have though.
Since other Democrats are actually people we need to speak to and with, our inability to speak about an enormous number of topics and our deep suspicion of each other has essentially put a wrench in our politics.
Propaganda against what everyone has decided to call "the left" (which are really just more liberal or social democrats) actually IS effective, as are the norms they flog constantly. For example, if I mention Hillary Clinton anyone reading this has been primed think 'is this a BRO? A white man?' They have created a caricature in the minds of people, a whole tableau and so no real discussion can take place because people can't look at other views.
It's just a weird idea that specific views can only be held by someone of inherently deficient moral character, probably due to something intrinsic to them. A PRIVILEGED upbringing of some kind. (Note: Privileged and entitled people ARE annoying, which is why this works.)
I am not old enough to remember how political discussions went before maybe Bush was elected but I remember they were much less fraught, and options were a little more open-ended. Yes, the people we ended up getting were not necessarily successful each time. I'm not sure we could 100% talk our way out of all jams. But some weird things have happened as a result of the intense juggernaut focused on punching left. First it split the party. Not eveyone the each side of the juggernaut even has very different political views. It’s also a strategic rift. Then, because a lot of people feared widening the split (for good reason) they stopped speaking up.
Did people revere the Democrat political leaders like they do now? Is this celebrity culture? It's like a crime to ever criticize certain figures. Did this start with Obama? (Yes, this is a real question.)
Honestly, the Democratic Party reminds me of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is theologically like 5 different sects (or more) but stays together because it fears schism more than anything. But that works fine for the Catholic Church because they don't have to win an election. Not speaking about things to avoid an open rift helps them.
It also helps us to some degree, unless we're all facing a catastrophe. In which it brings it about.
It's creating what you fear. So we've become more touchy as our fear has become greater and then because of our fear we have not been able to get out of fix we're in.
This is also how democracy died. It's worth talking about that part, even though more difficult to explain or understand.
With Obama, we were just coming off Bush, and it was SO nice not to have an administration that was not batshit insane. There was a way ‘the rescue’ boosted Obama’s stature. But very early on people of course noticed that what they had voted for wasn’t what they got. And there was brewing discontent over that. And of course, the astroturfed ‘Tea Party’ shit. A great deal of the weirdness we’ve faced has been from a very effective media campaign—you are completely correct about that.
But I was wondering more about the political culture even before Clinton. I know that JFK developed a sort of cult after he was assassinated—but what about before? I am curious whether Americans had more democratic habits of mind at certain points, and whether this has slowly started to fade of its own accord. And if so, why would that be?
Yes, it's odd that people simply stopped talking about the effect of television on the public--or now, video imagery.
I am one of those weird people who didn't watch much television growing up, and often did not as an adult either --so I am frequently shocked and scandalized by the most everyday things, like cable news and how manipulative it is. But even that's changing. People were deciding not to vote for Harris on the basis of ten second clips on TikTok.
So it won't be who is more photogenic in the future but who has the better social media team.
From reading what people who revere Biden write here on substack, I simply can't tell if their reactions to him are due to television or cable news or how these come about. These people are as mystifying to me as the MAGA people are in a certain respect.
Maybe some humans are simply prone to this reaction. It almost seems to stem from childhood.
I deeply appreciate your capacity for self-examination and your willingness to go public with these thoughts - hopefully modeling for all of us the need for regular self-reflection and humility. For me, that very human need to hope & believe was most active the moment Biden yielded to Harris. Relieved that the Democrats were finally surrendering their seemingly intractable attachment to the status quo, I allowed myself to think a broader shift was afoot. Harris’s convention rhetoric aspiring to the “most lethal military” should have cleared that up. But it took a few more weeks of her tilting to the center-right to realize that, both morally and strategically, the Dems were still over-invested in winning back white men, leaving the mobilization of their actual base to under-resourced nonprofits and the AKAs.
I, for one, think that your exposition of fascist undercurrents in America and elsewhere, now and in the past, has been enlightening and insightful. If anything, I fear this post is stepping away from an exploration of the deep emotions and beliefs underlying fascist tendencies and toward a discussion of real-world policy. Not that policy doesn’t matter, but when what people believe differs so much from what is, there are bigger problems. While leftists argue over the salience of materialist interests, I think it’s part of a broader question on the salience of reality.
Building on your doubts regarding “relativistic pragmatism”, let me ask this: when did liberals institutions function significantly better than they do now, and if they ever did, wasn’t it at times when the ruling party had much more clout than it does today?
Being disappointed in institutions is a more-or-less constant state of affairs (that may abate for some periods of calm). For me, what broke this time wasn’t faith in the institutions but in the electorate. I’ve always known on some intellectual level that there are many morons in the world, but I assumed the vast majority weren’t. That changed during COVID when too many people in my social circle displayed levels of stupidity I had not imagined ran so deep. Still, I refused to accept what Republican politicians obviously did: just how stupid so many people are. One question on my mind these days regarding Bernie Sanders is, is he relatively popular among some segments because of his policies or because he knows how to talk to idiots using the language of goodies vs baddies?
I feel like a lot of people are having this kind of epiphany around stuff that feels obvious in retrospect. I have been one of the people sarcastically swiping at people who voted for fascism because bacon was suddenly too expensive, even though I am fully aware that real wages have been stagnant for something like 40 years.
I am fully aware that while prices of some goods (appliances, clothes) have risen more slowly than inflation, others have risen much faster, most notably housing, healthcare, childcare, college tuitions. Food had roughly tracked inflation, and so people felt those increases acutely. The fact that the US fared better than other countries was cold comfort, and I agree the Democrats relied on this technocratic stuff too much, eschewing a real airing of the problem, let alone any solutions.
Don’t beat yourself up. In retrospect, the only person who really saw with crystal clarity how much of a pushover all those vaunted “guardrails” were…was Trump himself.
Form a loyal crew, keep up the sales and the money flowing, never ever fold, tell everybody to fuck off, you’re not going anywhere, keep it simple, let everybody else come up with their own meaning, their own story, about what the hell you’re talking about, sue everything in sight. They can’t get rid of you, eventually they don’t want to. You were Roy Cohn’s friend.
The 2022 midterms fucked up the calculus. It was the actual hiccup/outlier (maybe it *was* the Majora’s Mask-esque blood moon on November 8th, 2022, that saved Dems, after all? /s). Looking back, 2021 seems like the true baseline leading us here. I looked up some of the numbers:
NJ: 2020, D+16 | Gov 2021: D+3 | 2024: D+6
VA: 2020, D+10 | Gov 2021: R+2 | 2024: D+6
The country swung right even in NM and MN. Whatever liberalism the institutional Democratic Party and culturally center-left places like mainstream news, entertainment, etc. (Taylor Swift! Olivia Rodrigo! Eminem! Beyonce! All the coolest endorsements!) were selling, the electorate slapped it back. Not too surprising given the combo of stubbornly high prices and an infinite-scrolling, social media-drenched doom loop courtesy of the convenient tech in our pockets and desktops. Still depressing, though!
I still think that the Hegelian impulse generally is the correct one, and worth fighting for. But it has to be done, and when things aren't working, we gotta be loud about it. That said, what would you say didn't work, or should have been done better in terms of policy/administration? Israel/Palestine was obviously disastrous but I don't think it rated for most of the electorate or seriously contributed to a sense of dissatisfaction outside of activists and people related to the communities affected.
Otherwise, this is an admirable stock-taking but, just speaking for myself, it never felt like you were self-censoring, second-guessing, or otherwise somehow not staying true to yourself. I never felt bullshitted at, ever, regardless of whether I was on-board or not, and thought you /did/ do it your way, whatever your regrets--and that's still a whole heck of a lot, and not so common. Even if you think you ought to have done better, don't sell that bit short.
Thanks for this. It's hard to find bearings in a time when what had occupied the space we might call Left is so manifestly incoherent and without vision, either holding on for dear life to the past or just all over the lot. So those of us who engage in more action than commentary make stuff up in the interim and hope things will work out. Not yet ...
John, have you lost all faith that "liberal democracy is still functioning to some degree and gives representation and form to the various conflicting interests in society"?
Liberal democracy does not happen by itself. It is willed into existence by people willing to fight for it. It's not your fault what happens. The democratic party in it's current form is too broken to go forward. There is probably nothing you could have done other than fight the good fight a little better, but to the same result. Sad fact that it is truly a good thing the Democrats lost. If we can't beat an obvious bottom dweller like Trump handily, then we need to reinvent ourselves. We are not doing enough to be who we say we are and help the people we said we were trying to help. Bernie was basically right. It isn't that complicated. It's been obvious since MAGA first entered the scene.
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound argumentative. I feel bad. I thought we we all on the same side. I appreciate your writing, and will try to find another way to contribute. I can often be blunt, but I do very much still learn from appreciate your observations.
I would imagine I speak for most of your readership when I say that your work in the Age of Trump has not only been good, it has accomplished the far more difficult feat of being unique, so don't beat yourself up too much.
As for describing the world continuing before us though, in some ways I think your erudition might be a fatal weakness, which kind of goes for all of us. Educated left-of-center people with a nostalgia for a bygone world of letters and ideas (which is to say the donor/staffer/volunteer base of the Democratic Party) have a hard time even having a theory of mind for what the average person's mediated existence through screens is like now.
Will Stancil is annoying, but he's onto something. Beats me where we go from there.
The volunteer base of the Democratic Party is not center-left and highly educated. In many parts of the country it’s moms. Black moms, white moms, straight & queer moms of average education. If Democratic leadership listened more to the voices of this base - who know for certain, as their college grad kids move back home due to lack of housing and stable employment, that the economy isn’t fantastic - we might not be where we are today.
No comments yet? I'm usually not first. You probably took far more things into consideration than most thinkers on the left. I do believe that we (intellectuals for lack of a better word) should remain firm in our conviction that social changes are rooted in reality. We should not apologize for looking to Hegel and Marx as upholders of connections throughout society.
It's good to review your work and try to assess it honestly.
But we are at a phase in the nation's history when every election is a coin-toss away from the other outcome. 100k votes make Hillary the winner in 2016; a similar margin makes Kamala the winner this year (they have to be distributed correctly to get the EC to work, but still.) And Biden's victory in 2020 is not that different, even if his popular margin is bigger.
Given that so little distinguishes a second Trump regime from a Harris regime, I don't know how much we can really learn from refighting the last few years.
Trump has benefited from luck at many turns (as well as benefitting from Leonard Leo's capture of the Supreme Court). His luck will run out. Had his luck run out a bit earlier, you might be drawing very different lessons about the last few years.
I wouldn’t necessarily call a rigged Supreme Court “luck.” Same with other aspects of our calcified democracy, which alone among developed democratic governments holds on to counter-majoritarian institutions like the electoral college; lifetime high court appointments; a powerful upper legislative chamber designed to protect elite interests; and a constitution that’s nearly impossible to amend.
"I wouldn’t necessarily call a rigged Supreme Court “luck.”"
We're in agreement. That's why I distinguished the rigged SC from the luck cases.
I also agree that there are other structural flaws in our system that have benefited Trump.
But with some of those structural flaws, there is also an element of luck: recall that in 2004, Kerry came very close to winning the EC without winning the popular vote. Had that happened, we might be talking about how the EC favors Democrats. Even this year, the gap between the popular victory and the EC victory was relatively small (unlike in 2016).
Agree that there’s an element of chance involved - so we’re not just calcified, we’re also a casino democracy!
I would diagnose this as people getting into our heads, and our own powerlessness.
Would you have been hesitant to speak out if any critics of the main power structure of the Democratic Party had not been brow-beaten for over 8 years?
Immediately, when people DID speak about Biden the brow-beating commenced again. The only thing that got us out of that fix with Biden was--surprise, surprise--very, very, VERY rich and famous people who have the Democratic Party stamp of approval.
There are some views that almost can't be heard by partisan Democrats. It's like conversations have to be scripted in a certain way or they immediately derail.
Such conversations as 'who should represent the Democrats during the next election' or 'what should we do now that the anointed candidate absolutely can't beat the psycho the other side is running' seem like pretty important conversations to have though.
Since other Democrats are actually people we need to speak to and with, our inability to speak about an enormous number of topics and our deep suspicion of each other has essentially put a wrench in our politics.
Propaganda against what everyone has decided to call "the left" (which are really just more liberal or social democrats) actually IS effective, as are the norms they flog constantly. For example, if I mention Hillary Clinton anyone reading this has been primed think 'is this a BRO? A white man?' They have created a caricature in the minds of people, a whole tableau and so no real discussion can take place because people can't look at other views.
It's just a weird idea that specific views can only be held by someone of inherently deficient moral character, probably due to something intrinsic to them. A PRIVILEGED upbringing of some kind. (Note: Privileged and entitled people ARE annoying, which is why this works.)
I am not old enough to remember how political discussions went before maybe Bush was elected but I remember they were much less fraught, and options were a little more open-ended. Yes, the people we ended up getting were not necessarily successful each time. I'm not sure we could 100% talk our way out of all jams. But some weird things have happened as a result of the intense juggernaut focused on punching left. First it split the party. Not eveyone the each side of the juggernaut even has very different political views. It’s also a strategic rift. Then, because a lot of people feared widening the split (for good reason) they stopped speaking up.
Did people revere the Democrat political leaders like they do now? Is this celebrity culture? It's like a crime to ever criticize certain figures. Did this start with Obama? (Yes, this is a real question.)
Honestly, the Democratic Party reminds me of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is theologically like 5 different sects (or more) but stays together because it fears schism more than anything. But that works fine for the Catholic Church because they don't have to win an election. Not speaking about things to avoid an open rift helps them.
It also helps us to some degree, unless we're all facing a catastrophe. In which it brings it about.
It's creating what you fear. So we've become more touchy as our fear has become greater and then because of our fear we have not been able to get out of fix we're in.
This is also how democracy died. It's worth talking about that part, even though more difficult to explain or understand.
Late to this, but here was the whole JFK Camelot myth making. And Jimmy Carter was surprisingly tight with 70s rock and country musicians who raised his profile and helped him win. (Shameless self-promotion here, I recently wrote about the latter in a review of a documentary about it, at https://cinema-purgatorio.ghost.io/jimmy-carter-rock-and-roll-president-hes-historys-greatest-rock-star/ )
With Obama, we were just coming off Bush, and it was SO nice not to have an administration that was not batshit insane. There was a way ‘the rescue’ boosted Obama’s stature. But very early on people of course noticed that what they had voted for wasn’t what they got. And there was brewing discontent over that. And of course, the astroturfed ‘Tea Party’ shit. A great deal of the weirdness we’ve faced has been from a very effective media campaign—you are completely correct about that.
But I was wondering more about the political culture even before Clinton. I know that JFK developed a sort of cult after he was assassinated—but what about before? I am curious whether Americans had more democratic habits of mind at certain points, and whether this has slowly started to fade of its own accord. And if so, why would that be?
Yes, it's odd that people simply stopped talking about the effect of television on the public--or now, video imagery.
I am one of those weird people who didn't watch much television growing up, and often did not as an adult either --so I am frequently shocked and scandalized by the most everyday things, like cable news and how manipulative it is. But even that's changing. People were deciding not to vote for Harris on the basis of ten second clips on TikTok.
So it won't be who is more photogenic in the future but who has the better social media team.
From reading what people who revere Biden write here on substack, I simply can't tell if their reactions to him are due to television or cable news or how these come about. These people are as mystifying to me as the MAGA people are in a certain respect.
Maybe some humans are simply prone to this reaction. It almost seems to stem from childhood.
I deeply appreciate your capacity for self-examination and your willingness to go public with these thoughts - hopefully modeling for all of us the need for regular self-reflection and humility. For me, that very human need to hope & believe was most active the moment Biden yielded to Harris. Relieved that the Democrats were finally surrendering their seemingly intractable attachment to the status quo, I allowed myself to think a broader shift was afoot. Harris’s convention rhetoric aspiring to the “most lethal military” should have cleared that up. But it took a few more weeks of her tilting to the center-right to realize that, both morally and strategically, the Dems were still over-invested in winning back white men, leaving the mobilization of their actual base to under-resourced nonprofits and the AKAs.
I, for one, think that your exposition of fascist undercurrents in America and elsewhere, now and in the past, has been enlightening and insightful. If anything, I fear this post is stepping away from an exploration of the deep emotions and beliefs underlying fascist tendencies and toward a discussion of real-world policy. Not that policy doesn’t matter, but when what people believe differs so much from what is, there are bigger problems. While leftists argue over the salience of materialist interests, I think it’s part of a broader question on the salience of reality.
Building on your doubts regarding “relativistic pragmatism”, let me ask this: when did liberals institutions function significantly better than they do now, and if they ever did, wasn’t it at times when the ruling party had much more clout than it does today?
Being disappointed in institutions is a more-or-less constant state of affairs (that may abate for some periods of calm). For me, what broke this time wasn’t faith in the institutions but in the electorate. I’ve always known on some intellectual level that there are many morons in the world, but I assumed the vast majority weren’t. That changed during COVID when too many people in my social circle displayed levels of stupidity I had not imagined ran so deep. Still, I refused to accept what Republican politicians obviously did: just how stupid so many people are. One question on my mind these days regarding Bernie Sanders is, is he relatively popular among some segments because of his policies or because he knows how to talk to idiots using the language of goodies vs baddies?
I feel like a lot of people are having this kind of epiphany around stuff that feels obvious in retrospect. I have been one of the people sarcastically swiping at people who voted for fascism because bacon was suddenly too expensive, even though I am fully aware that real wages have been stagnant for something like 40 years.
I am fully aware that while prices of some goods (appliances, clothes) have risen more slowly than inflation, others have risen much faster, most notably housing, healthcare, childcare, college tuitions. Food had roughly tracked inflation, and so people felt those increases acutely. The fact that the US fared better than other countries was cold comfort, and I agree the Democrats relied on this technocratic stuff too much, eschewing a real airing of the problem, let alone any solutions.
I think you're way too hard on yourself.
Who did better, anyway.
Don’t beat yourself up. In retrospect, the only person who really saw with crystal clarity how much of a pushover all those vaunted “guardrails” were…was Trump himself.
Form a loyal crew, keep up the sales and the money flowing, never ever fold, tell everybody to fuck off, you’re not going anywhere, keep it simple, let everybody else come up with their own meaning, their own story, about what the hell you’re talking about, sue everything in sight. They can’t get rid of you, eventually they don’t want to. You were Roy Cohn’s friend.
The 2022 midterms fucked up the calculus. It was the actual hiccup/outlier (maybe it *was* the Majora’s Mask-esque blood moon on November 8th, 2022, that saved Dems, after all? /s). Looking back, 2021 seems like the true baseline leading us here. I looked up some of the numbers:
NJ: 2020, D+16 | Gov 2021: D+3 | 2024: D+6
VA: 2020, D+10 | Gov 2021: R+2 | 2024: D+6
The country swung right even in NM and MN. Whatever liberalism the institutional Democratic Party and culturally center-left places like mainstream news, entertainment, etc. (Taylor Swift! Olivia Rodrigo! Eminem! Beyonce! All the coolest endorsements!) were selling, the electorate slapped it back. Not too surprising given the combo of stubbornly high prices and an infinite-scrolling, social media-drenched doom loop courtesy of the convenient tech in our pockets and desktops. Still depressing, though!
The war is not over. Firstly, survive to fight another day. Adapt to overcome what does not kill you. The war is not over.
I still think that the Hegelian impulse generally is the correct one, and worth fighting for. But it has to be done, and when things aren't working, we gotta be loud about it. That said, what would you say didn't work, or should have been done better in terms of policy/administration? Israel/Palestine was obviously disastrous but I don't think it rated for most of the electorate or seriously contributed to a sense of dissatisfaction outside of activists and people related to the communities affected.
Otherwise, this is an admirable stock-taking but, just speaking for myself, it never felt like you were self-censoring, second-guessing, or otherwise somehow not staying true to yourself. I never felt bullshitted at, ever, regardless of whether I was on-board or not, and thought you /did/ do it your way, whatever your regrets--and that's still a whole heck of a lot, and not so common. Even if you think you ought to have done better, don't sell that bit short.
tough but fair
Thanks for this. It's hard to find bearings in a time when what had occupied the space we might call Left is so manifestly incoherent and without vision, either holding on for dear life to the past or just all over the lot. So those of us who engage in more action than commentary make stuff up in the interim and hope things will work out. Not yet ...
John, have you lost all faith that "liberal democracy is still functioning to some degree and gives representation and form to the various conflicting interests in society"?
not all
Liberal democracy does not happen by itself. It is willed into existence by people willing to fight for it. It's not your fault what happens. The democratic party in it's current form is too broken to go forward. There is probably nothing you could have done other than fight the good fight a little better, but to the same result. Sad fact that it is truly a good thing the Democrats lost. If we can't beat an obvious bottom dweller like Trump handily, then we need to reinvent ourselves. We are not doing enough to be who we say we are and help the people we said we were trying to help. Bernie was basically right. It isn't that complicated. It's been obvious since MAGA first entered the scene.
Okay if it's not that complicated and you know, then don't bother reading me
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound argumentative. I feel bad. I thought we we all on the same side. I appreciate your writing, and will try to find another way to contribute. I can often be blunt, but I do very much still learn from appreciate your observations.
no worries!