Liberalism has reached the crisis point we have seen coming for 30 years; everyone can see that "The rules! The institutions! The norms!" is no longer a battle cry that an effective coalition can be rallied behind, and in its place they seem to be completely at a loss to offer an alternative.
They don't remember how to do materialism (Why should they? It's been decades!) and they have never understood vision, politics-as-emotions, narrative, or having a story other than "The system works, provided smart people like us are in charge of it."
They seem utterly shocked that "He's not following the rules!" isn't working and I fear that it's going to take quite some time before they can admit that they need a different message *and* find one that works. We are entering a tunnel and the exit isn't visible yet.
Pundits and politicians love to quote Franklin's reply to the woman who asked him on the last day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 whether we have got a republic or a monarchy. His answer: "A republic if you can keep it."
I think there is a far more more important comment by Franklin which I've very seldom seen quoted, but it's worth quoting in full: "I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administred; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
Along with Franklin, I believe that the system will work as long as it is well administered. The ideology isn't what ensures that. It's the character and the good faith of the people tasked with administering it that ensures that. And as we now know too many of those responsible took their oaths in bad faith. I fear Franklin's prophecy is coming to pass.
I fully agree, and I think my own emotional reflexes are part of the proof. After I left the conservative, religious culture I grew up in and found a much more hospitable world in east coast academia, I'm discovering that the liberal habits of mind of that milieu are hard to shake (even though I rely on materialism in my academic work).
So even though it is the 10,000th blatant lie that Trump just uttered, when he said "Ukraine should have never started the war" my whole constitution is still jolted ("why doesn't it matter that he just gets up there and tells obvious lies?")
I don't know how to get out of the tunnel, either. But I do think it is potentially significant that Trump has allowed Musk to be the face of the MAGA destruction phase. Will MAGA voters be able to elevate him as their avatar in the way they do with Trump?
I suppose it's probably possible to at the same time defend what's important about the system (the rules and institutions aren't important nor tokens in themselves, what's important with this whole system of checks and balances is that it hinders corrupt autocrats trying to govern at their whims and other powers getting too big) and to try and find a compelling vision for the hard to solve political problems that the left (and the others) haven't been able to solve ?
They're long known ; our nations are experiencing scaling up problems ; our governments have so far collectively not been able to protect their citizens against the new pressures brought in a globalized world ; they've not been able to significantly push back against the insane accumulation of money in few hands it helped, which is now coming back to bite us in ways we didn't even expect ; parties from the left and the right have been divided between trying to solve the equation through internationalism, a long, slow process dealing with a huge amount of bad faith actors that has not been able to hold its promises to the extend people hoped, or through nationalist or protectionist measures (knowing that these words can mean vastly different things) ; the fascistic far right parties gaining ground everywhere are the monsters created by the fact that no solution was found to this problem. Before the message, there may be first some far-reaching thinking to be done about to this question, to find a desirable vision to promote, or at least a desirable strategy ?
It's very hard not to lean on facts and rule of law when trying to go up against MAGA. Sure, we can seem like annoying smarty pantses when continually questioning the truthfulness and legality of our enemies, but I don't see how we can abandon this function. If "finding a message (myth) that works" means out-bullshitting or out-hyping MAGA, how is that going to play out? Can we operate without some adherence to agreed-upon truth? Plus we do have a lot of mythical-adjacent messages, e.g., we are controlled by a fascist corporate oligarchy. I mean, that's pretty much the Rebel Alliance vs. the Empire.
Great post, and I think the main thrust of your point is dead on. That being said, I would reject the wholesale characterization of Russiagate as a Liberal myth, for two reasons.
Firstly, as to the question of how mythical a conception it is, while there unquestionably was a certain hysteria running through Liberal circles about the topic (pee tape, etc), at the same time there actually is a tremendous amount of factual basis to many of the core claims, as made ultimately clear in the Senate Intel report and the Mueller report. Again, that's not to say that *no* myth making and general nonsense production occurred around the topic during the first half of Trump's first term, as obviously there are a million hysterical ResistLib tweets to point too, but much the same way that the truth is on our side about the question of oligarchs stripping the country for parts, so too is the truth on our side about, e.g. Paul Manafort being a corrupt toady taking money from Russian oligarchs, WikiLeaks publishing Clinton campagin emails which were stolen by outfits associated with Russian intelligence, among many other factual matters from that case.
Second reason: the mythical aspect of Russiagate that lives on in our common memory is I think at this point much more of a rightwing construction, and more of a prelude to Stop the Steal, of a righteous agent of the people unjustly persecuted by The Deep State, and to bring this back to the actual idea behind your post, I think the fact that Liberals so quickly ceded this as a topic and allowed to become an object of rightwing myth-making rather than refine it themselves, and as you suggest make it a more wieldy cudgel with which to hammer Trump et al is itself indicative of our general failure and doesn't bode well for our ability to craft compelling stories in the same way that the right does.
When the Mueller Report was released and it wasn’t the clear-cut slam dunk that could bury Trump that we all wanted, all air went out of our quest for justice. Also, with a little help from Bill Barr, MAGA was actually able to declare victory and, to this day, remain adamant that this was the scandal of the century and it is they now who are righteous and will bring down the hammer of justice.
This is something that really gets at me. There are so many people who will reject any new argument just by referring to Russiagate, like it’s established fact that it was a left wing conspiracy, which feels impenetrably thick. But it’s unavoidable.
Leads me to think that we have to stop worrying about the right. But I try to imagine that, and it leads me to a similar dead end. But less familiar so it’s still the only possible way forward, imo. The problem seems to me that it requires us to let go of hope of reconciliation or even rapprochement, and accept that we are going to have to fight.
Perhaps the mythic quality of believing that Mr Trump were a conscious Russian asset is my certainty that he wouldn't give a damn about being so or not beyond what he could get out of it, and its potential, practical, downsides. That is to say, it means something to me that I perceive his _not_ being so to be, in an almost Thomist sense, an accidental property.
This is of course dangerous, because it pulls me into a world in which facts don't matter in the face of Truth. It is very much like holding that 'illegal aliens' are responsible for much (most?) of our violent crime, at least when they're not busy eating our pets, regardless of the crimes they're not committing and Fluffy's simple tendency to stray.
EDIT: This is different to factoring-in Mr Trump's amorality in considering whether a report of his acting so were true.
I think this piece is pretty unfair to positivists, and Enlightenment thinking, because it seems to imply that these right-wing myths are equally potent across the electorate. In 2022 "stop the steal" candidates lost a lot of midterm races (admittedly lower-turnout contests) in swing states. The Xtian nationalist hooey is popular to the extent that it's captured some number of evangelical congregations, but what percentage of voters is this, really? Trump's margin of victory was quite small. If this right-wing myth-making was so potent I would have expected something closer to a Ronald Reagan-style blowout.
So long as we have a population whose livelihood depends on inhabiting the real world, playing it straight with facts and evidence is probably a better strategy than cooking up your own myths. The right's myths work on some subset of the population, but for the voters who reliably swing back-and-forth in each election just looking for someone to give them a better living I doubt that they care very much about the ideological underpinnings. And seeing the kinds of myths that come out of the left so far, they seem likelier to repel voters than to attract them.
I'm currently reading Fishkin and Forbath's really excellent book The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, and it has me convinced that the way for the progressive left to do our own political mythmaking is through what they call "popular constitutionalism." That doesn't entail finding textual or legalistic warrant for implementing this or that policy, but an argument that the defense and maintenance of republican government demands a broad-gauged attack on private concentrations of power and wealth. We should be screaming at the top of our lungs that Trump, Musk, et al are violating the constitution - less because they're violating this or that clause or article of the document (though, of course, they are), and more because "the constitution" they're violating is a comprehensive vision of political economy that underpins and sustains institutions of democratic self-rule.
It's not that liberalism doesn't have myths. It does. They're just not very useful for its cause. Most liberals have long succumbed to the myth that rational discourse is politically significant, or the more pernicious myth that all speech is created equal and should be so treated at law, or the even more pernicious myth that "rights" are privileged, but have nothing to do with the distribution of wealth and non-statal power in society. (The latter goes to Ed Burmila's point: liberals "don't remember how to do materialism".)
The smarter lefties--the AOCs and Bernies of the world--seem to know better. But then again, neither of them was trained as a lawyer: the great professional deformation of liberals.
I think that is a lot of it. I think we will seen that borne out when, if any DOGE cuts get to the Pentagon, they will much, much less significant than in other areas...
I think this hints at something I've felt missing from the Democratic party: a transformative vision for the future. I at least felt that a vote for Harris was just kicking the can down the road again, without really changing anything in a positive way. It also ties into a thought I had recently, which is that to truly combat the climate crisis, the Democrats, or the Left, needs to declare a "War on Global Warming." It seems to me that this is the framing in which the US views everything, and even if it is silly or stupid, that framing is an easy touchstone for pretty much all Americans.
The Left does in fact have a counter-myth that remains very powerful in academia and the media. According to this myth, the history of humanity is the history of the oppression of women and nonwhites by (generally straight or at least straight-acting) white males, and of women and nonwhites' collective struggle to overcome such oppression. The oppression not only determines every social relation, but reaches into even the most seemingly innocuous corners of thought and feeling. The duty of all good people is to overthrow this oppression by any means necessary (e.g. decolonialization). However, since division by race and gender is a basic category of social and political thought, some sort of revolution will be necessary, that will abolish all traces of straight white male oppression and enable us to begin anew on a properly multiracial and feminist-oriented basis. (Whether this revolution will be violent or not is a question.)
Insofar as you are speaking about a middle-class liberal narrative of surface reform ("if we just make the CEO ranks and Washington power brokers more diverse, then there will be utopic equality in the land"), then sure, it is a blinkered myth.
But there are also historical realities that undercut the assumptions and habits of those who scorn "oppression" talk of any kind. Maybe it is actually not the case that enlightened Europeans were the most advanced portion of humanity, who did a big favor to all the benighted peoples of the globe when they forced them into a system of labor and trade (with millions on the property side of the ledger) and funneled massive capital to themselves. It takes a lot of ideological effort to narrate domination as progress without getting pushback from folks who don't feel like this has been a cosmic blessing, and as the planet burns and floods.
It might be that a lot of ridiculous ideas (eg Sheryl Sanders' "lean-in feminism" claiming that women are oppressed when they don't get to be hedge fund managers) are not where the action is. They might be epiphenomena of a much deeper, tectonic shift whereby huge numbers of people are no longer very persuaded by the myths of modernity––myths that are now overtly having to circulate as non-rational myths.
Well, it's not the case that the open scorn of women, intellectuals, and feminized Beta men worked too well to pull the electorate over to a large, politically potent GOP majority.
Call me crazy but I have my doubts that large numbers of Harris voters are going to suddenly see the truth that their instincts and interests are "nonsense." Realities like that are the reason Trump and company care less about persuading voters than they do about dismantling representative government and crushing the press.
When the hard impact with reality eventually happens, either through the economic collapse (crypto ponzi contagion or tariffs or FDIC abolishment or whatever) or the WW3, liberals will have a riveting narrative of "rational governance and social safety nets will put food on your table", but until that happens, is it even possible to break through the current myths that enthralled the population? How do the myths die?
It is interesting that I’ve seen for a few years now, the idea of the general strike attaining mythical appeal on the left. People trying to proselytize about it, sort of organize to have it happen, and now maybe most concrete indication of it has been Shawn Fain’s move to have major unions plan their contract fights to align in 2028. The early proselytizing was met, including by myself, with a bit of judgement for the way people seemed to be trying to bootstrap it into existence, picking arbitrary dates as goals, but it never being clear how engaged they were with like, unionizing drives and doing things in real life as opposed to doing things on social media. Maybe that was the wrong reaction, or maybe it’s a necessary complement to the myth. It’s always worth remembering, it’s not like anything else has worked either.
I don’t personally want any kind of myth in my head. I want to live in reality. I don’t want to tell compelling lies.
The idea of being part of a political movement that does this is actually repulsive to me. This repulsion is itself irrationally strong, I know on some level that I’m not a superior clear-minded being compared to those who can get something powerful out of a myth. I just personally hate it.
Likely it is a political weakness and victory requires some myth-making. But if this is actually how people want to live — a good story matters more than reality — I can’t help but feel as though a large part of the country is partially insane.
The enlightenment was fueled by the idea that we can understand the universe by using our minds, and was informed by scientific discoveries that countered the claims on ultimate truth made by the church. This eventually led to the conclusion that rule by divine right or religious authority was illegitimate, and it's not an accident that the idea of democratic self-governance came from that world. The idea that one can devise noble lies to counter the lies of the nihilistic right seems fundamentally flawed to me.
"From the standpoint of mythmaking, the problem with Russiagate and the idea of Trump as a Russian asset, probably the closest thing to a Sorelian myth the liberals were able to generate in recent years, was that it was just a little too sophisticated: it was for upper-middle-class people who read the Washington Post and enjoy spy thrillers. It was also too optimistic: it spoke to a utopian belief in bureaucratic competence triumphant, rather than years of bitter political struggle against an occupying enemy. (Sorel teaches that pessimism can be a strength.) When the factual basis started to look a little shaky, most liberals shrank away in embarrassment."
The factual basis may be a little shaky, because the factual basis of any espionage operation is impossible to disambiguate by its design. I haven't sharnk away in embarrassment and think the current machinations of the nerd reich and the nature of their coordination with Putin, Xi, MBS may present an opportunity to re-visit propagating an updated version of this narrative. Because it just happens to be FUCKING TRUE!!!
This helped me put into focus something I’ve been trying to articulate for a while, which is that the discourse has split into what feel like two distinct languages. Members of the “myth” tribe are uninterested in, perhaps incapable of operating empirically. Members of the empiricism tribe treat myths as marginal. This is why I am skeptical of your remedy to the extent that you propose the left needs to develop more a compelling narrative, if not a mythology. Just as empiricism doesn’t really compute with people of the myth tribe, myths don’t resonate with empirical people.
Religious folks are mired in myth and thus primed to respond to that language. The left, meanwhile, leans much more towards empiricism, and so any compelling narrative would still have to be fundamentally, rational, and empirical.
"One advantage we have is the truth on our side: they really are the party of rapacious oligarchs who are stripping the country for parts." This line reminds me of reading George Lakoff 20 years ago, mainly his 1996 (?) edition of Moral Politics and subsequent articles and interviews. Since then, he's seemed to become niche and trendy in some circles, but I do recall him saying something almost identical about framing and spin/lying: Dems could frame to activate their own moral worldview in people (or myth-make in the present context) without becoming the enemy in large part because truth and facts (rational, logical and empirical) were on our side. The framing approach may seem technocratic, and to the extent it was ever taken up by Dem pols, it probably became that, just another knob to tweak, but I don't think it's too far a stretch to see a connection here.
Evolution isn’t a perfect method. It can adapt and improve upon only that which it is given. For many humans, a first response to fear, especially fear of death, is to seek the cause of the fear. That may be an animal, perhaps a large cat, hiding in the bush, about to jump out and bite you in the neck. The fear we carry is very ancient. We were once prey to much larger and more aggressive predators. And equally ancient is the response to fear: looking for someone or something to blame for causing the fear. Sometimes survival depends upon split-second decisions. As our cultures have become increasingly complex, we still look for simple, immediate reasons for our fear. Our so-called rational nature is new, and not fully established in our makeup. To think rationally is something we learn. But the first response to fear is to find whoever or whatever is responsible for the fear and to attack. If a sabretooth tiger is lurking in the bush, you have no time for Bacon’s scientific method or Freud’s Psychoanalytical theory, to ask, Why am I afraid?, but must respond immediately. Evolution has made us flawed creatures.
Even the most rational, most highly developed technical mind coexists with an emotional, irrational, animal nature, one which responds to a good story about a hero who combats the Sabretooth Tiger threatening the hero's family, or the “wholly rapacious and corrupt government hoarding treasure” like the mythic creature in the illustration, or the enemies Q-Anon will reveal at the bottom of a rabbit hole. Everyone wants to be a hero, to slay the tiger or dragon. Coming up with stories like that is as old as men and women sitting around a fire during the Stone Age.
To come up with a story equally compelling is a worthy challenge, perhaps a fantasy or science fiction story equal to Game of Thrones about good governance, without the misogyny and warmongering. And right there, our liberal morality weakens the plot. What is a moral liberal to do?
Liberalism has reached the crisis point we have seen coming for 30 years; everyone can see that "The rules! The institutions! The norms!" is no longer a battle cry that an effective coalition can be rallied behind, and in its place they seem to be completely at a loss to offer an alternative.
They don't remember how to do materialism (Why should they? It's been decades!) and they have never understood vision, politics-as-emotions, narrative, or having a story other than "The system works, provided smart people like us are in charge of it."
They seem utterly shocked that "He's not following the rules!" isn't working and I fear that it's going to take quite some time before they can admit that they need a different message *and* find one that works. We are entering a tunnel and the exit isn't visible yet.
Pundits and politicians love to quote Franklin's reply to the woman who asked him on the last day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 whether we have got a republic or a monarchy. His answer: "A republic if you can keep it."
I think there is a far more more important comment by Franklin which I've very seldom seen quoted, but it's worth quoting in full: "I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administred; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
Along with Franklin, I believe that the system will work as long as it is well administered. The ideology isn't what ensures that. It's the character and the good faith of the people tasked with administering it that ensures that. And as we now know too many of those responsible took their oaths in bad faith. I fear Franklin's prophecy is coming to pass.
I fully agree, and I think my own emotional reflexes are part of the proof. After I left the conservative, religious culture I grew up in and found a much more hospitable world in east coast academia, I'm discovering that the liberal habits of mind of that milieu are hard to shake (even though I rely on materialism in my academic work).
So even though it is the 10,000th blatant lie that Trump just uttered, when he said "Ukraine should have never started the war" my whole constitution is still jolted ("why doesn't it matter that he just gets up there and tells obvious lies?")
I don't know how to get out of the tunnel, either. But I do think it is potentially significant that Trump has allowed Musk to be the face of the MAGA destruction phase. Will MAGA voters be able to elevate him as their avatar in the way they do with Trump?
I suppose it's probably possible to at the same time defend what's important about the system (the rules and institutions aren't important nor tokens in themselves, what's important with this whole system of checks and balances is that it hinders corrupt autocrats trying to govern at their whims and other powers getting too big) and to try and find a compelling vision for the hard to solve political problems that the left (and the others) haven't been able to solve ?
They're long known ; our nations are experiencing scaling up problems ; our governments have so far collectively not been able to protect their citizens against the new pressures brought in a globalized world ; they've not been able to significantly push back against the insane accumulation of money in few hands it helped, which is now coming back to bite us in ways we didn't even expect ; parties from the left and the right have been divided between trying to solve the equation through internationalism, a long, slow process dealing with a huge amount of bad faith actors that has not been able to hold its promises to the extend people hoped, or through nationalist or protectionist measures (knowing that these words can mean vastly different things) ; the fascistic far right parties gaining ground everywhere are the monsters created by the fact that no solution was found to this problem. Before the message, there may be first some far-reaching thinking to be done about to this question, to find a desirable vision to promote, or at least a desirable strategy ?
It's very hard not to lean on facts and rule of law when trying to go up against MAGA. Sure, we can seem like annoying smarty pantses when continually questioning the truthfulness and legality of our enemies, but I don't see how we can abandon this function. If "finding a message (myth) that works" means out-bullshitting or out-hyping MAGA, how is that going to play out? Can we operate without some adherence to agreed-upon truth? Plus we do have a lot of mythical-adjacent messages, e.g., we are controlled by a fascist corporate oligarchy. I mean, that's pretty much the Rebel Alliance vs. the Empire.
How specifically should the democrats "do materialism" now in a way that allows them to win elections?
Great post, and I think the main thrust of your point is dead on. That being said, I would reject the wholesale characterization of Russiagate as a Liberal myth, for two reasons.
Firstly, as to the question of how mythical a conception it is, while there unquestionably was a certain hysteria running through Liberal circles about the topic (pee tape, etc), at the same time there actually is a tremendous amount of factual basis to many of the core claims, as made ultimately clear in the Senate Intel report and the Mueller report. Again, that's not to say that *no* myth making and general nonsense production occurred around the topic during the first half of Trump's first term, as obviously there are a million hysterical ResistLib tweets to point too, but much the same way that the truth is on our side about the question of oligarchs stripping the country for parts, so too is the truth on our side about, e.g. Paul Manafort being a corrupt toady taking money from Russian oligarchs, WikiLeaks publishing Clinton campagin emails which were stolen by outfits associated with Russian intelligence, among many other factual matters from that case.
Second reason: the mythical aspect of Russiagate that lives on in our common memory is I think at this point much more of a rightwing construction, and more of a prelude to Stop the Steal, of a righteous agent of the people unjustly persecuted by The Deep State, and to bring this back to the actual idea behind your post, I think the fact that Liberals so quickly ceded this as a topic and allowed to become an object of rightwing myth-making rather than refine it themselves, and as you suggest make it a more wieldy cudgel with which to hammer Trump et al is itself indicative of our general failure and doesn't bode well for our ability to craft compelling stories in the same way that the right does.
When the Mueller Report was released and it wasn’t the clear-cut slam dunk that could bury Trump that we all wanted, all air went out of our quest for justice. Also, with a little help from Bill Barr, MAGA was actually able to declare victory and, to this day, remain adamant that this was the scandal of the century and it is they now who are righteous and will bring down the hammer of justice.
This is something that really gets at me. There are so many people who will reject any new argument just by referring to Russiagate, like it’s established fact that it was a left wing conspiracy, which feels impenetrably thick. But it’s unavoidable.
Leads me to think that we have to stop worrying about the right. But I try to imagine that, and it leads me to a similar dead end. But less familiar so it’s still the only possible way forward, imo. The problem seems to me that it requires us to let go of hope of reconciliation or even rapprochement, and accept that we are going to have to fight.
Perhaps the mythic quality of believing that Mr Trump were a conscious Russian asset is my certainty that he wouldn't give a damn about being so or not beyond what he could get out of it, and its potential, practical, downsides. That is to say, it means something to me that I perceive his _not_ being so to be, in an almost Thomist sense, an accidental property.
This is of course dangerous, because it pulls me into a world in which facts don't matter in the face of Truth. It is very much like holding that 'illegal aliens' are responsible for much (most?) of our violent crime, at least when they're not busy eating our pets, regardless of the crimes they're not committing and Fluffy's simple tendency to stray.
EDIT: This is different to factoring-in Mr Trump's amorality in considering whether a report of his acting so were true.
I think this piece is pretty unfair to positivists, and Enlightenment thinking, because it seems to imply that these right-wing myths are equally potent across the electorate. In 2022 "stop the steal" candidates lost a lot of midterm races (admittedly lower-turnout contests) in swing states. The Xtian nationalist hooey is popular to the extent that it's captured some number of evangelical congregations, but what percentage of voters is this, really? Trump's margin of victory was quite small. If this right-wing myth-making was so potent I would have expected something closer to a Ronald Reagan-style blowout.
So long as we have a population whose livelihood depends on inhabiting the real world, playing it straight with facts and evidence is probably a better strategy than cooking up your own myths. The right's myths work on some subset of the population, but for the voters who reliably swing back-and-forth in each election just looking for someone to give them a better living I doubt that they care very much about the ideological underpinnings. And seeing the kinds of myths that come out of the left so far, they seem likelier to repel voters than to attract them.
I'm currently reading Fishkin and Forbath's really excellent book The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, and it has me convinced that the way for the progressive left to do our own political mythmaking is through what they call "popular constitutionalism." That doesn't entail finding textual or legalistic warrant for implementing this or that policy, but an argument that the defense and maintenance of republican government demands a broad-gauged attack on private concentrations of power and wealth. We should be screaming at the top of our lungs that Trump, Musk, et al are violating the constitution - less because they're violating this or that clause or article of the document (though, of course, they are), and more because "the constitution" they're violating is a comprehensive vision of political economy that underpins and sustains institutions of democratic self-rule.
It's not that liberalism doesn't have myths. It does. They're just not very useful for its cause. Most liberals have long succumbed to the myth that rational discourse is politically significant, or the more pernicious myth that all speech is created equal and should be so treated at law, or the even more pernicious myth that "rights" are privileged, but have nothing to do with the distribution of wealth and non-statal power in society. (The latter goes to Ed Burmila's point: liberals "don't remember how to do materialism".)
The smarter lefties--the AOCs and Bernies of the world--seem to know better. But then again, neither of them was trained as a lawyer: the great professional deformation of liberals.
Neither of them elected outside of left-wing regions of the country, either.
People who run in places where they need to appeal to a broader range of opinion aren't more moderate by accident.
The use of 'DEI' to mean 'n-gg-r' would have been of no surprise to the late Lee Atwater, and that is all it is.
How much of their excesses are fundamentally rooted in their certainty that they have a lot more guns?
I think that is a lot of it. I think we will seen that borne out when, if any DOGE cuts get to the Pentagon, they will much, much less significant than in other areas...
I was thinking about the guns in private hands, but a good point.
I think this hints at something I've felt missing from the Democratic party: a transformative vision for the future. I at least felt that a vote for Harris was just kicking the can down the road again, without really changing anything in a positive way. It also ties into a thought I had recently, which is that to truly combat the climate crisis, the Democrats, or the Left, needs to declare a "War on Global Warming." It seems to me that this is the framing in which the US views everything, and even if it is silly or stupid, that framing is an easy touchstone for pretty much all Americans.
The Left does in fact have a counter-myth that remains very powerful in academia and the media. According to this myth, the history of humanity is the history of the oppression of women and nonwhites by (generally straight or at least straight-acting) white males, and of women and nonwhites' collective struggle to overcome such oppression. The oppression not only determines every social relation, but reaches into even the most seemingly innocuous corners of thought and feeling. The duty of all good people is to overthrow this oppression by any means necessary (e.g. decolonialization). However, since division by race and gender is a basic category of social and political thought, some sort of revolution will be necessary, that will abolish all traces of straight white male oppression and enable us to begin anew on a properly multiracial and feminist-oriented basis. (Whether this revolution will be violent or not is a question.)
Insofar as you are speaking about a middle-class liberal narrative of surface reform ("if we just make the CEO ranks and Washington power brokers more diverse, then there will be utopic equality in the land"), then sure, it is a blinkered myth.
But there are also historical realities that undercut the assumptions and habits of those who scorn "oppression" talk of any kind. Maybe it is actually not the case that enlightened Europeans were the most advanced portion of humanity, who did a big favor to all the benighted peoples of the globe when they forced them into a system of labor and trade (with millions on the property side of the ledger) and funneled massive capital to themselves. It takes a lot of ideological effort to narrate domination as progress without getting pushback from folks who don't feel like this has been a cosmic blessing, and as the planet burns and floods.
It might be that a lot of ridiculous ideas (eg Sheryl Sanders' "lean-in feminism" claiming that women are oppressed when they don't get to be hedge fund managers) are not where the action is. They might be epiphenomena of a much deeper, tectonic shift whereby huge numbers of people are no longer very persuaded by the myths of modernity––myths that are now overtly having to circulate as non-rational myths.
Well, it's not the case that the open scorn of women, intellectuals, and feminized Beta men worked too well to pull the electorate over to a large, politically potent GOP majority.
Call me crazy but I have my doubts that large numbers of Harris voters are going to suddenly see the truth that their instincts and interests are "nonsense." Realities like that are the reason Trump and company care less about persuading voters than they do about dismantling representative government and crushing the press.
When the hard impact with reality eventually happens, either through the economic collapse (crypto ponzi contagion or tariffs or FDIC abolishment or whatever) or the WW3, liberals will have a riveting narrative of "rational governance and social safety nets will put food on your table", but until that happens, is it even possible to break through the current myths that enthralled the population? How do the myths die?
It is interesting that I’ve seen for a few years now, the idea of the general strike attaining mythical appeal on the left. People trying to proselytize about it, sort of organize to have it happen, and now maybe most concrete indication of it has been Shawn Fain’s move to have major unions plan their contract fights to align in 2028. The early proselytizing was met, including by myself, with a bit of judgement for the way people seemed to be trying to bootstrap it into existence, picking arbitrary dates as goals, but it never being clear how engaged they were with like, unionizing drives and doing things in real life as opposed to doing things on social media. Maybe that was the wrong reaction, or maybe it’s a necessary complement to the myth. It’s always worth remembering, it’s not like anything else has worked either.
I don’t personally want any kind of myth in my head. I want to live in reality. I don’t want to tell compelling lies.
The idea of being part of a political movement that does this is actually repulsive to me. This repulsion is itself irrationally strong, I know on some level that I’m not a superior clear-minded being compared to those who can get something powerful out of a myth. I just personally hate it.
Likely it is a political weakness and victory requires some myth-making. But if this is actually how people want to live — a good story matters more than reality — I can’t help but feel as though a large part of the country is partially insane.
The enlightenment was fueled by the idea that we can understand the universe by using our minds, and was informed by scientific discoveries that countered the claims on ultimate truth made by the church. This eventually led to the conclusion that rule by divine right or religious authority was illegitimate, and it's not an accident that the idea of democratic self-governance came from that world. The idea that one can devise noble lies to counter the lies of the nihilistic right seems fundamentally flawed to me.
Spot on here, John:
"From the standpoint of mythmaking, the problem with Russiagate and the idea of Trump as a Russian asset, probably the closest thing to a Sorelian myth the liberals were able to generate in recent years, was that it was just a little too sophisticated: it was for upper-middle-class people who read the Washington Post and enjoy spy thrillers. It was also too optimistic: it spoke to a utopian belief in bureaucratic competence triumphant, rather than years of bitter political struggle against an occupying enemy. (Sorel teaches that pessimism can be a strength.) When the factual basis started to look a little shaky, most liberals shrank away in embarrassment."
The factual basis may be a little shaky, because the factual basis of any espionage operation is impossible to disambiguate by its design. I haven't sharnk away in embarrassment and think the current machinations of the nerd reich and the nature of their coordination with Putin, Xi, MBS may present an opportunity to re-visit propagating an updated version of this narrative. Because it just happens to be FUCKING TRUE!!!
This helped me put into focus something I’ve been trying to articulate for a while, which is that the discourse has split into what feel like two distinct languages. Members of the “myth” tribe are uninterested in, perhaps incapable of operating empirically. Members of the empiricism tribe treat myths as marginal. This is why I am skeptical of your remedy to the extent that you propose the left needs to develop more a compelling narrative, if not a mythology. Just as empiricism doesn’t really compute with people of the myth tribe, myths don’t resonate with empirical people.
Religious folks are mired in myth and thus primed to respond to that language. The left, meanwhile, leans much more towards empiricism, and so any compelling narrative would still have to be fundamentally, rational, and empirical.
"One advantage we have is the truth on our side: they really are the party of rapacious oligarchs who are stripping the country for parts." This line reminds me of reading George Lakoff 20 years ago, mainly his 1996 (?) edition of Moral Politics and subsequent articles and interviews. Since then, he's seemed to become niche and trendy in some circles, but I do recall him saying something almost identical about framing and spin/lying: Dems could frame to activate their own moral worldview in people (or myth-make in the present context) without becoming the enemy in large part because truth and facts (rational, logical and empirical) were on our side. The framing approach may seem technocratic, and to the extent it was ever taken up by Dem pols, it probably became that, just another knob to tweak, but I don't think it's too far a stretch to see a connection here.
Liberal myth that will re-capture the public imagination when it sours on this illiberal disaster in the making: Green New Deal.
Evolution isn’t a perfect method. It can adapt and improve upon only that which it is given. For many humans, a first response to fear, especially fear of death, is to seek the cause of the fear. That may be an animal, perhaps a large cat, hiding in the bush, about to jump out and bite you in the neck. The fear we carry is very ancient. We were once prey to much larger and more aggressive predators. And equally ancient is the response to fear: looking for someone or something to blame for causing the fear. Sometimes survival depends upon split-second decisions. As our cultures have become increasingly complex, we still look for simple, immediate reasons for our fear. Our so-called rational nature is new, and not fully established in our makeup. To think rationally is something we learn. But the first response to fear is to find whoever or whatever is responsible for the fear and to attack. If a sabretooth tiger is lurking in the bush, you have no time for Bacon’s scientific method or Freud’s Psychoanalytical theory, to ask, Why am I afraid?, but must respond immediately. Evolution has made us flawed creatures.
Even the most rational, most highly developed technical mind coexists with an emotional, irrational, animal nature, one which responds to a good story about a hero who combats the Sabretooth Tiger threatening the hero's family, or the “wholly rapacious and corrupt government hoarding treasure” like the mythic creature in the illustration, or the enemies Q-Anon will reveal at the bottom of a rabbit hole. Everyone wants to be a hero, to slay the tiger or dragon. Coming up with stories like that is as old as men and women sitting around a fire during the Stone Age.
To come up with a story equally compelling is a worthy challenge, perhaps a fantasy or science fiction story equal to Game of Thrones about good governance, without the misogyny and warmongering. And right there, our liberal morality weakens the plot. What is a moral liberal to do?
Lets have a contest.