All in the Mind

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States gave American leftists a thrilling idea. Now, by "leftists" I don't mean people like me who merely favor a slew of progressive policies, but people for whom the policies are sacraments on an ideological altar.

The thrilling idea was that Trump, in his unprecedented awfulness, had at last opened a window of opportunity for revolution. Never had the Left been able to sell itself to many voters as an improvement on what they had. Even in the time of George W. Bush, who was pretty bad, there was no market to speak of for anything beyond center-left. The True Left had by then put down roots in the wilderness, where it ran a sort of alternative Christmas shop offering jeremiads year-round. Now, suddenly, jeremiads were in. This was either the end of democracy or the prelude to an election cycle in which anyone should be able to defeat the incumbent and his collaborators. To the Left, that prospect was a mesmerizing light in the sky, a sign that might appear once in many lifetimes. When conditions were right for anyone to win control of the US Government, the Left had a chance. The day had come to spring out of the wilderness and take the tide at the flood.

Each new low in Trump's behavior heightened the illusion of opportunity, not to say destiny. For illusion is what it was. America was in a fine political ferment, but it didn't follow that the status of the Left had changed. As we continue to see, widespread loathing of a figure like Donald Trump does not entail a newfound affinity with Marx-adjacent intellectuals. Discontent with a deepening Gilded Age does not entail a proletarian spirit of revolution. The popularity of policy ideas found on the leftist agenda does not entail openness to the agenda as packaged and sold by people better known for niche preoccupations, tone-deaf slogans, social vigilantism, and a dim view of America.

Meanwhile, more than four in ten Americans were being drawn into the vortex of a competing illusion: that hallucinatory world to which Trump's mountebank show was the entrance. It resembled nothing so much as a carnival midway, where coarse spiels and insistent tunes can excite you against your better judgement even in daylight. When night falls and garish lights come on, better judgement recedes as into a past life.

In the beginning was the Lie. There was Donald Trump's master-businessman persona, crafted with his father's connivance to disguise a career of blundering and irresponsibility; an imposture that Trump rehearsed in New York City before dinning it into the nationwide audience of a television show. Next came his brazen falsity as a political actor. He promoted the canard that Barack Obama was not a US citizen by birth. In his own run for president, he kept up a deceitful patter that dovetailed with lies purveyed by internet trolls (including agents of a Russian disinformation campaign). From the moment of his inauguration, he turned the presidency into a theater of make-believe. The common politician's laxity with truth paled beside Trump's assault on the fabric of reality. He apparently knew, in spite of himself, that reality at such an altitude of public life was a medium in which a man like him could save face only by constant disruption. Surrounded by people far more intelligent, competent, and disciplined than he, Trump had to show that intelligence, competence, and discipline counted for nothing against a charmed life.

And then there was QAnon. It was by no means the genesis of crackpot conspiracy theories, but it became their apotheosis for millions. No pot was ever so intriguingly cracked as the cranium of Q. No witch's brew was ever so turbid and thus so satisfactory to the imagination. You could go on for the rest of your life grappling with its riddles, teasing out its possibilities, burrowing through its dead ends, and savoring the freemasonry with its other believers. Where does the movement stand now? On May 27, 2021, The New York Times reported that a poll released on that day showed QAnon to be as popular among Americans as some major religions. Less than two weeks later, the Forbes article "'Q' Hasn't Posted In Six Months – But Some QAnon Followers Still Keep the Faith" stated,

Many QAnon believers lost faith after January 20, when President Joe Biden was inaugurated and their big day, predictably, never came. Since then, some have proposed new dates for when Trump will be reinstated, a conspiracy the former president reportedly has embraced.

The person known only as Q and claiming to be a "government insider" is, or was, what amounts to the high priest of a cult. Q fell silent soon after the US election of 2020. The reports cited here leave it unclear whether the cult is fading away or settling in, especially in view of the Forbes writer's observation that

Most Q activity has moved underground after social media companies cracked down on the conspiracy in January following the Capitol riot. A report published by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab last month concluded that QAnon content is "evaporating" from the mainstream Web.

The author of a book on QAnon interviewed for the Forbes article, Mike Rothschild, said he thought the latest "drop" (message) from Q, posted on December 8, 2020, would be the last, "since the Q movement has outgrown the need for new drops." That sounds more like settling in than fading away.

"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds," declared Edmund Burke. He didn't live to see QAnon, a farrago of sick imaginings that makes superstition look like the caprice of hale and hearty minds. Nor could he have foreseen the crowd of madnesses that now vie for pride of place in our forum. The selection is wide in itself. Compared with the belief that there's a Satanist cabal of elite liberal pedophiliac cannibals running the world, the mere belief that Donald Trump can fix things or that America is due for a socialist awakening is nothing to be ashamed of. But that's faint praise. Americans need healthier alternatives; at least the examples of sane liberals with the self-assurance to brush off bad company and sane conservatives who can harry their captors effectively.

Our forum is also crowded with great problems. Some, such as climate change or infectious disease, exist in a separate dimension from belief. We must meet them there. Social problems test our ability to reason together conscientiously. When problem-solving entails moral choices, we're obliged to consult a moral compass. All of this presupposes that we operate on principles more common and constant — and humbling — than our passions or our visions. It presupposes that we're not only in touch with reality but working with it, trying to make things thrive in it.

In our time, bodies of illusion have become like cloud banks that stretch across the American sky until they meet, overcasting the reality on the ground and charging the air with static. Reality remains, and wise people continue to work with it, but the clouds impose a sickening atmosphere and a distorting light on everything. The aggregations of people that embody the illusions form an arbitrary political elite.

The label rightist hardly suits an aggregation so crudely partisan that political content becomes secondary. However, it will do. The main opposing aggregation is leftist enough but similarly tribalistic beneath its veneer of intellectuality. Rightists immerse themselves in fluid certitude. Leftists jump jerkily between modes of self-justification: they know the will of the people; if you fault their unpopular ways, you're a defender of the status quo; progressive advocacy is a higher calling than electoral politics; mind you, the electorate is progressive at heart and only awaits more stirring advocacy. As a last resort, or even a first, there’s always the what-about dodge. ("You object to anti-Semitism at Southern Cal? What about settler colonialism in Palestine?")

White-nationalist rightists don't care whether they have a majority of Americans with them or not (having been led to believe that a majority juggernaut of Others is coming to run them down). The nascent effort to understand non-white conservatives and moderates, which could help us view the political scene realistically, runs up against the pat leftist response that such people don't know what's good for them. Theorists and activists for far-left movements long ago acquired a mental mechanism that accounts for any diversity of opinion among their intended constituents as the product of an enemy's divide-and-conquer strategy. Today that mechanism meshes with other cogs of a similar stamp to keep a new history always in the making in leftist minds. Rightists have their mental maelstrom. Leftists have their mental clockwork.

Seldom has America needed the best efforts of clear, free minds as it does now. Never have clear, free minds been overshadowed by bodies of illusion as they are now. Up among the cloud banks, the defense of Valhalla contends with the epoch of social revolution. Down in reality, tillers of the fields work in wintry darkness but also record-breaking heat. And no relief in sight.

Bad Company

One night in the tropics, I was riding in the back of a jeep with another American. The jeep was a public conveyance, and the driver was a taciturn local man we didn’t know. In those days, the country was in a state which some members of the American community likened to our own Wild West. Another faction likened it to Prohibition-era Chicago. Attitudes toward Americans ran the gamut, and a pottering but homicidal insurgency complicated things. In short, this was not the juncture of place and time that one would choose for hurtling through the night in a jeep with a stranger at the wheel. A taciturn one, too. I focused my mind as never before on wishing myself home in bed.

The other passenger was a man known to all his acquaintance (but not to the driver) for a perverse brand of humor. Placed in a position requiring tact and circumspection, he’d turn garrulous and insouciant. Now he genially declared that we were CIA agents. He claimed – genially, again – that he had a gun. I don’t remember what else he said; only that he said it all with mortifying plausibility. The man was glibness itself. I looked daggers at him in silence, unsure whether it would help or hurt to admit that we were not really CIA agents. As it turned out, silence at least did no harm. The driver delivered us to our destination without incident, never having let on how much of my companion’s prattle he believed.

Today, liberal-minded Americans are journeying through dark, dangerous historical territory with companions who seem bent on stacking the odds against safe arrival. Unlike my companion in the jeep, however, these have no sense of humor at all. Whereas he was an irrepressible menace, they are repressive ones. Whereas he waltzed across boundaries, they labor to carve intricate patterns of them in our minds. Their prattle is not impromptu nonsense, but scripted cant: the language of the radical left.

Before proceeding, it’s necessary to take a stand on two questions:

First, does the most leftist element in American politics lie outside the Democratic Party? No. It ought to. Illiberal people ought to do what they can with a party of their own, and not try to operate through the main liberal party. However, everything left of center as far as the eye can see has become the implicit responsibility of the Democrats. Voters tend to think so. Republicans help them think so. Many Democrats confirm it by striving to “sanewash” radical positions instead of rebutting or ridiculing them. Radical leftists are going to be seen as our companions (for I am a Democrat) as long as we don’t energetically dissociate ourselves from them. We need to care what trouble they court, because we’re going to be in it with them.

Second, are extreme progressives -- misandrous feminists, prejudiced “antiracists” – in fact Marxists? Leninists? Marxist-Leninists? Yes, that sort of thing if only in a generic way. They’ve imbibed red ideology, assimilated it, and adapted its forms to their own purposes. Old Bolsheviks may dislike the substitution of biological class for economic class within the red political strategy, but to these activists the strategy is the thing of value. They understand how credit accrues to people situated as members of an oppressed group and how one can discredit innocent others by submerging them in the notion of an oppressor group. Then there’s the value of the Marxian mise-en-scène with its conceptual scale and its True Left vocabulary. The extremists like it for itself, no doubt, but also for the way it sells them to insecure progressives. And they share Lenin’s appreciation of agitprop.

Race warriors of the left are using the word antiracism the way old-fashioned communists use peace: as a fossilized name for their own line of offerings, not as a living lexeme. They could bring their language within the bounds of honesty by using counterracism instead, but that would be hinting that their project is one of racist competition. As it is, they’re being called out as neoracists. That the label antiracism is common currency even among critics of the movement shows that it lacks the force of anything more than a brand.

Hard-left strategists have made other dubious investments in agitprop. In their determination to remake society so as to cut out formidable rivals for power or position, they’re dismissing more and more values, behaviors, and even intellectual resources as relics of an oppressive culture. Their most conspicuous flourish (so far), a push to rework mathematics instruction on sociopolitical principles, is part of a larger defeatist response to inequality in education: bringing claims against difficult subjects, schools, and tests instead of preparing children for achievement. Meanwhile, other countries continue to pursue global standards unfettered. Most American voters will grasp this picture in full, and many will penalize the Democratic Party for the perversity of its far-left cohort.

That was once a reasonable prediction. It then became an importunate specter. Now, within the past two months and with increasing frequency, The New York Times has run multiple items that, taken together, signal an institutional shift from a preponderance of sympathy with radical advocates to a preponderance of concern about Democrats’ keeping such company. Their unifying theme is the question, sometimes made roughly explicit, “Can the left wing face facts?” The principal facts are that demographic change does not look like delivering power to the left as expected; that hard-left activists’ recent signature issue, defunding the police, lacks a grassroots constituency; that people who make signature issues of such unpopular things pose an electoral liability to their party; and that winning elections is more conducive to progress than walking over hot coals.

Here’s a more fundamental question: Can the Democratic Party stop fearing its left wing? When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib won primary elections in 2018, the US news media — hungry as always for sensations and in some cases for progressive energy — began treating them as rising stars of the Democratic Party. That treatment not only tended strongly to self-fulfilling prophecy, but also ignored the fact that radicals can rise within a party and thereby make the party less relevant to the country. Though American public opinion had been growing more liberal for years, it didn’t follow that democratic-socialist firebrands represented the future.

None of the four newcomers contributed to the Democrats’ net congressional gain that year. All took over safe seats. Ocasio-Cortez ran her primary race against a complacent, long-sitting white male incumbent, attributes that were salient liabilities in a progressive New York City district in 2018. The candidates who flipped seats for the Democrats were — of necessity — more moderate, pragmatic ones capable of appealing to people who might vote either Democratic or Republican. There was no cause to mistake the Blue Wave of 2018 for a progressive wave, other than intra-progressive boosterism aggravated by faith in a deus ex machina: the mobilization of new voters on an epic scale.

The media-made stars of 2018 grew so big in the imagination that within two years even the dean of progressives, Bernie Sanders, coveted their support. Ocasio-Cortez, particularly, was accorded the status of kingmaker to those in need of young, leftist new voters. Sanders’s need was great. When Ocasio-Cortez endorsed him, his joy was almost palpable. However, as the campaign wore on he lamented the difficulty of getting those young leftists, who undoubtedly liked him, to become voters. Unable to do so sufficiently, he was up against a divergence reported by Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy in the Times in April of 2020: that while progressive Democrats predominated on social media, most Democratic voters were more moderate. Sanders’s army was too much like the one Shakespeare provided to Henry V: a mighty host of “youth on fire” somewhere offstage.

Americans now in their youth may get to be dependable voters. They may at the same time remain markedly more progressive than past generations. However, it’s probably a safe bet that the majority will apply themselves to promising ends and means more than to ideological affirmation. No doubt they are the future; but the nature of their future politics remains to be seen. At any rate, they are not now entitled to deference within the Democratic Party. It’s not as if they’d done somebody a favor by supporting Joe Biden against the abominable Donald Trump.

But it’s not progressive youth that makes bad company for the Democratic Party. It’s the class of ideology merchants, the competitively avant-garde academics and activists for whom progressives of all ages comprise a market. No major American political party should be guided by dogma, much less by fashions in dogma. It should be guided by noble instincts that find their way forward through sound political transactions. The Republican Party has dropped all pretense of being such a party, and yet it can successfully appeal to moderate voters when abetted by a Democratic Party that allows itself to be associated with dumbfounding slogans or with a dark vision of the national character. Despite appearances to the contrary, jovial politicians are mentally superior to saturnine activists.

Politically competent Democrats must break up the ideology merchants’ game without further delay. The mid-term elections of 2022 could isolate President Biden in the seat of executive authority, which is not an adequate position from which to consolidate the public’s trust in Democratic stewardship. The presidential election of 2024 could then bring anything.

Earnestly sanewashing crackpot rhetoric and making excuses for campaigns against intellectual freedom is not the answer. The response that we Democrats must make to our odious companions is the one we were often urged to make to Donald Trump: ridicule. Open contempt. If we are genuine progressives, we should take a back seat to nobody in mocking the ham-handed revolutionism of the ideology merchants. Let us do all we can to differentiate them from the Democratic Party in the public consciousness. Republicans may be in thrall to Trump and Trumpists, but we needn’t accept thralldom to radical leftists. Trumpists have got the votes to ruin most of their co-partisans. Radical leftists have not. They’re merely messing with progressive minds.

Democrats needn’t worry whether they can in good conscience break with people who portray themselves as struggling for social justice. The things for which the ideology merchants are struggling include, on the one hand, individual advancement in careers as academics or activists and, on the other, the suppression of individual agency in the rest of us. (Anti-cognitivism has long been integral to Marxist-Leninist work with the intelligentsia.) The merchants’ stock in trade includes neoracism and other forms of biological bigotry. The effect of their spiel on the electorate is to hinder the establishment of a sustainable liberal regime. They’re always throwing a lifeline to the Republicans, as Lindsey Graham puts it in Bob Woodward’s Rage. Democrats owe them nothing.

Imagine, instead, a political scene in which the Republican Party remains as thoroughly outlandish as it is now and the Democratic Party has precipitated its outlandish element into a crank faction without influence. The legitimate Democratic Party will be a hospitable environment, and the only one, for all those voters, donors, and operatives who can live with some degree of compromise. For purposes of actual progress, that kind of company will do.

What Am I, Then?

On the American political spectrum, am I a radical leftist, a progressive, a liberal, a centrist, or what? As a Democrat, what way forward should I urge on my party?

I’m for a robust welfare state. I favor redistribution or predistribution of wealth and income. I say that nothing can justify a condition in which some people corner enormous amounts of money while others, through no fault of their own, must spend their lives struggling to make ends meet. What I advocate is not socialism with a human face, but free enterprise (including its manifestation in capitalism) harnessed to the common good.

In principle, I favor a single-payer health insurance system. In practice, I approve of a universal multi-payer system like Germany's or Japan’s. No one should remain uncovered for lack of money.

I advocate a universal basic income, primarily because robotics and artificial intelligence are slicing through the traditional discourse of economic injustice. Blue-collar, white-collar, even white-coat jobs are in line for automation. Societies will need to pay their members a dividend out of the profits derived from productive activity. No, this is not tomorrow’s full-blown reality; but the bud is opening, and we’d better pay attention.

If I ruled the world, there would be no guns. Since I don't, I desire thoroughgoing gun control. Aim to repeal the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Implement tight regulation of the ownership of firearms. Drastically restrict the types of firearm that may be owned, and aggressively confiscate all others now in circulation.

What am I, so far?

I see immigration as a boon to American society, even apart from its economic value. I also think immigration needs to be regulated on principles that are both humane and realistic. Give DACA Americans a path to citizenship. Don't separate the children of aspiring immigrants from their parents. However, no political party should simply put its imprimatur on illegality. Require all immigrants to meet legal requirements or face deportation. Drastically reform U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or abolish it and start over. There are no contradictions here.

All things considered, I think abortion should be available at the woman's discretion. I wholeheartedly advocate access to safe means of contraception.

I oppose any restriction on sexual relations or marriage between consenting adults on grounds of sexual orientation.

Though racism, being a fundamental evil, has no rightful place on the political spectrum, it does intrude. I say racial discrimination is not merely wrong. If we fully grasp our own humanity, we feel racial discrimination to be unnatural; and yet not merely that, either. The notion of race itself evaporates, leaving behind only people. Let's rid society of racial injustice and go on to rid ourselves of any mental habit of racial discrimination. Let's awaken to our humanity.

Climate change is another strange subject to find in a discussion of political persuasions. There was a time when prominent Republicans understood it and worried about it as much as Democrats. It's been decades since scientists began warning that action was urgently needed. Dire consequences are now assured. To avert the very direst ones, we must bring enormous resources and rigorous compulsions to bear on this problem without delay.

What am I, then?

I'd say that in a vacuum, alone with my ideals and a political agenda, I'm progressive bordering on outré. Amid the hurly-burly, however, I'm a bit pragmatic -- more serious about progress than about progressivism. Consequently, I’m at odds with the type of progressive who seems to belong atop a barricade with feet spread and arms akimbo, or one arm akimbo and the other pointing into the future. This progressive type is the bane of progress.

Liberals in America achieve the most for the cause of social justice when their politics are rooted in the cause of economic justice and governed by consensus-building. The factor that's defeating their potential today is the influence of academics. Outside of academia, people of different colors, ethnicities, sexual identities, and ages may see the path to a better day leading through consensus and cooperation, but in liberal circles they find that path beset by marauding theoreticians.

Why theorize conflict instead of building power through concord? To secure one’s position in the sociopolitical vanguard. It’s an old story. Ambitious progressives want to be not just more advanced than common liberals, but every bit as advanced as any other progressive. They’re competing to catch the wave of the future. For the Democratic Party, as other observers have pointed out, the problem with this competition is that it's essentially internal. Starting from progressive assumptions, it proceeds to over-theorization and ideological rigor, thereby rarefying the Democratic appeal instead of expanding it.

Those of us with visions of progress should focus not on ruling the Democratic ecosystem, but on developing it as the main habitat of American political life. So squelch the morbid tendency to biological class warfare. Discourage academics from trying to turn the struggle against racism into a proprietary concession based on a pedagogical relationship with the rest of society. Reject flamboyant slogans. Don't dream of normalizing the word socialist. Give up arguments like "Nowhere else in the world is this kind of talk considered radical." Nowhere else in the world are Democrats charged with winning hearts and minds. They'd better get used to dealing with America, where much is possible in the way of progress if it’s not impeded by performative progressivism.

The elections of 2020 (setting aside the unique presidential contest) gave Democrats a chance to recognize a problem which they can solve without sacrificing anything of value, one that's independent of issues: the problem of political tactics and attitudes that repel many Americans. One can work for every kind of justice without lobbing verbal cherry bombs, propagating taboos and shibboleths, or conceptually demolishing the nation that is to be improved. These are procedural choices, not integral parts of any progressive agenda. It's true that some voters, while economically progressive, are culturally conservative and therefore challenging to reach. Many others, though, are open to progressive policy across the board but can't abide an overbearing presentation of it. We progressives must stop gratuitously making it hard for those people to join hands with us. More than that, we must allow our political selves to evolve in new directions.

Time To Walk the Earth

The brain of a bird knows that it takes more than one wing to fly. In America’s Democratic Party, one wing – the leftmost – has been striving not only to stay airborne over the heads of the electorate but to pull those heads up, into its draft, and fly away with them. It hasn’t worked.

Progressives, as the high-flyers distinguish themselves from plodding liberals, got a word of caution from the electorate in the 2018 mid-term elections. A word was not sufficient, and so the point was driven home in 2020. In the mid-terms, progressives did make a conspicuous showing in several congressional primary elections, in two cases by upsetting old-guard Democratic incumbents. All the districts in question were safely Democratic, which meant that victory in the primary election led to victory in the general. The result was a gain for the progressive wing, but a wash for the party as a whole. Along the way, these political newcomers had captured the imagination of the press as Donald Trump had captured it two years before. They continued to ride their granted star status after taking office. Those politicians and journalists who were not among the star-struck had to gasp for oxygen when pointing out that all of the candidates responsible for the power-shifting Blue Wave of Democratic congressional victories had run decidedly non-progressive campaigns. The real national electorate was talking to the Democratic Party, but the progressive wing continued listening to an ideal one.

In 2020, the Democrats’ two-year-old House delegation of 235 seats dwindled to 222 (four more than a bare majority), including two seats to be vacated by people joining the new administration. Democratic primary voters had already given the party’s presidential nomination to the least progressive candidate in a large field, the ultimate old-guard Democrat. Joe Biden won the presidency while many Democratic candidates for other offices suffered unexpected losses or struggled to win. Biden won the popular vote in a landslide and the electoral vote by a comfortable margin, but one that hinged on narrow victories in crucial states. Any of his rivals in the primary almost certainly would have lost. This was against a president whose personal defeat was many voters’ main objective. Logically, it bore no relation to the choices people would make in “down-ballot” races; and logic pitilessly asserted itself.

The Democratic Party’s success in 2020 was limited to benefiting from a popular revolt against the incumbent president, and the scope of that success was restricted about as severely as the voters could manage. They surgically removed Donald Trump from the White House while declining to trust Democrats with much power elsewhere. This looks like aversion, but aversion to what? Progressives are saying, Don’t look at us. However, they should acknowledge that many eyes are in fact on them and try to see what others see.

Bob Woodward’s second book on the presidency of Donald Trump, Rage, relates something Senator Lindsey Graham says he told Trump as the election of 2020 approached:

If it weren't for the Democratic Party, the Republican Party would fold. They always keep us in the game. They're able to throw us a lifeline. So this defund the police, occupation of Seattle and this crazy [expletive] is going to put you back in the game.

It did, too. Trump lost only after outperforming the expectations of most polltakers. He lost despite the exertions of progressives who would speak in bombastic language and then try to tone it down — or not — with a lecture on its proper interpretation. The lecture naturally reached a smaller audience than the bombast and with its effect diminished by a counterpoint of assertions that, no, “Defund the police” meant nothing less than “Abolish the police.“ Meanwhile, the odd savant would volunteer that looting is a valid political act. The Republicans took their pick.

It's not just racial politics. From the politics of gender to those of generation, arch-progressive thought in recent years has followed principles of division and estrangement. Essentially simpatico people now come under as much pressure for their biological situations as enemies do for their hostile designs. Any past lapse in political virtue can swallow up one’s present. Only the future holds promise, because then the Left (that's the left with bells on) will have forgotten its current manias and moved on to new ones.

Trump got back in the game but still lost. Other Republicans won or came close against Democrats who found themselves plagued by a widespread view of their party as a pack of radicals. When voters heard the Republican canard to that effect, many heard no more than confirmation of the story already told in left-wing Democrats’ words and acted out in their attitudes. It was as Graham had said to Trump. In the run-up to the election, there were signs that voters who had been leaning Democratic till the cry of “Socialism!” went round were abruptly changing their minds.

Since the election, the Left has continued giving Republican propagandists choice material to work with. The New York Times, which shows sympathy with the progressive avant-garde in its editorial policy, recently remarked in a news analysis,

For now, many ambitious Republicans are glad to embrace the element of Trumpism that is most animating to the right: seizing on the most extreme ideas of the left. Such oppositional politics allows party leaders to draw attention away from Mr. Trump, reminds voters of what gives them pause about Democrats and has effectively become the adhesive binding Republicans together.

The writers cite as an example a report from San Francisco of one of those epiphanic drives to strip the name of some historical figure from a public institution. The historical figure is Abraham Lincoln. According to the chairman of the committee behind the drive, which is looking to airbrush blots from the escutcheons of forty-four schools, Lincoln “did not show through policy or rhetoric that Black lives ever mattered to [him] outside of human capital and as casualties of wealth building.” The mayor, to her credit, is not on board; nor are many other San Franciscans. That doesn’t stop rightists from having a field day simply by disseminating available truth. To propagandize would be to paint the lily.

If such material came from outside the left boundary of the Democratic Party, it would be a headache not of the party’s own making. Republicans’ use of it against the Democrats would then be deceitful propaganda. However, that is not the case. The cause of the Democrats’ headache is internal, not to say inherent. It’s an offshoot of liberalism in a party from which offshoots can’t hope to separate themselves and still thrive in American electoral politics. Instead, they try to grow within the party.

The internal dynamics of a conservative party reward constancy. Those of a liberal party reward ferment. As moral endeavor is vital to modern liberalism, it naturally becomes the medium of competition among liberals. To be a leader in propagating the partisan consensus is good. To be the author of some new development in it is better. This is also the way among academics, and liberal circles are rife with academics.

Here we enter progressive society. Academics are not the whole of it, but they set its tone. Members who are not professional intellectuals tend to be amateur ones and engage in the same evolutionary striving. So, for example, a perfectly intelligible campaign against racism begets a new campaign against monuments to the Confederacy – again, intelligible in essence – which begets general hostilities against people of the past who lived in benighted times and were themselves somewhat benighted. Each front has its self-made commander eager for distinction. Others’ misgivings about scorched-earth warfare offer a chance to prove oneself stalwart by leaving no earth unscorched. And that is how Abraham Lincoln arrives on the ash heap of history.

Academics' political activism, like their scholarship, is characterized both by the personal quest for a place on the leading edge and by habits of classification, naming, and reductive theorization. Add the legacy of Marxist critique, and you get activism that emulates feudal strife. Progressives’ critics call them “illiberal” with perfect justice, not irony. The progressive offshoot is not an ultraliberal one. The words liberal and progressive alert us from the start that they’re not going to mark stages on a single scale, because they stand for different ideas of good. The liberal idea is freedom from pernicious forms and forces. The progressive idea is advancement to a state without contradictions. Where liberals trust in minds, progressives trust in the management of them. Once progressives have, for example, noted anomalies in customs pertaining to sex and gender, they can’t rest till all anomalies have been stamped out, down to the last pronoun. Once confirmed in a secularist belief system, they can’t tolerate any vestige of religious thinking — down to the last “God only knows.” Not to put too fine a point on it, they’re a bunch of obsessives.

They’re also children of Marx. It’s no use quibbling over degrees of conscious subscription to Marxist doctrine. Marx lives in the idea of the oppressor class, now applied as readily to a race or a sex or an intersection of categories (“heterosexual cisgender old white male”) as to the bourgeoisie. Stalin lives, too, in the conformism and the penchant for indoctrination. Mao lives in the public shaming, with its prompted self-denunciation and its professional banishment. Lenin lives in the conceited cynicism that produces sophistry to order. Sometimes old-school leftism announces itself outright, as in Socialist Feminism, or hints at its pedigree, as in the critical of Critical Race Theory.

Any practised apologist for Castro’s Cuba, when pressed about the regime’s specific evils, would blithely fall back on some general, high-toned non sequitur (“Is it so wrong to seek economic and social justice?”). The people who are giving the Democratic Party its headache today often make exactly the same move. When the slogan “Defund the police” was criticized by Barack Obama and others for having injured the party electorally, Representative Rashida Tlaib added insult:

Rosa Parks was vilified & attacked for her civil disobedience. She was targeted. It’s hard seeing the same people who uplift her courage, attack the movement for Black Lives that want us to prioritize health, funding of schools & ending poverty, rather than racist police systems.

This kind of insult is wonderfully intricate. The speaker replaces your argument with a straw man; thinks you’re too stupid to notice; or thinks you’ll notice, get the attribution of stupidity, and take offense; if so, doesn’t mind offending you; and doesn’t care if you know it.

The American public sees it all, but the Left doesn’t care. It’s playing to a crowd of the imagination: a new electorate that will surge forth and throw the old one onto the ash heap of history with Abraham Lincoln. First, the young intelligentsia will assert themselves in droves. Then, stirred by their example, the slumbering-giantry of ordinary people will awaken to their own progressive nature and prove America to be in fact a leftward-yearning nation. After all, opinion surveys show broad support for one progressive policy after another.

What’s wrong with that vision, as the displaced conservative Ross Douthat has warned us both before and since the election, is that affirmative answers to individual questions objectively phrased by polltakers don’t add up to anything like a favorable view of the Left. The moment people find that they’re being offered a comprehensively progressive diet, they recoil from the hand that wants to feed them. They know the type. If they’re old enough, they’ve been observing the progressive type in embryo (the liberal elite) for decades. The big problem is not the policy. It’s the type.

Preachy. Smug. Glib. Far gone in theorizing and wordcraft. Convinced that they’re God’s gift to the world, except that they neither believe in God nor believe any good of people who believe in God. Anyway, bent on setting the world straight as only they know how. Down on America. Overbearing, pompous. Cold and hot; never warm.

Going into the elections of 2020, the Democratic Party had high hopes of winning not only the presidency but also an expanded majority in the House of Representatives. The polls even showed Democrats ahead in so many senatorial races that it seemed likely they would gain a clear majority in the Senate as well. This second, decisive Blue Wave would enable them to advance their agenda unimpeded, once they had negotiated their intra-party differences. The progressive wing made it known that they, as rightful owners of the party, expected a large concession of influence from the anticipated Biden administration. They regarded Biden as the necessary front man for a party still struggling with its transition to their kind of politics. Once in office, he was to listen to them. They would complete the transition by driving the agenda.

They might have begun to doubt this projection of history months before, when they had heard their champion, the democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders, account for a disappointing turn in the primary race.

This is a campaign which is trying to bring, and it is not easy, people who have not been involved in the political process. So if you might want to ask me, maybe as a follow-up question, “Have we been as successful as I would hope in bringing young people in?” And the answer is no. We're making some progress, but historically, everybody knows that young people do not vote in the kind of numbers that older people vote in.

The political engagement of youth was a crucial premise of the whole progressive project, but here was new evidence that progressive youth had been punching above its electoral weight in the contest for attention on social media. Nearly a year earlier, Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy of The New York Times had reported a disparity between progressives’ presence online and in the Democratic Party as a whole. To gain power, they would have to overcome a numerical disadvantage by combined feats of turnout and proselytism or else bring their own politics closer to the mainstream. It would not be enough simply to claim ownership of the future. However, the turnout hurdle was probably too high in any case; and winning friends was not their forte. The progressive cause continued to express itself in lecturing and scolding. (The number of people who perversely rebel against advice to wear a mask during the current pandemic might have been smaller if that advice hadn’t triggered associations with leftist nannyism.)

The Democratic disappointment in the general election of 2020 has not brought the party’s left wing down to earth, so far. As Joe Biden has formed his administration, progressives have instructed him in ways to implement their agenda and pressed him about the biological diversity of his appointments. They show no sign of awareness that their position has been weakened by the electoral consequences of trying to popularize socialism and to turn a broad movement for racial justice into a vehicle for radical politics.

There’s no longer any excuse but vanity for continuing to listen to an ideal electorate and not the real one. The Left’s ideal electorate, millions of people awaiting the progressive call as one, is a projection of overweening ego. The real electorate has millions of different minds of its own, and not enough of them cotton to the progressive type. Many are well-disposed toward items on the progressive agenda, but not toward the political culture that identifies the agenda with itself. Some people fear that culture; others dismiss it. Here are two big reasons.

Monomania
Progressives, seen as others see them, are people who live in the grip of fads and fixations. Great things come and go, but while a thing is great it must be taken to its logical extreme. On top of the logic, there’s a personal need to be as far advanced as anyone else. There’s also a somewhat radical view of ends and means.

For example, once the #MeToo movement had begun, progressive supporters swiftly bid each other up until a flat “Believe women” was the standard of seriousness about fighting sexual aggression against women. A woman’s word was to be sufficient for establishing guilt, at least in the court of public opinion. But only in the realm of sexual offense; and, presumably, only when accuser and accused were not both women. A woman bringing a charge of sexual assault, unlike the same woman bringing a charge of non-sexual assault or of trespassing or of theft, would be entitled to outright belief.

A movement to believe accusers outright could never have gained purchase in any other context, but this was the context célèbre of the day. So we got a revolving assortment of rationales devoted to justifying “Believe women”: that sexual abuse is a particularly grave offense, though not so grave as to warrant safeguards against false accusation; that “Believe women” simply means one should start by believing women (which is simply begging the question); that “Believe women” is just a way of saying one should listen to women (which it isn’t); that, anyway, #MeToo is the great thing now, and sexual offenses are notoriously hard to prove, so we can shrug off the usual abhorrence of lynch law. After all, it’s not physical lynching, and it’ll put the fear in men.

As with “Defund the police”, a slogan was chosen for its toughness as the right stuff to give the troops, then half-heartedly tenderized and minced for general consumption, and ultimately — inevitably — left to work its mischief on public digestion of a progressive cause. Worthy causes deserve more intelligent management. However, progressive activism is characterized by compulsive mismanagement and by a tragicomic swarming of bees in the bonnet: cultural appropriation, microagression; secularism, abortion; the politics of race and of gender. The feminist movement alone has gone through a series of radical assertions. For a while, it asserted that there was absolutely no difference between men and women other than the obvious physical ones. Then it switched to asserting that women were the superior sex (wiser, more courageous, less egoistic, better at cooperation) and viewing men as the cadet branch of the human family, if not a malign alien species. Then came the challenge of transgender womanhood. Here were people without a woman’s experience of life, without a baby girl’s lot, but with a female identity and a burgeoning presence on the social-justice agenda. A period of confusion ended with public feminists collectively rallying to the latest cause, but not before some had declared that trans women were not in fact women. The new orthodoxy soon trampled them. Born women who wished to debate the nature of sexual identity, let alone hew to the core assumptions of feminism, now faced summary ostracism as transphobic reactionaries.

The proof of a sound progressive is the ability to leap from one squirrel cage to another without missing a step.

Platonism
If American progressivism has its manifest culture of fads and fixations, it also has its underlying grand illusion and its sleight-of-hand.

First the sleight-of-hand. For decades, people on the left have typically espoused — or affected — moral relativism and epistemological constructivism. The conception of absolute standards they treat as arrogant parochiality. However, this display of enlightened freedom from absolutes, while it has apparently become second nature to many leftists, puts an easy-going face on quite a severe, puritanical mentality. The more the focus shifts from philosophizing to political action and then to the use of whatever power can be gained, the more it transpires that the Left believes in absolute truth and wants to enshrine it without further delay. Its affectation of relativism and constructivism serves the purpose of discrediting those edifices which it aims to replace while supporting a myth in which new edifices are constructed by the collective wisdom of the people. Where progressives predominate, freely-ranging thought will be stigmatized. One will lend one’s voice to the approved line or be deemed in league with the enemy. All this is plain enough to the casual observer. It hurts the progressive cause.

And then there’s the grand illusion: that America’s progressives, who are conventionally imagined as being farthest along on the liberal spectrum, must be the most thoroughgoing democrats. In truth, they’re something quite different. They’re Platonists.

Although The Republic is required reading for serious students of government, it’s by no means a blueprint for democracy. Of the five forms of government which Plato defines, he ranks democracy second from the bottom in desirability and argues that it leads to the very worst form, tyranny. His favorite is an aristocracy of those who possess the qualities of philosopher king. This concept is the unacknowledged soul of the progressive type that makes its home in American society. The progressive type wants the demos to be solicitously governed but wouldn’t want to be governed by the demos. This, too, is plain to see. A politically untutored mind is fully competent — and possibly quicker than a tutored one — to size up the progressive type and judge what will probably follow when that type gains a seat at the table in government, especially having seen it before in administrations national and local. Indoctrination. Zero tolerance. Great leaps. Petty manias. Language purges. Symbols rampant on a field of social engineering. And always an air of superior intelligence.

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Progressives have often noted that many of the changes and improvements they advocate enjoy widespread support among the electorate. Now they need to take note of the way their substantive message is defeated by the overdrawn gestures and overbearing attitude of the messenger. In the months before the general election of 2020, it became the conventional wisdom that the Democratic Party’s left wing represented its future and would dominate the next administration even if it did not capture the presidency. The Left would settle for influence over policy and personnel in return for having helped the centrist presidential nominee oust a demagogue. Big of the Left. But that was before the election. When the results were in, the demographic theory of history showed signs of failing peer review, and the obstreperous progressive type had shipwrecked many Democratic candidates.

Every time we recall that the Republicans falsely portrayed Democrats as socialists, let us also recall that progressives had handed them that very word to use as a weapon. Would they have used it successfully in any case? We’ll never know. We do know that progressives won half the battle for them by naïvely trying to normalize the word, pleading that it’s perfectly respectable overseas (overseas!) and offering scholarly enlightenment about different modes of socialism.

We also know that members of the Left, seconded by dutiful if perspiring members of the mere left, broke voters away from the Democratic cause with their rhetoric about defunding police departments, their apologias for violent protest, and their rolling war on historical figures and narratives.

If progressives hadn’t been flying so high, they might have noticed that American soil — the soil they must work — is stubbornly inhospitable to such seed. The way they’re going, they shouldn’t expect to garner much support even among the people they regard as their natural constituency. Residents of high-crime neighborhoods are not, by and large, keen on the idea of less robust policing. Working-class Americans are never going to reimagine themselves as figures in a socialist-realist mural, striding into the sunrise with tools on their shoulders and love of the collective in their hearts. They can imagine themselves contented and confident, but not on quite those terms. The economic justice that millions of Americans want may require some infringement of capitalism, but that can’t be an end in itself. The racial justice that a growing majority of Americans demands must mean the dissolution of barriers by all people of good will, not the creation of a proprietary domain by black academics and activists.

Progressive policies have a great future in America, but not while they’re associated with the progressive type. It’s time for the people who have embodied that type to come down to earth, walk with the electorate, and master the ways of Progress American-style.