Out of the Looking-Glass

Last time, a pale companion to the US presidential election of 2024. Today, something in another key.

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Start from the assumption that the Democrats were hard pressed, no matter what they did. In the approach to the election, political analysts pointed out an inescapable structural problem: that no incumbent party had prevailed when so many voters felt that the country was "headed in the wrong direction" (polltakers' maddeningly though understandably vague formulation, to be discussed below). Moreover, the Democrats had held the White House for twelve of the preceding sixteen years. The pendulum of favor was against them.

Then contemplate the discretionary factors that seem to have compounded the structural ones unnecessarily. Therein lie the pointers to the way forward. What follows is not an attempt at expert electoral calculation, but a consumer's-eye view of the political marketplace.

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When polltakers ask voters whether the country is "headed in the right direction" or not, they're presumably trying to build a comprehensive indicator of mood. There's value in that. However, there are no pointers in it. A preponderantly negative response is just bad news for incumbents, like the little scrap of paper with a black spot on it that you get if you're a doomed character in Treasure Island. A respondent may be thinking about one or more aspects, respectively, of economic conditions or social trends or national security or governance — or about some combination thereof. We can look at the responses to more precise questions and guess at the meaning of the "wrong direction" response, but such a guess may be perturbed by wishful thinking or deliberate spin. Some commentators, for example, have attributed the Democratic defeat to the disappointment of voters who longed for a hard left turn. Others (if not the same ones in the next breath) argue that too many voters desired a turn to authoritarianism and away from social justice. Divining what most people mean when they say the country is headed in the wrong direction is a subjective exercise. Herewith, one highly subjective attempt.

The most probable and variously co-existing components of the "wrong direction" verdict are these:

• Dismay at the affective polarization of society
• Alarm at the consequences of a laissez-faire stance on immigration
• A valid, if imperfectly conceived, sense of economic injustice
• Resentment of overbearing minoritarian activism

It's pretty clear that Donald Trump was not returned to power by a popular revolt against norms, much less by white supremacism. As Isaac Saul points out in Tangle (with links), white voters were the one racial demographic that shifted toward the Democratic Party in this presidential election.

Here's a fact to consider: Kamala Harris did better with white voters than Joe Biden did, but worse with nonwhite voters. Not only that, but the group that has shifted most toward Democrats since Trump broke onto the scene is white men. Democrats lost because everyone except for white voters moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle. How is that for a narrative buster?

Note also that Trump did not gain support in comparison with 2020 so much as he benefited from a decline in support for the Democratic alternative. As for that decline, those who wish to blame it on misogyny are free to do so but must recognize that the heralded host of women for Kamala Harris did not show up. Before the election, the Obamas and other prominent Democrats practically declared that if Harris lost it would be because men had not backed up their women by voting for her. In the event, however, women themselves didn't vote for her in droves. An unprimed observer of the outcome would never guess that this election had been expected to signify a great divergence between the sexes or that Trump was supposed to be acceptable only to white nationalists. Among the negative lessons to be learned by Democrats, those two are high on the list.

Among the positive lessons, it seems the chief one is the least edifying: that even when a candidate is shockingly abnormal, many voters will absorb the shock and proceed to vote on issues of the day, with the most elemental concerns weighing most heavily. They'll punish the incumbent party for the things they don't like and give the opposition a chance; and in the elections of 2026 and 2028, the Democrats will be the opposition.

Though elemental concerns weigh most heavily, rarefied ones can tip the scales. Polling shows that the Trump campaign's ad attacking Harris over the microniche issue of sex-change services for prison inmates was markedly effective in swaying undecided voters. But the weight of that one issue is inseparable from the pre-existing weight of the overgrown trans lobby, which has gained a presence in politics and public debate far out of proportion to the size of the interest group represented or to any danger threatening that group's members. The actual rights of transgender people are protected by the 2020 US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County and subsequent lower-court rulings that apply its logic. Today's routine invocation of "trans rights" cloaks a demand for submission to the lobby itself. But no one can claim a right to go unchallenged in a sociopolitical venture. People know it's a bluff, and those outside the sphere of tame progressives are going to call it.

The extent to which bumptious identitarian projects hurt the Democratic Party is debatable, but hurt it they do. Now, with the campaign to dissolve the identity of woman in an acid of trans hubris and non-binary improvisation, leftist identitarianism has reduced itself to the tyranny of minority factions. This may always have been the destiny of the social-justice Left. But if the Democratic Party prefers a destiny of winning elections and thus gaining the power to do good, the minoritarian fever must break. Americans with more catholic concerns need not feel any guilt about treating it with cold water when they get the chance; and there's no chance quite like an election.

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From the Democratic Party's collective persona, take away the penchant for cultural experimentation. Take away the left-reactionary impulses like neoracism and degrowth mania. Take away the dim mentality that expects to hammer society into shape by dint of indoctrination. Take those things away, and what you get is a mere skeleton crew of a Democratic organization. After all, personnel is policy. Progressives demanded oversight of personnel in the nascent Biden administration; they got it; and America got policies and proclamations that, coming from Joe Biden, had the ring of ventriloquism. That is to say, the electorate got something it didn't ask for. To form a future administration free of such deceit, Democrats will have to form one free of personalities that would connive at it. That goes for congressional staffs as well. It goes for all those entities, internal and external, that should want the party to win for the common good more than they want to use the party for their own purposes.

It is, of course, a dispiritingly tall order: accomplishing a reformation of the Democratic ecosystem at the level of personnel. In November, Yascha Mounk published a pessimistic and, alas, masterful analysis of the broader problem of reformation that approached its conclusion as follows:

This finally brings us to the most fundamental obstacle to a real course correction: the staffers, the donors, and the activists who are the real decision-makers in the Democratic Party. Democrats are disproportionately dependent on young staffers who have recently graduated from prestigious colleges. Many of these staffers have been socialized in the hothouse culture of campus activism in which one supposedly offensive remark can lead to lasting social ostracism. And since they stand at the beginning of their careers, they often have a greater incentive to demonstrate ideological purity than to win the next election [emphasis added].

Progressive activists outside the Democratic Party can take a cavalier attitude toward its electoral fortunes, as some openly do; but the presence of such people throughout the staffs of the party itself, of its officeholders, and of its candidates amounts to rampant entryism by agents of a competing interest, albeit a loosely defined one. Hard as it may be to replace them, the thing must be done. One of the most widely noted blunders of Kamala Harris's recent campaign, her refusal to visit the podcaster Joe Rogan for a long interview, seems to have been due to a fear of offending progressives, as represented by members of her staff, to whom Rogan is beyond the pale. Sitting for the interview might not have changed the outcome of the election, but turning up one's nose at such a chance is a luxury Democrats can't afford from here on. Party-scorning sociopolitical snobs may not care. Democrats have got to care.

Donors, be their pockets ever so deep, are a lesser concern. It's been hard to accept the idea that elections are not won by outspending the opposition, especially with journalists and political pros always calling our attention to war chests and advertising budgets, but it's a lesson Democrats were overdue to learn before the bitter experience of this past presidential election. In 2020, I donated part of my mite to the US Senate campaign of Jaime Harrison in South Carolina. Mine was part of a flood of out-of-state donations that ended in Harrison's raising more money than any other senatorial candidate in national history. Nevertheless, he lost by more than ten percentage points to the supposedly vulnerable incumbent, Lindsey Graham. This year, Kamala Harris's campaign famously raised over a billion dollars. Though they spent that and more, the best they could do was to narrow the margin of defeat in battleground states. The spending might have been done more judiciously, but probably not enough more so to matter.

"There is not a single expenditure in a different spot that would have changed the outcome of the race," said Bakari Sellers, a close ally of Ms. Harris and a former lawmaker in South Carolina. In fact, Mr. Sellers said, the campaign faced an unusual problem: "We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door."

Donors matter, of course, but not so much that they ought to be treated as customers who are always right. Donors who don't like the way the party changes can be relieved by donors who do.

As for activists, specifically those obstreperous leftists who appear to be of the Democratic Party but not in it, they and the onlooking world should be made to understand that they are not even of the party if they function as litigants and not as stakeholders. The attitude that it's not their job to help Democrats win elections (which some have proclaimed outright) should let them in for adversarial treatment just as if they represented a separate party. Since they haven't joined one or formed one, they obviously recognize that they need the vehicle of the Democratic Party more than it needs their seal of approval. Above all, the party should beware of academics and their political potions. Any party should value knowledge and expertise, but none should take its lead from academics.

Wild as these thoughts are, they unfortunately comprise the one vital seed of future prosperity for the Democratic Party. If it's out of the question to cultivate that seed, then the party will surely become a barren tract containing only a citadel of the elite.

Tyler Austin Harper, writing in The Atlantic, recounts a recent conversation with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who posed a question for his copartisans to face: "Does the Republican Party become more economically populist in a genuine way before the Democratic Party opens itself up to people who don't agree with us on 100 percent of our social and cultural issues?" Murphy may have been speaking diplomatically out of consideration for progressive sensibilities, but the proposition of a Democratic Party that "opens itself up to people who don't agree with us on 100 percent of our social and cultural issues" implies telling voters, "Yes, we hold these positions that you abhor, but we've decided not to chastise you for disagreeing with us. You're welcome in our tent." That would be perversely ineffective. The transformation of a dim Democratic future into a bright one must begin with a transformation of the party's character. It can't remain a party characterized by people who incline toward positions that repel the median voter. The problem is not the way the party chooses to behave, but the kind of political community it is in the first place. This is not yet a problem with rank-and-file members, despite the growing proportion of progressive college graduates. It's a problem with operatives.

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The Democratic Party must demonstrate the ability, but first of all the will, to take America in a direction that seems about right to most Americans. That should not strain any Democrat's basic principles. There is no popular demand for Darwinian competition or social homogeneity, any more than for Marxism or social atomization. Most people value fairness. They also value peace of mind. They want a combination of freedom to get ahead and freedom from being calamitously left behind. That's an opening for Democrats, even as Republicans show early signs of trimming their sails.

The Republican metaphor for America is a gold field suited to fortune-hunters. Let the Democratic metaphor be a community suited to good neighbors. Yes, the community will be inclusive and nurturing. It will be a community of many parts, and it will be supportive where support is needed. But the main electoral appeal should be made to core interests that unite the parts and sustain the vitality of the whole.
— "The Voyage to Restoration" (2018)

Once, that was pretty much what the Democratic Party stood for. The electorate didn't turn away from it; the party did. As avant-garde academics and social activists gained influence, the party abandoned the principle of literal inclusivity for an inclusivity-branded strategy of setting the most numerous groups back on their heels. It forsook the unity of parts for the meteoric supremacy of one little part after another and forsook the vitality of the whole for a nihilistic disavowal of the whole. Inversion and dissolution became implicit goods. In this way, the Democratic Party passed through the looking-glass.

As those last words were being set down, Matt Yglesias published an important essay in which he illuminates an actual inversion — a momentous one — in the Democratic coalition itself.

To understand the role and stature of the groups in Biden-era Washington, it's worth reading some of the old articles about Obama-era Washington and "the veal pen."

This was progressive blogger Jane Hamsher's derisive term for a "tightly-managed coalition of Democratic groups centered financially around the Democracy Alliance and organizationally around the Center for American Progress, both in turn creations of the left in exile in the Bush years." These groups had standing calls and meetings with members of the Obama administration. And their funders, the Democracy Alliance donor circle, were also major donors to Barack Obama and to Democratic Party candidates. The purpose of these coordinating calls and meetings was for the groups to speak their mind and get access to the White House and feel included in the process. But really the purpose was for the White House to tell the groups what it wanted them to say. The role of the groups was to try to generate positive press coverage for the administration, to sell progressives on the merits and necessity of compromises the administration made, and to create an "echo chamber" that amplified the administration's messages.

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So I think ultimately, the veal pen was right all along: Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards, and it requires convincing people to vote for you in elections.

But that's not what happened. Instead, we got the Sanders insurgency, a wave of "woke" academic concepts migrating from Tumblr onto the mainstream internet, Trump's shocking win, a thermostatic swing of public opinion to the left, a surge of donations to progressive advocacy groups, "the squad," Elizabeth Warren's laser focus on personnel, and a new conventional wisdom that 2009-2010 was a huge disappointing failure rather than a big success.

The upshot of all of this is that between 2013 and 2021, the basic logic of the veal pen inverted.

Rather than mainstream progressive advocacy groups working to amplify Joe Biden's message and create good press for him, they threaten him and other Democrats with bad press unless they hew to progressive orthodoxy. This is done in collaboration with progressive staffers and like-minded journalists [emphasis added].

Yglesias goes on to note that the Republican coalition had the discipline, this year, to act on the "veal pen" principle, with anti-abortion activists and plutocrats counseling tolerance of Trump's populism and his relative moderation on abortion for the sake of winning the election.

Democratic presidential candidates would find it hard enough to campaign under either the handicap of being attacked by "the groups" or the handicap of adopting their impolitic positions, without an adverse change in the electoral map. However, The Atlantic's mercilessly attentive Jerusalem Demsas has noticed that the most adverse of changes is in fact taking place. In "The Democrats Are Committing Partycide" she writes, "Democrats' self-conception as a party that represents the future is running headlong into the reality that the fastest-growing states are Republican-led."

According to the American Redistricting Project, New York will lose three seats and Illinois will lose two, while Republican-dominated Texas and Florida will gain four additional representatives each if current trends continue. Other growing states that Trump carried in this month's election could potentially receive an additional representative. By either projection, if the 2032 Democratic nominee carries the same states that Kamala Harris won this year, the party would receive 12 fewer electoral votes. Among the seven swing states that the party lost this year, Harris came closest to winning in the former "Blue Wall" of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—at least two of which are likely to lose an electoral vote after 2030. Even adding those states to the ones Harris won would not be enough to secure victory in 2032. The Democrat would need to find an additional 14 votes somewhere else on the map.

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Population growth and decline do not simply happen to states; they are the result of policy choices and economic conditions relative to other states. Some states lose residents because their economy hasn't kept up with the rest of the country's. But in much of blue America, including California and New York, economic dynamism and high wages aren't enough to sustain population growth, because the skyrocketing cost of shelter eclipses everything else. ... Policy failures are dragging down the Democrats' prospects in two ways: by showing the results of Democratic governance in sharp, unflattering relief, and by directly reducing the party's prospects in presidential elections and the House of Representatives.

Democrats who wish to avoid partycide have got to break out of the looking-glass world in which activism makes for stasis, parts bedevil the whole, service to a theory beats service to society, and then one day the election of a Republican by a demographic cross-section of the electorate elicits murmurs of "At last the country is coming together!"

That breakout won't be accomplished by persuading the people who oppose it or by striking a bargain with them, but only by dominating them with superior organization and leadership and, as necessary, driving them out. Yes, it's a wild thought. But if Demsas is right (and you know she is); if Mounk and Yglesias are right (and you know they are); then the time has come to think it. Personnel is the problem.

Lack of Character Is Destiny

Today, a pale companion to the US presidential election of 2024. Next time, something in another key.

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Donald Trump — who would have passed from any enlightened political scene four years ago, who wouldn't have gained a foothold in one eight years ago — has won both the electoral vote and, apparently, the popular vote. Let it be understood at once that the most crucial failures of enlightenment occurred far from the haunts of the people who voted for him.

Oh, it may always have been written in the stars that absurdity would stalk any country named after Amerigo Vespucci; but let's not give in to superstition. The movers of the American Revolution and the founding of the Republic were eminently serious people, not to say cognitive giants by today's embarrassing standards. They understood well enough that "of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants." How could they foresee that party politics would eventually defeat their safeguards against that fate? Even the demagogues of their acquaintance were more considerable men than Donald Trump. They themselves, regardless of political leanings or social sensibilities, were at any rate men of character. The baseness — not evil, but baseness contending with mediocrity — of political movers in our time was beyond their imagining.

A survey of those movers must begin with a reference to Donald Trump, as this one did. But many words have been written about him, and more will follow. Let's move on while keeping him in mind.

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Consider Joe Biden. The negative re-evaluation of this man can begin at once, because his negative qualities have always been in plain sight. His personal vanity, which, though not on a par with Donald Trump's, contradicts the image of a regular guy at peace with himself. His creepy tendency to fabulize and plagiarize, made only creepier by his allies' standard excuse ("That's just the way his mind works"); albeit a far cry from Trump's reality-bashing. And his selfishness — which, again, doesn't put him in Trump's company, but which does put him in the company of morally negligible career politicians everywhere. Nothing in his political life defined him like the tardy leaving of it, having subordinated his party and his country to his vainglory. He might at least have become an object of compassion if those around him had declared that he wasn't quite himself; though, in truth, he was quite himself through it all.

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Then there's Kamala Harris. As she was essentially a pawn or, at most, an anti-mover in this saga, she doesn't warrant the harshest of reckonings. She proved the weak candidate she was generally said to be before and after the burst of giddiness upon her nomination. Here was a person who had hopscotched from state politics to the presidential nomination in exactly three steps, the second and third of which consisted in being picked up and set down by Joe Biden. As for the first, her truncated term in the US Senate, she acquitted herself well in hearings and co-sponsored some legislation. However, her campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination collapsed before the first primary elections and caucuses. At that time and again during her term as vice president, the organizations under her control were known for dysfunction, demoralization, and extremely high turnover. In both of her presidential campaigns, she deployed a manic laugh that seemed a cover for the insecurity perceived by people who have worked for her. That and her habit of escaping substantive discussion through the mere churning of verbiage marked her as an empty vessel. She had never needed to be anything more in a career of riding political currents. Some observers have professed indignation at seeing yet another woman allegedly denied the nation's highest office by misogyny; but did they really want the "glass ceiling" to be broken in such a way, by such an aspirant?

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And then there's the Democratic machine. After learning to think of Trump and his surrogates as the only ones imposing on people's credulity, we — all right, I — increasingly struggled to hold back the dawn of recognition that national Democrats and their surrogates were playing a vast, ceaseless, multifarious confidence game. The word gaslighting had enjoyed a vogue in progressive rhetoric when the subject was patriarchy, with men (especially male doctors) portrayed as perpetrating mental mischief against women. Now it transpired that the Democratic Party and its associates comprised a veritable Axis of Gaslight. I had been quick enough to notice some pieces of this picture, such as the pan-progressive effort to put all brains under an ether of social-justice dogma. But I was very slow to step out of the mainstream of liberal thought about the coronavirus pandemic and entertain doubts about the science behind masking or the absence of science behind the outbreak in Wuhan. I also thought that a letter signed by more than fifty former intelligence officials was sufficient to pigeon-hole the affair of Hunter Biden's laptop as a Russian disinformation scheme. Again and again, trust proved misplaced. Then, with the reckless campaign by the Biden administration and its advocates to conceal the president's unfitness for another term of office, the keystone of Democratic credibility dropped out and the whole edifice collapsed.

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The rest are evanescent Shakespearean shadows: Jill Biden, whose assured fate is that those who liken her to Lady Macbeth will outlast those who insist on her academic title; Tim Walz, a sub-Polonius as windy as the original but too much the knucklehead (his word) to form the habit of shunning falsehood; and JD Vance, our Edmund, who diligently aids the eclipses in portending these divisions. We can expect Vance to return in a Republican production of Richard III, but in which role?

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The political scene of 2024 wouldn't give Shakespeare much new material for anything but a farce. And with what a dreary cast of characters! First Knave, Second Knave, Third Knave....

It won't do.

Veils of Fiction

This is going to be about literary fiction, not political lies. If you're in no mood for such a theme at such a time, that's perfectly understandable. Please just accept my wish for a happy Halloween before moving on.

Shirley Jackson earned her place in the literary canon — a place now so obscure that it aptly suggests the dark interior of two pages stuck together — with disturbing tales of the supernatural, the abnormal, and the socially monstrous. They somewhat resemble the tales of Walter de la Mare in their author's willingness to leave us without comfort and even without confidence in our understanding.

The Haunting of Hill House is (though one can easily forget) a story told by an authorial third-person narrator. After just a few pages, however, the narration starts getting entangled in the mind of the protagonist, Eleanor Vance.

There has to be a first time for everything, Eleanor told herself.

Though the narrative voice remains formally objective throughout the novel, it becomes possessed by Eleanor's thoughts.

After the manner of men who see women quarreling, the doctor and Luke had withdrawn, standing tight together in miserable silence; now, at last, Luke moved and spoke. "That's enough, Eleanor," he said, unbelievably, and Eleanor whirled around, stamping. "How dare you?" she said, gasping. "How dare you?"

And the doctor laughed, then, and she stared at him and then at Luke, who was smiling and watching her. What is wrong with me? she thought. Then — but they think Theodora did it on purpose, made me mad so I wouldn't be frightened; how shameful to be maneuvered that way. She covered her face and sat down in her chair.

"Nell, dear," Theodora said, "I am sorry."

I must say something, Eleanor told herself; I must show them that I am a good sport, after all; a good sport; let them think that I am ashamed of myself. "I'm sorry," she said. "I was frightened."

...

"I wondered if you two were going to come to blows," Luke said, "until I realized what Theodora was doing."

Smiling down into Theodora's bright, happy eyes, Eleanor thought, But that isn't what Theodora was doing at all.

Since the narrative is haunted by a mentally volatile protagonist, we can enjoy imagining to what extent the strange occurrences in and around Hill House may be products of her psyche. Does she positively generate those occurrences? (After all, her family was beset by poltergeists in her childhood.) Is she the originator of a psychological contagion? Is something taking place, but not what she perceives? Or has she really been summoned to a fateful encounter with the supernatural? Laura Miller, in her introduction to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of The Haunting of Hill House, sees reason to believe that Shirley Jackson was content with the supernatural view.

It should be said that both [Henry] James and Jackson gave every indication that they considered the ghosts in their short novels to be real within the fictional world that their books describe. Jackson, who had a lifelong interest in the occult, who dabbled in spells and liked to tell reporters that she was a witch, professed to believe in ghosts. But both of these writers were too preoccupied with the notion that people are attended by multiple, imaginary versions of themselves to be unaware of the nonsupernatural implications of their ghost stories.

So we're welcome to simply gaze at the supernatural design that's displayed before us; or to peek behind the veil and tease our brains with as many psychological puzzles as we can discern; or to draw back the ultimate veil of fiction and contemplate the psyche of the author.

Miller tells us, "Jackson seemed to see sex as an uninteresting distraction from earlier, more fundamental questions of identity." In The Haunting of Hill House, she leaves the potential for sexual dynamics among her ghost-hunters practically unexplored, though not absolutely so. When the emotionally stunted Eleanor has her head turned by the only young man in the group, Luke, it's just a flutter of puppy love. When she feels something akin to jealousy, it's just a basic craving for attention. (After spending most of her stay in Hill House wondering what the others say about her, she eavesdrops on their conversations and finds that they forget her very existence when she's out of sight. Is she the ghost, then?) However, we learn that the worldly-wise artist Theodora lives, in a tempestuous relationship, with a "friend" whose sex Jackson hides by contriving to avoid pronouns. That wholly gratuitous tease, together with Theo's behavior toward Eleanor, does hint at a sexual subtext. Robert Wise's excellent film adaptation, The Haunting (1963), gradually makes Theo's sexuality understood without ever quite naming it, even in Eleanor's outburst about "nature's mistakes" (which is not in the novel). Meanwhile, the deeply middle-aged, rather silly Dr. Montague of the novel becomes the younger, superficially masterful Dr. Markway, thereby setting up a triangle as thin but tensile as a spiderweb. Theo notices Eleanor's interest in Markway and reacts with veiled cuts. Markway seems to notice nothing, though his little gallantries may veil manipulative intent. Eleanor notices everything — if the account of her consciousness is to be believed — and suffers. Young-buck Luke, not finding his type among present company, stands back and functions as an ironic commentator. There is no "sex" whatever in this film; and yet the web vibrates.

Jackson's last completed novel, the acclaimed We Have Always Lived in the Castle, contains no supernatural elements. Instead, it contains a dormant murder mystery. The main characters, two sisters aged eighteen and twenty-eight, live with their invalid uncle in the ancestral mansion, having lost their parents and two other members of the family to arsenic poisoning some years before. The truth about that fatal dinner remains unpursued since a trial that ended in acquittal; nor will it be pursued here.

Our narrator is the younger sister, Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood. After introducing herself to us, she relates a distasteful part of her life's routine: a foray into the nearby village for food and library books. The villagers exhibit hostility to the Blackwoods in varying degrees; their only friends live at some distance and seldom come calling. When Merricat has finished running her errands along a course planned to minimize encounters, she beats a retreat to the family property through a small gate that opens into a wild, overgrown wood. Be it ever so dark, it's a welcoming world to her. Now she can happily walk the rest of the way to meet her sister Constance in the garden and proceed to the most welcoming world of all: the kitchen.

"We'll have muffins," Constance said, almost singing because she was sorting and putting away the food. "Uncle Julian will have an egg, done soft and buttery, and a muffin and a little pudding."

...

"I'm always so happy when you come home from the village," Constance said; she stopped to look and smile at me. "Partly because you bring home food, of course. But partly because I miss you."

Constance stops to look and smile at Merricat many times in the course of the story. Is it just one of the rhythms of an uneasy fairy tale? If our narrator finds her sister's smile suggestive of anything, she never lets on.

Mary Katherine Blackwood is a strange guide to follow through a fictional world. Though fourteen years younger than Eleanor Vance, at eighteen she could chance to be the more mature of the two. In fact, she's profoundly infantile. Eleanor is a socially passable adult harboring a psychochild; Merricat is altogether a child. When she zigzags through the village on her errands, she comprehends it as a game in which she loses two turns here, takes an extra turn there, and so on; all the while thinking baleful thoughts about the villagers. It's not a whimsy, but a ritual. Off the path that runs through the wild wood, she's made a hiding place in a bower so dense it keeps the rain out. She retreats there in times of distress to lie on a pallet and dwell in perfect security. This idea must be supremely appealing to the child in every reader; but in order for the author to say all she has to say to us as one grown-up to another, she must sometimes let her narrator observe things with a grown-up's informed intellect and describe them with a grown-up's — nay, with Shirley Jackson's — command of language.

Constance was perfectly composed. She rose and smiled and said she was glad to see them. Because Helen Clarke was ungraceful by nature, she managed to make the simple act of moving into a room and sitting down a complex ballet for three people; before Constance had quite finished speaking Helen Clarke jostled Mrs. Wright and sent Mrs. Wright sideways like a careening croquet ball off into the far corner of the room where she sat abruptly and clearly without intention upon a small and uncomfortable chair.

In The Haunting of Hill House, we had an authorial narrator who could assume the guise of a mentally compromised character. Here, we have a mentally compromised narrator who can assume the guise of the author. These are tricks done with veils, and thank goodness for them. Through the dark terrain of We Have Always Lived in the Castle runs a babbling brook of gallows humor personified by the courtly Uncle Julian, who is extremely well-spoken and as mad as a hatter. That lethal dinner may have killed the majority of his putative loved ones and ruined his own health, but it was the making of him as a raconteur. His pleasantries over tea with Mrs. Wright, a meek but morbidly voracious listener, are too good in context to be excerpted.

Get the book and have a happy Halloween.

If I Should Die Before We Wake

Yesterday an old friend got in touch to confide that he was thinking of leaving the United States on account of the political climate. He was writing to me because he had few like-minded friends to talk to. Ordinarily, our correspondence doesn't go much beyond exchanges of personal news occasioned by Christmas or Halloween (his favorite holiday, and one for which I have a soft spot).

I responded with unfeigned sympathy but also noted the evidence that a majority of Americans are sick of partisan polarization. Maybe it won't be much longer till sanity and common decency prevail. Then again, maybe not in our lifetimes. My friend and his wife, who at least would not be separating themselves from a family, will go on considering the option of making a break for it — but to where? Yesterday we tentatively browsed the menu of countries together till it got to be my bedtime.

Now, the phrase "my bedtime" has gained a certain complexity — I like to think of it as an elegiac echo — over the decade or so since I was diagnosed with a lymphoma that's not going away. The disease is also classified as a form of chronic leukemia, a wonderfully indolent form that just nudges me along through passages of fitfully ebbing vitality toward the night when I lay me down to sleep for the last time. I'd like to see America wake from its delirium before that.

Even in the prosaic sense, my bedtime promises otherworldly mysteries: labyrinthine dreams alternating with those treks through the dark house that are common to men of a certain age, during which I delight in looking at the clock and seeing that I still have hours to sleep. This is a pleasure I never knew in my youth, when the dead of night was just a rumored time between two drowsy moments. Last night was especially good. I awoke to a splendid thunderstorm and relished the lightning for the span of my trek before plunging back into Slumberland. This morning the wet earth only hinted at the events of the night, but I had witnessed them.

The approach of the Big Sleep doesn't promise any intra-sleep thrills that a mortal mind can contemplate. As far as my sentient self is concerned, the approach is all that remains; but that holds mysteries enough. I observe this old man and the continually rejuvenated world around him with a bemused sense that the world has the more crotchets of the two. It stuffs its manifold mind with real problems and fabricated ones, with practical solutions and theatrical ones, soon forgetting which is which in a frenzy of contention. No wonder my level-headed friend wants to go in search of his Shangri-La. The world will of course prove more durable than I will, but I can say that when there's no mirror in front of me, and especially when I'm out walking, I mistake myself for a healthy young man — except in one situation. At seventy-eight I can still sprint up a spiral stairway of twenty-eight steps and walk on. However, descending is another matter. The top of any stairway gives me pause. When I look down, the voices of childhood elders start murmuring somewhere in my head: So-and-so had a fall. Broke a hip. Bad thing at that age. Never the same after being laid up for a spell. The bone doesn't mend quite right, either. So active until that happened! All it takes is one fall, though. So I descend with care — pretty rapidly, but deliberately. Not with that brisk scuffing action whereby you float down in communion with gravity while punching the steps with the balls of your feet. I don't believe I could do it now if I tried. I dare not try.

Pride goeth before a fall. In American political life today, pride is the deadly sin that runs through all folly from one end of the spectrum to the other. Followers of Donald Trump have invested theirs in a mountebank who flatters them with a sense of mission. Their nemeses on the left, never at a loss for hubris, place them and practically everyone else outside the circle of respectful engagement. Lyndon Johnson's appeal from the Book of Isaiah, "Come now, and let us reason together," is the appeal of the many Americans who are sick of polarization, but it's lost on the deaf adders who guard the poles. In their vain certitude, they wage a shouting match reminiscent of a political joke which I shall condense to its essence: When a family find that their house is on fire, most of the members pitch in to put it out, but the proud grandfather stands bellowing at the flames, "We'll see who tires first!"

I hold out hope that America will wake from its crazy dream before my friend feels compelled to leave it and, if possible, before I'm gathered into the arms of Morpheus for good. There should be time yet. I have the relentless energy of a child who doesn't want to stop playing at bedtime; however, I understand that we children eventually fall asleep over our toys and are carried off to bed. I don't exactly mind being the one who tires first. It's just that I'd like to sink into oblivion confident that America will not soon follow.

Don't Look at "Us"

The recent attempt on Donald Trump's life is appalling. The subsequent commentary is exasperating. I start reading each of the editorials and essays I come across, only to stop after a few lines and impatiently skim the rest in search of something that cuts through the usual lamenting of what "we as a society" have come to and the pointing-out that this is no way to solve problems. It seems that the authors, when confronted with such an occurrence, are occupationally compelled to put in their thumbs and pull out plums of general meaning.

Here, the general story being told is that of a polarization balloon that was blown up bigger — and bigger — and bigger — until boom! it produced this. But there is no such linear progression. Ever since Donald Trump became president-elect in 2016, there must have been millions of people wishing with resolute vagueness that something would make him go away and marveling that no one had acted on the wish as far as we knew. There must have been more than a few who made up their minds to act but couldn't manage it. The other day, someone happened to manage it. It was not the culmination of an advancing social disease.

I'm reminded of the "sick society" trope that was so much in vogue in the 1960s. It was typified by the reaction to the murder of Kitty Genovese and the mythical (later debunked) indifference of neighbors who supposedly "didn't want to get involved." For a long time thereafter, it was one of the givens of commentary and conversation that people (present company always excepted) were no longer willing to get involved in each other's troubles. Assassinations were similarly treated as evidence of a collective sickness.

As for polarization, study after study has shown that ordinary Americans are not polarized in their values but have been made prone to "affective polarization" — emotional aversion to people of different party affiliations — by misleading information and overwrought rhetoric. One thing I will say about cause and effect is that if a demagogue personifies chaos and threatens opponents with retribution, it does become marvelous that years go by without an assassination attempt. I have no objection to blaming the opponents as well when they've hysterically exploited the demagogue's bluster instead of setting an example of sanity.

And as for the would-be assassin acting alone, who knows what causal web produced the effect? Each such individual is, after all, an individual with personal demons.

Quite Contrarian

The Family Property began in response to the election of Donald Trump. There followed a few essays about Trump's treasonous bent or Trump's dangerous personality or Trump's impending (in March 2017!) fall from grace with the Republican party, after which "Castle Trump will settle down to being a mad-king affair without the king." There was also a rumination on the way forward for Democrats that regained some prophetic ground, if I may say so.

June 2020 saw a short paragraph in praise of the demonstrations that were going on in American cities ("[t]hat grand movement to build a society free from racism") as contrasted with the actually anarchic nature of the Republican Party. True enough as far as it went. In this house, criticism of Trump and his crowd continues unabated; but after a while I found that when the spirit moved me to write political criticism, it most often turned my face into the wind blowing from the left. Objectively, this is a puzzle. There shouldn't be much policy to dislike on that side of me.

The New York Times once ran a guest essay containing a quiz designed to let you see which of six imaginary political parties would be the best fit for you. My responses placed me closest by far to the American Labor Party, though decidedly to its left on the cultural axis and (gulp) almost as much so on the economic one. While age was trundling others to the right, it had spirited me to the left flank of a notional labor party. Imagine my surprise. I find that I want things I'll never live to see, such as a gun-free America; things I might live to see if kept on ice for a good while, such as a robust welfare state; and things I could see right now if only the "anti-racist" dust would settle, such as an America proceeding to dissolve the significance of race. Of course, there's something missing from that list of progressive credentials: ideology. With ideology out of the way, it's easy to notice the symbiotic relationship between reactionary demagogues and radical dilettantes who can't grasp the harm done to the progressive cause by talking in Marx Deco jargon, trashing intelligible feminism for the sake of current vogues in gender politics, and proselytizing for neoracism. It's an error to shrug off the offenses of leftists, arguing that those of rightists pose the greater threat to the general good, because the two are joined. If the Right is the villain, the Left is its unwitting lackey. Take away the lackey, and the villain faces a harder task. Replace the lackey with a competent, popular alternative, and the villain is nowhere.

A small but conspicuous element, the radical Left, is undermining progressive politics at a dangerous juncture. That's why a progressive-in-the-wild may feel compelled to stake out contrarian territory. For The Family Property, this has meant urging the Democratic Party to reject bad company, scorning the game of advocacy and the gamble of trying to move society by audacious feats of leverage, and blushing for progressives who fall into intellectual arrogance by aping academics. It has meant taking a stand against biological class warfare and, now, witnessing the fall from self-conscious enlightenment to vicarious savagery that comes of allyship with exotic bigots. Now and then, it has seemed necessary to mention that all this commentary comes from a primitive leftist point of view and not a Trump-averse rightist one.

Contrarian territory has its dangers. It's a wild wood in which you can stray off till you forget where you came from. A commentator with a large readership may, on finding that the majority of readers give the warmest reception to the most biased polemics, get to be an ingratiating polemicist. The term for this phenomenon is audience capture. Actually, it's a hazard for contrarians and non-contrarians alike.

❖

A contrarian is a swimmer against the current. In the context of political commentary, the term can mean one who criticizes prevailing trends regardless of their orientation. More to the point, though, it distinguishes a dissident member of a camp from a member of a naturally opposing camp. A conservative who criticizes the progressive camp is not a contrarian. But what does it mean to be a contrarian progressive?

A camp is both a patch of ground and a gathering of people. The progressive ground is my proper place, but that doesn't mean that others who have gathered there are people after my own heart or that their visions and strategies — let alone their fads and conceits — seem right to me.

I've always detested Leninism and groaned at Marxism. I shun the fabrication Marxism-Leninism and maintain that Marx was reduced to a political phantasm when Lenin stepped off the train a century ago. His presence thereafter took the form of busts in the offices of Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist commissars, whose tyranny he justified to the world's Leftists while they underwent initiation into the new party-line Mysteries. By the time Khrushchev conclusively discredited Stalin, the Left had learned to shuttle between motte and bailey while heaving false Scotsmen over the stockade in defense of a humanitarian ideology that, in practice, couldn't be stopped before it killed again. Stalin? He was not a true socialist. Mao? Not a true socialist. Nor was Tito or Kim or Mengistu or Ceausescu or Mugabe.... Ah, but Castro! As brutal dictators-for-life go, that was more like it. His victims numbered in the thousands at most. He kept up appearances as a man of the people. Here, then, is an admissible socialist. And yet so is the progenitor of them all, Lenin, in circles where time and etiquette have effaced the record of his wholesale atrocities.

Long ago, I recoiled from the new fetishes of a liberalism starting its slide into academic captivity and later realized that I was mostly seeing a cohort of people who had earned self-assurance being supplanted by people born to it. Though I belonged to the second cohort, it was my lot to feel rubbed the wrong way. The incomparable Michael Kelly cut straight to the heart of the matter:

The left-liberalism that considers itself the true faith (but which eschews the name it appropriated and ruined and now calls itself progressivism) ... is an ideology of self-styled saints, a philosophy of determined perversity. Its animating impulse is to marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many people as possible: If it were a person, it would pierce its tongue.

When the liberal degeneration had been going on for years, conservatism miraculously overtook it in a rapid collapse under the weight of a demagogue. Thereupon I witnessed the squandering of opportunity by my own side and knew that the opportunity had been misread. Donald Trump had cleared the way for a competent, sensible liberal alternative that might have brought the founding of a sustainable Democratic majority in national politics. However, ideological progressives thought they saw an opening for revolution.

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.

And so we saw an attention-grabbing push to normalize democratic socialism. Not social democracy, which would, alas, have been hard enough to sell, but democratic socialism. This was alien to most of the Democratic Party's officeholders and faithful voters. In the congressional elections of 2018, candidates who espoused socialism of any kind were outliers among successful Democrats. The four progressives (including three socialists) soon to be renowned as The Squad contributed nothing to the party's return to power in the House of Representatives, as they had taken over safe seats. Nevertheless, they inspired liberal commentators to treat them as the vanguard of a new wave in American politics. It tended to be forgotten that not every wave is of the future. Meanwhile, young Democrats who had proved their broad appeal — the very people the party needed as its faces of the future — became faces in the crowd.

Confidence in a leftward destiny had already begun to fortify itself with intoxicating visions of demographic triumph. These were wishfully drawn from a 2008 US Census Bureau report predicting that the US would become a majority-minority country by 2040. However, that calculation rested on a system of racial classification absurdly like the one-drop rule of the Jim Crow South, and the dreams that were spun from it rashly assumed, to boot, that non-white immigrants would be leftist in their own politics or would at least attach themselves to their leftist patrons. It was all an egoistic delusion of the Left. There can be no functioning majority where there is no cohesion except among activists. The thesis of demographic triumph was faulty in all its parts, but social-justice progressives' delight in it was so much greater than their critical faculties that they believed it. They chattered about it. They publicly exulted in it. Yet when Republicans told the same story with the aim of alarming white voters, they deplored it as though they'd never heard of such a thing.

Critical faculties recede where intellectual arrogance advances. Threadbare Marxist brain-cudgellers would at least have avoided the mirage of demographic triumph, but their sleek Leninist successors differ from them in a way that must be sought between the lines of theory. The theoretical difference is that Marxists concern themselves with the interests of urban workers while Leninists concern themselves with the modernization of agrarian societies. V. I. Lenin merged the two through the medium of vocabulary but also introduced a strategic difference that has transformed the character of the "Marxist-Leninist" Left.

Thus, Lenin thought of his modernizing revolution as a proletarian revolution and of workers playing the leading role in the revolutionary movement. They do so, however, as represented by intellectuals or, as Lenin put it more often, by his Party or simply by "us." The Introduction of "the Party" is generally seen as Lenin's major modification of or contribution to Marxism, but it does not merely add an organizational element that was absent in Marx's Marxism. Marx's social-democratic successors had added such an element long before Lenin did, but it continued to express Marx's concern with the working class. The introduction of Lenin's "party of a new type" involves a change of the ideology from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals. The Party is, and "we" are, in Lenin's mind clearly distinct from the working class and must lead that class where it would otherwise not go. In short, it is intellectuals, not workers, who give direction to and lead the revolutionary movement.
— John H. Kautsky, 1994, Marxism and Leninism, Not Marxism-Leninism, p. 43

This change "from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals" is the element of Marxism qua Leninism that survives most vigorously in the American Left. Intellectuals are to lead; to lead where they list, with nothing to keep them from improvising signposts out of brainstorms as they go along.

There was the crusade to nowhere about defunding the police, and now the centrifugal quackery about sex and gender. There's the academy-driven denial of racial progress. There's the climate cult that shuns discussion of ways to cope with impacts that are already inevitable, preferring a monomaniacal campaign against fossil fuels combined with maximal alarmism about the future. In case after case, the Left demonstrates the impulse to proud perversity noted by Michael Kelly. Encompassing all the individual cases is a sphere of solipsism wherein no arc is particularly long, but each one bends toward self-justification.

❖

The pursuit of progress, in the sense of social improvement, is the following of reasoned imagination and disinterested compassion. You may believe that imagination and compassion have already brought us to a state of equipoise worth keeping, in which case you're a conservative; or that they've overshot the mark, in which case you're a reactionary; or that we ought to follow them further, in which case you're some sort of liberal or progressive. But there's a separate sort of progressive who rearranges "the following of reasoned imagination and disinterested compassion" into an imaginative leading of reason in ruthless devotion to one or more interests. Such progressives are the temperamental descendants of Lenin's we. It's because of them, the branded Left, that I stay busy as a contrarian.

The Magical Other

When I was growing up in the American South, my parents were friends with a couple from Britain. The woman was English; the man, Scottish. She was my father's secretary, which is to say the entire staff of a hole-in-the-wall agency. (Think The Maltese Falcon, adapted to advertising.) He was a landscape gardener who had come to the New World to oversee a project and had, appropriately, put down roots.

Both were estimable human beings. By no design of their own, they were also, to me, emissaries from the outside world. The wife was a kindred spirit of certain American aunts — ladylike, kindly, becardiganed — but a spirit brought on the wind from far away where the Queen's English was spoken. The husband was a revelation. Compact, angular, brown as a nut, clear in his thinking, which he set forth in the Queen's English insofar as the royal diction rose to his own, he was a Scot among Scots and, no doubt, a gardener among gardeners. It was a fact that he knew more of the world than anyone else in our living room. He was unfailingly civil, but he was not a man to be bested in a matter of opinion. His effect on me can be gathered from my older brother's complaint that I hung on his every word (having theretofore hung on my brother's).

This man's sister and their aged mother once came over from Scotland to visit. Naturally, they joined the occasional gathering at our place. The mother was quiet and retiring. The sister was quiet but not retiring. Her quietude was that of serene self-assurance. Whereas her brother had stimulated my mind, she began to captivate it. There was no flirtatious charm involved in this. I no longer remember a word she said. I don't even positively remember the subject matter. What I do remember are her voice and manner as she talked to me — to me alone, at one side of the group, addressing me by name again and again. Her speech had a plaintive lilt that suited it to the work of moral enthrallment. I found myself being gently thrown off balance and made to feel that I could recover only by coming around to her way of thinking; that not to come around would be to prove unworthy of a rare mentor.

Perhaps the conversation had to do with religion. If so, it was hardly my first experience of religious exhortation. It was, though, my first exposure to that lilt; or, rather, to the oracular foreignness which it signified. It was my first encounter with the Magical Other.

That encounter had two salutary effects. It awakened me to the world and, at the same time, to the threat of manipulation. I'm pleasantly surprised to recall that I was capable of noticing that threat, especially in an Other who was undoubtedly benign and undeniably possessed of lulling gifts. To the extent that her spiel instilled a sense of guilt and a fear of unworthiness, it stirred wary reflection. Why, I wondered, should I feel this way?

The wariness of that moment prepared me for subsequent encounters, both direct and mediated, with Magical Others. To a green American, the most bewitching of Others are those who hail from what was once called the Third World (after the dominant capitalist and communist worlds) and is now called the Global South. Individual personalities may come across as abashingly unspoiled or as penetratingly shrewd, but all benefit from a sense that these people have lived, that they're of the real world. While we have nestled in lofty plastic-feathered nests, they have roamed barefoot down among nature's truths. So runs our tremulous conceit. But if we're even half as intelligent as we're green, we'll notice that truths are not the foremost things that endure out there in the world of down-to-earth Others. Parts of that world owe their otherness to a lack of virtues that rightly matter to us very much. Those unborn virtues are most easily named as superannuated vices: inescapable hierarchy, crushing patriarchy, and entrenched corruption, to name but a few.

I once had a neighbor who had immigrated to the United States from a country in South Asia as a young man. During our first extended conversation, he turned to musing on something he missed about the old country: a style of community life in which one could always drop in at a friend's house unannounced. In our suburban American community, that was out of the question. I began to deplore the spreading influence of American culture, which threatened to change the character of countries like his native one; but the first words were barely out of my mouth when he turned on me in undisguised exasperation as if to say, "Not that again! Not you, too!" He went on to explain that his old country was, apart from certain fondly-remembered graces, in dire need of such a change. There, every phase of society had been customarily corrupt for so long that no indigenous process of reform was possible. The only hope of improvement, he said, lay in wholesale Americanization. That was the word he used. Not modernization, not democratization, but Americanization. And he was sternly in earnest.

Then there's bigotry. The concept of race may be a European invention, as our own social-justice authorities tell us, but bigoted non-Europeans have always managed nicely without the concept. What is race, after all, but one of many motifs for lumping people together and thereby submerging their humanity? What color is to one bigot, clan is to another, and caste is to yet another. Each classification, to the respective bigot, is a far deeper thing than any rationale for classifying that meets the eye of an outsider. "Let me tell you about those people," says the exotic oracle. "You don't know them as I do." Thus begins a bitter tale of perfidy, rapacity, exploitation, and aggression — all on the side of "those people" and all inherent in a collective character. General calumnies that would get a domestic bigot banished from one's circle may pass for revelations because one fails to reflect that there is such a thing as an exotic bigot. American society doesn't differ from others in the existence of racism, but in the constant grappling with it.

Most of the American students currently devoting themselves to passionate "pro-Palestinian" (effectively pro-Hamas) activism may, as thoughtful observers attest, be innocent of personal antisemitism. However, they've subscribed to a partisan view of a foreign ethnic conflict, a view in which agitation against the state of Israel is inseparably overlaid on Jew-hatred. The Columbia University campus newspaper has identified Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group allegedly linked to Hamas through a fiscal sponsor, as organizers of the protest encampments at Columbia and beyond. As far as US-based supporters of Hamas are concerned, the underlying antisemitism can remain hidden. Or it can be implicitly displayed in a callous attitude toward atrocities against Israeli civilians. Or it can be treated as a lesson long since learned by Magical Others and now imparted to green Americans: that Jews are proper objects of loathing.

Hamas itself is fundamentally antisemitic, even unto its antecedents. Its 1988 charter makes that clear, and the 2017 revision which apologists tout as a laying-down of religious fanaticism and a taking-up of respectable nationalist aspirations is merely the sort of update that might be suggested by a public-relations consultant. It rings the changes on its subject in a way that brings it within the affective sphere of civilized discourse while substantively leaving it where it began. SJP, with its blatant antisemitism and its endorsement of violence, appears to serve as the terminus of a supply chain for importing poison seed into America.

Leftists' cool indifference to the bestiality demonstrated by Hamas on October 7 — the sadistic massacre of civilians that spared neither infants nor their grandparents — the orgy of rape and mutilation — is something new. It's literally alien to the American political arena. This acceptance of the utmost depravity is no outgrowth of American hatred or American arrogance, much less among Americans who fancy themselves progressive. It had to sprout from seed brought from far away where pitiless war on other Others is destiny.