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.

❖

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.

The Great Christmas of '20

It's a difficult thought to express. After all, this is a season of grief for many people and one of cruel suffering or crushing work for many others. The thought here is only appropriate as a sort of greeting among all whose burden is limited to disappointment, inconvenience, boredom, or loneliness. Where the holiday imagery is not universal, please understand that the spirit is.

Through the first half of the twentieth century and into the second, the Great Snow of '88 was a touchstone of shared experience, then a generational boast, and ultimately a running joke among Americans. By the time "'88" could mean something other than 1888, even the joke had become a mark of advancing years.

The snow wasn't funny when it blew in. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us of a

winter storm that pummeled the Atlantic coast of the United States, from the Chesapeake Bay to Maine, in March 1888. The blizzard caused more than $20 million in property damage in New York City alone and killed more than 400 people, including about 100 seamen, across the eastern seaboard.

In later years, though, there were many who could look back on it as a scene of sublime terror giving way to great adventures and prized hardships: being stranded in the impromptu society of strangers on a snowbound train or in a shop; coming and going by an upper-story window of your house because the first story -- or two -- had been snowed in. Walking ever so many miles to school through a trackless white wilderness. The Great Snow generation had memories far out of the ordinary.

When all is said and done, ordinary winters beat extraordinary ones. A holiday season without the hardships of a pandemic is the kind we want, really. But when life gives you lemons, the thing to do is whip up an eggnog of a different flavor. We may not quite relish the thing itself, but we'll relish the memory of it. The feeling will become recondite knowledge, a lost chord of piquancy that can never be reproduced. What, exactly, will we have to hold in mind, and how will we hold it?

The memory starts putting itself into words even now. "In the year 2020, something extraordinary happened all over the world. I was caught up in it. Those were strange times, and this is how I got through them. When I was away from home, I wore a mask and kept my distance from other people. We did such things for the common good. At home, I kept myself company (if one was all alone). I returned gratefully to the old sense of recreation. And when the dark year-end days wore on without festivities or friends, I put on another pot of coffee and took down another book."

People of Flesh and Blood

Free the POC millions! Spring them from that cellblock cunningly marked "people of color" to keep us from seeking particular human beings there.

For Americans, this period following the elections of 2020 is the best chance yet to end the misconceived aggregation of ethnic identities into a notional superminority. Ethnic identity is itself a veil traditionally drawn across myriad and varied personal worlds. The construct "people of color" (POC) carries depersonalization to an unsustainable extreme. Though the phrase goes back multiple centuries, through multiple good intentions, it holds a place in the lexicon today because it serves two ends: political coalition-building and rhetorical leverage.

By rhetorical leverage I mean the effect achieved when a writer begins a discourse with "As a person of color, I..." rather than, say, "As a Polynesian, I...." It fills the mental frame with an impressive cross-sectional wall of supporters like those seen behind politicians at rallies. It maximizes the essay's claim on our attention and places the essayist among the voices of a vast constituency. Individuals who want to make "people of color" work for them can do so in this way.

But the main use of the POC construct is coalition-building. In principle, it does make sense for minority groups to join forces. The use of the words “people of color” was once a code for solidarity with black Americans. It served to reinforce the 13% of the population that had historically suffered under slavery and Jim Crow with peers for whom the racial burden might be no heavier than the annoyance of stereotyping. However, a coalition is implicitly a transactional thing; and a coalition that rests on an artificial formulation cannot long stand.

The formulation "people of color" is artificial. Though people of various races share the one attribute of being non-white (which is barely even an attribute), they share no POC history. No POC cultural heritage, no POC language code, no POC food for the soul. Such things, which exist only for traditional groups, are bound to exert a differentiating influence until the very concepts of race and ethnicity lose currency. White progressives tend to overlook that influence. Activists of any hue may depreciate it in their enthusiasm for scaled-up politics. Many of the people being scaled up, however, remain alive to it and correspondingly dead to their supposed bond with other members of the coalition.

The illusory nature of a solidly progressive POC bloc became apparent in the results of the recent elections, which were disappointing for Democrats below the presidential level. Jay Caspian Kang of The New York Times Magazine subsequently wrote on the Times Op-Ed page,

In the past, antiracist messages relied on categorizations like Asian-American, Latino and the umbrella of “people of color.” All three are abstractions that have little grounding in the everyday lives of immigrants. My uncle, who has lived in Los Angeles for 40 years, might now understand in a purely taxonomic sense that he is “Asian,” but he would laugh at the idea of “people of color.” His interactions with his fellow “people of color” have mostly come in kitchens where he works as a chef and speaks a hybrid Korean-Spanish with his Latino co-workers.

As Kang reminds us in passing, even the original category “Asian” is bloodless nonsense. If we hadn’t grown up with the geographical concept of Asia, we’d recognize that it’s wildly broad and arbitrary. We use it because, once upon a time, someone (perhaps Herodotus) started using such a term for the land just across the Aegean Sea from Greece, and over the years Europeans came to let it stand for more and more territory east of that. Now we passively imagine an “Asia” that stretches over an immense range of latitudes and longitudes (but curiously stops in the middle of a landmass), peopled by “Asians” who exhibit no unity of race, language, religion, traditional economy, or culture. As in other parts of the Old World, there’s historically no love lost between neighboring ethnic groups. If their offspring in the US know any communality, it’s that which lies in the “American” part of “Asian-American”. To plead for the “Asian” part is to pay tribute to the ultimate Eurocentric conceit.

It may seem that giving up the term “Asia” would mean losing the one good shorthand we have for denoting a certain region of the world, but we need to remind ourselves that there is no such region and start taking the trouble to deal with discrete realities. We must liberate a multitude of people from our conception of them as Asians. So it is with “Latinos”. So it is, above all, with “people of color”, a formulation that carries breadth and arbitrariness to an extreme.

The term “of color” has a certain appeal as a noble substitute for the negative “non-white”, but both terms become odious when we recognize them as identity thieves and insults to our intelligence. They presuppose a distinct "white" set of people who share a certain experience of whiteness and consequently enviable status. Against this they posit a residual set of people who must, if they are to function as a political interest group, possess something approaching a shared experience of color and consequently unenviable status. But they don’t. Their diversity in appearance, consciousness, lived experience, and status is as great as that of “Asians”. They’re not going to coalesce except in pipe smoke.

The 2020 election results are only the most quantifiable evidence that the POC experiment must fail. We were already seeing signs of a revolt against identity-pooling by black Americans, or at least by activists among them. Far from expanding their political community to encompass non-black non-whites, they had begun to subdivide it between those blacks with roots running through slavery and those without. Vertical heritage is asserting itself against lateral coalition-building.

The apparent sacrifice of numerical strength that comes with the idea of discarding the POC category is not a real sacrifice. In the first place, the trend in the US population to a non-white majority is hardly more epoch-making than the Millennium Bug of 2000. As for political outcomes, it might have been guessed even before the 2020 elections that people would not necessarily vote their skin color. As for economic power and social influence, any shift as a result of demographic change ought to be so gradual that it could be overtaken by a decline in the significance of racial identity. After all, whites will not one day become a beleaguered minority. They will simply go from being a majority of the population to being the largest single category and then, perhaps, to being the second largest for years to come. Nor will power and privilege necessarily change hands in any ordained way.

In the second place, the vision of a superminority -- destined to become a majority -- of people united by non-whiteness is necessarily a mirage. Those members of the constituent minorities who value racial identity will prefer the thick kind to the thin. Those who devalue it will be altogether lost for purposes of aggregation. Minority people will tend to merge with the more advantaged elements of the population when possible, and not linger in the ranks of "people of color" for the sake of grim solidarity. Even now I strongly suspect that at the end of each day, when all the public talking has been done and people retire into their private lives, the words "people of color" mean the most to white progressives. As for their own place in the shifting kaleidoscope of colors, the Harvard geneticist David Reich (cited in a New Yorker article by Douglas Preston) has found

that as recently as eight thousand years ago there were at least four distinct groups of Europeans, as genetically different from one another as the British are from the Chinese today, some with brown skin color. As he put it in an e-mail, "'White people' simply didn’t exist ~8,000 years ago."

POC partisans' triumphalist heralding of demographic revolution in recent years alarmed many white Americans and smoothed the way for a demagogue while distracting people in the liberal spectrum from genuine sources of strength. Shared rhetoric is not shared consciousness. Coalitions are not bonds. Color is not destiny. The most reliable allies are not identified by racial origin, but by moral destination. Your closest political kin are the like-minded.

So free all the people of flesh and blood. Set loose all the minds. Dissolve the biological bars, and discover the ties that benignly bind. Let there be politics.

The Triple Seal

The outcome of the 2020 presidential election may not hinge on the behavior of Donald Trump's base, but it would be nice to see that base shrink under the crescendo of his incompetence and dishonesty. A combination of three factors may soon fix the seal of impossibility on that hope. It could even cause Trump's base to start doing what it has failed to do since 2016: grow.

What they don't know
John Stuart Mill noted that "facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it." The crescendo of Trump's incompetence and dishonesty has always been muted for his base by Fox News and other sources of information that spare their consumers much exposure to untoward facts and arguments, from a Trumpist point of view. This factor is already notorious. However, it's not decisive by itself. Surveys have shown that Trump voters are not entirely isolated from mainstream news media. We know that they even get perturbing ripples of reality from Fox News itself. So far, then, there exists hope of an awakening.

And what about the palpable human loss and hardship that Trump causes by acts of commission or omission such as his irresponsibility in the face of the coronavirus crisis? There are, after all, facts that bring themselves before the mind unaided.

Mysterious ways
Donald Trump's political base has always been strong in the more paganistic kind of Christianity. Now, many of its members have passed from merely supporting him as a politician to fetishizing him as an instrument of God. They openly speak of him in such terms. So the same cruel assurance which the pious inflict on parents who have lost a child -- that this, too, is part of a divine plan -- can serve to seal fissures in the confidence of Trump's religiously-minded supporters. "God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform." In principle, that all-purpose article of faith can keep even the most painful turn of events from shaking belief in Donald Trump. However, its effect is vindicatory rather than motivational. It lacks any broader appeal than a call to Apollyon-worship.

QAnon
The third, new factor is the stealthy spread of the QAnon cult. What matters about QAnon is not the most conspicuous part of its layered conspiracy theory, the notion of a liberal elite cabal running a pedophilia ring. What matters is the underlying story, which portrays Donald Trump as a secret agent working heroically to defeat the machinations of a bureaucratic "deep state". This conceit, that Trump is not what he seems, has the potential to neutralize every objection to his presidency for a large set of susceptible individuals.

Ignorant buffoonery? Just an act. Spectacles of narcissism, immaturity, mendacity, racism, and subservience to foreign powers? All smoke and mirrors to confound the enemy. Or, if one wishes a particular element -- the racism, for example -- to be real, one can tune belief accordingly. The presumption of a heroic Donald Trump becomes immutable, and everything that seems wrong with him is diligently incorporated into that presumption by the believing mind.

Since Trump's base is largely oblivious of facts and arguments that discredit him, it's primed to adopt the QAnon portrait without much of a strain. Its members are already accustomed to managing the embarrassments that do get through to them by means of broad sophistries: that Trump is no worse than other politicians, or that he's got a plan. On top of that, the sacrilegious view of him as an instrument of God renders his sins irrelevant while exalting his imagined plan to the level of God’s design.

But it's QAnon that will perfect the seal on Trumpism. Its alternate reality will flow into all gaps and over the rough features of all surfaces. Given the single conceit that Trump is an undercover agent waging a struggle more vital than anything we see, it ceases to matter what we see. If he's supposed to be serving some mysterious cause greater than himself, the notion of divine will is always viable. Trump may go on boisterously claiming that it's all about him; but he would say that, wouldn't he? It has already become possible to interpret his words along QAnon lines, as when a New York Times interviewer recently questioned him about his reputation for whiling away too much time in front of a TV set. His reply: "Just the opposite. I don’t watch very much TV. Nobody knows what I do." The Republican National Convention was rife with barely oblique QAnon-signalling.

As the cult of Trump shades into that of QAnon, reservations about the man will fall before the thrill of getting in on what he supposedly represents: a sub rosa movement possessing a vault of secrets and a panoply of symbols. The portentous slogans, the furtively ubiquitous "Q" logo, and the winking freemasonry with other initiates should appeal to more people than Donald Trump himself does, while drawing them to him. His base can then grow at last. By and by, it can easily become a base for someone else.

Anarchy in America

No, it's not about the public demonstrations that are now sweeping the country. That grand movement to build a society free from racism is anything but anarchic. The destruction and looting that have sometimes attended it are fits of chaotic lawlessness, but not anarchy.

Anarchy in America today is slothful, cynical. Muttering, chuckling, sullenly settling like a doomed old house that mocks its inmates. Its embodiment is a political party that has come to resemble an antebellum mansion waiting for decay to run its course. On the shuttered upper floors, grandees guard their treasure and conspire to salt the earth for miles around before they sleep. In the cellar, wayfarers who once stumbled in delirious now pass the time in tapping casks of forgetfulness.

The authorities flouted by this kind of anarchy are fundamental ones: not only principles of democratic government that one discards at one's own future peril, but also sources of accurate, comprehensive information; learning; science; reason itself; even common sense, that rough but serviceable guide that generally kept our ancestors from swallowing arrant nonsense or trusting obvious phonies. The usual anarchist's gamble on improvement through demolition has given way to something more akin to nihilism. Partisans of slothful anarchy are not looking for a way forward, but for a way down and out that will let them casually scar the world as they go. Since they can't prevail, they'll try to leave behind a disabled government, a poisoned society, an intellectual wasteland, and a planet deprived of its last hope.

In America, anarchy has become the province of those who can't abide any change but rot.

Lumping Together, Pulling Apart

As surely as the American body politic has seams, it now appears bent on coming apart at them. The centrifugal force of a blood feud between conservatives and liberals is only half the story. The other half is the displacement of inclusively-minded liberals by exclusively-minded progressives.

The main liberal party of the twentieth century, the Democrats, were always known for disarray. The array of interests represented by the party assured that. Blocs, in the course of vying for influence, were bound to rock the boat. Those Democrats who had no need of a bloc were liable to find the rocking a bit much. Still, at the end of the day, there was a sense of being Democrats all. Underlying shared values were sufficient for cohesion.

All the while, however, something was happening that would lead to a crisis of value-sharing. More and more liberals were casually becoming amenable to the concept of class struggle. People who would never have thought of espousing Marxism itself seem to have thought nothing of picking up Marxian tropes. As they did so, they gave liberalism an aspect of slavishly canting piety. For example, the reflex of depersonalizing responsibility for antisocial behavior and looking for root causes in society got to be so compulsive that the phrase “root cause” became a running joke among the unsympathetic. Some legacy liberals turned away in disgust. They would soon receive the derogatory new label neoconservative from erstwhile peers who, for their own part, were turning to the dogmatically progressive left.

Next the American vision of society as one big assemblage of individuals came under pressure from multiculturalism, with its premise that ethnic identity groups ought to be affirmed, celebrated, accommodated, and given a wide berth; not expected to dissolve in the fullness of time. The liberal abhorrence of lumping people together, founded on the recognition that it's the groundwork of bigotry, became untenable for progressives. Not only did it fit badly with multiculturalist assumptions, but it collided head-on with Marxist ones. Marxist thought doesn't really get rolling until it has lumped people together and designated certain lumps the enemy. Liberals oppose prejudice as a matter of principle. Marxists have less time for principle than for useful prejudice.

Modern progressive politics made a ready basin for a confluence of two dynamics. One was this Marxist imperative to submerge individuals in classes, lest minute particulars make a mess of political clarity. The other was the universal tendency for schools of thought to seek their strong forms over time and for movements to take on the character of their firebrands. Those who are most militant in agitating for racial justice will tend to villainize whites indiscriminately. Those who are most militant in agitating against entrenched ways will tend to villainize elders indiscriminately. The tendency runs to an extreme in the case of feminism, a movement that was bound to act as a magnet for women inclined to misandrous sisterhood. And so, among today's archetypal progressives, political engagement has become war on biological class enemies.

Males. White people. White males. Old people. Old white males. Or old white heterosexual cisgender males. The categories expand and contract, merge and split and morph from moment to moment as progressives improvise exceptions for their perceived clients, traps for their adversaries, and shelters for themselves. Personal virtue is beside the point. Every young white male, be he ever so woke, is in for it when he becomes an old one. Ostracism will come when newly ascendant progressive powers decree it. It came two years ago to one who was not male or particularly old or the least bit backward in her politics. It was sufficient that she was white, and the fact that she was Jewish clearly told against her in the unguarded early moments.

For details, please refer to the article "Women’s March Roiled by Accusations of Anti-Semitism" in The New York Times (December 23, 2018). The gist is that one of the organizers of the Women's March, Vanessa Wruble, was morally isolated and then organizationally marginalized for her identity. The faction that accomplished this consisted of a black woman, Tamika Mallory, and a Latina, Carmen Perez, later joined by the Palestinian-American Linda Sarsour and "another woman named Bob Bland, a white fashion designer who created one of the first Facebook pages about the march". These four proceeded to lead the organization under a cloud of rancor until it was announced in September, 2019, that Mallory, Sarsour, and Bland were "moving on to other commitments".

Meanwhile, Wruble's antagonists had fallen back to the position of deploring anti-Semitism in principle and allowing that Wruble had one foot within the pale inasmuch as Jews had been victims of oppression. They downplayed their ties with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan (who anyway complicates the puzzle of progressive solidarity by inveighing not only against whites generally and Jews particularly, but also against LGBTQ people). But come what may, these progressive paragons will never appreciate the spectacle they make in the eyes of mere liberals as they stamp through their activist careers, grimly totting up and doling out credit for victim status as if that were the currency of virtue and they the purse-keepers.

Fifty-five years ago, the black civil rights worker James Chaney faced death with two other young men, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. They were white. They were Jewish. They were not the only whites or the only Jews who put their lives on the line in the cause of justice for black Americans. At the same period, black Americans' strongest ally in this world was the United States Government, personified by a white president who had made up his mind to see the battle through regardless of political consequences ("Well, what the hell is the presidency for?") and an equally resolute Department of Justice, a bastion of white males. America was that rare kind of country in which members of the ethnic majority will rally around a small minority. It's that kind of country today, even while its federal government languishes in piratical captivity. All along, Jewish white Americans, both female and male, have stood in the forefront of efforts to preserve civil liberties and to extend social justice. Yet they are now under attack from people who, if not merely ignorant or merely absorbed in the Palestinian cause (to the exclusion of the Uyghur cause and the Tibetan cause), are perhaps resentful of a moral example which they cannot hope to follow. For more, please see "On the Frontlines of Progressive Anti-Semitism" (The New York Times, November 14, 2019).

When progressives assign themselves and others to biologically determined classes, they escape the need to test their views against common standards of reason or to circumscribe their claims with common values, because they have denied commonality itself. Opinions from across a biological border can always be dismissed out of hand by saying, in effect, “Consider the source.” Fundamental notions of justice or of moral responsibility can, like the literary canon, be dismissed by saying they embody the interests of an oppressor class.

This trick of escaping may be a deliberate strategy, but it takes us on a wild binge at the expense of communal health. Of course, a civic organism as well endowed as American democracy may prove robust enough to experience a binge like the current one and still show up for work in the morning. It does have a history of rebounding from misspent nights to do better work than before. Maybe even this period of fevered lumping-together and pulling-apart will turn out to have been only a phase in the life of a growing nation. Then, if it’s not too late, we can give all our attention to the state of our undeniably common planet.

On Bone Marrow Aspirations

It may serve a good purpose to share some notes on bone marrow aspirations. I've had four so far.

You lie face down and have marrow drawn from a hip bone for testing. The whole procedure takes about half an hour, followed by another half hour of rest on your back before getting up. It's good to have a book along for that.

My doctor explained that despite local anesthesia I'd feel sharp pain three times for one or two seconds each. And so I did. In contrast, if I stub my toe while barefoot I see stars for about ten seconds and endure slowly diminishing agony for a minute or so. With a typical bone marrow aspiration, three short jolts and you’re in the clear. My first two were typical.

It's only fair to report that the third went wrong. The needle must have struck a nerve, or so the doctor speculated when we compared notes, because it was a royal pain in the hip for most of the hour. Not quite a crisis, and yet a passage of heavy breathing and dark thoughts.

But you must hear about the fourth. This was done by my thirty-something outpatient chemo doctor, who had met my sallies on the subject of Stage IV with unerring tact. I knew her competence, but it began to seem that she’d take forever preparing to do the deed. Then, just as I re-tightened my grip on the end of the mattress, she said it was over.

I have no reason to doubt that she jabbed me; after all, I got the biopsy report. But I can't say it made much of an impression. May others be so fortunate.

Finally, here are my two best tips on bone marrow aspirations:

If you learn that you must have one, plan something fun to do afterward and keep your mind on that.

If you’re granted a life free of bone marrow aspirations, don't go and spoil it by stubbing your toe.

❖
Reconciled but Hungry
Cavorting at Eventide
Scrooge and Shelley