Manifesto

Figuring Out My Politics

For the few reading this Substack, the politics here must be a bit perplexing. This is for the good reason that I’m really not sure what my politics are. Or, to put it a little more proudly, that I’ve found it important to scrape away various political assumptions I have and try to put together a politics from scratch.

In the early 2010s I almost consciously switched my brain off. The feeling was that Obama sort of represented the pot at the end of the rainbow of in terms of party politics – that government should be technocratic and reformist, highly pragmatic in dealing with the world-as-it-is and the resources at its disposal but forward-looking and dedicated to the long arc towards justice. That was what a moderately left political class in Europe and America represented, with only mild critiques from the media and the professional scolders – and, if there were any lingering doubts, they were put to rest by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a tag-team against the insanity of the opposition.

Ten years later nothing about that picture holds. It’s obvious to everybody that the political fabric of the country has torn apart. It probably is impossible to overestimate the importance Trump had in that but that’s not to say that Trump is the only culpable party. The liberal left has become completely unrecognizable to me. The fixation on identity politics at the exclusion of all else has created a bitterly divisive, deeply un-free environment within liberal America. If it was only a matter of progressives being progressive that would be one thing, but the liberal institutions have been astonishingly toothless in abiding by core values of freedom of exchange and a spirit of skeptical inquiry. The result is a weirdly uniform, craven, and unworldly mode of discourse from very well-credentialed, well-established figures in media and academia – and, meanwhile, a raft of truly terrible art, essentially just political agitprop, is unceasingly and straight-facedly promoted.

In retrospect, of course, the liberal consensus wasn’t as intact as I naively thought circa 2010. The press wasn’t asking tough questions of the Obama administration, and the critique of the heartland – that government signified taxes and regulation without corresponding benefits, that liberal politics had assumed a scolding, identitarian-minded tone that had little to do with the social realities in much of America, and that really devastating issues like the opioid crisis, the long-running hollowing-out of the working class, and the emergence of a terrifying violent new nihilism were almost categorically ignored by the political powers-that-be – had never been so regressive or untethered as the liberal pundits made it out to be. At the level of party politics, the underlying issue, I suspect, was that the Democratic Party was, at its core, the party of the labor unions. With the decline of the unions, the Democrats no longer had a real identity. That could be smoothed over with the right charismatic politician at the top of the ticket – Obama or Bill Clinton – but the Democrats had shifted into an unfortunate position of standing for a condescending managerial elite; and the Party’s liberal backbone was (and continues to be) astonishingly unperceptive in understanding the danger.

The point here isn’t to blame liberal punditry for the fissuring of the body politic. The point is that the old consensus was more fragile than it appeared and isn’t coming back. A decent analogy to what we’ve been going through is the collapse of the liberal establishment in England circa 1910 – as chronicled in George Dangerfield’s altogether wonderful The Strange Death of Liberal England. In that vision, the political disintegration of the Liberal Party at its ostensible peak isn’t attributable to some failure of policy or leadership or even to the advent of World War I – in the context of the time, the war was seen almost as a relief, a respite from the agonizing politics of the previous half-decade. The issue was that the society was changing so rapidly, above all through a hyper-concentrated urban migration, that ‘rational,’ managerial politics couldn’t keep pace.

England’s agonizing politics c.1910

In our case, the great change is social media, which has completely blown apart our conventional modes of public discourse – institutional leaders, most conspicuously in universities, find themselves surrounded and harassed by online mobs and forego long-standing institutional policy for the sake of mollifying public pressure; while charismatic radical figures, most conspicuously Trump, have been able to assemble political coalitions apparently out of thin air. If George Dangerfield was the chronicler of England circa 1910, Martin Gurri has fulfilled a similar function for our time. “We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born,” he writes. “The conflict is so asymmetrical that it seems impossible for the two sides to actually engage but they do engage and the battlefield is everywhere. You who are young today may not live to see its resolution.”  

What that means, as far as I’m concerned, is that it no longer works – except in the very narrow sphere of party-line voting – to simply choose a political alignment and stick to it. To say something like ‘I’m an Obama liberal’ – which was my line for years – becomes meaningless; and political thought turns into a much more fraught, and ultimately more interesting, process of thinking issue-by-issue, taking nothing at face-value, remaining mindful always of the sources of one’s information, and really laboring internally to reach one’s conclusions. (It could be objected that this is always what it meant to be an independent thinker – and that’s absolutely true – but, in my case, I was taken in for a period of time by the notion that liberals were on the right side of history, and what I’m saying right now is almost more as a memo to self, an encouragement to jump-start my brain.)

Contemporary prophet Martin Gurri

To actually reach some sort of viable coherent political philosophy isn’t at all easy, and my politics so far have taken me only to the point of being alert to and critical of a few highly toxic trends, each of which I’m associating (a bit reductively) with a particular thinker.

These thinkers are:

-  Carl Schmitt. A belief that the sole purpose of statecraft is to maintain ‘order’ – and that the primary tool for doing so is a permanent ‘state of emergency,’ a never-ending political crisis for which the remedy is centralized hierarchical leadership. This philosophy is almost never articulated out loud but for a long time has been an article of faith within the leadership class and particularly in national security circles. Giorgio Agamben is its primary critic today, just as C. Wright Mills was in the 1950s. Figures like Dick Cheney and, in Russia, Aleksandr Dugin are surprisingly open in stating how this philosophy works from the vantage-point of power.

- Francis Bacon. A belief in ‘lab conditions,’ in improving the world through the scientific method and through ever-unfolding technological ‘progress.’ This has quietly been the dominant philosophy of the Western world for the past 500 years. It started to raise eyebrows through the squalid conditions of the Industrial Revolution and then through science’s contribution to the devastating weaponry of the 20th century and, now, through science’s lackadaisical willingness to make humans obsolete via AI and advanced computer technology. To an unsettling extent, liberalism, in its post-trade union era, has identified itself with Baconianism – with an acceptance of whatever is technologically cutting-edge and a kind of obeisance to both Silicon Valley and to Big Pharma.

- Judith Butler. A belief that the heroic work of social reform is carried out not in opposition to power-writ-large but in an endless patrolling of social interactions, in the subversion of ‘normality.’ Critical race theory and wokeism are, I contend, basically tributaries of Butler’s philosophy, which is a fundamentally irresponsible interrogation of daily life (and for which social media turns out to be ideally suited).

At the same time it goes without saying that MAGA and the loose-cannon right, at once insurrectionary and autocratic, represent another deeply toxic strain, but this is better understood – and the obvious analogy to Fascism makes liberals attuned to its dangers.

As the political center – the old liberal consensus – crumbles, I’ve been deeply sympathetic to a range of intellectuals who have found themselves unmoored. As a partial list, these are Bari Weiss, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, David Brooks, Bill Deresiewicz, John McWhorter, Jordan Peterson, Matt Taibbi, Alex Berenson, etc. An alarming number of them have been ‘canceled’ – or chased away from their public platforms. A few have held onto their old jobs and a few have adapted nicely to the shift in circumstances. As a group they haven’t arrived at any sort of consensus position nor are likely to – although the University of Austin is a sort of touching flagship of the intellectual revolution that they have in mind. A few of them – Weiss, Peterson – seem to have drifted towards a slightly old-fashioned conservative position, which would be roughly equivalent to Likud or the Christian Democrats if either of those parties existed in North America. There’s a value placed on continuity with the past and a sense that business culture is more rational and grounded than the intellectual left.

For the majority of the intellectuals listed, though, a coherent political position is a long way off. They are openly shellshocked by what’s happened on the left – by what they view as the cowardice of the institutions that they dedicated the early parts of their careers to and by the failure of the majority of their old friends to even notice the collapse of core liberal values. Their project is to return to some sort of basic civic discourse along the lines of what Locke, Jefferson or Mill had in mind – a celebration of free speech and cultural exchange for their own sake, a willingness to hear out voices of dissent, an ingrained skepticism of authority in whatever form authority takes, and a certain pragmatism about the realities of living in a dangerous and violent world. And that’s basically what the political sections of this Substack are about as well – trying to open the aperture wide, to let in perspectives from different points on the political spectrum, to think a little more broadly and philosophically about political trends, and to get outside of dogmatic thinking; to reexamine.