Admittedly, most of what I have written since I began this blog has
focused on the threat that we are now facing from the right. And
I think that threat is real and its looming in the American future is
oppressive. But Liberalism has prepared the ground, and it’s
important to understand Liberal culpability in setting things up in
such a way that we are now so vulnerable.
Even though for now it offers the only opposition available, I do not think that the opposition proffered by Liberalism to the threat from the right can
be an effective counterweight in the long run. Liberalism is in disarray. It neither
offers intellectual vigor and a compelling imagination of the future,
nor does it any longer command a power base that can effectively
counter the growing power of the big-money, power right. If some
alternative to the oppressive future that the rightists would fashion for us is to be found, it will not come from Liberalism.
Liberalism has always been the ideology of the modern project, and the modern project has always been about the emancipation of the rational individual from the constraints of custom and tradition. Liberalism is about the rejection of the superstitious, feudal, premodern past and the embrace of unbounded future possibilities engineered by human brainpower. There are certainly some people who still believe in this kind of Liberalism, but it’s a liberalism driving on fumes. Liberalism has become now more of an old habit than it is a lively, animating cultural impulse. And its anemic vision is not something most people, especially politicians, are willing to stick out their necks to defend as a matter of principle.
It’s not a question of what we would like or prefer; it’s a question of
looking clearly at our situation and understanding its pitfalls and opportunities. The pitfall is that with the passing of Liberalism a kind of cultural vacuum has been created that is now being filled by the worst human impulses, and those are working through the GOP in an egregiously regressive way. See the post I put up earlier this week about how the continuing appeal of fascism is a serious contender to fill that vacuum. The possibilities lie in the challenge to the human spirit and imagination to frame something new, something that moves us forward out of the limitations of modernity into broader possibilities for global humanity.
The Democrats are not the answer. If you think the election of Democrats is anything more than a temporary expression of national revulsion at the incompetence and corruption of the GOP, you’re kidding yourself. The right will find a way to regroup and advance its attack. And it has a very strong chance of success because so many of the structural factors (courts, money, media, weakening long-term economy, and a confused, anxious, easily manipulated electorate) favor it, and the long-term trend lies with the right unless something more vigorous can rise to counter it. In my view the human being as envisioned by the secular left is so limited, flat, and at root nihilistic, so circumscribed by the limitations of modern rationalist materialism, that it cannot possibly offer a way forward. And that limited modernist vision of the human underlies the Liberal worldview and fundamental values that shape the active base of the Democratic Party and the Greens as well. And so long as it does, most Americans will not be able to identify with it, even though they might vote Democrat for reasons of expediency.
So I support the Democrats out of such expediency, but I do not believe that the Democrats are anything move than flimsy breakwall incapable of doing more than slightly slowing down the momentum of political and economic forces that favor the right.
And it’s important to understand how Liberalism has played a role in getting us into this predicament, because when its spirit dominated the cultural zeitgeist, it was largely responsible for destroying the traditional-values and economic infrastructure that provided the institutions needed for a flourishing republican political culture. That infrastructure is all but gone, and there’s no use in crying over spilt milk, but it’s important to understand that the people who destroyed it are not in a position to understand what’s needed to build something sane and lifegiving to replace it.
A sane Liberal solution is unlikely because of Liberalism’s flawed understanding of the human being. Classic Liberals look at everything that comes from the past as unnecessary baggage that impedes progress toward the future. Classic Liberals believe that humans are tabula rasa, blank or empty slates, closed to mystery or transcendence, capable of being engineered by Skinnerian or Leninist social scientists or of endless Madonna-like invention or reinvention.
For the classic Liberal the human being is a cipher, and the consumer-oriented economy created during the Liberal era became the perfect means to fill this cipher’s emptiness. I’ll have more to say about this later this week, but for now it’s important to understand the fundamental emptiness that characterizes the Liberal vision of the human, and how Liberalism is root and branch implicated in the nihilism and materialism of consumerist culture. And it’s important to understand that many decent Americans are repelled by this vision and are too easily exploited by religious charlatans. The hunger for transcendence is a deeply human, a universally human trait. It is not in itself a delusional, but it is a hunger that too often is satisfied by junk food. And right now there are a lot of peddlers of junk food these days.
I am implacably opposed to everything that movement conservatives are seeking to accomplish in their program, but I do think that the critique of Liberalism that comes from some of the more thoughtful conservatives needs to be absorbed. Movement conservatism is a loathsome and dangerous phenomenon–far more so than Liberalism. But if we are to find a way forward, we have to come up with something better than what Liberalism offers. And we have to understand why movement conservatism is so appealing to many decent Americans.
At this point Liberalism is the only alternative to movement conservatism, and people who are opposed to the right by default have to align themselves with Liberal ideology. For some like me, that’s not a comfortable fit, and so I’m struggling to find something that fits better, but I’m not interested in being a party of one. I’m hoping to find something that resonates broadly and in the long run will provide a more robust alternative to the Liberal/Conservative choices available to us at this time. I’m also interested in finding ways to connect what I’m writing about here with the work others are doing. Perhaps some readers can help me with that.
In future posts I want push further this argument that Liberalism is a failed project and why it is no longer useful except as a temporary breakwall, and I want to begin to think through some ideas about what an alternative imagination might look like. It’s not that I have anything already clearly set in my mind about this. But its basic outline lies in some ideas I have already briefly presented when I wrote about ‘first and second naiveté’ and ‘retrieval’. I know these ideas seem abstract and unhelpful now, but my hope is to bring them down to earth and to make them work in a way that can help us, at least in our imagination of the task, to break this impasse.
Leave a Reply