You might have thought that the Democratic and Republican Parties are different versions of the same thing, but that’s no longer true. As Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has noted, the G.O.P. is no longer a standard coalition party. It’s an anti-political insurgency that, even before Trump, has been elevating candidates with no political experience and who don’t believe in the compromise and jostle of politics.
Right now, Republicans are a culture war identity movement that suppresses factional disagreement and demands total loyalty to Trump.
The Democrats are still a normal political party. In 2020 they rejected the “base mobilization” candidates who imagine you can magically create a revolutionary majority if only you go purist.
I've been on the other side of this argument. I know that often the only way things get done is you start screaming and breaking things. I'd still argue that when you have a stolidly clueless establishment impervious to any ideas except what is echoed by others in the establishment, that screaming and breaking things can be effective and justified.
But we're not living at a time where there is a stolid, complacent establishment. It has been deeply shaken by the events of the last four years. In my post from a couple of weeks ago This Moment is Different I wrote addressing Trump supporters:
I can understand why you voted for him in '16. I can understand why you wanted to send a message. I can understand why you wanted to shake things up and put the fear of God into complacent elite thinking. Message received.
By "message received" I meant that elites are no longer complacent in their thinking. They are vulnerable to make necessary adjustments, and what that means essentially is that Neoliberalism no longer has hegemonic legitimacy.
That being said, I doubt that David Brooks got the message. He really does represent the old elite Neoliberal complacency, and that's the subtext of the column from which I excerpted the epigraph above. Nevertheless, he's right about the Republican Party and about the political process. And while I reject the implication that Warren, AOC, and Sanders, and Black Live Matters are the equivalent on the Left for what Trump, Qanon, Fox News, and the right-wing militias are on the Right, he's right that we have to return to the ordinary business of politics because for all its flaws and frustrations it's better than the chaos and violence toward which we are otherwise headed.
That's the difference between someone like Sanders and Biden on the one hand and Trump and McConnell on the other. As different as Biden and Sanders might be in their politics, they accept that the give and take of politics is the arena in which they work. That's no longer true of the Republican Party. It really hasn't been since Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh pushed it over the cliff in the 90s.
The system is healthy when it's boring and stable, and yes when it is so it favors elites and insiders. Establishment moderates should be running things, but they need to be pushed by non-establishment outsiders. If that sounds weak, well welcome to reality, which is largely governed by the Iron Law of Oligarchy. No revolution on the Right or Left is going to change that–it's just a question of choosing the elites who will do the least harm are more likely to be pushed in a positive direction. That excludes fanatics of either the Left or Right.
And for me it's clear that the difference between Liberal elites like Biden, the Clintons, and Brooks, squishy though they may be, is that they are malleable in a way that Right-Wing elites are not. There is a fanaticism that drives Republican Right-Wing elites in a way that is alien to Liberal elites precisely because the latter are so squishy. A fanatic is not persuadable; a Liberal, by virtue of his squishiness, is.
The definition of a political fanatic is someone who thinks it's better to burn the whole system down than to nudge it in the right direction. Are there fanatics on the Left? Of course. But AOC and Elizabeth Warren are not among them. Neither are they squishy. They are strong-willed, clear-headed, down-to-earth women with a point of view and with good arguments. Our best hope is that they will play an outsized role in persuading those in the squishy center of the Biden administration to move the country in a direction that actually deals with the underlying problems that led to Trump's election.
It's not about what we want; it's about what's possible. Republican Right-Wing fanatics want impossibilities because they are delusional in their longing for a return to a pre-1960s American reality. Indeed, many of them wish it were the 1880s. The typical cosmopolitan Liberal is not morally superior to the typical cultural Conservative, but she is less dangerous because better adapted to reality.
Liberals did not create an anything-goes, morally nihilistic cultural milieu–consumer capitalism did. Many Liberals have adapted and found ways of living relatively decent, morally serious lives in that milieu. Conservatives have not adapted and as a result feel that they are facing extinction–and they blame Liberals for it. And they are willing to justify committing outrageously immoral violent acts because they have come to believe that their survival depends on it. But Liberals did not cause their problems. It's their own rigidity in being unable to adapt to a cultural reality that was caused by an economic system that they otherwise largely approve of.
If Americans want to change the culture, a big part of it is about changing their capitalism idolatry. David Brooks does not understand this–not really–while AOC does. But the greatest irony of all is that capitalism is the last thing the Republican Right-Wing fanatic wants to change his thinking about. He'd rather an America run by the Koch Brothers than by AOC or the "squad". Capitalism for the Republican Right-Wing fanatic is the poison that's actually killing him. He's too angry at Liberals to be clear-headed enough to understand what truly ails him and where a real cure lies.
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