If you have never read it or are new to After the Future, it might be worth your while to read my "About" statement. It's a good succinct (for me) statement of purpose. But today, just a short reflection to put all that in the context of today's big event:
I don't know about you, but it feels to me that after today's inauguration, we're in a different world, and we haven't even begun to get our arms around the scope of how significantly things have changed.
What we'll come to see more clearly is that what seems to many, especially complacent Liberals, so shockingly discontinuous in the Trump restoration has a long backstory. The Liberal establishment was, of course, aware of it as a threat, but it was so certain of it's own orthodoxies and righteousness, that it could not understand how most Americans would reject their worldview for the worldview of this deeply ignorant, vicious human being.
I will admit to falling into that pattern of thinking myself. It wasn't that I thought Liberals were so great, but that Trump was so bad–the country could not possibly choose him again. Right?! No, wrong. The reverse proved to be true: it's not that Americans think that Trump is so great, but that the Liberal establishment is even worse.
Do those in the Liberal establishment understand this? Guys like Ezra Klein argue maybe Trump won by only 1.5% because there was a vibe shift that favored Trump, and because vibes are fickle, they can shift the other way–that they are even likely to shift as soon as a fickle electorate is reminded how awful Trump is. Maybe he's right, but I doubt it. And do we really want to old thing back? And do we really have a future that is dependent on the fickleness of an electorate so easily manipulated by the vibe of the moment?
Every historical moment comprises both continuities and discontinuities, but there are some in which the disontinuities are more dramatic, and we're in one of those moments now. Because the cultural energies that have forced this discontinuity seem so malign, we naturally want to defend what was good in the old thing. Now I certainly don't want what Trump and the MAGA world wants, but neither do I want the old Liberal thing; I want something new; I want something that draws on the deep, originary energies from which all healthy culture springs.
Our historical/cultural situation is very complex and fluid, whatever ping-ponging might be going on at the surface, there is a profound movement shaping things underneath–perhaps for ill, but I think we must have hope that for good as well. The task now, as I see it, is not to become Liberal reactionaries, i.e., to fight to restore the status quo ante Trump, but rather to understand what's happening and to identify and develop its most positive potentialities for the future. That means thinking differently by stepping outside the habitual conventional liberal/conservative categories as best we can, and to see with new eyes.
Because I want something vital and new doesn't mean it's going to happen, but I'm not concerned with what is likely or unlikely. I am concerned with focusing on what is our best possibility. It's not as if I have a plan or strategy. What I have rather is a perspective or a point of view, a lens that focuses on certain patterns of information while filtering or graying out other information, even if what is grayed out for me is where most of the culture's attention is focused. What matters for me is the qualitative, not the quantitative.
Whether or not my lens provides a clearer picture about what's really happening only time will tell. But if what I hope for comes to be, it will emerge gradually, probably originating in innoucuous places from which you least expect anything significant.
We are at the end of something, but also the beginning, and at the beginning whatever is new is a sprout struggling to be born between the cracks of the ruins of the old. The new thing needs attention, protection, and care if it is to thrive. My focus will be on focusing on where those sprouts are poking up here and there, and doing what I can within my very modest scope to nurture them.
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