Before returning to Hart, I want to make the case that “Rescuing Aristotle” is not just an abstract intellectual exercise. It is that in part, but it’s more. I think the current chaos provides an opportunity to replace the existing cultural Operating System that I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix with a different system with a completely different architecture, and laying out what that architecture could look like is the underlying argument Rescuing Aristotle makes.
I have no illusions about how unrealistic and grandiose this sounds, but I feel compelled to be among those who make the argument for it anyway because I think that circumstances are forcing it. Everybody, deep down, knows it’s true, and we deal with it in different ways. Electing Trump, for instance, was an unhealthy way to deal with it. And so Rescuing Aristotle is my way of dealing with it in what I hope is a healthier way.
I don’t expect to persuade the skeptical reader. My goal is simply to plant a seed and to see if in time circumstances reconfigure in such a way that it might find a space to germinate and grow.
***
So where are we a month into Trump 2.0? The country is divided primarily along a cultural fissure. On the right are an agglomeration of (1) the populist, non-college educated demos, and middle Americans—including small business people, farmers, rank-and-file union members, and, increasingly, urban ethnic minorities; (2) reactionary Catholics and Protestants in the pews; (3) reactionary intellectuals in the Federalist Society, the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, et al., and (4) secular radical Libertarians in the Koch Brothers’ mold who have wanted for decades to dismantle the administrative state. This latter group has recently expanded to include Silicon Valley oligarchs who see Trump aligning with their move-fast-and-break-things ethos.
On the Left are the educated elites whose cultural attitudes were largely shaped by their attendance at the best undergraduate programs, MBA programs, law schools, med schools, and other graduate school programs that credentialed them for careers in journalism, the arts, film and TV, the tech world, medicine, prestige finance and other prestige corporations, K-12 education, university faculties and other university programs. Some of these folks, especially in the higher income brackets, skew Libertarian on economic issues because they hate taxes, but most lean Left or are moderate on cultural issues. Most of the Left leaning Libertarians voted for Obama in ‘08 and ‘12 and Biden in '20, but many defected to Trump in '24 because they felt the cultural Left was pushing things too far.
These are the clerisy for the TCM. They run it and operate it and accept its values presuppositions, and for the most part they feel comfortable in it. Sure, it’s not perfect, but with a tweak a tweak here and there, it’s fine, or at least better than anything else.
A second weakening Left constituency are racial and ethnic minorities whose cultural values tend be more conservative than those of the educated elite, but who have voted for Dems out of habit since the 60s for obvious reasons. Many in this group, especially Black and Hispanic men, defected to Trump in '24 because they are attracted to the more macho ethos of the MAGA Right.
All the energy and dynamism right now is on the Right; the Left is on its heels. Whatever the reasons Trump voters give for voting for him, it boils down to their perception of the Dems as this institutional clerisy and the Trump GOP as the anti-institutionalists. Ecraser l’infame.
This is the real problem for the the Dems and the broader center Left. They can talk all they want about how this election was close and that Trump has no mandate, but the bottom line is that lots of the people who vote for the Dems share with Trump voters their mistrust of these establishment institutions. Such people cannot get excited about voting for Dems, and they tend to roll their eyes at the Dem obsession with saving democracy because they see it as a cover for defending their class interests, i.e., for defending the institutions that benefit them but not the bottom 80%.1
That's why nothing that the talking heads on cable TV or other MSM pundits say has any impact on these voters. And there should be little wonder why more and more people look to get their information from non-mainstream establishment media sources. These establishment types in defending these institutions are just talking among themselves, not to these Trump voters—or to people like me for that matter.
The Left has zero credibility with the populists who should be their natural constituency. It has to offer something better, but it can't because of the way it accepts the constraining materialist presuppositions of the TCM. I think there's an opportunity for that to change, but it would require a cultural shift within what is now the culture's intelligentsia. Is such a shift possible? Yes. Is it likely? Maybe more so than it would appear. In what follows below I want lay out what I see as a plausible scenario in which such a shift might take place.
***
Right now, the demos derives its solidarity from its antipathy toward the cultural left. That sense of solidarity has been exploited by Trump’s demagoguery. The question for me is if and when the demos comes to realize that this alignment with Trump and the oligarchs on cultural issues does not serve its interests.
Populist reactionaries like Bannon are allied for now with the Elite reactionaries like Musk because both have an interest in destroying the system that they both see as dominated by Left cultural clerisy. The Populists reactionaries and Elite Reactionaries do not in the long run share the same cultural values or the same material and power interests. Their alliance, based on their shared opposition to the Left Cultural elites, will be temporary, unless the Reactionary elites adopt a wealth-distribution politics that is designed to adequately meet the material and cultural needs of the reactionary Populists.
That's what Bannon (and maybe Vance) hopes for. It's not impossible, but it's unlikely because the Reactionary elites are radical Libertarians for whom such a redistributive regime would constrain them in ways that are deeply, deeply repugnant to their John-Galt, hubristic individualism. They feel no obligation to the demos, and besides, It would require empowering the big government they have been on a decades-long mission to dismantle.
This reactionary populists vs reactionary libertarians conflict points to the the fundamental contradiction at the heart of MAGA: It's one thing for populists to hate the current establishment dominated by the Left cultural clerisy; it's quite another to emasculate the power this establishment wields to check the power of their class enemy in the oligarchy. A guy like Bannon understands this. Big government isn't anathema to the Bannon populists; they just want a government gutted of cultural Left types and replaced with cultural right types. Musk and Trump are allies in the gutting phase of this project for now, but what comes after the gutting is completed?
For now the perception of rank-and-file populists regarding the identity of their real enemy is clouded because they see the conflict more in culture-war terms than in class-war terms. As it becomes clearer to the populists that the oligarchs will prevail in shaping Trump 2.0, they will, hopefully, come to see that their cultural values do not align with these nihilists and that their material conditions are continuing to deteriorate. At some point they will have to recognize that Musk and other oligarchs couldn't care less about them, and the oligarchs are just fine with the rich getting richer and the poor and working class getting poorer. At some point populist social media influencers will turn their ire away from increasingly irrelevant cultural Left and toward the oligarchs. That’s when a strategically serious Left has to make its move.
If the oligarchs are to be successfully opposed, I can imagine two possible scenarios. One in which a coalition that comprises populists in alliance with strategically serious Left types who agree to disagree about their cultural values differences in order to focus on their common enemy. It won’t be easy, but tribal antipathies can be overcome when the threat of a common enemy becomes existentially urgent. It would help if a charismatic young Bernie would emerge who would have credibility with both the demos and the Left intelligentsia.
But such a coalition, if ever achieved, would be at best fragile, and the culture fissure would be easy for the oligarchs to exploit. The strategy of the 1% all along has been to keep everyone else divided and conquered along culture-war lines. It's been too easy for them, and I fear it will continue to be. A young Bernie might be enough, but what I think we really need is a MLK or Gandhi. A better, stronger coalition could be built if both Right populists and Left cultural elites found solidarity in a shared transcendental ideal mediated by a charismatic leader.
I don’t know that a person like this will emerge, but I think if such a person did, he or she could galvanize solidarity in ways that seem impossible now. Such a figure would be more than just another pol trying to herd cats, but an inspiring transformative figure in the way that MLK was. MLK was a flawed human being, but his charism lay in the special way Justice as a transcendental ideal shone through him. That’s what set him apart, and that’s what our situation calls for now. Indeed, I would argue that no effective resistance of the TCM oligarchs can succeed unless it is led by a vanguard that is as morally serious, disciplined, and courageous as the leaders of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s. Politics as usual isn’t going to get it done.
Right now most Left cultural elites don't believe in such an ideal, or if they do, they won't advocate for it because it would be too cringe. Imagine discussing Justice as a transcendental ideal in the typical graduate school philosophy or political science seminar in recent decades? But this is why the cultural Left has been so alienating and ineffective. Left elites are great with analysis, but just plain awful when it comes to persuasion and motivation.
The Demos has been pushed to the Right by the Left because the Left has offered them nothing except contempt for their not having attended the fashionable seminars that Woked them. But this is faux enlightenment based on status signaling rather than genuine compassion. Yes, compassion for the marginalized Other is an important ideal, but there's a huge difference between genuine compassion and a hollow performance of it, between the real thing in the concrete as contrasted with platitudinous tee-shirt and bumper-sticker sloganeering.2
I find the Marxist analysis of the problem very powerful, but the Marxist solution is inadequate insofar as it assumes that material interests are the only interests that matter. Marxists are in this respect simply the opposite face of the same coin occupied by the capitalists, and quite frankly material self interest cannot be the basis for substantive social change. Any truly transformative political social change must have a moral dimension, and material self-interest fails in that regard. A truly morally inspired and morally disciplined social movement requires that people be called to transcend their self-interest. I’d argue that a transcendent ideal has always motivated the most effective and sane people involved in social-justice politics, even if they don’t consciously recognize it as such because their theory doesn’t allow for it.
Appealing to material self interest is James-Carville politics as usual. It’s uninspiring, and is an insufficient motive to drive genuine social political change. No successful, truly transformative social political movement can succeed unless there is solidarity around ideals that call people to transcend their self interest—thus my argument for Rescuing Aristotle. If the kind of MLK populist leadership I hope for emerges, Rescuing Aristotle would make sense as the most adequate theoretical superstructure to articulate its political praxis.
MLK’s Christian commitments were the source of his transcendentalism, but justice shone through him in a way that inspired every human being of good will no matter what their religion or lack of it. Rescuing Aristotle is an argument for a non-faith based transcendentalism that makes sense to all people of good will. It lays out a metaphysics that can make sense to both people of faith and to people who find themselves incapable of a confessional commitment.
Its functional purpose is to inspire solidarity of both populists and elites of good will, a solidarity that will be potent enough to effectively resist the hegemony of the Techno-Capitalist oligarchs. But for me it’s more than just functional; it’s true. And because it’s true, it opens up possibilities currently unavailable within the current TCM metaphysical framework. Any politics deeply aligned with the Living Real opens up possibilities far beyond politics. And any politics that subverts the TCM, diminishes its primary evil effect— the seductive way it seals us off from the Living Real. And subversion of the TCM opens up possibilities for the disclosure of that which is vital and healthful that is now mostly concealed.
We’re at a crossroads in human evolution: we can continue on the path we’re on toward a transhumanist dystopia, or we can find a path that leads to the re-enchantment of the world, the path that guys like Charles Taylor and David Bentley Hart are calling us to.
Extreme circumstances call for extreme solutions. If nothing else Trump is loosening things in such a way that opens up possibilities to embrace a radially different approach. Politics as usual isn’t gonna get it done. We need something new, something that arises from the originary depths and is shaped by its alignment with the Tao, the Logos, the Living Real.
Notes
1. Take the rule of law and the constitutional order that gets the Cable News talking heads so teary-eyed. Do Black Americans believe in the rule of law? Why should they? And really, how can any clear-eyed person believe in a legal system that is so ridiculously expensive and cumbersome? Where is the justice in it? Where is the justice in a system that failed so spectacularly to hold Trump to account? Where is the Justice in a supreme court that tells us that money is speech, corporations are people, or a constitutional system that from its inception has valued property rights over human rights? This is no “order’ I feel motivated to defend.
2. If being Woke means feeling a genuine compassion for the marginalized Other, I’m all for being Woke, but that’s not what it usually means in practice. In practice it’s an exercise in mimetic desire, status signaling, a form of snobbery. That’s performative compassion, and it is as such phony. That's what the demos sniffs out–it recognizes woke sanctimony for the hollow, intellectualized, tight-assed, Neo-Puritan b.s. that it is. But I also believe that most of the demos is capable of sniffing out and responding to the real thing when they encounter it.
Leave a Reply