American politics used to be primarily about people choosing candidates based on their positions on issues—taxes, deregulation, the environment, jobs, health care, energy policy, welfare, social security, national security, and so on. But elections have become more about making a statement about your identity; and national elections are about whoe we say we are to ourselves and to the rest of the world. The elections this decade are not so much about solving practical problems, but about deciding who we are.
The country is in a state of identity crisis, not unlike the one now being experienced in the Islamic world. The crisis there involves a conflict between the centuries-old traditions of Islam and the threat that modernity poses toward it. It’s not unlike the crisis the Western world experienced at the time of the Reformation. As those who then supported the traditional crown-and-altar institutions rejected modernity, so now do the traditionalist forces in Islam reject it.
American identity was shaped in very large part by the rejection of the premodern, medieval model, and its feelings of scorn toward the medievalism of Islam today are similar to the deepseated scorn Americans felt toward the medievalism of Catholicism back then. The post-reformation religious wars in Europe were symptomatic of how profound many felt the stakes to be. These wars were not at the deepest level about territory and money. They were for the traditionalists about preserving the integrity of their age-old way of life and for the the moderns about freedom from the constraints of what they perceived tradition’s irrationality and corruption. As in Europe then, so in the Middle East now.
America, unlike its European cousins, came into existence as a modern, post-medieval experiment, and for the most part it’s been an experiment that has worked out. But just as modernity is now posing a challenge to Islamic identity, post-modernity is posing a challenge to America's modern identity. And just as Islam has very powerful factions on its right that feel a desperation to resist the inevitable, so does America’s right.
Both in the long run are losing causes, but both in the short run can do a lot of damage. Both forces here and there sense their inevitable extinction, and both like cornered animals are thinking now with their reptile brains, which means that it’s all about survival, and when people feel that their survival is at stake, they can justify the commission of any crime. The reptile brain does not think in moral categories. Its only concern is survival. And the cultural right in America really believes that the survival of the American way of life is at stake, and its destroyers are Islam from without and Liberals from within.
In my view this goes a long way to explain the behavior of extremists and their sympathizers on the cultural right both in this country and in the Middle East. The people within these factions in each society have to be treated carefully because they are truly like cornered animals, and as such they are very dangerous. It would be nice if we could just tranquilize them and have them sleep it off until the new thing gels, but the task is far more difficult and confusing—and sane traditionalists have a constructive role to play in shaping the future if they would embrace it.
I consider myself such a traditionalist. I am, after all, a Catholic, but I'm one with historical consciousness, and I do not dread but rather see an opportunity in a society that is no longer modern. And Catholics, like Jews and Muslims, because they have a foot in both the premodern world as well as in the contemporary globalizing world, have the potential to play a stablizing role for the world as it makes the transition into the postmodern, if they develop an imagination for doing so. Protestantism, I'd argue, is too much a creature of modernity to be of much help, but who knows. Certainly the restorationists within the Catholic Church are of no use. They are simply part of this larger right-wing backlash for which there is no constructive future. My guess is that if Catholics are to play such a role, the impulse for it will come out of the southern hemisphere, but not in my lifetime. Too much has to change. But that's a topic for another day.
In a free, rights-centered society, the right, even its nuttiest extremists, must be allowed their freedom, and in the long run their influence will wither away for lack of relevance. But right now they have more relevance than they deserve because they offer a solution to a culture-wide problem that the more progressive forces in the culture cannot yet offer. The right offers a very clear picture about what it means to be American for people who cannot live with the insecurity and ambiguity that characterize a period of cultural transition. And that picture is based on a fantasy of "the way we were." Ronald Reagan was iconic in this respect. He was the embodiment of the "way-we-were" American fantasy, and his appeal lay in his giving Americans some feeling of pride in being an American again in a confusing time of identity crisis.
The Democrats, as awful as they are, and as bereft of solutons as they are, best represent the path forward. But it's not about answers now. We first have to figure out who we are, and in the meanwhile we need to put people in office who will do the least damage.
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