Politics in America today: what do “left,” “liberal,” and “conservative” mean?
Politics in America today: what do “left,” “liberal,” and “conservative” mean?
First, what is the left? I suggest that it is three things:
-egalitarian/democratic: It tends towards a faith in ordinary people.
-anti-authoritarian: It tends towards a suspicion of every form of social power.
-anti-/post-capitalist: It tends to see this social system as broadly the horizon of social life in our time, and therefore of the most important forms of social protest or criticism.
Historically, the “positive” name usually given to this tendency, which subsumes the other two, is “communist.” (Now usually spelled with a small ‘c’), this named a desire or project whose theory was Marxism. No particular appreciation for regimes calling themselves “Communist” was necessarily implied. The function of such signifiers is the ideological one of yoking certain broad popular desires (and ideally, some social movement) to a broad policy agenda on the part of members of the representational state. American society, partly because of virulent anti-socialist traditions, lacks a comparable signifier, and contemporary political radicalisms in general are not rooted in a social class as Marxist-inspired movements were.
In philosophy, particularly in France and Italy, it is clear that a broadly “left” politics in the above terms has survived the near eclipse of Marxism. In accordance with the above principles, it can be seen that there are today Heideggerian, Nietzschean, Spinozist, psychoanalytic, and other points of reference of philosophical oeuvres that are relevant in these terms. Theoretical creativity has not been lacking, but nowhere in the world today is a traditional left-wing movement in power, poised to take power, or actively contesting power.
Among the errors of classical Marxism is that of progressivism. This was operative largely in terms of its theory of history. When Marxist parties came to power, they claimed that history is, like a God, providential, essentially guaranteeing the good through the rule of forces allied with the deity. This meant a view of time as linear progress. That is not the only way to view time.
Progressivism
Most Americans who call themselves “liberals” are really progressives. There was actually an American political movement in the early 20th century that was called Progressivism. Progressives tended to have faith in science and bureaucracy, or administrative government, that considered these linked. The idea of progress is one of improvement, and supposes that societies naturally move towards the greater good. Government in this view is essentially good. It can be a force of liberation. This must not be confused with liberty, because the liberty (or classical liberal) ideology holds that power is a necessary evil that must always be limited and checked.
Progressives tend to identity politics and morality, and they believe that some political opinions, theirs, are actually true or more true (this goes with their scientism). While one could want to change a society without, in a general way, holding individuals within it guilty, in practice, progressives must try to make social changes by using law to punish people who are not yet progressive enough. (A good example of this is the approach of many feminists to pornography, prostitution, and sexual harassment.)
The way in which morality and politics for them are intertwined may help to explain the political importance of liberal forms of religion in the thinking of many progressives. However, their very idea of a progress that is both social and moral founders on the contradiction that persons who are not yet good enough by their lights both must be guilty of wrongdoing and must not be at the same time.
The conservative liberal moderate
A type that can be directly counterposed to the progressive is this one. Imagine someone who recognizes that there are social injustices, some systemic and not occasional, as well as situations that simply could be better, at least in theory. But he offers this demurral: We can work to make the world a better place, but we should not pretend when we do so that it already is. If the Messiah has not come yet, no amount of legerdemain will change that today. Further, we are all most effective within some sphere of influence. The politically and morally just person asks first, not, how can things be different, but, simply, what can I do, here and now? While this position is a temperament perhaps mainly, and more of a morality than a politics, it has the political consequence that its adherents very likely will want to work to change some things. However, the identification of politics and morality in progressivism, or the primacy of the political in some forms of political activism (of any kind), will be refused by this conservative, who is primarily concerned with what he can do. Unlike the Biblical Prophets according to A.J. Heschel, he does not burn with a passion to solve society’s greatest problems ASAP. Perhaps, our moderate conservative will acknowledge the value of such people, only he is not one of them, and can easily see that if too many people were, the result would be disastrous. The world would then be fully of angry social justice warriors.
The conservative “liberal”
Classical liberalism, as it is sometimes called, has little in common with the contemporary American kind, which is a welfare state progressivism concerned not with liberty but liberation (and usually with particular ideas of what that must be), and now is largely given over to identity politics.
In America there is an ideology that is particularly strong that may be called a conservative liberalism, since its principal commitment is to liberty, and morally perhaps also tolerance. This is our Constitutional liberalism; it is embodied both in the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The basic idea is that government should be limited. In fact, government is a necessary evil. (It becomes a positive good in reality at least by recognizing its own capacity for excess, and perhaps also, at least since WW2, internationally, by defeating regimes that are not liberal by our lights and replacing them with ones that are). The notion is not far from that of Original Sin. If we had a polity composed of individuals who not only were bearers of some desire for the good, but also morally imperfect “sinners,” we might have one like our own, or rather like it is seen by many who admire it and to some extent as it saw itself, at least in 1789 when the Constitution we have had ever since, with some amendments, was adopted. In an atomist metaphysics, every entity is or has a force, and this force can affect other entities like it in this respect. Obviously, such force is ethically neutral, at least absent a metaphysics identifying it, as Being or Nature is in Spinoza, with the divine good. But there is a clear tendency here towards recognition of wrong. This is interesting in light of today’s identity politics progressivism, which is a moralism that finds wrong everywhere, is vigilant about it, and often is quite unforgiving as well as uncompromising. Well, if you are or have a force, which is the capacity to influence and affect other bodies, and I might or might not like how you affect me, then we might want not only to have laws preventing people from messing with you somehow, but if we thought of the whole social fabric that way, we might want: a polity with a state with police powers strong enough to restrain any and every malefactor, suspecting everyone of being such, but also, paradoxically, since the state is made of laws but still involves men and women, its powers too should be limited. This would yield as a result something similar to the dominant thinking from Hobbes onward in English political thought, but also something resembling the US Constitution. My freedom is simply the unrestrained exercise of my powers free of the domination of yours, and so my legitimate freedom ends at the boundary of yours. Liberty based on a paranoid suspicion of ubiquitous power. Maybe it is no wonder paranoid tendencies have long been strong in American politics, on left and right. This paradigm also helps to explain the curious phenomenon of Americans, who again may be on the left or the right, whose political stance includes a deep distrust, and sometimes positive hatred of, the government. The major social group that has largely been immune to this tendency is African-Americans. They have tended to view the state and its powers more favorably, at least as a possibility, then white radicals. This seems to be both because the state has been successfully pressured at times to do things for them, and because the greatest suspicions seem to fall not on the government (not even the police), but on “white people.”
Liberalism’s roots were in aristocratic claims to share the power of the monarch. Later it came to represent the emergent capitalist class or bourgeoisie and its claims for both free markets and trade and limits to powers of government. In the 19th century, liberalism and democracy were merged in the ideology of the modern republican nation-state with representative government. Liberalism entered into the class conflicts that defined much of the 19th and 20th centuries because the claim for market liberty permitted opposing the claims of the industrial working class which fed the socialist, communist, and anarchist movements. In America this ideology had so much staying power that it wound up being taken up by “libertarians” whose only claim to liberty is that demanded by capital’s will to power. This accords with a broad tendency in the liberal tradition that is equally true of Progressives: power and government are good, so long as we wield them, but bad when wielded against us (whoever “we” are). It may seem odd to equate libertarianism and progressivism in these terms, but there you have it.
Identity politics progressives hold this view, and that is one reason they cannot be said to be on the left. The idea is that since the essential bad thing about the social power that is hegemonic heretofore is that it is used to “oppress” “us,” therefore, from a Black, female, or other minority point of view, power or domination is good if “we” exercise it.
The paradigm case of this view is Lenin. For Lenin, the communist workers’ state would abolish all social and political power or domination, just as a post-scarcity economy will abolish poverty, alienated labor, and social strife. But in the meantime, power must be exercised, firmly and even ruthlessly, in the interest of the proletariat, the first class in history whose fundamental desire does not destine it to rule others.
If totalitarianism is evil, and if it is also a form of progressivism, perhaps part of the reason is that the progressive ideology must necessarily claim the essential political and moral innocence of a privileged group. Of course, in today’s pseudo-left form, privileged ideologically and morally are those who are supposed to be oppressed and have no material or social privilege.
There are two other problems with identity politics that both have to do with something like “bourgeois ideology.” One is that they all promote individually the success of persons thought to have been denied it. That is, oppression becomes lack of (individual) success. That means that it can and should be addressed by some forms of Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action is the most bourgeois and capitalist and least Marxist or leftist of all political strategies for combatting social stratification, which is to class division what the individual pursuit of success on the capitalist market is to class struggle.
That subjects of Affirmative Action policies are expected to be angry and make reclamations becomes very misleading if you think that the angrier a person is, the greater the injustice they must be combatting, and the more far-reaching the solution they are calling for. What is produced in this process is a subjectivity of resentment and reclamation in which people are expected to make demands or claims on the rest of the society through the mediation of representatives and discourses that articulate these claims, and in a way that can easily be seen to have an emotional meaning that overwhelms any actual content, and also establishes a situation where the claims must endure to infinity because they cannot be satisfied. This is the meaning of the claims to the effect that if I am a person of color (or rather category of historical victimhood), it is effectively impossible for me not to be oppressed (and by “privileged” persons like you). This is part of the nature of things. But then can you change it? You cannot. And if very many people thought they could, organizations that are spokespersons for these angry radicals would begin to lose their constituency. It is an extension of the administrative state, which broadly needs social complaints to be made to it so that they can be managed.
The other feature of progressivism, consistent with the above, is that it wants to police attitudes. The campus-based identity politics “liberal-left” often seems to want nothing more. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices are attitudes. Many identity radicals will allow that these things are also institutionalized, but they are still thought of as being attitudes at root. However, they can at best be only partly right. You cannot eat an attitude or put it in your bank. It won’t pay your rent or feed and clothe your children. But it is a lot easier to act upon. And it feeds an economy of affects which then need to be managed in the interest of whatever is the goal. That there is a practical goal can be lost site of. Also, the corporate business world finds this policing of attitudes very useful for its purposes. Make everyone feel uncomfortable. If someone feels annoyed or offended at something you have said, you have wronged them. You were not sufficiently sensitive. Welcome to the kindergarten of the corporate liberal support group. Your violence differs from real aggression only in magnitude, and therefore is intolerable: the “micro-aggression.” What better food for the hermeneutic creativity of managers schooled in a discourse? If your Black neighbor is hurt by the police, why complain about the violent overextension and abuse of police power when you can produce a discourse about “white people”? Surely they are your problem. If black people are oppressed. the correlative opposite group, white people, must be their oppressors. It is as simple as that. How could there be “strategies without strategists” (Foucault), capitalism without the usorious, cruelty in practice without hatred in will, or an opppression without an oppressor? You are evil, because my identity requires it.
Progressives are moral; they need to be, and for you to know they are. In the 80s when I was a student at Berkeley, I lived in a “coop house.” That’s like a fraternity except that it is coed and most people are liberal. Or progressive. One young woman was talking at dinner about her visit to Rome. She was so troubled to find that the Romans around her did not have high moral values. Her outrage seemed nearly of the mocking type. “They were throwing bottles out of windows!” I got the feeling she was less troubled by the possibility a bottle might hit someone as that it was not being recycled. On another occasion, a pretty young woman student, who I gathered was Jewish, declared out of the blue, and with great glee, “I am environmentally correct!” Well, I thought, then you must be good to eat! I would not want to trip on any dietary laws. Or maybe I should have said, with a Bogart-like swagger, “The dames I go with only need to be anatomically correct.” And maybe not: moralists are not known for a great sense of humor.
Another thing that is curious about the discourse of oppression in identity politics is how much this paradigm has broadened. The most apparently comic example of this concerns gender. The standard view, which is from the perspective of progressivism, is that there are real and false oppressed peoples. It is of course an article of faith for many progressives that blacks, other “people of color” (a term that was obviously invented so that other groups could be counted with the blacks, for their benefit and maybe inventive politicians and activists), and gays and women—at least—are all oppressed as a general rule and a matter of course. (Jews are out of fashion among the champions of the oppressed and should not apply, especially as everyone now seems agreed that they have only a particular politics proper to them and their history and no claim on the general will, even in sometimes modeling more effective ways of combatting general forms of oppression, an historical role they were often understood by themselves and others to play until recently. Of course, their situation in relation to oppression as complex as certain theories of it place them infelicitously at both extremes, a fact not lost on many Nazis in their day, but suggesting the obsolescence of much of our ways of metaphorizing and thinking about injustice). Dissenters are associated with the extreme right, and of course some right-wing extremists do adopt and reverse the discourse, in grand claims about white people as oppressed and endangered, or something like that; and that would be comically absurd were it not a motive in some shocking crimes that have left some numbers of corpses. In fact, some counter-claims can be made, though they are not the ones that have gotten spectacular attention (and which follow a logic of mirroring and grotesque exaggeration beyond credibility to most sane people). James Baldwin himself suggests this in a quote that appears in the excellent recent film about him, “I am not your negro”. Baldwin says that, in general, white people hate black people out of terror and blacks hate whites out of rage. Indeed, much, maybe most, white racism is based on fear of crime, however exaggerated. The exaggeration of factual realities may be conducive to certain kinds of thinking in models or paradigms. What I want to point to is this: There can be something like a Sharks and Jets phenomenon (the updated Montagues and Capulets in the film “West Side Story”): We hate you just as (and because) you hate us. I do not think it is at all correct to say either that most white people hate (or fear) black people, exactly, nor that most blacks hate whites. But what does exist is an objective possibility for people to fear the group constructed in the popular imaginary as opposite theirs.
With gender it is even more interesting. First, it was the black movement, especially as radicalized after the King assassination, that directly was taken as inspiration by other minorities in America in search of a radical, or extreme, rhetoric. That was especially true of feminism around this time; which was nothing if not strident. The days of high feminist theory are certainly now past, partly just because the days of high theory are largely passed generally, but there remain many radicals formed by it. And there can be no question but that radical feminism, if that term meant anything, was hostile to men as such because it thought men were hostile to them. It dug out latent or micro-aggressions in expressions of politeness now demystified. It is natural in this context that when combatting rape and its supposed culture, the feminist radicals would treat men who are angry or insistent somehow as imaginary rapists. Extremism’s truth claim is always that the extreme possibility is common, implicit within what is being so called. Well, of course one thing that did happen is that beginning in the 1960s and 70s the women’s movement was in many ways wildly successful, most obviously in that almost every profession except professional football is now open to both genders and most Americans think this is as it should be, and they take it for granted. But what may be more interesting is to note that today there are credible voices who are not obvious reactionaries claiming that something has happened in recent decades such that in some ways (though maybe not at all in others), today girls and women are favored and have an easier time succeeding, while boys and men are disfavored and have it harder. Jordan Peterson is only the North American scholar to have gotten the most attention with this claim; another is Camille Paglia, who does not consider herself a conservative. In fact, there are voices on the left claiming something similar. France’s Alain Badiou has been called many things by those who don’t like him, but not being the leftist he proudly has been since before his Maoist days is generally not of them. For the sake of my argument here, I don’t wish to settle the disagreements about this (“How can you be oppressed relative to us when we are oppressed relative to (or by) you?”).
What I want to suggest is the disquieting possibility that a sense of oppression is becoming almost universal, and that everyone is supposed to understand that they are oppressed by virtue of the demographical social group they belong to, and with respect to complementary groups that are positively not oppressed or privileged beneficiaries of that oppression. This is a generalization of a logic of ideological civil war. It is a war not of all persons against all but all groups against every other, or their structural complement group. It is easy to show that there are many women whose lives are less happy (for lack of a better word) than they likely would be without some set of obstacles or annoyances that they might and should not have to face, and that this is also true of many men. In fact, maybe it is becoming true of everyone. A facile being-oppressed (and militantly angry on this account) could be marketed as an almost universal stance of self-presentation and affective involvement in some continuing trauma. This could partly translate the difficulties of life under neoliberal capitalism with its conditions of generalized precarity, as well as what may well be forms of oppression that are systemic rather than accidental or willed. What if there are not just “strategies without strategists” but victims but no victimizer? Who is the responsible causal agent who is to blame and can be put on trial for capitalism, or the form of it we presently have? Is it not the case that most of the life of this society is as it is and happens as it does not because of any causal agency (as in conspiracy theories) but because of social forms like the market that compel conformity to its ways by any person or corporate entity that simply wants to succeed? For that matter, who is to blame for racism? And are there class action cases of such injustice such that the bourgeoisie, white people, the Jews, men, etc., are not just involved but guilty because they are the cause? Making someone the recognizable cause of an injustice is what all inculpation does, and arguably nothing could be further than this legal/criminal model of justice to a left politics worthy of the name, or any politics worthy of anyone’s engagement, or any faith or hope, any reason to believe such proceedings will solve any problems or improve the state of things. Isn’t this just a completely wrongheaded paradigm? Many who follow it have all too easily wound up making strange general statements about a class of persons and all of its members, and the violent or evil will of this imaginary agency. It sounds far-fetched, but some black people and their leaders talk about “white people” as their problem. Susan Brownmiller wrote in her landmark book on rape that all men are engaged at least implicitly in violent acts against all women. More recently and infamously, Andrea Dworkin made similar claims, and there have been other theorists of like views. The military metaphorics of such thinking is designed to create a sensibility of war in the sense of friends and enemies, us and them, and since, almost 50 years since the greatest wave of this thinking began, it did not change the society so much as contribute to a false militancy, I think that is how such claims should be assessed. A group around the American political theory journal Telos argued in the 1970s that an “artificial negativity” had become popular on the liberal-left. This is an attitude that does not really go anywhere except in creating forms of angry implacability, which is perhaps the mood most characteristic of political demonstrations in recent decades. This getting people riled up may be serviceable to demagogues, and a liability to the thoughtfully political.
Consistent with this logic, surely some women are indeed oppressed (no reason not to use the term, since it does refer to experiences of and rooted in realities) because they are women, while at the same time, some men (it may not matter so much how many) are oppressed as men. Some will say that feminist theories cover this whole ground by allowing for things like “toxic masculinity”: Men are oppressed by having to be men, meaning Stoical, self-denying, combative and aggressive, needing power, etc. and the revolt of women or at least against patriarchy as rule of men will free them also, just as for Marxism the proletarian revolution would also free the bourgeois at least from its characteristic forms of alienation and neurosis. The crux here however would be the recognition that there is a normative masculinity, at least for men, and it is unhealthy to them (as well as their female victims) and thus bad—without there being available any better style of normative masculinity. Normative femininity also needed change, but was luckier. Many people think that a form of that has triumphed, and that is why men and boys today often do suffer a unique form of oppression, unlike that in a traditional macho society: they are oppressed not because they must be men but because everyone must fit models that tacitly, implicitly only, but clearly if you look at it, are feminine. This would be the case if enough people thought that it is bad to be combative or aggressive, and maybe also to insist on things like arguments and distinctions. Instead, one should be purely life-affirming, nurturing, and have few inhibitions. They would hardly be needed if unacceptable inclinations were weeded out early enough that everyone can say everything and act on all their inclinations without fear.
Also, in this view people are not different so much as same, looking awry is alienating and should not be allowed, and everyone should be agreeable constantly. Some French intellectuals have associated this idea with California, and of course they are partly right; take it from one who has lived there. Utopian extremes are dangerous not because they are realizable but because some people wind up acting as if they are. This kind of misogynistic dystopian social fantasy is surely as exaggerated as applications of models of masculinity based on imperial Rome are. Fantasies of the Other are wielded ideologically, to justify. But my question is this: suppose that the followers of Ms. Magazine and Jordan Peterson are in their way both right? Are we moving towards a society where it is so chic to be oppressed that everyone wants to claim some of it if they can, and where plenty of these claims are perfectly justifiable on the facts? What would this mean? What is the desire or project of such a society that it misrecognizes in itself? First of all, it is hyper-poliitcal because hyper-conflictual. That the Other is an, or the, oppressor, is another way of saying he is evil. I was acquainted in the 80s with a woman student who was captive of a radical feminist theory (that of France’s Luce Irigaray). We were walking through the campus and while describing her understanding of “patriarchy,” at one point she held out her index finger stiffly and said, “They are always asserting that.” I thought for a moment she was going to describe the Garden of Eden and its Satanic serpent, wily origin of all evil. Alas, we were taking a class in literary theory, not Milton. What I think is that many progressives are busying themselves thinking about their kind as oppressed by the Other, and in the meantime we wind up slouching towards a society in which the authorities and many groups and people are wielding that oppression uniquely wielded by fighting oppression. I think there is a mistake that has been made and that is widespread.
Oppression is a slippery name, because it almost rhymes with Evil. That is why it is moralistic. In fact, the term was in common use in English in the seventeenth century during the Puritan-led English Revolution, which was soaked in religious metaphors and concepts but a political movement absolutely progressive for its time, no less than the American Revolution a century later. Within Marxist and socialist movements in the last two centuries, it did not enjoy the happiest history either. It is always possible that institutions will develop whose functionaries, in the paradoxically cynical idealism so typical of this class, will wield whatever of such notions they can use. In an administrative logic, morality undergoes certain transformations; it tends to be wielded while being denied. Being oppressed or an oppressor would actually be similar, or could be treated as on the same plane, if both were, as in our health care system, simply considered “conditions” that an all-solving administration can attend to in order to address, cure, treat, or indifferently sanction, like “no-fault” divorce, where no one is blamed or guilty but simply given what the need or treated according to what the authorities need. As in Hegel’s political philosophy, whose key terms are need and reason, thought together in the administrative state. It is hard to know how anyone could “fight,” or effectively want to change, this kind of system, but we know that most people subjected to it do not think it is a problem. If we had the intellectual resources to combat an administrative state in all of its problematic excesses, it might be that some alternatives to the police state would begin to become visible also.
The police state is also therapeutic, not just interdicting and punishing, which is why the authoritarian character of our societies today cannot be transformed by simply opposing its doubtless more violent tendencies that are characteristically masculine, and because they are. If the administrative state is four parts mommy and only one part daddy, than it will be comforting, nurturing, encouraging, most of the time. This need not seem gendered, especially given the impersonal character of bureaucratic reason. And there may always be a need for both laws or rules that are enforced and for nurturance, encouragement, and related “feminine” virtues. Though we can certainly question the persistence of a thinking of the protection of property or right by legitimate power or authority on the one hand and oppressed victims complaining on the other, a distinction that is less about gender or other social divisions than the empowered vs. the infantilized.
In this model, there is agreement that the social field is basically structured by conflictual and power relations. A kind of theoretical radicalism that, as the name suggests, goes to the root of things to grasp the hard core of their origin or essence, may be better applied to art interpretation than programs of governance. The logic of administration is progressive: it is for experts and leaders to rule society through a morality based on and articulated as a politics. The whole question dividing the liberal left from a left worthy of the name lies in this. It is partly a question of time, of the actual versus the possible; a radical politics wagers on what can be rather than rooting itself wholly in what is. You can manage things or question and change them, but not both at once.
Next, I want to look at America’s two political parties. The Democratic Party has now a left and a centrist wing, and in these groupings, which enjoy some overlap, fall most representatives and adherents. These include one partly new force that I have not yet described. The Republican Party has had a greater diversity of voices in recent years, but basically has two right wings, a moderate center, and at present a populist leader whose deepest ideological commitment may just be to corporate interests on the grounds of authoritarianism, but is somewhat sui generis, having attracted the party’s other forces to his person and accommodating interests they mostly share. He has carried out a corporate agenda different forms of which are subscribed to, at least in effect, by all other factions except the new self-styled “socialist” one in the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party is the party of identity politics. They have been central to it at least since Jesse Jackson’s 1980s “Rainbow Coalition.” The lingua franca of this tendency is a rhetoric that has various degrees of stridency, and that appears designed to benefit a conveniently amorphous entity that it typically calls “the middle class” (“working class” identity is acceptable only as “middle”; the poor don’t exist; and Black people are still for the party something of a problem). Read Nancy Pelosi’s language in the recent Congressional declaration opposition Islamophobia, anti-semitism, and every other prejudice. She is a centrist, not a leftist. The party’s strategy with regard to the identities it represents and invites the cultivation of, including the poorer ones like blacks and hispanics, follows the principles I have described above.
The dissenting wing, though represented only by a few individuals in the present Congress, is social-democratic in a way that puts it to the left of the party’s normally overwhelming center. This wing is strong enough popularly that its presidential candidate in the 2016 election came close to unseating the presumptive nominee, who was supposed to be progressive because she is female, a notion that many voters found repugnant, stupid, and insulting. She is one of the most powerful women in the world. Some of the new social democrats call themselves “socialists.” Like much of Trump’s posturings, the effects of this may be more ideological than anything. The new social democrats, as I am calling them, are progressives of the liberal left. They are the only ones who can want to resist the massive ideological and administrative power of the corporate state. Or as I like to call it, the neoliberal therapeutic police state.
Ideologues almost always reduce their opponents to caricature. This is unfortunate, because it limits their effectiveness.
So what is right-wing in America today and what is the Republic Party about?
It now has two right-wings and something of a absent center. The right wings are the evangelicals and the libertarians. Like those who make up the overwhelming majority in Congress of the Democratic Party, they are not very sharply distinguished, and so must be considered less a faction or wing than a tendency.
Centrists in the Republican Party have in recent times often despaired at how left out they find themselves to be. The one sine qua non has been support for more or less untrammeled corporate power. This can be linked ideologically to various things. Trump linked it to populism and xenophobia. Since this is a possibility for a pro-corporate politics but by no means a necessity to it, it may be that something in the Republican Party has marginalized voices that might have been dissenting.
They might include the Constitutional conservative liberals I described above. A common argument has long been made on the left for that kind of liberalism, and it is a progressive one. In the left version of this narrative, society has naturally progressed towards larger enterprises, effectively towards a monopoly capitalism, as Marx showed, and there is no turning back. Marxists used to like reminding people, ‘You are not a Robinson Crusoe.”
Socialism then might just take over an already monopolistic economy and install a worker’s government in control of it. This is an interesting argument, since on the one hand there have long been tendencies towards monopolization, while at the same time it remains the case as it was before the American Revolution that most business is small business. We could say that a pro-corporate conservative will view these two tendencies as working well together, and some radical conservative liberals, though not most of our “libertarians,” will demur on this and want to exclusively favor small business somehow. That might be interesting, if it can be done; in practice business people tend to favor politics that favor business generally, and Republican conservative liberals who would like to favor mainly small businesses and middle-class families have found themselves without any distinctive political strategy or program for doing so. They ride the wave of big capital not only for ideological reasons but because there is none other by which they can keep aloft.
Is our Constitutional liberalism an idea that should be relegated to the past? Few American liberal Democrats believe this. Indeed, at least until the Supreme Court was moved by Republican appointments so far to the right, liberals, knowing themselves more committed to their own principles of justice than anyone’s interests besides their own, would find faith and hope in the intrinsic link between power and their idea of reason, were eager to get the secular God of the Court on their site, lobbying with interest group pressure as if the Court were another Congress. This can be and is done by interest groups hiring lawyers to craft on their behalf a legal argument, though the masses of us ordinary citizens are generally given to understand by most media stories that this is a matter of a fight between interests and of winning and losing. The God of the law is reason linked to legal principles stated in authoritative documents; it may limit some governmental powers, typically in the name of others; but strictly speaking, it is not an affair of ordinary citizens in a republic with their own principled opinions; that would be a democracy, and such a society would appear to face different tasks and risks in facing them differently.
The media in general do not seem to facilitate political debate. And now of course we have a semblance of it on Facebook and other social media, but it is generally shrill, and true discussion of the kind that involves curiosity and is not just civil war by other means seems rare. Theoretically, at least the legislative and judicial branches of our government should base their decisions on arguments of a kind. Whatever we say of the effect, this still takes place in the British Parliament, but it is weaker in the US Congress. It is hard to imagine making any sense of the idea of democracy, whether of the direct and participatory or the representative kind, without not just deliberation but rational deliberation based on arguments. I have attended representative bodies where the discussion involves no argument. Each person gets an allotted time to speak. They are presumed to want to speak to speak their peace, like so many men who quickly get angry that you are cutting off and not letting them speak, since they want to exercise an air of domination by speaking, and perhaps also hoping to get whatever they want. In these deliberative bodies, when everyone has spoken, that fact making it fair, there is a vote. No real discussion and no pretense at making or critiquing arguments based on reasons.
If the tendency of the latter barely exists or is being eclipsed, what will result is both a decline in civility, and a decline in the effectiveness of representative government. For what reasoned discourse is to a functioning democracy, rhetoric, central to marketing and public relations, is to a media-driven pseudo-democracy. And if republics have citizens where monarchies have mere subjects, what happens when in place of most discussion there is a partisan war game trading on the affects of outrage? How will a dissenting liberal and progressive faction oppose or be a counterweight to a society on a war footing, in which left and right differ in style or form only, and in the targets they identify, but not how they think about them? Does anyone have an effective response for the day after the night when our government has made the mass arrests typical of blatant tyrannies, having found its Reichstag fire, in seizing on the latest horror of violent crime by an extremist linking the personal grievance of the life frustrations that are common enough via affects of hate to apparent political memes that horrify almost all of us? Oddly enough, it may be our moralities as much as our strategies whose benevolent failures sink us.
Another principle of progressivism is Malcolm X.’s (said by him of revolution) “by any means necessary.” This is a feature of progressivism because it regards morality itself as political and so capable of being merged with the political. As I argued above, this is only possible if time is collapsed so that futural expectations are not to be worked for heroically out of faith and hope, but realized now through a legal apparatus and enforcement. We might just call this utopianism. Progressivism has the curious capacity the European Communist parties also had, of being simultaneously idealistic and cynical. What has to be recognized is that these go together as possibilities of bureaucracy, and this is partly because its form of what Lacan called the “university discourse” tends to both occlude and announce the enforceable traumatic terror of a “real.” This is because bureaucracy is capable of perfecting the world — on paper, through declarations matching good will to presumed attainment, through the perfection of discourse, which is perfect only because of what it must exclude. In this way, what is perfected while speaking of the world is only the conscience of the elite participants.
The great idea of the left that may have passed, perhaps partly due to technology, is perhaps that of a radical or participatory democracy. It found forms in this country in the New England Town Hall, no less than in the Soviets or workers’ councils and collective farms, and the Israeli kibbutzim, which all seem appropriate if at all to a time now past. Champions of some form of combining representative and participatory democracy could found a place in the Communist movement itself. For instance, some Trotskyists have held that elected representatives must be themselves workers, and serve briefly, in alternation, and with a right of the represented to recall them. I do not find it hard to imagine any future economic system rendering obsolete our Bill of Rights. Most liberals would say that rather their scope might be extended: For example, maybe employees should have them, on the grounds that companies are a government of their workers (and sometimes their consumers, debtors, or other clients). Every idea of socialism worth the name holds this, and it is how socialists and anarchists differ from libertarians and other conservatives.
In Marxism, it is part of how the concept of the “state” is distinguished from the government: news media, social media, schools, churches, hospitals, even families, are part of the state, because people are governed by them. It follows that the state, and society, whose construction as a theoretical totality and unity is the state’s projection, is not, like “world” in Cartesian (and empiricist) thinking, something outside us to which, by recognition, will, and choice, we relate. Which in turn means that strictly speaking you cannot be oppressed by the society. “Society” is the instituted fiction (it is real) that corresponds to the state, which represents it and rules in its name, and that of the inclusions and exclusions that define a totalized or (logically) totalitarian society or social world. Positing that anyone is inside or outside it, a fiction some misfit and minoritarian artists have claimed, as well as of course some social movements, but also a fiction that judges and doctors routinely make, is always an artificial, performative, and polemical move. Just as institutional authorities who think they need to use violence against you will typically say that you are violent, usually in some implied sense, imputing to you as origin and cause of their action what they intend, so too a judge or doctor who wants to forcibly exclude you from their fictional representation of society as order and totality, and of course this is done in ways involving the use of spatial architectures of enclosure and confinement that isolate and exclude along with an apparatus of enforcement officers whose job is in part to constantly remind the people in the places they help run, that they are isolated and excluded, and expected to respond with hatred and violence to hatred and violence. he person, who may or may not be describable as a “victim,” is considered (also?) causal agent and not, or not only, the passive effect of the activities of others. You are outside of society, a status you can affirm or deny, or interpret as you would, but you are also identified, individualized as object of procedures, thrown back upon yourself from associations with interests, projects, and friends of your choosing. In the terms of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, you are “interpellated” (called and positioned), indicating the social power performed when a representative of the state, paradigmatically a police officer, calls to you and you must recognize that it is you being summoned to respond. In modern bourgeois societies, which we now seem to be moving beyond, power was individualizing: it does not prevent you from being and appearing as you are, but focuses power and resistance to it around identity and subjectivity. Ethical notions of responsibility are build around this; they mark a distinction historically beyond feudalism and bourgeois modernity.
Most of the liberal left has been content to operate within this paradigm. It is not a democratic one, though it may not be incompatible with certain forms of liberalism and liberty. Since the reasons the left has taken the shape in this country that it has have more than a little bit to do with universities and their role and character in this society, and they are in some ways being destroyed, we could partly for this reason wonder if new possibilities in political thought on the left may open up. One might be that of a left Hegelianism (as in Gillian Rose, or even referencing deflationist readings of Hegel like that of Robert Brandom) that would think more about discourse and the role in politics of reason, and maybe rely less on thinking about desire and subjectivity (as in Judith Butler, beginning with her first book, on the reception of Hegel in France, appropriately titled Subjects of Desire; and of course also in Slavoj Zizek and the other Lacanians in the Ljubjana School; Zizek seems in part to be pursuing an idea of the sublime). An ontology of desire may naturally lead to a politics of liberation and liberty; an ethics (theory of the good life) based on a very robust idea of reason, which was central to Hegel, might show a way to a democracy to come, very different from the cynically Sophistical and manipulated kind we have. How are these motifs best related?
The idea of the victim is a notion correlative to that of oppression. Both are “social” rather than “political” in Arendt’s sense, and both seem to call on desiring subjectivity to liberate itself in ways that relegate reason to a marginal detail of techniques of liberation. And liberation as empowerment, with empowerment authorizing domination. This is the Leninist thinking that still animates much of the left. (See on this Antonio Negri’s argument distinguishing the concepts of power as potentiality and as domination in Spinoza, in The Savage Anomaly). Thinking of oppression may only lead to special forms of administrative care buttressed by humanitarian charitable or therapeutic discourses, which sometimes allow for the broad discursive posturings of a political “radicalism,” which may suggest that these notions have outworn their utility and should be abandoned, if only because they facilitate the continued power of the administrative state far more than any opposition to it. Historically, the term victim was used for animals being sacrificed; the term “holocaust” was borrowed from Leviticus, where it designates the annihilation of the victim, and this of course as part of a rite of sanctification. The privilege of the Jews, it must be said, is not to be sanctified by being murdered; death and torture make holy no one and nothing, and of course on this plane history is full of victims; if Jews have a moral privilege related to this, or if anyone does, it lies in the ability to understand it, a notion that must be kept distinct from all justification, and also calls for a different thinking of time, as suggested by Walter Benjamin and many others inside and outside the Marxist philosophical tradition.
It must be noted that liberalism and democracy are not the same. It is interesting to ponder how they might be, as motifs, truly interdependent, as I think they intrinsically are. But historically they had different roots: Liberalism was rooted in classes of individuals with social power demanding limitations on the central state power for their benefit. The democratic idea was more central in the socialist project. The latter was a development of modern republican traditions, extending from Machiavelli through Spinoza and Rousseau to Kant and Hegel, not the liberal tradition developed in English philosophy beginning with Hobbes. Democracy means I have a voice in decisions that are not mine alone but that may affect me or be proper to the polity I belong to. Liberty basically means you can do what you like. Democracy is a form of community; liberty becomes truly possible only with the modern bourgeois state, and it is a thinking of state or society and not of self-government. The liberal tradition was never able to consistently construct the opposition of liberty and authority that defined it. Evidence of this failure is the long persistence of slavery in the United States that was even upheld in the South by certain ideas of liberty that are not entirely false. Liberty wants to limit power but has no consistent critique of it that would enable it to. In practice, liberty ideologies always went hand in with property right and the legitimation of domination based upon it.
The two right wings of the Republican Party (it has a center but no left wing, as the Democratic Party has a left and a center but no true right wing—however much individual politicians often belie this judgement) are the Libertarians and the Religious Right. I have mentioned the libertarians above. In fact, the Republican Party finds both of these ideologies to be what its central ideology is to the Democrats: ways of selling their policies to the voting public. They must do this because policy is really directed by interest groups and lobbies. Indeed, a logic proper to interest groups is what ties the identity political radical (or angry) left-liberal progressives to the Democratic Party. Each minority group is treated like a giant interest group, and since we have representative government, the parties and their representatives and functionaries will claim to represent you as a member of such a group, if you are one. In the United States, the national identity of the society as republican is partly the pseudo-democratic one of equally representing every minority. Thus, out national motto is E pluribus unum, out of many, One. Originally, the plurality was the states, and also religious minorities. Later this became minority groups. It is not ideological; since our representative government is not multi-party as in much of Europe, Congressional representatives do not represent ideological groups and are theoretically free of ideology. Instead, they represent geographical groupings (now essentially gerrymandered by the Parties, whose representatives know that they represent moneyed interests on which their campaigns are dependent, and the representation of voters may as well by manipulated to get the right results). This may be one reason why there is no socialist party tied to labor-union membership as in much of Europe. To a significant extent, the Democratic Party needs the marketable idea that it represents the people by representing all the historically oppressed and marginalized people.
The Republican Party appears to speak more clearly to ideology. In fact, it really just speaks to corporate business interests and largely to the more conservative wing therefore on the basis of the presumptive ideological divide that puts people with “traditional values” on one side and lifestyle liberalism and radical liberalism on the other, with the key divisive distinction, unfortunately, being abortion. The country is fairly strongly divided abortion and weakly divided on bathroom gender identity, the rights of transexuals, and even the rights of gay people that more and more Americans find unproblematic. But very little public policy of consequence is affected by the divide over these things. It may give urban liberals, rich and (mostly in fact) poor an identity theme of their own, linked to the marketing of certain kinds of goods.
The other right wing in the Republican Party is the Religious Right. Like the libertarians, this is a grouping of somewhat artificial origin. It is has been found that both were initiated and given much initial funding from corporate business interests. In other words, this is how they chose to sell America. In fact, the faux division separates in the Republic Party conservatives and liberals of lifestyle and morals.
The emptiness of the Religious Right should be obvious from its curious moralism. They don’t care about the people, such as anything they might need, but only care about God, that people obey him. This is indeed a right-wing, authoritarian, and Calvinist idea of Christianity, but it is also a a parody of that religious ideology. Ideologies move closest to parody of themselves when they are marketed. Otherwise, we could truly wonder about this idea of God and his demands that appears to have conveniently forgotten much of the New Testament. The parodic image also gives progressive something to lash out at; the value of this should perhaps not be underestimated. What if we had only a media politics that was centered around troll-like exchanges of memes? In a certain way, Trump’s politics are exactly that. But if there is one takeaway from the political discourse of the religious right, it is surely thus: a sanctioned authoritarianism that is also partly the narcissistic self-promotion or power and property as linked to moral right. So pervasive is this underlying message that most progressives and liberals miss it. This can be seen in the controversies over the teaching of evolution. Armed with the absurdity of “creationist” evolutionary biology, the progressives arrive and announce that “Science” is the name of an idea of “truth” that is wholly religious in its absolutism. What Trump’s election seems to have meant is that our government has a marketer-in-chief whose essential claim is to an authoritarianism that refers to no principle of discursive legitimation other than its enunciation. The truth is what you are to believe because the boss says it is; so that in fact truth is deprived of any epistemic status. Trump’s statements are the boss’s “giving a head’s up” as to what you are supposed to think and do. It doesn’t have to be true, or rational; it’s the word of the boss.
What has happened in this country is that residual forms of democratic public social life have increasingly been eroded or eclipsed. Trump’s bad policies and his possible malfeasances have been given too much attention with respect to this. We already had a surveillance police state. The shocking advance further towards fascism consists in the fact that our trolling president now blatantly represents an anti-democratic style of governance. But we have had that in subtler forms for some time.
The Religious Right is, as I suspect many libertarians are, based on market-worthy identity themes. It has drawn to its evangelical fundamentalist Protestant core much of religious discourse in America. In America, to be religious, whether as Catholic, Protestant, Christian, Muslim, or perhaps something else — though one variant of Protestantism, the “New Age,” clearly lies outside this tendency — is to be someone who believes in authority: the authority of the text (in some versions, it is infallible), of tradition (and thus a preferred or imagined lifestyle—surely Americans can so want to live by “traditional values” because ours is the most diverse, socially and economically modern, mobile and uprooted society that has ever existed, and in many ways among the most unreligious of them, despite all the sound and fury). And what is the object of this authority? It comes down to something like, “Read the text, do the right thing; we mean it, man!” Something exists in the pull of this discourse and the ways it has been articulated in the political public sphere, that it is actually difficult for anyone to publicly avow a religious identity without seeming to be a political conservative, and along the lines these conservatives have defined. They are moralists, and of course this morality is tied to an authoritarianism (the two motifs are almost one in the same). Their politics is based on a morality according to which everyone should stop sinning and do the right thing.
The right is not the only group that makes a centerpiece of morality. So, as we saw above, do many progressives. I suggest that this broadly is a mistake and it is the same one. Government must not legislate morality. The reasons is not there is diversity among religious and moral factions, though that may be another reason. (If we cannot agree on what is right, perhaps — if we are liberals - you are right in your place and we in ours. Thus, as France’s philosopher Alain Badiou comments, the Sophism that holds that there are no truths but only opinions). The reality is more radical: Even if everyone agreed on what is right and wrong, we don’t want all of it policed. The excessive force of much policing is one reason, but another is thus: Suppose the Ten Commandments were law, and it were not just immoral but illegal to worship a graven image, cheat on your spouse, or want to cheat on your spouse. Do we want idolatry, adultery, and coveting to be illegal or not? I say not. It just seems to me that such things as idolatry and coveting are best policed by one’s own conscience alone. This is what it means to have separation of Church and State. It is not so that you can go to your own Church, it is so that your Church remains only a Church. And also because time is open, not closed, as the progressives think, and that means that science and history benefit by being allowed to make mistakes. In this way we emphatically will refuse Zero Tolerance policing, and maybe a move in this direction could reduce mass incarceration. After all, this is still a country where people can go to jail for using a virtually harmless but, alas, illegal drug. Forgive us our trespasses, as we ask the police to not violent arrest our dark thoughts. And maybe too, people can moderate their reactions, as if these might be on some scale of severity, reminding ourselves that tolerance itself is not directed at virtue so much as vice. Lots of things are sinful, some are peccadillos. Maybe that micro-aggression you thought so wrongful deserves fewer tax dollars spend to eradicate its crop. Maybe some men who get angry at some women are not virtual rapists. Maybe living a good life is not the perfectly simple affair it must seem if you are a crusading justice warrior. If there are micro-aggressions that are micro but true injustices, might there also be micro-sins? There is an American imaginary whose monstrous dream-figures include the idea of a War against Sin. When I am elected, sin will be no more!
The great figures of a Christian Manichaeanism include the war of good against evil, which is an old political metaphor that in my generation was used by Reagan regarding Communism and by G. W. Bush after 9/11. There was something uncanny about our figures in our government taking up metaphors of a war against evil, when that exactly was, and was noticed as, the ideology of the Islamist extremists. It was the same figure of discourse with different objects in the places of who was doing what. The other master-figure of this model is, at least in the Christian West, that of salvation and damnation. If you know any political hysterics, they might tell you that the other party is the bogeyman or bad cop, and if you don’t vote for them, the good cops, that’s what you’ll get. Scaring people with this hell fire was a motif of the Democratic for many years. You could be forgiven for suspecting that the sky will not fall if the other party ends; I don’t like Donald Trump, but I don’t think even he has brought the apocalypse and in a curious reversal the religious right in his party probably won’t either. It might be awful in many ways and surely will be in some, but it will be a downright secular awful, not a horror movie. Does political marketing require such evocations of entertainment? Is our voting populace that stupid now, or are they underestimated by enthusiastic political interns?
One problem with the war-against-evil, salvation vs. damnation model is that it enables those who wield it to retreat from the need to offer any positive policy initiatives at all. That is why the Democratic Party’s longtime cynicism was so very much that. To the poor and working class: We have nothing to offer you, it’s true; but you must vote for us, because look what they will do? This is also paranoia. The truly paranoid have no positive hope or “faith”: they are too absorbed with the evils they fear and must fight. It can also be said that these oppositional imaginary schemas are rhetorical strategies. It makes sense to be rhetorical when you don’t want to give the person anything, but only to use them to get what you want, and to do that you must manufacture their consent. But if a party does not trust its voters, why should they trust it? It may be predicted that these strategies will fall by the wayside if enough of the party’s voters say: this is what we want. Or, to not be paranoid one must have objects of positive identification, of a faith, hope, or love, to use religious metaphors, as well as negative ones. A movie where a character encounters only threats and harms is a horror movie. A life lived that way would be madness or very short. Same with a republic. What about a political party? Maybe what’s hopeful to say about Americans is that most of us are less stupid than we are supposed to be.
The two right wings have in common support for business values. They are both ideologies that could on their own terms only yield weak results in terms of policy. They are ideologies, and so they are used to win popular support for a political policy program that is predesigned by experts in that. We must, though, consider, that ideologies have effects, and in this respect curiously American politics and its discourses are perhaps much more powerful than the government itself and anything it can do. This may seem backwards: instead of popular desires exercising pressure on representatives to change policies to suit their authorizing public (we still have an official belief in popular sovereignty, where the people rule, which is at least still attested in our elections), we have policy-makers working out in detail programs that suit the lobbyists and interest groups that are their campaign donors, and then in effect selling them to the people. Brecht’s statement could not be more apt in our context, that perhaps the government should elect a new people.
The above reflections on democracy motivate for this writer a disquiet concerning a possibility some have mentioned, some exaggerated, in most cases I think without fully grasping what is involved. Certainly, our current president would not be the cause of this eventuality, quite, though he might be its enabler. The disquiet concerns left as much as right, or in the terms largely explored in this essay, what we may call the Authoritarians and the Progressives; arguably these are our two factions now. How will a dissenting liberal and progressive faction oppose or be a counterweight to a society on a war footing, in which left and right differ in style or form only in the targets they identify? Does anyone have an effective response for the day after the night when our government has made the mass arrests typical of blatant tyrannies, having found its Reichstag fire, in seizing on the latest horror of violent crime by an extremist linking the personal grievance of the life frustrations that are common enough via affects of hate to apparent political memes that horrify almost all of us? Oddly enough, it may be our moralities as much as our strategies whose benevolent failures sink us. It may suffice to reflect on a situation ours is unlikely to equal in extremeness, poor comfort that this is. The opposition to Hitler in Germany was partly liberal, and the liberals had moral objections. Doubtless we should not abandon ours or relativize them to a politics of pure technique and administration, that of permanent war and getting what “we” need any which way through the moral equivalent of politics as war that is as much an alibi for authoritarian political tyranny as every moralism is an authoritarianism. As I see it, progressives are largely unprepared, captives of an ideology that in our situation is useless when not counterproductive. Their error starts with mis-theorizing our society: if it has an essence, it is not that members of one demographic are systematically oppressed by another; the society is not feudal but capitalist, and the progressive left miscomprehends the whole nature of capitalist exploitation, not to mention alienation.
The two principal factions in American politics today are what may be called the Authoritarians and the Progressives. They are less different than they seem; though the thinking is very different, in its objects and concepts, the style is remarkably similar. The danger of authoritarianism is not one of obscurantism and prejudice, as progressives believe. Though they may be comparatively short on compassion (as a worthy motive of public policy), people who are on the right, whether elites or masses, are not all stupid, even if we concur that prejudice is stupid, which is a progressivist way of understanding it. (In fact, most white racism is in essence fear of crime, and here as elsewhere most voters are more the self-interested rational actor than they are given credit for). The danger of authoritarianism comes partly from what it is always latent in, which is moralism, and moralism may be defined as a morality thought of combatively in the terms the right-wing political philosopher (a darling of the intellectual left) Carl Schmitt thought defines the political as such: the opposition of friend and enemy. Progressives are rarely less moralistic, though they sound different themes. Relentless angry talk about oppression can sound an awful lot like an inculpating moralism, as if a left-wing Calvinism were unwittingly deployed to fight its ideological counterpart. Combatants can wind up saying opposite things but using the same gestures. And those of us who love art and think that it has a politics of its own that can speak volumes, we know the value of gestures, appearances, form and style.
What so many people across the political spectrum agree on is precisely the military model of the political, that it is us versus them and we are endangered. Or what we must need and love, such as the environment, is. This generates a mood of imminent crisis or state of emergency. The problem with almost every attempt for political purposes to sharpen the sense of opposition and urgency is that this leads to exaggerations (not prejudices: in broad terms, if not ethnic ones, they are universal). Schmitt also thought that the political turns upon the possibility of suspending the normal managerial order of things by declaring an emergency; the agent who can do this is the sovereign.
Historically, the last century or so saw several distinct forms of tyrannies and totalitarianisms. The concept of “fascism” properly so called was applied to a government whose ethos was a militarism exaggerating notions of war, courage, and the heroic. Doubtless, Mussolini’s system and the movement it began with was far too poetic to have many director imitators today, though the United States and large parts of the world have visibly move towards forms of authoritarian governance, allowing for a kind of floating state of emergency which does not depend on a blatant suspension of the Constitution as law but only the ability of police agencies and institutions of governance to disregard the civil liberties of individuals subject to them whenever it seems there is a “need” to do so. That the beneficiaries are various economic elites is obvious. Popular support for these tendencies is often accidental, but it falls into patterns that may be called ideological, since that is what ideology does: it coordinates in functional, not intentional, terms the actions and beliefs of many people whose first consideration is like most of us with their own interests or survival. Humanity is, after all, liable not only to sins and vices but also the unintended bad consequences of good ideas and intentions. If the dangers in progressivism may be considered accidental rather than constitutive, than progressive Democrats can try to manage them. One possibility might be to link justice more to happiness than to injustice, and therefore, perhaps with a better theory of time, to real objects of faith, hope, and love and not just to inevitably paranoid projects of defense and combat of foes. That is, .after all, one of the most profound and obvious tendencies of a national security or police state. Maybe we should talk again about the good life and not just oppression. If you think about oppression, you must be angry. Injustices exist and sometimes should be fought, but the world is not unjust, and however antimonial one wants to be about our government, that being a very American spectator sport, it probably is not true of American society either, not quite, not yet. Civil war is a bad model for the political in part because war is not the best context for generating new things, or solving problems that require complex thinking. It would be shame if our society became more fascist-leaning as a paradoxical result of attempts to resist that. Every real war is also a plague: while fighting the enemy, he may infect you with his thinking.
There are, surely, aspects of a neo-fascism that people on the progressive left will want. Like their counterparts on the right, they will be disappointed when they see how boring, and not just universally repressive, is the consequence. But the surest way to a fascism is a gradual erosion and self-destruction of democracy, and one sign of that is how many people shelter in their intentions and ignore the consequences of what they do. If you are the dangerous one, you deserve, or need it, anyway.
There is a figure of the person absent in totalitarian societies (where it is merely simulated) and central to societies that are in any measure democratic: the citizen. In his place is left only the subject. Desires and passions define subjects, they are determined by how they are affected, and how they react in response. The consumer/debtor is perhaps a contemporary figure of the subject: the state offers you some things, and demands things in return; but what the state is and does in essence is not your concern, it is another “person” with its own wholly independent existence and will, just like private corporations. “Stakeholders” also resemble consumers, and governments treat them like lobbies and interest groups, which is what they are. The citizen is a participant; he understands patriotism, not as a consumer/debtor or other subject might, as an object of near-absolute allegiance, like an early modern monarch, but as the rights and duties of participation, and the duties are enjoyed. The subject cares, like the Biblical Noah, about himself, his friends and family. and tribe. In time of crisis, he thinks about saving himself and those he loves. The citizen cares, whether more or less than himself or family is secondary and may vary, about the community he is part of which is also a polity. Citizens think about public and political matters, and they can change their minds; there is no political tribe, and even socialists and communists in their heyday did not make ideology or class names of a tribe (and far too many were intellectuals or artists and not workers); they mostly cared, and greatly, about the whole society or social world they were part of, however conceived. The ideological closure those parties mostly worked within probably owed less to Marxist philosophy than other prejudices or seeming demands, and limited their political effectiveness as much during times of mass upheaval as parliamentarian normalcy. Today, there are new social divisions that have gotten far too little attention while there is so much focus still on the cultural wars. For example, the universities are being dismantled, and a new proletariat of low-paid but highly educated workers has been forming. These people are a key demographic in the recent rise of “socialist” politicians. So tentative at the level of theory and practice today of these tendencies must any map of our situation be said to be, it may be worth wondering whether the kinds of mistakes and traps I have described do not tend more to characterize some very different groups, like elite university students hoping to land good salaried corporate jobs and nervous as hell about it (consider in this respect: the student protestors at the University of Missouri in 2014 and the Ferguson protestors the same year: same issue in theory, but very different demands, and very different groups by class). Maybe one reason we need to look for and identify the most hopeful tendencies is not only that the news media may fail to, but that excess disenchantment with the excessively disenchanted would lead to political sins of omission in the course of soaking in too much toxic despair.
Philosophically, the figure that is key to much of what I have described is the opposition ambivalence vs. ambiguity. Paradigmatically, ambivalence is a simultaneous love and hate, or an inability to decide between them. It is uncertainty about whether to welcome or fight the foreigner, but it is also the same/other distinction and a thinking of problems not as what in German is called a Bildung (a process of learning as self-formation) that would be a chaos transformed by concepts and form, but as a war or purification directed against an unacceptable Other. Ambivalence is undecidability of attitude towards a clearly demarcated Other who exists in a dualistic relation of mutual opposition and exclusion to the self. Ambiguity is the persistence of chaos. It is not the refusal to think and judge but the insistence that thinking and judging are a getting more clear about something that was less so. Ambiguity is an ethical virtue we associate, rightly, with liberalism, in the classical sense of the term: liberty and tolerance. Political polarization around master and slave moralities, favoring intolerance in the one case and resentment in the other, are mirrors of each other and usually are so conceived by their partisans. For who wants to fight a war against a party that is not at war against you?
The presumption of guilt and that of oppression, or of being a presumptive perpetrator of injustice or a victim of it, these are forms of the same moralism that judges situations on the basis of prejudice (a predisposition to think and judge in a certain way). The principal difference here between left and right is that the left does this in ways that are much less obvious. This is in part because its basis in this country is in universities, and so people who are on the left tend to be drawn to social theories, while the right prefers simpler and more ancient certitudes that are more obvious because less discursive. Business is getting things done, and this is a practical, business society; the right is not necessarily less thoughtful than the left, just less chatty. I say this not in their defense (I prefer chattiness to just meaning business, and I think that democracy and liberty depend on it), but because I think citizens of every stripe, including my own as a man of the left, are strengthened in their causes by recognizing what is involved in the blind spots in their own seeming innocence. Indeed, innocence loses its blush of virtue when proclaimed by the bearer, and such claims generally take the form of asserting that we are so good because you are so bad. There’s badness enough to go around as it is without anyone needing to claim to be good; hypocrisy is suspect because most of us know that only good people worry that they are bad, while the latter, and they alone, have no such scruples. Or else, in Hegelian terms, they are post-Cartesian empiricist subjects who think the perceiving and thinking mind is not in the world, so to talk about anyone or anything is only to speak of this object; your own position is not in question and cannot be. That is one way to become a justice warrior, though the gospel notion of not judging to avoid hypocrisy might suggest some mere tu quoque; that is, include the enunciating subject in the enunciation or include the gaze of the subject in the set whose members are objects of this gaze; this is a demand of the mirror, which is to say of identity (and of the self as both subject and object). The real political question is so practical and free of the resentment Nietzsche diagnosed that most business people themselves will recognize it. It was put in the title of a book that helped inspire a revolution, except that we can know what Lenin didn’t: it is a question that keeps being asked and has, as in science, only tentative answers. It might seem that the answer to this question is either “anything,” or, “whatever you choose,” but those answers are false because at least in politics there is no private language. This persistent question is, of course: What is to be done?