The Left Itself Does Not Actually Consider Itself Liberal

"Liberal" has often been equated with "left." Thus it is a significant change in our political rhetoric that the left itself has begun to impugn liberalism. Last August this blog noted that the radical protesters who disrupted a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle condemned liberalism as such:

Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, shot back, “I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,” accusing the audience of “white supremacist liberalism.” (Emphasis added) - Seattle Times

Likewise some members of the mainstream media have begin to speak of "the illiberal left." That's Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine. Chait describes the left as assailing liberalism, and implies that this radical movement prefers a destructive revolution to democratic gradualism:(1)

It is the expression of a backlash on the left against liberalism — with all its maddening compromises and deference to the rights of the enemy — which fetishizes success as the by-product of cataclysmic struggle.

Chait rejects class warfare's assumption that citizens in "oppressed groups" have greater civil rights than citizens who are not, for example, minorities:(2)(3)

Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. “Democracy” means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights.

Chait exposes the left's implicit justification of undemocratic violence. His article supports the conjecture that illiberal "progressive" class warfare leftism, despite its shrill proclamations, is a marginal movement existing mainly on some campuses and in the writings of the misguided "progressive" journalists who failed to notice that Ta-Nehisi Coates White Supremacist series constituted a wholesale condemnation of the liberal democratic principles of the Founding. Chait:(4)

Such a “victory” would actually constitute the blow to democracy it purports to stop, eroding the long-standing norm that elections should be settled at the ballot box rather than through street fighting. ...
But the campus was merely the staging ground for most displays of left-wing ideological repression because it is one of the few places the illiberal left has the power to block speakers and writers deemed oppressive.

Another fundamental difference: "A liberal sees Trump’s ability to deliver a speech before supporters as a fundamental political right worth defending. A radical sees this “right” as coming at the expense of subordinate classes, and thus not worth protecting."(5)

The conclusion to be drawn from Chait's article is, Always remind yourself, when you hear someone using the term "liberal" or the term "left," that you need to determine which is being referred to. They have nothing in common. There is, Chait argues, an "irreparable contradiction between two styles of politics. Does the future of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement lie in building a revolution, or in the continued work of (small-d) democratic liberalism?"

Finally, as argued in our article The Atlantic Revives Radical Chic: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the English Language, and several months later in Carlos Lozada's The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, leftism, in contrast to liberalism, is essentially radical chic. It is not practiced by working politicians of either American political party (with the exception of a vanishingly small fringe). How often do you hear a Democratic politician, let alone a Republican, advocate public policy in terms of protecting the oppressed from the oppressor? As radical chic, class warfare leftism is about pretense. A privileged elite pretends solidarity with people they don't socialize with in order to grant themselves absolution for benefiting from conditions whose solution is liberal democracy, not double standards, the denial of civil rights to people you don't approve of, violent censorship of opinions you're afraid to debate, an end run around the rule of law, and mob rule.

Michelle Goldberg notes the phenomenon of Leftists for Trump. "Increasingly, a vocal part of the left is marked by its contempt for liberalism."

This romantic-fantasy left functions mainly as a remedy for its practitioners' own psychological problems:

I recoil from a personality type—not uncommon in radical movements—that treats politics as a realm in which to enact revenge on society for its own alienation and to claim a starring role in history. (Emphasis added)

Because demolitionist left pretense has lost its earthly moorings, its wilful ignorance of its harmful effect is hardhearted:

There’s not a word in [Christopher Ketcham's] piece about the immigrants who would be rounded up and put into detention camps under Trump’s plan, or the people of color who would be terrorized by a total breakdown in the norms that make even an imperfect multiethnic democracy possible. This is not surprising. What is surprising is that Ketcham, as well as the likeminded people he quotes, are so forthright about seeing politics purely in terms of personal catharsis. (Emphasis added)

As we noted in You Say You Want a Revolution, 

One of the problems of "progressive" politics' underlying class warfare ideology, ... is that it can only work through revolution, not the "incremental reform" which is democracy's methodology. And the too-rapid change of revolution, as serious thinkers since Burke have concluded, wreaks catastrophic damage on society, particularly on its weakest members. ... Limousine liberals such as [Susan] Sarandon promote a "progressive" ideology whose hidden premise is "a populace that needs to suffer more in order to reach Sarandon’s superlative level of wokeness." Since democracy's tender-minded methods haven't worked, increasing the sufferings of the wretched of the Earth will produce an aroused angry mob which will sweep all the evil and corruption away, allowing a wonderful, paradisal world to flower in the ruins.

Such magical thinking is scary. The actual result of totalist revolution is, typically, real social harm. The revolution Burke meditated on eventuated in the Terror.

-*--

(1) Point 9: Can only achieve its objective through revolution, not by leveraging the structures (elected representatives, the justice system) of the existing oppressive society. - Ten Points Against the Class Warfare Ideology

(2) See Point 1: Against political democracy, which by definition includes all the people. Proposes rule by the oppressed rather than government (not rule) by the people.

(3) See Point 6: [Class warfare] employs a double standard in many areas. For example, members of oppressor groups do not have the same rights as the oppressed. Discrimination by the oppressed against oppressors is approved, but oppressors are accused of discriminatory attitude and conduct.

(4) See Point 4: [Class warfare] arrogates to itself two things belonging to the justice system in civilized societies: Determination of guilt; and administration of punishment (Example: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”).

Re Ta-Nehisi Coates on "white supremacy":

White Supremacy is foundational to America. White Supremacy is not a bump on the road toward a better America. It is the road itself, the means by which America justified the taking of land and enslaving of humans, which is to say the means by which America came to be. - in Chris Bodenner's In the Wake of Baltimore: Your Thoughts

(5) See Point 3: [Class warfare] rejects the rule of law. Class warfare regards the supposed protections and rights of the existing body of law as hypocritical, benefiting only members of the oppressor class.

The Shaking of the Foundations

On May 31 conservative David Frum wrote, in Donald Trump and the Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy:

One guardrail that Trump’s opponents all assumed would hold fast was the fourth: the guardrail of ideology. Hardline conservatives would surely reject a candidate who barely understood what a principle was! ... Trump may not be much of a conservative by conviction. But he functions as a conservative in silhouette, defined by the animosity of all the groups that revile him. ...

As conservatism’s positive program has fallen ever more badly out of date, as it has delivered ever fewer benefits to its supporters and constituents, those supporters have increasingly defined their conservatism not by their beliefs, but by their adversaries.

Recently William Saletan: wrote, "What caused Trump was the GOP’s decision to negate Obama in every way, and thereby become the party of Trump."

We remarked on this in an article about F.A. Hayek:

The reason may be found in a fundamental characteristic of conservatism: its tropism toward wholesale obstructionism, derived from a fundamental lack of political ideas and a resulting tendency to define itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas and practices. Half a century ago F. A. Hayek, in his landmark "Why I Am Not a Conservative," [PDF] wrote:

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. ... Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them. (Emphasis added)

"Why I Am Not A Conservative" argues that conservatism has no "distinctive principles" of its own, and seems to imply that at any given moment it defines itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas. (Even though this leaves conservatives with an incoherent outlook.)

News articles about Candidate Trump have remarked on his indifference the underlying norms of democracy, let alone those of elementary decency. From an article we published in 2013, various aphorisms about norms as such: 

Those who violate the bounds of propriety counting on the reluctance of more decent people to stoop to their level to protect them.

A willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

David Frum - Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

James Fallows: Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms -- on the assumption that you'll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends. The norms imply some loyalty to the system as a whole that outweighs your immediate partisan interest.

Epigraphs from the same article:

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment" - "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

[They're] capable of anything. - Very Hard Choices, Spider Robinson

A country once guided by exalted principles is now tainted by cruel ones. - Dahlia Lithwick

Thus came the era of Trump Chaos. Civilization, "the benign influence of good laws under a free government," as the first president's Farewell Address said, arose from thousands of years of the slow accumulation of the norms of decency and civility. Stuffy things. It's cool to mock them.

Such "habits of the heart"(1) are the very bedrock of all we value.

We, the public, drove Nixon from the presidency for attempting to politicize aspects of the justice system managed by his office, for violating the principle of "a government of laws, not men," (see the firing of Archibald Cox(2) ) in ways that were far less extreme than emerge in Trump's boasting, blustering proclamations every day. Racial bigotry is supposedly not acceptable, yet as William Saletan writes, Trump is a serial exploiter of prejudice. "He has no compunction about using race, ethnicity, or religion for advantage. ... This is the man Ryan, McConnell, Priebus, and other Republicans have endorsed for president. Banning Muslims, smearing Latinos, blaming blacks, mocking disabilities—none of it is disqualifying in today’s GOP."

The guardrails of democracy are endangered by the Trump Chaos which, for the moment, appears to be increasingly legitimized with every newscast.

The fourth guardrail appears at the beginning of this post. Frum's other six appear in the notes below.(3)


-*--

(1) De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

(2) In May 1973, Nixon's Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, appointed Archibald Cox to the position of special prosecutor, charged with investigating the break-in. In October 1973, Nixon arranged to have Cox fired in the Saturday Night Massacre. However, public outrage forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who was charged with conducting the Watergate investigation for the government.

(3) The first guardrail to go missing was the old set of expectations about how a candidate for president of the United States should speak and act. ...

The second broken guardrail is the expectation of some measure of trustworthiness in politicians. ...

A third broken guardrail is the expectation that a potential president should possess deep—or at least adequate—knowledge of public affairs. ...

[Fourth, see above]

Donald Trump would have been hemmed in a generation ago by a fifth guardrail: the primacy of national security concerns. Trump has no relevant experience, no military record, scant interest in the topic—and a long history of casual expressions of sympathy for authoritarian rulers. He famously explained that he gets his military advice from TV talk shows. The most recent Republican secretary of defense, Bob Gates, told Yahoo’s Katie Couric that he would not, at present, feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear button. ...

[Sixth guardrail:]

A deep belief in tolerance and non-discrimination for Americans of all faiths, creeds, and origins also once functioned as a guardrail against destructive politics. In the words of the 1980 Republican platform: “The truths we hold and the values we share affirm that no individual should be victimized by unfair discrimination because of race, sex, advanced age, physical handicap, difference of national origin or religion, or economic circumstance.”

Disrespect for targeted groups—including the very biggest of them all, women—has been the recurring theme of the Trump candidacy. ...

[Seventh guardrail:]

Once you’ve convinced yourself that a president of the other party is the very worst possible thing that could befall America, then any nominee of your party—literally no matter who—becomes a lesser evil. And with that, the last of the guardrails is smashed.

 

Many conservatives and Republicans recognize Trump as a disaster for their institutions and their ideals. Yet they have found it impossible to protect things they hold dear—in large part because they have continued to fix all blame outward and elsewhere. ...

Policy, however, is not the first or second or third impetus of the Trump campaign. It’s driven by something else—and the source of that something is found inside the conservative and Republican world, not outside. The Trump phenomenon is the effect of many causes. Yet overhanging all the causes is the central question: Why did Republicans and conservatives react to those causes as they did? There were alternatives. Of all the alternatives for their post-Obama future, Republicans and conservatives selected the most self-destructive of the options before them. Why? What went wrong?

"Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate"

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson

Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" argued that our "news" covers hurricanes, shootings, and other sensational events while ignoring matters which would inform us how to vote wisely.(1) Once, Sorkin's show argues, national TV news anchors took a stand when called for:

Charlie joins in, encouraging Will to shed his safe centrist camouflage. "Anchors having an opinion isn't a new phenomenon," he says. "Murrow had one, and that was the end of McCarthy. Cronkite had one, and that was the end of Vietnam."

A recent article(2) by Dahlia Lithwick reveals a situation the news ought to be covering: The acts of the courts — including the Supreme Court — are often not about justice. Instead they are about corrupt, cynical partisan advantage. (Lithwick: "The 2016 term was meant to be the Supreme Court’s year to destroy Obama.") They usurp the function of those the people elect: the president and the members of Congress. (Emphasis added)

The unexpected strength of fringe candidates — Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump — testifies to massive public dissatisfaction with a political and economic sphere which has been hijacked by the obscenely rich. The news could be pointing out that while these extreme candidates don't represent a workable solution, popular action rising up against a corrupt politicized Court is one area where our democratic tradition could be effective.

Jamelle Bouie recently identified another area where the American people are being betrayed by their media and by the Democratic politicians they elected: the widespread disenfranchising "voter ID" movement. Why, Bouie asked, is there no Democratic uproar about this cynical subversion of democracy? Sorkin's TV series also asked, Why is the news silent about this travesty of the democratic process?(3) Here's how the august Court dismantled the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act which prevented certain benighted states from enacting voter suppression laws:

 

On June 25, 2013, in Shelby v. Holder, the Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that Section 4(b), requiring preclearance of historically discriminatory states' changes in voting laws, is unconstitutional. Wikipedia:

The Court held that Section 4(b) exceeded Congress's power to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, reasoning that the coverage formula conflicts with the constitutional principles of federalism and "equal sovereignty of the states" because the disparate treatment of the states is "based on 40 year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day" and thus is not responsive to current needs. (Emphasis added)

Since the ruling, several states once covered under preclearance have passed voter ID laws that removed provisions such as online voting registration, early voting, “Souls to the Polls” Sunday voting, same-day registration, and pre-registration for teens about to turn 18, which had expanded means of voter registration. The ruling has also resulted in some states implementing voter identification laws and becoming more aggressive in expunging ineligible voters from registration rolls. States that have changed their voting policies post-Shelby include both jurisdictions that were previously required to undergo federal preclearance, as well as some that were not covered, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and Texas. (Emphasis added)

If this red-handed anti-democratic conduct of the Court received the publicity which, for example, the latest rainstorm receives, the public would at least have a chance to know where its true interest lies.

And neither Bouie or Sorkin have so far addressed another unmistakable — and easily remedied — derailing of democracy: the pervasive gerrymandering which, in a majority-Democratic nation, inflicts on us a dangerously irrational Republican house. As Sorkin's Will McAvoy asked, "how come [liberals] lose so g** d*** always?"

Well, what was the last time the nightly news led with a gerrymander report rather than the latest flood or tornado? Or a voter suppression tally? Or an "Erosion of liberty: Supreme Court" documentary?

 

Imagine plain talk about the Religious Right:

It’s ironic because the biggest enemy of the phony Republican isn’t Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama. It’s this man. [image of Jesus Christ displays]. He said "Heal the sick. Feed the hungry. Care for the weakest among us. And always pray in private." (Emphasis added)

Or the courage to take down rabid ideological purity:

Compromise as weakness
A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism
Denying science
Unmoved by facts
Undeterred by new information
A hostile fear of progress
A demonization of education
A need to control women’s bodies
Severe xenophobia
Tribal mentality
Intolerance of dissent
A pathological hatred of the US government

[Will McAvoy]
They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves Conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans. Though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are: The American Taliban. And the American Taliban cannot survive if Dorothy Cooper is allowed to vote.

-*--

(1) Newsroom Anchor Will McAvoy: I'm a leader in an industry that miscalled election results, hyped up terror scares, ginned up controversy, and failed to report on tectonic shifts in our country. From the collapse of the financial system to the truths about how strong we are to the dangers we actually face. I'm a leader in an industry that misdirected your attention with the dexterity of Harry Houdini while sending hundreds of thousands of our bravest young men and women off to war without due diligence. The reason we failed isn't a mystery. We took a dive for the ratings. ... Congress forgot to add that under no circumstances could there be paid advertising during informational broadcasting. They forgot to say that taxpayers will give you the airwaves for free and for 23 hours a day you should make a profit, but for one hour a night you work for us. ... From this moment on, we'll be deciding what goes on our air and how it's presented to you based on the simple truth that nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate. ... We'll be the champion of facts and the mortal enemy of innuendo, speculation, hyperbole, and nonsense. We're not waiters in a restaurant serving you the stories you asked for just the way you like them prepared. ... I'm News Night's managing editor and make the final decision on everything seen and heard on this program. Who are we to make these decisions? We're the media elite. (Emphasis added)

(2) Lithwick: "The Supreme Court’s look at Obama’s executive action perfectly explains the Merrick Garland fight": One of the lessons of the new HBO film Confirmation, starring Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce as Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, is the extent to which fights about the Supreme Court are not simply about what is or what may be, but also about what could have been. Confirmation thus opens with the borking of Robert Bork for a seat at the high court, and the GOP outrage that engendered. This is important, because it explains the extent to which seating Judge Thomas—even if it meant destroying Professor Hill—became a Republican priority. In the party’s view, that seat belonged to Bork and it was stolen.

 

This same coulda, shoulda imperative is crucial for understanding the derangement that simmers beneath the GOP obstruction of hearings for Merrick Garland. You may think we are at war over what the court might become. But we are in fact at war over what should have been. And what should have been, for Senate Republicans, is quite simple: The 2016 term was meant to be the Supreme Court’s year to destroy Obama.

(3) Sorkin Anchor McAvoy: Tonight’s top story is a woman named Dorothy Cooper.

Dorothy Cooper is a 96 year old resident of Chattanooga Tennessee and has been voting for the last 75 years. This year, she has been told she can’t. A new law in Tennessee requires residents to show a government issued photo ID in order to vote. Dorothy Cooper doesn’t have a driver’s license, because Dorothy Cooper doesn’t have a car. Dorothy Cooper doesn’t have a passport; a vacation abroad was never in her future.

Tennessee isn’t alone. At this moment, 33 states have proposed or already adopted the same voter I.D. laws that have disqualified Dorothy Cooper from the one fundamental thing that we all do as Americans. It’s estimated that 11% or roughly 20 million people don’t have government issued voter I.D.’s and will be disenfranchised this November. Why? To crack down on the terrible problem of voter fraud. ... Because voter fraud is such a huge problem that during a five year period in the Bush Administration, when 196 million votes were cast, the number of cases of voter fraud reached 86. Not 86,000. 86. Here’s what that number looks like as a percentage of votes cast. .00004%. Four one hundred thousandths of a percent. This would be called a solution without a problem, but it’s not. It’s just a solution to a different problem.

Republican’s have a hard time getting certain people to vote for them. So life would be a lot easier if certain people just weren’t allowed to vote at all. I’m ashamed to say that 32 out of the 33 voter I.D. laws were proposed by Republican legislators, and passed by Republican controlled statehouses. And signed into law by Republican governors. 

Pseudo-Conservatism and Tonight's News

Writing during the presidency of George W. Bush, Ethan Fishman recalled Richard Hofstadter's article on “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” It was "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." "A politics," Fishman continued, "that emphasized unarticulated psychological impulses over reasonable analysis—a politics of the gut, in other words, rather than of the mind." Pseudo-Conservatives were "those who discount reason to practice a politics of largely inchoate sentiments." 

Fishman added:

Pseudo-conservatives are suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rely on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions.

Fishman saw a resemblance between today's pseudo-conservatives and the ideologues of the French Revolution:

In the context of Iraqi history, therefore, the administration’s vision of a democratic Iraq is reminiscent of the mistakes made by the French revolutionaries. Both acted as if dreams can easily be translated into political reality. Both upheld the ideal of freedom, but neither was able to adapt that ideal to the specific circumstances they encountered. Both were unable to appreciate the staggering costs in human lives and property that are unavoidable when radical change is pursued over a very short period of time.

Donald Trump's politics are those of W. taken to an extreme. He is "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." We gave an example in a recent article:

Trump, in his recent interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times, showed that he does not comprehend the system of global alliances the United States has developed, does not understand international trade, is unaware of the importance of the military bases the US has around the world, and is ignorant of nuclear protocols.

The pseudo-conservative as the person who is "suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rel[ies] on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions" is exemplified in another recent article:

Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders.

Pseudo-conservatism is thus a form of romanticism. "Romanticism," as Professor Ian Johnston argued [PDF]:

celebrated, above all, the figure of the heroic visionary artist, struggling over time against a hostile or uncaring world, never giving up until death, living life as an unending series of self-affirmations, moments of collision in which the power of the individual's mind and his or her faith in the imagination, imposed a sense of order and gave value to his or her life against insuperable odds.

Such heroic vitalism, characteristic of Central European thought in the first half of the last century, contributed to the aura of such authoritarian figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as it now constitutes part of the charisma of Donald Trump. Such icons, symptomatically, are believed to represent "the power of the will."

The attractiveness of such wilful political figures as Trump to youth is part of the pattern. The glamor of the romantic, larger-than-life authoritarian politician has an appeal, Johnston continues, to an anarchic youthful spirit:

At this level the Romantic spirit is a relatively uncomplicated celebration of the anarchic, optimistic, youthful spirit of sheer potentiality, an unfocussed affirmation of energy, motion, and good feelings. And if this were all there was to the Romantic ethic, it would never be much more than a pleasant but ultimately rather adolescent yearning for a spirit of total freedom (a good deal of popular Romanticism is little more than that).

"What happens," Johnston asks, "to this youthful creative spirit when it encounters the real world?" As we noted in Trump Reveals What's Wrong with Conservatism, it could "result in the selection of a dissimulating, bigoted, immature, bully":

In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities, accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. ... Republicans are [at risk of] nominating a child.

Writing during the previous Republican administration, Fishman accurately predicted:

Just as McCarthyism was followed by the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” the Reagan presidency, and the current administration, it is inevitable that another version of pseudo-conservatism will appear on the American political scene.

The current state of the Republican party is a catastrophe decades in the making. Since at least the Goldwater era, Republicans have leveraged cheap, doctrinaire, simplistic politics to distort the deliberative character of American democracy. They sowed the wind, and now reap the whirlwind. We are all the losers.

You Say You Want a Revolution

Today, in After Trump, Our Turn, Michelle Goldberg describes a wealthy actress' call for revolution:

Let’s be grateful to Susan Sarandon for exposing just how vapid and callous the left-wing #NeverHillary argument is. Speaking to Chris Hayes on MSNBC on Monday night, Sarandon, a Bernie Sanders surrogate, said she was unsure if she could bring herself to vote for Hillary Clinton in a general election. Hayes was shocked, but Sarandon posited that a Trump presidency might be preferable to a Clinton one, because it would hasten the revolution. “Some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in, things will really explode,” she said. (Emphasis added)

A summary of Michelle Goldberg's article:

"In this way of thinking, the real enemy of progress is incremental reform that would render the status quo tolerable. ... The cost of electing a Republican provocateur is human misery on an inconceivable scale, inflicted on people who lack Sarandon’s many resources. ... Its tolerance for human sacrifice. ... The major barrier to such a revolution is not a populace that needs to suffer more in order to reach Sarandon’s superlative level of wokeness. It is the structural obstacles to democracy systematically erected by Republicans and Republican-appointed judges: the widespread erosion of voting rights, the unlimited flood of money into politics unleashed by the Supreme Court, and the epic gerrymandering following the 2010 census that makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to win back the House, even if they win a majority of votes. These things will get worse, not better, in any Republican administration, making the possibility of a peaceful electoral revolution all the more remote." (Emphasis added)

One of the problems of "progressive" politics' underlying class warfare ideology, as cataloged in Preliminary Notes on the Effect of the Class Warfare Paradigm (Item 9), is that it can only work through revolution, not the "incremental reform" which is democracy's methodology. And the too-rapid change of revolution, as serious thinkers since Burke(1) have concluded, wreaks catastrophic damage on society, particularly on its weakest members. (Note the Beatles' critique(2) in "You Say You Want a Revolution") Limousine liberals such as Sarandon promote a "progressive" ideology whose hidden premise is "a populace that needs to suffer more in order to reach Sarandon’s superlative level of wokeness." Since democracy's tender-minded methods haven't worked, increasing the sufferings of the wretched of the Earth will produce an aroused angry mob which will sweep all the evil and corruption away, allowing a wonderful, paradisal world to flower in the ruins.

 

Such magical thinking is scary. The actual result of totalist revolution is, typically, real social harm. The revolution Burke meditated on eventuated in the Terror. Michelle Goldberg describes a Trump ascendancy as eroding civil liberties and diminishing the humanitarian safety net:

Sarandon posited that a Trump presidency might be preferable to a Clinton one, because it would hasten the revolution. ... The results of a Trump presidency ... might just include the widespread persecution of undocumented immigrants, the appointment of Supreme Court judges who will jettison Roe v. Wade, the end of any federal action on global warming, and a ramping up of American war crimes. We certainly won’t see any expansion of family leave or early education. Based on what we’ve seen of Trump so far, we can expect him to use the powers of the federal government, including NSA surveillance, to target and humiliate his personal enemies, especially women.

A Trump presidency would actually be much worse than that. Trump, in his recent interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times, showed that he does not comprehend the system of global alliances the United States has developed, does not understand international trade, is unaware of the importance of the military bases the US has around the world, and is ignorant of nuclear protocols. Commerce would suffer, unemployment would rise, the stock market would plunge, and the various brushfires abroad which diplomacy restrains or prevents would proliferate. The resulting Trump recession would likely dwarf the Bush recession we are still recovering from.

-*--

(1) In the Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. ... society should be handled like a living organism, that people and society are limitlessly complicated, ... - Wikipedia


(2) Excerpts from lyrics:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world ...
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out ...

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We're doing what we can
But when you want money
For people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait ...

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow ...

The "Social Justice" Attempt to Portray a Gandhian Pacifist as a Class Warrior

Melinda D. Anderson, in Teaching MLK's Life—the Man, Not the Myth, implies that his was a "social justice" (i.e., class warfare) message, not the "mainstream" message it is made out to be:

The Chicago teacher Gregory Michie says his lessons on the social-justice icon are designed to upend what he views as a simplistic and clichéd image often presented in schools. Since many of his students know King’s famous excerpt hoping for a day when no one is judged by the color of their skin, Michie’s social-studies class zeroes in on lesser-known sections of the “I Have a Dream” speech, like the “fierce urgency of now” and “tranquilizing drug of [white] gradualism.” The youngsters quickly realize that they’ve never really heard the full message of the speech, he said, and “it’s a lot more nuanced, and more fiery, than they’d thought.”

As the country observes the federal holiday named in King’s honor, it seems that schools are increasingly coming under sharp criticism from educators and activists for their approach to teaching King’s life. Some question a sanitized teaching of the black civil-rights movement, its leaders, and other struggles for social justice that denies students an accurate and complete account of history. These debates are complicated by the inherent professional dangers in teaching through a social-justice lens.

In her book Language, Culture, and Teaching, the multicultural educator and author Sonia Nieto writes that schools in attempting to make King “palatable to the mainstream … have made [him] a milquetoast.”

But King cites Lincoln, who emphatically rebuts the class warfare skepticism about the sincerity and legitimacy of the Declaration and the Constitution. (Previous blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) ) More to the point, this is the speech where MLK himself affirms the mainstream:

I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." ...

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

In these passages King rejects the social justice dogma that the principles in the Declaration and the Constitution are hypocritical; and the dogma that assigns ineradicable class based on skin color.

Ms. Anderson's implied argument—that portraying King as a great American who employed peaceful democratic persuasion to achieve his ends is a "myth"—is deeply dishonest and maliciously divisive. Her article's appearance in The Atlantic is another example of the way class warfare ideology corrupts the editorial judgment of "progressive" journalism.

Well may Anderson complain about "the inherent professional dangers in teaching through a social-justice lens." In King's case, doing so is morally wrong not because it makes the mainstream uncomfortable, but because it is untrue.

Trump's Tribalism Does Not Belong in a Nation Founded on Principles

In Clinton’s Values vs. Trump’s Tribalism, Slate's William Saletan connects presidential year politics to the Enlightenment values of the Founders:

In a shared-values framework, foreign peoples and faith traditions aren’t necessarily your enemies. They can be objects of empathy. [Hillary] Clinton drew an analogy between Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims and an infamous U.S. exclusion of Jewish refugees: “We remember the nearly 1,000 Jews aboard the St. Louis who were refused entry in 1939 and sent back to Europe. ... If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. If you see a bully, stand up to him.”

America was founded on values, unlike the other nations which existed at the time, which were founded on kinship. (France was the ethnic French; Spain was the "Spaniards," etc.) The Enlightenment values in the Declaration and the Constitution—equality, natural rights, and government by the people—defined the infant nation, and define us today. Allan Bloom asserted that "it is possible to become an American in a day" (by adopting America's democratic values), while in France it is still debated, he argued, whether Jews (who have been there for centuries) are "constitutively French."

The various forms of kinship politics, by operating in the ad hominem terms of identity rather than the universal principles of liberal democracy, are inevitably behind the times. Backward.

The right's current practice of judging people in terms of religion, which Saletan describes in dissecting Trump's politics; and the left's current class warfare identity politics, are both outdated and dysfunctional. They elevate partisan factionalism and self-interest above principled values and the public good. Saletan argues that such tribalism tends toward "barbarism": "When tribalism is your only guide, reluctance to use extreme measures is weakness. ... The real enemy is barbarism, and it can infiltrate your soul."

Kinship politics is the politics of class, a tribal arrangement utterly foreign to the spirit of the Constitution. Last week Mark Joseph Stern reminded us that, as Justice John Marshall Harlan stated, the Constitution "neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." ... "In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law."

Discussing North Carolina’s New Anti-LGBTQ Law, Stern notes:

HB 2 is also unconstitutional—not maybe unconstitutional, or unconstitutional-before-the-right-judge, but in total contravention of established Supreme Court precedent. In fact, the court dealt with a very similar law in 1996’s Romer v. Evans, when it invalidated a Colorado measure that forbade municipalities from passing gay nondiscrimination ordinances.

Stern reminds us that even a democratically elected legislature is not permitted to practice class warfare against a group of citizens it does not like:

As the court explained in Romer, the Equal Protection Clause forbids a state from “singl[ing] out a certain class of citizens” and “impos[ing] a special disability upon those persons alone.” Such a law is “inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects,” and under the 14^th Amendment, “animosity” toward a “politically unpopular group” is not a “proper legislative end.” Just like the law invalidated in Romer, HB 2 “identifies persons by a single trait”—gay or trans identity—“and then denies them protection across the board.” The Equal Protection Clause cannot tolerate this “bare desire to harm” minorities.

The lawlessness of the brand of Republicanism which has developed since the 1980 presidential election has come home to roost, degrading the United States to banana republic politics in which scores of millions imagine that an utterly unpresidential scoundrel like Trump could legitimately occupy the White House; and North Carolina attempts legislated bigotry expressly forbidden by the Supreme Court to Colorado twenty years earlier.

Jacob Weisberg: "An America in which Trump can represent one of the major parties feels like a very different country from the one many of us thought we lived in."

Saletan, Hayek: Trump Reveals What's Wrong with Conservatism

Recently William Saletan: wrote, "What caused Trump was the GOP’s decision to negate Obama in every way, and thereby become the party of Trump."

The reason may be found in a fundamental characteristic of conservatism: its tropism toward wholesale obstructionism, derived from a fundamental lack of political ideas and a resulting tendency to define itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas and practices. Half a century ago F. A. Hayek, in his landmark "Why I Am Not a Conservative," [PDF] wrote:

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. ... Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them. (Emphasis added)

"Why I Am Not A Conservative" argues that conservatism has no "distinctive principles" of its own, and seems to imply that at any given moment it defines itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas. (Even though this leaves conservatives with an incoherent outlook.)

In Obama Didn't Create Trump, Saletan begins:

Everything that’s wrong with America is Barack Obama’s fault. That’s what Republican politicians have told themselves and the public for eight years. It began before Obama took office, when Republicans blamed him for a recession that started on their watch. Now they’re blaming Obama for the rise of their own presidential front-runner, Donald Trump.

The delusion that Obama caused Trump has been building since last year. This week, it reached the last bastion of rationality on the right: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat has a long track record of fairness and good sense. When the madness infects even him, it’s time to clear the air. No, Obama didn’t cause Trump. What caused Trump was the GOP’s decision to negate Obama in every way, and thereby become the party of Trump.

The result is incoherence and moral bankruptcy:

Nevertheless, Republicans opposed Obama at every turn. Whatever he embraced, they rejected. They refused to compromise on health care or offer a realistic alternative. They staged dozens of votes to repeal the new health-insurance law in its entirety. They forced a federal shutdown to protest the law. They took the nation’s credit rating hostage in a debt-ceiling showdown. They urged Iran to reject a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the United States.

A consequence of knee-jerk oppositionalism is that, where your opponent pursues wise and constructive political positions, you tend to be maneuvered into foolish and destructive positions:

If Obama had been a leftist, the GOP’s policy of negating him on every issue might have positioned Republicans in the mainstream. Instead, because Obama was a moderate, the GOP’s negation strategy pushed it toward the fringe. Obama was for fiscal responsibility and compromise, so Republicans were for absolutism and drama, risking a federal shutdown and a credit default. Obama was for respecting the Supreme Court, so the GOP was for defying judicial orders. Obama was for using sanctions to pressure Iran into a nuclear deal, so Republicans were for scrapping the deal and daring Iran to provoke a war. Obama, like Bush, was for drawing a clear distinction between terrorists and Muslims. So Republicans were for blurring that distinction.

Furthermore, if your opponents' leader is temperate and decent, the blind pursuit of difference may result in the selection of a dissimulating, bigoted, immature, bully:

In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities, accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. Trump validates the maxim that in presidential primaries, the opposition party tends to choose a candidate who differs temperamentally from the incumbent. Obama is an adult. Therefore, Republicans are nominating a child.

Saletan adds, "And what Obama wasn’t—insecure, bitter, vindictive, xenophobic, sectarian—is what the GOP, in the era of Trump, has become."

There are disturbing parallels between the rise of Trump and the dissolution of the German democracy in the early thirties of the last century:

• An implied Leader Principle(1) (Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders)
• An emphasis on strength and power (see next item)
• Scorn for "weak" democratic decencies. (A commentator, to Conor Friedersdorf: "It is profoundly ugly when Trump just gleefully says, more or less, I love torture and we’re going to be doing a lot of it.")
• A contempt for civil liberties (Friedersdorf: A pol who seeks to gain power by demonizing ethnic-minority groups and threatening their core rights is engaged in a special category of leadership failure.)
• Expulsion, sometimes violent, of opponents from public meetings
• The belief that Trump is too bombastic, too offensive, too overbearing to survive the electoral process of a modern democracy

(1) Google Führerprinzip