Half a Year In: Making Sense of the New Amerika

Mechanism Nice
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

Saturday, 8/28/17

The America of late 2017 bears scarcely any resemblance to the America of early 2016. Cities writhe and shudder in turmoil — white supremacists march freely through the streets — monuments to traitors are defended en masse while demonstrators of good conscience are body-slammed to the street. Clansman duckstep triumphantly through liberal bastions while sympathetic police brutalize and imprison counterprotesters. The Commander in Chief cheers on the evil-doers and, shunning his typical wink, declares the counterprotesters equally responsible for the unrest.

To Americans of decency, the summer of 2017 has been a wake-up call mainlined into the carotid, blasted through the subwoofer of a rebel-flag-waving pickup and refracted through a haze of diesel smoke and blood-spatter. A year ago, the fault lines of our predicament were present, no doubt — though practically invisible to members of our aspirational class. This cultural elite (generally speaking, those who stand to reap the rewards of a globalized economy) were lulled into thinking that theirs was the primary POV, that the many Americans who lose from globalization and its discontents would change their minds, or at least have the decency to stay on the sidelines.

Rather, Trump has had the remarkable effect of empowering this latter group, of giving it a sense of identity and purpose. This band of the ‘disenfranchised’ is reveling now in its newfound importance, taking it to the street, the square, and the monument-spangled green. (And next year, one imagines, the ballot-box.) To be sure, there is much for these people to be upset about. That life for them is, objectively speaking, harder and poorer than it was for their parents is perhaps the crux of the matter. Betrayal by the American Dream is no small slight, and such grievance lends itself to affinity groups where the likeminded downtrodden find company: the KKK, American Nazi Party, Alt-Right, and their ilk.

To the talking heads of television, these slavery apologists, neo-Nazis, and pepe fanboys seem to have emerged ex nihilo. An honest reckoning, however, should quickly show that mouthbreathing Breitbart readers have been among us from the beginning, whether their guise be the John Birch Society, German American Bund, or neighborhood zoning council. Indeed, this toxic undercurrent was being documented all the way back in 1964, in The Paranoid Style in American Politics. A superb, more recent book sheds light on the disillusioned whites that (in part) make up these ranks.

Thus, the ‘Amerika’ of late 2017 is hardly new, hardly depraved more so than before. People just feel more emboldened — thanks most of all to social media — to show their true colors. And social media companies, perhaps not wanting to engage an extremist supreme court, take pitiable half-steps or otherwise wash their hands of the matter. Preaching their message from the digital rooftops, once-fringe elements have thus wasted no time winning hearts and minds, building up a crowd where antisocial attitudes seem downright comfortable. And so the spiral of hate continues.

While it’s a dismal situation, one can argue that those up in arms have brought their misery upon themselves (and in so doing feel less personally implicated). Indeed, there’s a delicious piece in the National Review arguing precisely this; that the angry disenfranchised take responsibility for their failure. Exasperated calls come from the left as well, arguing for much the same.

With a view to the economic prospects of the average American, I would argue that this is dishonest. It’s especially dishonest when the critique comes from members of the Democrat Party, as the average American’s dismal prospects are, to a great degree, the result of neglect by their policies. President Obama — whether stymied by indifference or obstructionists — failed to deliver the needed hope and change, so John Q Public turned to a man of last resort.

The Democrat Party, in letting a clown to do a proletarian’s job, indeed deserves blame beyond any of the usual suspects. It has become profoundly blind, and effectively ignores the interests of the majority it purports to represent. (If you don’t believe me, where is the advocacy for single payer healthcare that 60% of Americans support; where is the debate about our stunted $7.25 federal minimum wage, or the immense difficulty of attending a non-failing public school?) Crucially, it has developed an unhealthy fixation with identity politics, to the point that they have become the lodestar of the party platform. This is a critical point, one which merits far greater discussion, as the future of liberalism in America hinges on it.

To wit, there is a widening gap between those who would prioritize economic policy and those who would forefront identity politics. There is a long line of people on the side of the former. Whether we look at the New Deal of FDR or the Great Society of LBJ, we know exactly where they stood — on the side of economic initiatives to empower working people, on the side of poverty eradication. (While these programs were assuredly dismantled by Reagan and his acolytes, their impact was rapid and real.) But a line of people (mostly hailing from the aspirational class) on the side of identity politics is long and growing, fueled largely by an identity-politics-steeped campus culture. It might have been possible in last year’s election to fuse the two camps — indeed, it could have made for laudable policy — but Clinton, if somewhat awkwardly, opted to embrace these fashionable new politics. Sanders, indifferent to them, if bewildered by the hostile reception to his own, opted for the opposite. The forked road of liberalism’s future was made real and acted out before us.

What, then, is the appropriate prescription for a liberal politics? What, indeed, to do if few voters are motivated by identity? (This was surely Richard Rorty’s prescient warning to us in 1998.) Certainly it is not right to back down on the primary premises of identity politics, its mission to reform benighted whites, promote racial comity, level the playing field, etc. But perhaps, rather than have it dictate the broad strokes of the party platform, it is time to unabashedly forefront economic concerns — and particularly those of the least fortunate. Perhaps it is time that liberal America train its attention on the bread and butter issues that most impact the average American’s day-to-day. The threat of mass technological unemployment makes this project more urgent than ever. Leninists will find it ironic that there could hardly be a better slogan for this reformed program than “peace, land, bread”.

Unless an economics-first political program is forcefully pursued, we should expect to see the unrest continue, division widen, and America’s decline accelerate. Ultimately, people act (if not vote) in their perceived self interest. So should candidates decline to pursue policies with mass appeal and mass impact, we will be stuck with the demagogues. 16 more years of them, perhaps…

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