Quote:
Most people on the Right who focus on politics can be divided, broadly speaking, as representing one of two distinct attitudes about our current crisis. Those I will call the pessimists believe America—insofar as it is part of the modern, Western, liberal world—was doomed from the start. … They reject the incompetence and ethical bankruptcy of the establishment (not to mention the open hostility to heterosexual white men), which they equate with the whole liberal project of equal natural rights.
The practical agendas within this group vary—ranging from strategic withdrawal to escape the cultural degradation, to a resigned but cautious “wait and see” attitude, to overt enthusiasm for violent conflict.
The other major group—which is significant for its credentials and clout within the establishment—seems to hold a nearly opposite view. … These people, whom I will call the optimists, … often insist—in the face of what seems to be strong evidence to the contrary—that America, while a bit shaky, is still basically healthy and functional. Our electoral system is still intact, according to this view, and what is called for at present is not reckless apocalyptic rhetoric but a renewed commitment to the unglamorous work of persuasion and grassroots campaigning. They think the United States is going through a rough patch—but not for the first, or last, time. We need to push on without succumbing to hysteria about the end of constitutional government and possible civil war, which is melodramatic at best, and a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy at worst.
“Push through” for this group means much more than a temporary, tactical accommodation with the status quo. While those with a more radical outlook might stipulate that working within the system is the most prudent course right now, the optimistic conservatives act as if this is not only necessary, it is the only necessary and sufficient option.
As near as I can tell, they refuse to admit the possibility that liberal democracy can fail. They seem to assume that the United States can and will carry on, almost as a matter of metaphysical necessity—though you won’t often hear them say that explicitly. But having engaged in quite a few conversations with these “normies” (including several friends), my experience is that they are unwilling to entertain, even hypothetically, any plausible scenario in which our political institutions must be abandoned because the founders’ constitutionalism has become defunct.
Yet, the question immediately arises, why not give this approach the benefit of the doubt? On the surface, it might seem that there is no downside to this can-do optimism. Why not just contribute, as far as we can, to keeping the system wheezing along? That’s a fair question. To answer it, we have to understand a theoretical incoherence at the heart of this position.
For most of these optimists, talk about America’s collapse isn’t merely wrong at the moment; they reject it as irresponsible in principle. There is, they seem to say, never a right time to abandon the constitution’s nominal framework. But this reveals an underlying dilemma about why political organizing and good-faith persuasion are necessary.
Under the constitutional system crafted by the framers, we participate in political rhetoric and campaigning because we think elections matter and their outcomes are not predetermined. This must logically mean, however, (and did mean for the founders) that several bad electoral outcomes can weaken and ultimately—at least in theory—destroy the regime. The alternative is to believe the system is so robust that it is structurally immune to errant choices. But in that case, consent becomes effectively meaningless, and we might as well just embrace the bureaucratic rule of experts. Civic gestures like voting would then become merely performative—which, by the way, is exactly what the woke oligarchy wants in order to maintain the fiction of popular sovereignty.
The defenders of our “constitutional guardrails” could acknowledge that we are in dire straits and that the United States might be only one or two critical elections away from collapse. But in that case, there wouldn’t be all that much separating them from the radicals who say “it’s over". Some of the most acrimonious debates on the Right arise because, when pressed, the optimists usually won’t admit that we may, in fact, be only a few steps from disaster because—again—they refuse to acknowledge that total collapse is possible.
But then what is the point of campaigning and speechifying if the republic will survive regardless? To proceed as if the perpetuation of our political institutions is inevitable is to deny that American constitutionalism is or ever was an experiment.
Just as much as the pessimists, then, the optimists seem to believe in a pre-ordained America, which doesn’t so much pose a question about mankind’s capacity for deliberation and choice as supply a definite answer. Whether doomed to fail or destined to carry on, the United States ceases to be—in the eyes of both groups—a community of free individuals making good or bad choices that shape its future. Rather than see America’s fate as an open-ended product of moral and intellectual freedom, along with luck, the dogmatic pessimists and doctrinaire optimists both reduce the United States to an equation with a certain solution. In both cases, it becomes hard to justify any civic engagement.
Yet the practical dangers of resignation, on the one hand, and complacency, on the other, share an intellectual root: the belief that political legitimacy is determined by some kind of logical or historical process. What works is what succeeds, and what succeeds is what is right. We may argue about particular policies, and accept that there can be temporary gains or losses in achieving our preferences, but the regime—the political order or system that defines the modern world—exists by a kind of moral-political-historical necessity. Liberal democracy and the global financial system, which together might be called neoliberalism, along with its supporting technologies, all evolve together according to an inherent logic. This is simply the nature of the modern world, a world we did not create and which we cannot really repudiate. Nearly everyone in America believes that this world establishes the limits of our political freedom.
In that case, however, we have become spectators to our own fate. To the degree that most leftists are already quasi-Marxists or postmodernists, and most on the Right are invested in either the pessimistic or optimistic dogma, then nearly all of us are in the grip of an ideology that subordinates popular self-determination to the impersonal forces of the modern world.
Comment:
Is this true, do you think? (Better read the whole article.) I have had thoughts both ways. Pessimistic and optimistic.