Keep at it Ms. Horton! Some beautiful writing at this site. That more recent bit on the feeling of a massive sea-serpent lurking in the depths beneath us was quite good. And some beautiful thinking. Interested to hear you talk about Yang's new venture. I'm someone early gen-X who grew up pro-life Dem, with a period of democratic socialism mixed in there, and then went conservative in the year 2000, after arriving at a grad-school. Your own intuition that something is rotten In Denmark meaning an end-of-the-road for certain approaches is quite right.
I'm not going to change being a conservative, but here's a bit from some of my own draft material that hints at why a thinker like you is particularly interesting to me. We will always have a left, and having once been on the left, I want a better one available! A better opponent! FWIW, the context here is my making the case to fellow conservatives about the need to now call ourselves "populist-conservatives":
"if American democratic socialists want to claim to provide the better populist platform and philosophy, they are welcome to make their case, and perhaps they might convincingly argue that they have more in common with the Populists of the 1890s than the Trumpers do. ...if such leftist leaders really did the hard work of establishing a populism-friendly faction on the Left, that could result in a net benefit to their side’s electoral prospects, and regardless of the electoral impact, it could do good work against America’s woke-provoked disunity. But it is difficult to see what this as-yet-largely-undeveloped possibility, or its possible repetition of 1890s patterns, would tell us about the existing American movement most likely to get called “populist.”
I think the key to these moves would be focus on the "democratic" adjective in "democratic-socialist," and a redoing of serious leftist interest in localism. I think folks like you should be reading Christopher Lasch, and most especially, Carey Wilson McWilliams.
Kind of a mixed bag in my comment here, but kudos!
Hi Carl - Thanks for reading and commenting! Definitely happy to have populist conservatives here. Of course, I have the same skepticism about an intelligent populism developing on right that you do regarding the left (although I hold no hope out for the Democrats as currently configured, either). Also, I am a huge Lasch fan (particularly admire "The Revolt of the Elites," which is stunningly prescient), but have never heard of McWilliams. So, thanks for the tip!
Hey - great to hear from you! Took me a couple of seconds to reconnect your name and your infamous blog, as yes, wow, lots of water under the bridge since the old Babarazzi days . . . but at any rate, thanks!
Marvelous peice. I wish I had the patience to respond more fully. You're really mining a rich vein here. Like you say, it's been a long time coming, but it was the reaction to the failure of 2016 that fully exposed how empty the progressive liberal institution had become. I have some real optimism though. This crisis in politics began in 1996 when Boomers suplanted the GI generation in national politics and brought with them the culture war they'd been fighting since the 1960s.
My worry (and normally I am an optimist) is we are so far down the sinkhole of harsh binaries (“We are good and they are evil”) that thoughtful alternatives will not be considered. People are reverting to human tribalism and simply don’t want to expend the necessary intellectual and emotional effort of…thinking.
I hear you and it's easy to feel that way, as it's where the majority of the available evidence seems to point.
That said, I think there's a big but unorganized and unrepresented, and therefore voiceless majority of the country that wants more thoughtful alternatives. Another way of putting this is that I am more worried about the negative force and power of our dominant leaders, instiutions, and elites than I am about ordinary people per se. If the former could be shifted in a better direction, I think a whole lot of people would be very happy to get on board. The problem is, I'm not at all confident that can or will happen.
But, it's a big, diverse, and dynamic country, and there are some positive shifts happening. Hopefully, positive momentum will build. Even if it's never enough to leverage a decisive change, I still think it's worth the effort and matters nonetheless.
Please check out what the highly organized movement in the form of the 2025project has in store for everyone.
It is sponsored by at least 72 deep-pocketed right wing think tanks and advocacy groups, most/all of which are part of a movement to re-Christianize America .It has a 900 page manifesto describing in great detail what it intends to do if it gains the necessary political power so to do.
This site provides a very detailed critique of the all-inclusive agendas of the 2025project. The authors have read and digested the entire 900 page manifesto of the project
Wokism brings out the sense of anger and the urgent need for change in social structures which is part of the lived experience of many Americans. That’s understandable to me. Many people of color, many Native Americans, and many women have been killed off or really set back in their life courses through the functioning of social structures. Those problems are ongoing – they’re ancient, medieval, and modern all at once.
Wokeness has excesses. People are denounced; people are charged with transgressions without any application of a moral or factual basis. In wokeness, there’s sometimes an invalidation of the very important protocols of due process, free speech, and civil discourse. (Those are essential elements of civil society, of course.) However, I don’t think that wokism is inherently incompatible with those. I think wokism is essentially liberal because it recognizes dignity and human rights for all people, so what you refer to as the “attacks on core liberal values” are internally contradictory. Those may be a temporary aberration, but they do lasting damage to targeted people, and to wokism as a proto-movement. Wokism becomes less coherent, less credible, when it neglects certain standards of civility.
I’m not so sure that feminism and identity politics are generally anti-liberal. A theory in these kinds of systems may be that liberalism can’t be authentically realized under a condition of certain relationships of power. I think MacKinnon is saying that male-dominated liberalism is an elaborate charade.
You say, Carol: “I’d also seen a growing tendency within the relevant literatures to conceptualize politics in terms of subjective feeling, quasi-essentialist identities, and cultural discourse, while sidelining structural issues of economics, policy, and governance. I’d naively assumed, though, that such academic theory would never gain serious traction in everyday life.” I think if academic theoreticians have discovered what people have in their heads, their journeys in identity, and their lived experience, that’s really positive and paradigmatically useful. Those are real for people – subjective as they may be. Structural issues are difficult – unfortunately - to incorporate into politics. So candidates need to somehow convert the objective back into the subjective in order to move voters – factually-based policy debates are rarely found within an electoral campaign.
Hi Harry - Sorry for the delayed response - I have been busy with the holidays. Just a few thoughts:
Note who is left out of your first paragraph's list of those who have been systematically harmed by social structures, and then compare that to who was included in the other comment you made about the root causes of Trumpism, and I think it starts to become clear why U.S. politics are such a mess.
As far as wokeism goes, both the term itself and why I think it's both intertwined with but also hostile to liberalism need a lot more fleshing out, which I plan to do in later posts, so I will leave that for later.
Re feminism, there are different schools of thought, including liberal feminism. MacKinnon is explicitly anti-liberal - although also commited to using the liberal legal system for her own sort of feminist agenda. So it gets complicated in terms of the intertwining of the two in practice - again, something I plan to write a lot more about later.
Yes, I like Andrew Yang. I did some volunteer work for his campaign in the 2020 Democratic primary, and actually ended up as one of his Ilinois delegates. I really like the fact that he is thinking into what are (relatively speaking) doable options for structural change to improve our electoral system right now and am signed up with the Forward Party. That said, having been disappointed with third party campaigns more than once in the past (e.g., canvassing door-to-door for the New Party back in the mid-90s- and has anyone ever heard of that??), I don't have hugely high hopes that this will gain a ton of traction. Regardless, I support it and think it's a good and worthwhile thing to do.
It's a long shot, but there's not much else. The last candidate I canvassed for was Eugene McCarthy, and I've never joined a party, but I could get enthusiastic about Forward. Will they have candidates in the 2022 elections?
I'm not sure, but from listening to some recent podcasts with Yang, my sense is that they will be backing candidates in state and local races, and pushing for ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms rather than running candidates per se. He is focused on how to change the rules of the game so that it's possible to get better outcomes.
Sounds like a good approach. The late, great Jack Layton, from my neck of the woods up here in Montreal, said that you can accomplish a lot if you don't care about who gets the credit, or something to that effect.
Keep at it Ms. Horton! Some beautiful writing at this site. That more recent bit on the feeling of a massive sea-serpent lurking in the depths beneath us was quite good. And some beautiful thinking. Interested to hear you talk about Yang's new venture. I'm someone early gen-X who grew up pro-life Dem, with a period of democratic socialism mixed in there, and then went conservative in the year 2000, after arriving at a grad-school. Your own intuition that something is rotten In Denmark meaning an end-of-the-road for certain approaches is quite right.
I'm not going to change being a conservative, but here's a bit from some of my own draft material that hints at why a thinker like you is particularly interesting to me. We will always have a left, and having once been on the left, I want a better one available! A better opponent! FWIW, the context here is my making the case to fellow conservatives about the need to now call ourselves "populist-conservatives":
"if American democratic socialists want to claim to provide the better populist platform and philosophy, they are welcome to make their case, and perhaps they might convincingly argue that they have more in common with the Populists of the 1890s than the Trumpers do. ...if such leftist leaders really did the hard work of establishing a populism-friendly faction on the Left, that could result in a net benefit to their side’s electoral prospects, and regardless of the electoral impact, it could do good work against America’s woke-provoked disunity. But it is difficult to see what this as-yet-largely-undeveloped possibility, or its possible repetition of 1890s patterns, would tell us about the existing American movement most likely to get called “populist.”
I think the key to these moves would be focus on the "democratic" adjective in "democratic-socialist," and a redoing of serious leftist interest in localism. I think folks like you should be reading Christopher Lasch, and most especially, Carey Wilson McWilliams.
Kind of a mixed bag in my comment here, but kudos!
Hi Carl - Thanks for reading and commenting! Definitely happy to have populist conservatives here. Of course, I have the same skepticism about an intelligent populism developing on right that you do regarding the left (although I hold no hope out for the Democrats as currently configured, either). Also, I am a huge Lasch fan (particularly admire "The Revolt of the Elites," which is stunningly prescient), but have never heard of McWilliams. So, thanks for the tip!
Nice take, Carol. (long time no see)
Hey - great to hear from you! Took me a couple of seconds to reconnect your name and your infamous blog, as yes, wow, lots of water under the bridge since the old Babarazzi days . . . but at any rate, thanks!
Marvelous peice. I wish I had the patience to respond more fully. You're really mining a rich vein here. Like you say, it's been a long time coming, but it was the reaction to the failure of 2016 that fully exposed how empty the progressive liberal institution had become. I have some real optimism though. This crisis in politics began in 1996 when Boomers suplanted the GI generation in national politics and brought with them the culture war they'd been fighting since the 1960s.
My worry (and normally I am an optimist) is we are so far down the sinkhole of harsh binaries (“We are good and they are evil”) that thoughtful alternatives will not be considered. People are reverting to human tribalism and simply don’t want to expend the necessary intellectual and emotional effort of…thinking.
I hear you and it's easy to feel that way, as it's where the majority of the available evidence seems to point.
That said, I think there's a big but unorganized and unrepresented, and therefore voiceless majority of the country that wants more thoughtful alternatives. Another way of putting this is that I am more worried about the negative force and power of our dominant leaders, instiutions, and elites than I am about ordinary people per se. If the former could be shifted in a better direction, I think a whole lot of people would be very happy to get on board. The problem is, I'm not at all confident that can or will happen.
But, it's a big, diverse, and dynamic country, and there are some positive shifts happening. Hopefully, positive momentum will build. Even if it's never enough to leverage a decisive change, I still think it's worth the effort and matters nonetheless.
Please check out what the highly organized movement in the form of the 2025project has in store for everyone.
It is sponsored by at least 72 deep-pocketed right wing think tanks and advocacy groups, most/all of which are part of a movement to re-Christianize America .It has a 900 page manifesto describing in great detail what it intends to do if it gains the necessary political power so to do.
This site provides a very detailed critique of the all-inclusive agendas of the 2025project. The authors have read and digested the entire 900 page manifesto of the project
http://www.stopthecoup2025.org
Thanks! I will check it out.
Wokism brings out the sense of anger and the urgent need for change in social structures which is part of the lived experience of many Americans. That’s understandable to me. Many people of color, many Native Americans, and many women have been killed off or really set back in their life courses through the functioning of social structures. Those problems are ongoing – they’re ancient, medieval, and modern all at once.
Wokeness has excesses. People are denounced; people are charged with transgressions without any application of a moral or factual basis. In wokeness, there’s sometimes an invalidation of the very important protocols of due process, free speech, and civil discourse. (Those are essential elements of civil society, of course.) However, I don’t think that wokism is inherently incompatible with those. I think wokism is essentially liberal because it recognizes dignity and human rights for all people, so what you refer to as the “attacks on core liberal values” are internally contradictory. Those may be a temporary aberration, but they do lasting damage to targeted people, and to wokism as a proto-movement. Wokism becomes less coherent, less credible, when it neglects certain standards of civility.
I’m not so sure that feminism and identity politics are generally anti-liberal. A theory in these kinds of systems may be that liberalism can’t be authentically realized under a condition of certain relationships of power. I think MacKinnon is saying that male-dominated liberalism is an elaborate charade.
You say, Carol: “I’d also seen a growing tendency within the relevant literatures to conceptualize politics in terms of subjective feeling, quasi-essentialist identities, and cultural discourse, while sidelining structural issues of economics, policy, and governance. I’d naively assumed, though, that such academic theory would never gain serious traction in everyday life.” I think if academic theoreticians have discovered what people have in their heads, their journeys in identity, and their lived experience, that’s really positive and paradigmatically useful. Those are real for people – subjective as they may be. Structural issues are difficult – unfortunately - to incorporate into politics. So candidates need to somehow convert the objective back into the subjective in order to move voters – factually-based policy debates are rarely found within an electoral campaign.
Hi Harry - Sorry for the delayed response - I have been busy with the holidays. Just a few thoughts:
Note who is left out of your first paragraph's list of those who have been systematically harmed by social structures, and then compare that to who was included in the other comment you made about the root causes of Trumpism, and I think it starts to become clear why U.S. politics are such a mess.
As far as wokeism goes, both the term itself and why I think it's both intertwined with but also hostile to liberalism need a lot more fleshing out, which I plan to do in later posts, so I will leave that for later.
Re feminism, there are different schools of thought, including liberal feminism. MacKinnon is explicitly anti-liberal - although also commited to using the liberal legal system for her own sort of feminist agenda. So it gets complicated in terms of the intertwining of the two in practice - again, something I plan to write a lot more about later.
Are you considering the Forward Party alternative?
Yes, I like Andrew Yang. I did some volunteer work for his campaign in the 2020 Democratic primary, and actually ended up as one of his Ilinois delegates. I really like the fact that he is thinking into what are (relatively speaking) doable options for structural change to improve our electoral system right now and am signed up with the Forward Party. That said, having been disappointed with third party campaigns more than once in the past (e.g., canvassing door-to-door for the New Party back in the mid-90s- and has anyone ever heard of that??), I don't have hugely high hopes that this will gain a ton of traction. Regardless, I support it and think it's a good and worthwhile thing to do.
It's a long shot, but there's not much else. The last candidate I canvassed for was Eugene McCarthy, and I've never joined a party, but I could get enthusiastic about Forward. Will they have candidates in the 2022 elections?
I'm not sure, but from listening to some recent podcasts with Yang, my sense is that they will be backing candidates in state and local races, and pushing for ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms rather than running candidates per se. He is focused on how to change the rules of the game so that it's possible to get better outcomes.
Sounds like a good approach. The late, great Jack Layton, from my neck of the woods up here in Montreal, said that you can accomplish a lot if you don't care about who gets the credit, or something to that effect.