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!
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.
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.
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!
Nice take, Carol. (long time no see)
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.
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.
Are you considering the Forward Party alternative?