Can the Democratic Party survive identity liberalism? Reflections after a Republican tv night

It is your allies, not your adversaries, whom you should want to criticize. Send adversaries a Trojan horse or a marketing campaign they can share with most of the audience. (Send it, of course, using the post office.) The following remarks are written in this spirit.

Will the pseudo-radical liberal identity idiots in the Democratic army's camp give the Republicans another victory by shooting the party and its candidates in the foot? (I wonder, with a shudder, what the many followers of Robin Diangelo among the liberal wing of the corporate suite set are thinking and planning here. Hell, why didn’t she speak at the convention?) Maybe not. The Democratic convention did not give much airplay to this crowd, but then they took such good care to avoid all controversy. I wonder if that is a despairing or hopeful sign.

Conservatives in America have recently flourished in part by making a lot out of the fact that left-liberals today, at universities, in the corporate world, and elsewhere, have promoted identity politics, cancel culture, victimology, exaggerated polemical conflict, call outs of micro-aggressions, race-baiting, and other things.  (If you find this entertaining or doubt me on this, read any issue of Commentary magazine; they do a great job of this.)

It is entirely possible to agree with these critics of left-liberalism much of the time and be on the left, as I am. In fact, we on the more Marxisant left often say similar things about liberalism. Ask that other great Slovenian participant in American public life--not the one who spoke tonight, though she said nothing one can take very great issue with--Slavoj Zizek, who always does. He doesn't even think we should talk much about racism. It's a distraction, it's false the way it is done. But then he is a former politician and an academic inured to conflict of the kind parliamentary socialists in newly democratic countries might expect and she a former model. I must say, I would vote for her charity work. 

It is also worth recognizing that the things people are most sure about and quickest to be on the draw against, are often where they are stupidest. Call this ideological prejudice. Liberals don't understand how this is a problem, because they continue to be so absorbed in their identity politics and social justice warrior norm enforcement officer behavior. It is true the Republicans are the party of business, the Democrats have for generations marketed themselves as representing particular population groups, including ethnic minorities. But the Republicans are right on this issue, mostly, and really vulnerable on other things. 

In fact, the Republican Party is the more ideological one and the more political one in many ways. This is because while certainly the Republicans are the party of business, explicitly linking the needs of self-sacrificing workers to the capitalist economy and not just family and nation, the Democrats are too dependent on an interest group politics rooted in social particularities (not just the particular business interests of corporate industry lobbies). They need social, not political or ideological or moral, opposition (though moral opposition to the non-politically wrong and so intolerable is always an easy move). And resentment, that of disadvantaged groups who are expected to complain. (What insane white male extremists have done is just invert this rhetoric in a political perversion of sorts; someone should call attention to the real truth about what they were calling attention to, which is the poverty and idiocy of a certain discourse when taken to an extreme by rhetorically variation or inversion. I am thinking here of course not just of some disaffected assholes shooting up schools and cinemas instead of just taking meth to get it up, but a lot of idiots, some whom get major media attention, whose thinking is not so different). 

If you are a Vietnamese laundry owner, what the Democrats have to offer is to empower your son or daughter at the university to be a proper victim of permanent injustice, complaining and then voting for radical (because angry?) Democrats. (A subtler problem faces people like me who wanted to succeed in academia, not business; American politicians for generations have only recognized one social class, the “middle class,” which is actually a cultural identity and a notion that obscures real class difference, which is displaced into mere stratification, and they have recognized only one kind of ambition: business. The Republicans are more pointed about this, the Democrats more silent about it. They are silent about many things, and that is an interesting fact about the historically much more ideological singular if not united political party that they are.) With gerrymandering and lobbyist money controlling most politics, the Democrats think their strategy will win them votes. It's partly a legacy of Tammany Hall and all the old blatantly corrupt mafia-like (protection racketeering) union urban ethnic white labor machine politics. The Republicans will remind you that they value business and are pleased at your hard work (and loyal sacrifice) and success. Though in fact the Democrats at their recent convention sounded those same themes and not the (pseudo-) radical ones. Maybe the best hope for the Democrats is that the militant left liberalism of persons and types will vanish ultimately beneath a left wing that talks about economics again, finally, and a centrist wing that talks of neither economics or ethnics, nor even the correctional procedures of gender bio-technics performed to redress identity-negating social alienation (which I am on record as favoring recognition of) associable with historical inequities (which I believe should be considered as inequities and relegated to the history they belong to), with surgical genitoplasty (which I am on record as favoring the legality of, along with abortion and equal pay for women, but that’s hardly the issue), but only joins, as the Dems did last week, the chorus of platitudes about values religions nation family hard work and soldierly sacrifice etc.

Oh and God, flag, and warfare. I wonder what Biden, who in his speech looked so grim in determination as future Commander-in-Chief that I could only wonder what little country he will start a war in; he doesn’t look timidly cautious about it, even ending his speech and the convention by substituting the standard stock phrase of closure, “and may God bless America” with “God bless our troops”; is that the matter at the end of the day? We are not, as I pointed out in my discussion last week of the Democratic convention, a nation that is like an army; no republic will stand on such terms; we need to have an army, preferably of short-term conscripts rather than mercenaries in exchange for an education and a shot at middle-class professional life as a transactional matter between a privatized government and minorities singled out for this. But we should have an army, and not be one. We should all be prepared to fight but we should not act like we are in a total war, when we are not. The name for societies that do that is totalitarian. This gives me pause not because I think Biden-Harris is worse than Trump-Pence or even Obama-Biden, but because I know from personal experience and observation that the trend towards imperial presidencies and government by pure administration or state-of-exception is a deeper one, even more a “deep state” one, than it is likely to much differ between parties and candidates. Tonight Rand Paul, a typical messenger for this message, opposed more foreign wars and told us Trump will; but should we believe that? Probably the same experts who counsel presidents on foreign affairs in terms of “national” business interests will advise similarly either man and with similar results.

It must be said, however, that the Republicans to so much a better job at linking invocations of piety and patriotism to policy (and it must be said, the Democrats are not more credible in this), though they do it at the price of making a lot of false or dubious statements. True, the Democrats and their allies in journalism can make a lot of this, and they have. Many of us rightly worry that that’s not enough, and that Trump could be re-elected as he was elected, in spite of (or even because of?) personal dishonesty, venality, and provocational performative marketing of administrative positions by trollery, and in spite of or even because he fights “false facts” with—false facts, and almost everyone knows it. This is a problem. The biggest problem facing the Democratic Party at least against Trump is a marketing one, and they certainly know it.  

The conversation about socialism (America’s favorite nightmare of its own ideological sleep of reason since 1917) will not go away, because it is a consequence of broad economic shifts that have downgraded employment for educated white professionals and seen power shift away from the formations that made politics in this country so solidly centrist, but I don't think the Democrats will make many points against their opponents in this election on this issue. (Everyone promises jobs, the Republicans sing about tax cuts, while relatively little is said about economics or policy, and the argument about whether an economy must be neo-liberal or at least totally capitalist, and not a Western European style social democratic mixed economy (what Sanders somewhat misleadingly calls “democratic socialism,” a term that truly names only an identity and a desideratum or profession of faith that as ideological preference is somewhat independent of policy and its vissicitudes), will get little airplay. (Elections are not decided by people who make careful decisions based on examination of lots of data and information independently of media memes; we voters are most of us not policy wonks.) But not with Biden and Harris; that must wait for the triumph of the socialist left in some future, or at least a more militarily economic liberal and eager policy wonk candidate like that shrill lady senator from Massachusetts, Ms. Warren (whose personal marketing profile is measuredly 1/64th Native American, a fact that made me only 1/65th units (that’s less, actually) of right-thinking sentimentality more eager to vote for her, though I would have preferred her also to Biden—and precisely because I like politicians with the willingness to antagonize, not trying, like JFK and Reagan and so many others including Biden (far more than the intellectual if ineffectual Obama), to be elected like the high school Class President on the basis of nice-guy popularity. (Did you notice? Biden and Harris have got families, and they are so so important; and they have a religious faith (and lots of religiously-toned social values, all with some kind of political relevance), which means that with them we are in the good hands of those who are in good hands, or something like that. I assume these values are transitive and will rub off on well-intentioned people including urban single people like me. It will give me a nice warm feeling, which I may well carry with me on election day.

So what will they talk about? Will they say much? They may not have to. The Democrats were coasting on opposition to Trump, personalized and moralized, and so chose to emphasize character and values. And to do so to a striking degree I had never seen or imagined even in American politics. (In Europe, this would be impossible.) For more on this, see my recent post on the occasion of the Democratic convention.

Only please don't tell me it's the politics of good versus evil. That thinking always distorts the realities of ideas. It distorts them in favor not just of philosophical Manichaean nihilism, though it is that also, but a false polarization ideologically whose ultimate basis is the mere fact that ours is a two-party system based on representation by geography rather than ideological positions whether linked to class interests or not. Our nation's politics will have matured another notch when the capitalism vs. socialism debate is recognized as something other than one of good and evil. The Soviet Gulag proves Marxism false just as surely and completely as the Inquisition disproved Christianity (remember Protestantism?). The Cold War has been over now for some time, and people from countries like that of the President's wife are starting to realize as many Americans are that we are all left with a poor deal in the neoliberal corpoate winner takes most sweepstakes. The Cold War was lost by both sides when an all-too-great America won, with tens of millions of people from Staten Island to Slovenia among the losers.  Campaigns, and so conventions, are based on soundbites. One of them tonight was “Opportunity.”

The Republicans seem to think opportunity not only is purely economic, but it is based evoked by celebrating the past, and so all the sacrifices of workers in previous generations. But then the Democrats have the same message. In my more paranoid moments, I suspect that the two parties have political marketing teams that decide their messages at luncheons held simultaneously at adjacent tables, and the occulted message is that we should all shut up and get back to work lazy bums that we must be, for the experts will take care of us as surely as this old patriarch knows best; the truth of politics is that there is none. This celebration of our own heroism is great, it makes us all feel more patriotic and therefore want to vote (does it? Probably; the Democrats are clearly betting in part that even if just more people vote at all, they will win). But the question before the candidates and voters and donors and campaign grunt workers and ad hoc opinion essayists (in that order) is: what kinds of policies will bring more or most of us a better life, in monetary and other terms?

There is an argument to be made that many, perhaps most, Americans will have better opportunities under an economy that: -closes prisons instead of building them, -has public schools that educate kids to think and not just answer questions with what they “know”, -supports medical professionals without having a nation ruled by doctors (is everyone “mentally ill”? Wouldn’t that be profitable for some people?), -pays university scholars and teachers, -has fully socialized medicine, -is resistant to starting or joining foreign wars (but not against it categorically), -downsizes police forces, -has equal funding for every public school child in the land, -wants to have good-paying, interesting jobs and not just any jobs (and so also has a high minimum wage), -finds ways, partly economic, to pursue racial equality and reduce residential segregation, -and has a better approach to the pandemic than the failed one, partly denial, that has enabled our country to be the worst hit and least well recovering. I believe I did notice that the Democrats have something to say about this last thing. That will remain the most important thing for a few months longer, unless that is the economy.

Biden and Harris have this argument to lose. It would have been much easier to make if the candidate were Sanders. Without him, they seem to be going the Joe Biden way, which is the politics of personality and values. He’s a career politician who can in fact, on different experiential grounds, claim, like Trump, to be a man who will get things done. He is a man not who thinks a lot about policy but who will try to implement well the right one when he finds it. In this he is less intellectual and ideological than perhaps any Democratic President since at least LBJ. (Who started the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam.) The Democratic Party needs its left wing more than ever. And its pseudo-left less than ever.