Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Assuming she wins, how do we break out of this cycle?

Nov 04, 2024

*The Struggle of Sisyphus - Eternal Endurance Art Print by Matthias Hauser. Print available for purchase there.*

When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again

—The Beatles, “Helter Skelter”

I think Kamala Harris will win the election. I think she’ll win the popular vote by like five to eight million votes, and I think she’ll manage to capture the Electoral College…somehow. (Specific details don’t interest me because I try not to study the minutia of stupid things, and the Electoral College is very, very stupid.)

Point: I think she’ll win.

This is not a prediction. And I’m quite ready to be mistaken in my guess, because my fellow Americans are revealing themselves to be deeply disappointing people. And I am not saying anything about when I think this whole mess will be settled.

If, for some truly mad reason, you needed the small voice of a very pessimistic custodian to help calm your electoral anxieties a bit, now you have it. The sum total of vibes and current events flotsam, minus the heinous fuckery to subvert a fair election, filtered through my addled, balding pate yield up this result: after all the lawsuits and bullshit maneuvers the GOP will try are over, I think Harris will be the next POTUS.

After Kamala Wins

But what will happen then?

Well, I suspect we already know the answer. I found it on Facebook, reshared so many times it drove me mad.

What will happen? Well, America will go back to brunch.

Unless the Democrats win both Houses of Congress as well, they will continue to be blocked at every turn by bad-faith lunatics who will keep spreading lies about policy and society to stymie any good-government efforts to fix the problems America faces, threatening government shutdowns whenever they can. I know this because this is what they’ve been doing since at least Obama.

Even if the Dems nail a trifecta, there will be a few in-party holdouts more interested in reelection or future job prospects who’ll gain inordinate attention as they try to eke out concessions that confirm they’re secret corporate stooges who should have run as Republicans in the first place. I know this because of Tulsi Gabbard, Krysten Sinema, Joe Manchin, and their ilk.

And even if the Dems succeed in passing dramatic reforms that are truly needed, the Supreme Court will entertain some of the worst bad-faith arguments rising up through MAGA circuits, funded and argued by fugitives from the ninth circle of hell, to strike down some of the most plainly fair and just efforts to give relief to struggling Americans in all sorts of jeopardy and precarity, seizing more and more power for the judicial branch.

Meanwhile, the Dems will suck at message discipline across the board such that whole swaths of society will be so unplugged from what Dems do achieve that Republicans who voted against all these measures will be able to campaign on these successes as if they supported the new jobs and factories and programs when they never did. Fox News and its infinitude of micro-platform imitators will shape the national vibe until everybody thinks things are bad when they actually aren’t or that bad things happen because Dems are evil or that good things fail to materialize because Dems are feckless, instead of highlighting the ways Republicans and MAGA courts and corporations are selfish, opportunistic nihilist-arsonists who ruin everything.

The press will play along because the only people expected to act responsibly with rhetoric and facticity, with agency in government, are Democrats, plus they’re afraid of losing even more readers/viewers and money or getting fired by billionaire media owners.

All this will be possible because something like 75-80 million American voters will have decided that everything Donald Trump has shown them, everything Trumpism has done to the country and the American psyche, is perfectly delightful and they wanted more of it. (Or, they were so clueless about the reality of the race and its stakes, that they voted on what amounts to nonsense, what someone’s brother’s cousin’s ex-girlfriend once heard somewhere, or a whim.)

Meanwhile, something like 80 million Americans will have probably sat this one out, because they did not vote when they could have. Then 90-some million Americans will have been legally prohibited from voting for reasons of age or status. Total: 170-plus million of us we won’t have heard from.

But November 5 is supposed to tell us if we still have cancer? And if we don’t, we can breathe easy and go back to brunch, for another four years, I guess.

It’s not just Facebook. It’s also quasi-sainted Mayor Pete, the poster child for fitting in. Witness:

But this is a prescription for eternal return, and not even the “good” kind Nietzsche went on about. In another four years, if Buttigieg’s message holds sway, we’ll be hoping against hope that Harris pulls off another basically flawless campaign, having racked up no debilitating scandals or failures that can be effectively weaponized by whomever the fascists throw up to challenge her in an even more grossly gerrymandered, even more hallucinogenic, even more vibe-poisoned public consciousness than we see today.

Because the GOP has committed itself to permanent minority rule and the embrace of supremacy as its guiding lights, the Dems have to compete on a structurally ever steeper incline, and if they lose even once, the country is boned. But to win, they must capitulate more and more in general elections to a public mood that’s slowly being turned more and more center-right-hostile to marginalized populations, relying entirely for GOTV enthusiasm on the strength of outrage as they play defense against the latest reversals of rights and decency by right-wing victories.

Imagine if SCOTUS had just waited to kill Roe v. Wade. Seriously. Imagine it. Imagine that they’d just shot down the Texas abortion bounty law and continued their death by a thousand cuts strategy of weakening abortion protections—because that approach doesn’t make the news in ways that even Kansans freak out. Sure, Trump’s cult would love him a bit less, but he could have railed against SCOTUS’s failure to close the deal, insisted he was betrayed by his appointees, and those robed hacks have lifetime tenure anyway, so what do they care about negative press? There’d be no Roevember, no gender gap, just more scaremongering about how Roe was in danger, but it would ring hollow and conspiratorial because with a 6-3 majority on the court, they still hadn’t overturned it,

I offer this hypothetical because it illustrates just how much the current Democratic chances depend on the successes of Trumpism in turning back the clock 49 years. Had this “victory” not occurred, do you honestly see a Harris win in the cards as a response? I struggle with that scenario, to be honest.

If I’m not totally nuts here, then the playbook for future Democratic victories basically requires Republican offenses against modernity so egregious it amounts to two steps back so we can muster one more step in place or maybe—optimistically—one forward. And that assumes the Republican atrocities are huge, shocking, well-publicized, salient, and stick in memory long enough to motivate voters at election time.

It’s just not sustainable.

Something’s Gotta Give

We have a GOP that, in terms of incentive, structure and ideological capture, has zero incentive to moderate, chill out, come to its senses, wake up, or any other metaphor we can imagine. What they are doing now just plain works too well for the various key players and their ambitions and goals. Moreover, there is nothing saner waiting in the wings as an alternative. There’s no going back to Reaganism, as if that wasn’t part of the slide to hell in the first place, because we live in a radically different world. If nothing else, the boring parts of Reaganism just don’t animate the GOP base anymore, only the quiet parts like Tea Party crypto-racism, and Trumpism proved those aren’t allowed to stay quiet if they are going to work today’s world.

So the GOP will continue down it’s path, unless it blows up in a fiery crash, utterly discredited for all time, which would take a massive, blow-out realignment of historical proportions. Which we are not going to see happen. Oh, we might see something like a reacquaintance with rule-of-law Constitutionalism per Liz Cheney’s alliance with the Dems, but the numbers just don’t portend a massive bandwagon of Americans rediscovering high school civics lessons, more’s the pity. The GOP has been captured by the far-right, mask-off, and while it may try to put the mask back on, with spirit gum and tamer rhetoric, the conquest has been the dream of a century of whack-jobs and conspiracists and supremacists who have finally hit the Bigs to control one of the two major American political parties, and they are not going to give that up. Even if they don’t win presidential elections, what they can win and achieve through colonizing statehouses and the national psyche is enough for them to make the country into what they dream of. It’ll just take a bit longer than having a Red Caesar in 2025.

The Democrats could wake up and start tackling the structural barriers that so distort and mutate democracy, of course. Expanding the Supreme Court and tacking on sane term limits and rotations, for example. Seriously tackling the Electoral College. Making the District of Columbia a state. Working with Puerto Rico toward the same end, seriously. A dozen other, far less well-known reforms.

The problem here is that all these things hit what amounts to an electrified fence in either the Constitution or the captured quarter of the voting public that identifies as MAGA. I mean, we have this thing called “property rights” and another thing called “freedom of expression,” so it’s rather unlikely the Dems will confiscate the Koch empire, seize Twitter and Fox News and and turn them into publicly funded utilities working toward a common good, a new public square, though that would be the salutary thing to do.

We’re hemmed in by legal precedents and worship of concepts we fundamentally don’t think are problematic because we conceive of them through our own, self-identifying scales of reference. If the government seized Twitter, what could the government do to little old me? Well, absolutely anything, pal. And the government could do it now with more or less impunity, depending on how dehumanized, unpopular and powerless little old you happen to be. If you don’t get that, you’re not paying attention. If you’re voting for Trump, you’re just making that sort of thing easier, not harder.

SCOTUS declined to intervene in the Texas abortion atrocities, knowing they would overturn Roe, and within days, women died—though it’s taken us this long to learn about these murders they committed. The cops in Marion County, Kansas, basically killed a woman by Gestapo-ing her tiny newspaper and home, and we still have zero idea if there will ever be any meaningful accountability there. Y’all are just lucky life circumstances haven’t put you on the receiving end of the deadly, indifferent, violence our system hands down on the daily, but you like to think it’s because you lead a virtuous life, so you’ll do nothing about it other than go to brunch.

Fascism’s Long Game

Everybody lost it after Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, where a comedian never before heard of called Puerto Rico a floating pile of garbage, and for the ten billionth time, we were all demanding to know how on earth anyone could support this man and his movement.

But historian Seth Cotlar came up with a blast from the past:

1996 was 28 years ago. It wasn’t even Buchanan’s most impactful run for office, which was 1992, when he gave us “culture wars” and challenged George H. W. by stealing his campaign strategy from Klan loser David Duke’s successes in Louisiana…when Ross Perot hypnotized America with his dementia…when Bill Clinton won with a only plurality.

But join me in the Way-Back Machine to travel twenty-four years before Buchanan’s ‘92 run. Here’s George Wallace rallying in Madison Square Garden, which Damon Linker summarized thusly:

Wallace's campaign slogan was “Stand Up for America.” His self-styled “politics of rage” defended “our fine American people” against “the bureaucrats and intellectual morons trying to manage everything for them.” He spewed contempt at hippy protesters, calling them lazy and dirty, and threatening to run them over with his limousine.
On foreign policy, Wallace combined vociferous anti-communism with indifference to the fate of Southeast Asia, pledging to withdraw from Vietnam if victory didn’t prove achievable within 90 days of his inauguration, and suggesting that foreign aid was pouring money “down a rat hole.” At the same time, Wallace's running-mate, retired U.S. Air Force General Curtis LaMay, mused about the possible efficacy of using nuclear weapons against the Vietcong.
No candidate before him had gone so far on a message of scalding cultural alienation and grievance. We are the virtuous ones. They are the corrupt, the stupid, the incompetent, the filthy, the presumptuous, the arrogant. They think they’re superior and look down on us. But we know better. They are the fools. We are the real America, America at its best, and the redemption of the country depends on us.
Sound familiar?

And 29 years before Wallace at the Garden, we had the German American Bund at the Garden.

It’s like Stephen King’s IT just returning every few decades when it gets hungry enough. Except it went from the Nazi freaks to a Southern segregationist governor to a mainstream-embedded conservative pol with extensive experience in presidential staffs and on TV to a former President trying to get back into office at the head of one of our two major parties. Nice long game, you have to admit.

The thing is, the fascists don’t hibernate like old Pennywise the Clown. They may hide and nurse those wounds, but they continue to strategize and hold grudges and add to them and feed the wrong wolves inside, and make pitches to people who, over the course of their lifespans, encounter setbacks and disappointments and begin to look for scapegoats and wonder why their lives didn’t turn out the way they dreamed or the way supremacy narratives promised they would.

They now have an entire political party and its slick and massively funded, included-in-every-basic-cable-package propaganda network helping to mainline their grievances and undermine and overwhelm what little bits of civic education and critical thinking public schools have been able to inoculate us with.

The problem with fascism’s long game is that it doesn’t build anything except wrecking balls. It can undermine and destroy, and manufacture machines to do this, but it can’t really assemble anything positive, pro-social, adaptive, constructive. Damon Linker doesn’t even believe it’s proper to call what the Right is doing a “fascist” project, in part because he doesn’t think fascism is possible in America. Why not? Because “fascism” is by definition totalitarian, and it’s just not feasible to imagine a nation of 330 million people so widely spread out across so much space being totally controlled by a government. So “authoritarian” is the most daring any would-be intellectual should be in labeling this evil. I give not a rat’s ass.1

Yeats: The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

Eliot: This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

Share Know Your Place

Civic, Which Is To Say Moral, Amnesia

I’ve argued all along here that fascism (or whatever term the academically picayune prefer) starts with a moral rot in the soul. Maybe just a necrotic mustard seed. And we all have at least a susceptibility to it. Not just individually, but institutionally.

The problem with the liberalism we have apparently settled on is that it has no soul, no heart, no moral courage, no conscience, no values worth fighting for. This framework- / rules- / procedures- / process-obsessed liberalism regards fighting itself as gauche or beneath or behind us now, perhaps an artifact of the pivot to the well-educated and professional “knowledge-workers” and “cultural creatives” and away from those grubby hippies and Black radicals (before they got their PhDs) and certainly away from the hardhats the hippies and radicals so alienated that they defected to the Right. It believes we live under a consensus on reality that’s been blasted apart a decade or more ago while people in boardrooms failed to notice.

Witness now the embrace of violence for its own sake or as a sign and strategy of opposition to everything associated with liberalism and modernity. The Proud Boys exist thanks to a colossal airball of missed satire, viewing Fight Club as a real social critique. The gnashing of teeth over “masculinity” unable to find a place in this society where women are people and folks can choose a variety of ways of being in the world, instead of what their naughty bits dictate for them, so they embrace not traditional manliness (which, to its partial credit, tended to contain both tonic as well as toxic traits in order to propagate itself) but the cooked-down vices of its worst legacies: rape culture, patriarchy to the nth power, male supremacism uber alles. To fight, to kill, to abuse, to subjugate, is to be a man. To speak that way, to vote that way, to signal dominance and rejection of all alternatives in that way—this is how you show your bona fides to your brothers and your True Americanness and right to belong.

Because fascism starts in the soul, with what we should recognize as immorality, the shallow and timid philosophy of value-neutrality seen in liberal societies is always vulnerable to it, always an easy mark. Fascism preaches moral evil, calling it tradition or principle or common sense or reality, then points to institutional wishy-washiness (“So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth” —Rev. 3:16), and suddenly the bad guys look like strong, decisive, heroic cutters of Gordian bureaucratic Knots.

Take a gander at our liberal institutions grounded in neutrality or supposedly dedicated to some higher principle like truth or objectivity or justice. See how they’re doing.

Since I last posted, we’ve seen quite clearly that the obscenely rich are certainly not morally strong. For all the American mythology that to be rich is to be morally superior (from the Doctrine of the Elect to the Protestant Work Ethic to the Prosperity Gospel), billions manifestly do not buy backbones.

Elon Musk “skipping around like a dipshit” at a Trump rally (after every other Nazified, mindless, horrific, shittily parenting thing he’s been doing everywhere else), bribing people to vote for TFG, and trafficking people to door-knock for TFG.
South African-raised biotech tycoon and friend-of-Elon Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the LA Times and shut down their editorial page endorsement of Harris.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos who owns the Washington Post doing the same with that paper because he wants aerospace contracts or doesn’t want his empire gutted by Trump’s 1890s regime of economically disastrous tariff walls.

The rich and powerful won’t resist fascism, and water is wet.2 Why won’t they? Because capitalism is a giant hierarchal game of one-upmanship and the unimaginably rich know they benefit from such systems.

Trumpism is just one wardrobe for the proposition that some folks are better than others, that there’s a rank order system among humans where people can be slotted into their places to get shat on from above and shit on those below, such is the price and the reward of life. “Good” people are those in power who choose to shit very little on those below them, although they could change their minds at any moment and unleash a heavy, sloppy load, so we remain grateful, oh, so grateful to our betters that they continue to refrain from doing so. If you work for a boss, you understand this dynamic. (If you are a boss, maybe you understand it, too.)

Because every institution is headed by a boss or bosses operating in a political economy, all institutions—even the “good” ones—are vulnerable to the same calculations and pressures that lead to capitulation, anticipatory compliance (obeying in advance), and the moral cowardice we see in our papers of record, owned by people who could buy and sell you and me. Since fighting—both literal violence and any worked-up, morally-rooted, principled opposition—is anathema in our civilized, board-meeting’d, HR’d, institutional world, the established organizations we trust to be the arbiters of reality and sanity, of truth, objectivity, fact, respected authority, democratic decency and fairness are, well, “unmanned,” to twist a knife here.3

It’s the old saw about becoming a conservative after age 40. Why is this supposed to happen? Because after 40, you’re supposed to have too much to lose. Well, established institutions end up focusing on how much they have built, how much they have accomplished, how much they stand to lose if they acknowledge the principled skeletal systems that formed the architecture of their founding int he first place.

They focus on “mission,” which means serving their constituents. “Constituents” means their client or “customer” base (a euphemism for what used to be called the public or the people of the community, before the neoliberal lexicon) and sometimes their employees. Can we continue to serve our clients if we do or say something that will trigger these [obviously insane and deluded and increasingly violent] people to react? What of the safety of our personnel? Would our partners in the community sever ties [withhold support, grant money, tax dollars or join with the loonies] if we were perceived as too strident?

The result of such a Q&A is almost always further timidity, further retreat into niceties and politesse, maybe mild “education and awareness” campaigns to teach people with zero desire to learn actual facts about how the world works and the real motives of institutions as they operate. For those who deeply care about the institutions, all these contortions to avoid offending the sensibilities of people who crave offense as an excuse to enact violence and persecution, to vent their imaginary grievances, well, it takes its toll. The often front-line true believers in “mission” want to fight back, speak the truth to the frothing loonies at the school board meetings or the library board…but they know they’ll be dogpiled, and they know—based on the official line handed down from institutional leadership—that the organization won’t have their backs. The organization will likely deem their truth-telling and spine as “unprofessional” and show them the door, leaving only compliant yes-men behind.

This process ratchets toward violence on the one hand and capitulation on the other, toward encroachment of a fascist worldview. Because the more the institutions retreat from principle, from moral values that animate and underlie the pluralistic democratic order that makes them possible in the first place, the more they eschew anything that has the power to stir the soul of actual human beings and give them a sense of purpose and nobility and meaning as they live and participate in a democratic order, the more they speak and require their people and allies to speak in the language of process, procedure, abstractions, and “professionalism,” all the blood in the body politic flows to the fists…or, pace the Facebook meme, to its tumors.

People don’t rally and fight for cost-benefit analyses. They fight for reasons of the heart. They fight because they care. And they don’t care about propriety and process. They care about values and meaning and decency and right and wrong. Sure, King Solomon suggested splitting the baby, but that was a savvy ad hoc tactic to reveal which woman truly loved the child: Sol didn’t then institutionalize the idea in the courtier’s handbook as the established procedure for how to handle stray infants.

I’d bet most management training, despite the buzzwords of core mission and vision statements and so on, ignores or glosses over the specific political values that undergird pluralistic, egalitarian, multiracial democracy, despite the vague nods in that direction we have seen with allegedly “woke capital.” No, core mission and vision are always fill-in-the-blank. Why? Because management trainings would never dream of imposing values or indoctrinating their students about what should go into their “core.” So abstractions are the best you ever get, with vague clouds of “what-if” maybe circling around a table-top exercise.

As a result, timid and untested institutions always launder justice for palatability. Affirmative Action only made sense in terms of reparation for past inequity and state-sponsored and -tolerated oppression and discrimination, yet the only politically palatable rationale on which it survived as long as it did was that of “campus diversity,” which the Right dismantled over a few decades of bad faith, court-packing, and lawfare. And our educational institutions rolled over.

Even in earlier education, we teach kids not to be racists because it hurts other kids’ feelings.4 It certainly does this, and it’s good to nurture empathy this way (especially since empathy is under a full-blown assault in the political realm). But what we don’t teach is that picking on someone for their skin color or yarmulke (or, or, or…) also absolutely wrecks the ability of a classroom to cohere and form a learning community, just as racism, sexism, and religious oppression destroy a political community’s ability to function, to attract jobs, address crime, keep the streets clean, solve problems.5 We could teach that, even to grade schoolers, but we’re afraid to, for fear that wingnuts would descend upon our school boards and charge us with insidious indoctrination.

Indoctrination this might be, but it’s indoctrination into the core lessons and morality essential for living in a country called America, based on principles like those found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, especially after its Second Founding in the Reconstruction Amendments. (I mean, Lord of the Flies doesn’t arrive until high school, and that’s more about anarchy, and hell, it now seems too many of us found it aspirational.)

You cannot maintain a political community if you do not transmit the core political values that uphold and sustain it, the truths held to be self-evident as its foundations as well as the truths it’s uncovered over time. Institutions are supposed to do this, not only for the sake of the political community, but for their own sake, because they cannot exist and do their work in a radically different kind of political regime. This is why kids need to leave school understanding at a bedrock level why stuff like fascism and authoritarianism are to be rejected out of hand. Not just that they are to be rejected, but why.

Do this well in schools, and you can usually trust the institutions kids flow into as adults to be populated with strong, grounded, morally conscientious folks who will call out bullshit and name the evils they encounter. There will be a good consensus against dangerous ideas that harken back to the worst chapters of history—which folks will at least be conversant with. There will be decent people in big enough numbers to shut down the sickos who fall for propaganda and keep them on the fringe instead of allowing them to, oh, I dunno, seize control of one of our two major political parties and the presidency not once but maybe two times.

Bad-Faith Parasitism of Value-Neutrality

The irony, of course, is that the wingnuts and fascists who object to indoctrinating kids into the values underpinning American cohesion as a functioning community of many peoples, faiths, genders, colors, and cultures—those psychos aren’t asking that zero indoctrination happen. No, they use the timid, tepid, short-sighted value-neutrality of vapid liberalism to get such crucial work excluded. The people who teach those values get run out of town. Books get banned and challenged.

These fascist opportunists look at the soft underbelly of value-neutrality and see a place to plant their invasive spores. Once they’ve captured institutions with legions of cordyceps zombies from The Last of Us, pointing out that they aren’t being very value-neutral like they were arguing last week suddenly has no purchase. Because they never cared about that stuff in the first place. They were just using it as an exploit to take over the joint.

So laws are passed to require sex and gender to be taught as rigid biological binaries when they are absolutely-fucking not, history and civics to be taught as an unrelenting message of American nobility with nary a blemish and little or no mention of injustice perpetrated by its leaders. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion gets banned under the self-same “logic” as “All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others.”

By hijacking the liberals’ value-neutrality delusion, the Right strikes down all efforts to forge a country that coheres because it faces reality, learns hard lessons from its failures, and works to instill pro-social ethics. The Right then turns around to legislate and mandate reality denial and anti-sociality. “Anti-indoctrination” is a bad-faith maneuver by the Right to purge what they reject, so they can institute the kind of indoctrination they approve of. They climb a ladder of value-neutrality that liberalism built for them, only to kick it aside because they don’t really believe in it—they ascended it opportunistically, just because it was there—and institute authoritarian regimes of teaching and reading and thinking and speaking only what’s officially sanctioned, which is now not pablum but poison.

We need to stop falling for this and accept that indoctrination or enculturation happens, has to happen, and it’s best to try to indoctrinate or enculturate using the facts as we understand them best at the present moment, seeking always a world that stands a chance of actually working, not the same old tired models that led to disaster and inhumanity time after time.

What Happened to Our Institutions?

Oh, a lot of stuff. Just as with the rise of fascism (or “illiberal democracy” or “Christian nationalism” or “authoritarianism” or whatever the picayune academic inside of you wants to call it instead), social science would call institutional flaccidity overdetermined. Which kinda means that there were a whole lot of causes for it.

Politically, I start with over-learning the lesson of World War II. Here we had a colossal global conflict that pitted a clash of visions about how to organize societies—fascism, communism, liberalism—that resulted in massive death tolls, grueling, grinding, war machines, death camps exterminating millions of “undesirable” populations, industrial-scale propaganda, whole societies under the thumbs of dictators or mobilized to resist.

Ostensibly, fascism lost. (This is me, shaking my head.) Ostensibly, liberalism “won.” But communism was still out there, and nobody wanted a shooting war between the two ideologies, because that would be…um, bad.

The overlearning part kicked in when we decided that “ideologies” were bad. See, fascism was an ideology that captured the Axis powers, and Communism was an ideology that possessed the Soviets and the Chinese, then threatened to spread across the globe. These ideologies were totalizing, you see (cue Linker). They ate everything: lives, identities, societies, governments, economies, foreign policies, domestic spheres, religion, you name it. And because they ate everything, there was never room for compromise or critical thinking. There was no variety beneath the umbrella of the ideologies, no cross-cutting ties of interests or similarity that we could appeal to or relate to—apart from the mutually assured destruction that threatened all interests if ideologies should ever go to total war.

Of course, America and the West had no ideologies. No, not us. Because ideologies were totalizing, remember, and nothing in America or the West ate absolutely everything under our umbrella ideas of freedom, markets, and individual rights. We were so diverse by contrast. We retained our critical thinking skills, by gosh. We just all agreed that fascism was dead, that Communism was Evil Incarnate and insidious and must be opposed everywhere, that anything that smacked of Communism was a gateway drug or slippery slope to the full Monty of naked KGB control. Oh, and that Black folks, women, LGBTQs, non-Christians, et al, had to know their place.

Thanks in part to these blind spots, the trouble with this post-war “liberal consensus” was two-fold. First was that “ideology” became anathema. At least for the reigning liberals and the institutions they built, favored, and eventually entered into. Maybe because they grew flabby and complacent about that long period of “consensus,” they acted, once in positions of some authority, as if things had been settled and all we had to do was apply the proper technocratic metrics and lingo to remaining sticking points to smooth out rough edges (the “end of history”).

In our neoliberal order, which grew to engulf even non-profit and public institutions, world-spanning, totalizing “ideologies” were now seen to be present in seed form in any pluralistic difference of opinion that did not directly impact “institutional mission” (unless a discrimination lawsuit loomed). As a result, any insight from non-technocratic sources, especially moral-political ones, would be paternalistically set aside as irrelevant and somewhat gauche. Such topics led to division, to conflict, to fighting, and all those things smacked of the clash of irreconcilable worldviews that we had seen tear the world asunder in the Second World War.6 Since fascism was deemed to be rotting in the grave, the main threat came from anything that smelled of collective effort or community, and since the stealth ideology of America was an atomizing, selfish individualism, liberal institutions tended to be particularly allergic to appeals rooted in these “socialistic” values. They were either dangerous or naive, and best relegated to private life if people were really serious about them.7

So liberalism grew averse to any concept of fighting. Fighting was the bad thing that ruined everything else. Fighting and conflict ruined communities, destroyed families, and weren’t all of us here in these good liberal institutions like one big family?

The second thing that flowed from the blind spots of America’s belief that it—in contrast to the Axis and the Soviets—had no ideology (and could therefore develop a “liberal consensus” that feared and avoided anything that even smelled “ideological”) was that only half the country played along. While the liberal consensus played this game, there was what John Huntington called a “far right vanguard” operating from long before the days of FDR, very much possessed of an “ideology” for America. It was a mess of an ideology, but such is always true of nascent fascism, that is, the opportunistic moral rot based on sorting people into rank orders.

These folks had absolutely no problem with “fighting.” And far from mouldering in the grave, this fascist impulse just kept reanimating its zombie form to show how needed it was—to juice up a political campaign, to undermine some RINO seeking reelection, to make boatloads of money for an obscenely rich media magnate.

Point being that liberalism decided it was too civilized for “fighting,” by which it meant “ideology,” which it convinced itself America and the world had transcended. All that was left was the endless micro-adjustments of the vast machinery of technocracy, best left to lawyers and specialists and professionals who had degrees in such things (and apparently zero time or inclination to study up on stuff like history, political context, or sociology to see how they were being played while they arrogantly hyperfocused). At local levels, we elect know-nothing ex-realtors or whatever who believe they’re qualified because they can suss out a spreadsheet or bring a crop to market, but their grasp of the legitimately thorny issues of democracy, rights and, hell, existence as public servants with moral vertebrae is so tenuous that we must suspect that municipal drinking water causes carpal tunnel syndrome. Meanwhile, those driven by the fascist impulse kept reanimating, reorganizing, funding, and gaming the good-liberal, value-neutral rules in bad faith, and nobody cottoned on, or if they did and spoke up, they were dismissed as cranks and ideologues causing division in our staid and neutral, consensus-driven institutions.

What the fascist vanguard understood, what the liberal technocrats who so feared conflict and fighting forgot, was that “ideology” is unavoidable. But ideology doesn’t have to be totalizing and stultifying, imposed with an iron fist. Ideology can permeate and inform a general consensus, and in fact it has, but because we’re so afraid to admit it and acknowledge it, we’ve been unable to examine and critique and shape it. So we have this ideology of weak-sauce technocratic neoliberalism that refuses to admit it is an ideology. Anything that questions or critiques it (from the Left at least) is radical and dangerous. Anything that nips at it from the Right will be accommodated for the sake of electability until we reach crises where Trump, Project 2025, and Dobbs are shoved in our faces. And then we’ll accommodate it some more, while claiming we’re fighting for “democracy.”

It’s a ratchet that goes only one way. And there’s precedent. In “We’ve Seen This Schmidt Before” I wrote at length about how Carl Schmidt, the Nazi jurist, paved the way for this: he critiqued liberalism as spineless and incapable of defending itself against its “enemies” because it refused to view the world in terms of “friends and enemies,” which he regarded as the fundamental hallmark of all politics. To save the volk, the true people, Germany needed a strongman, a sovereign, who would rise up and dictate a new order that clearly delineated the enemies from the friends, punishing the former and elevating and protecting the latter.

The ironies abound. Cue Linker here: “Sound familiar?” Cue my critique of Linker’s sainted, rational liberal consensus which must always resist any “ideology” because of its tendency to devolve into bloody violence because ideologues insist they “know the truths.” Sorry, Damon. Only a few tankies out there are really that lost. Most decent people are just wondering why universal healthcare is so horrible an idea while grandma dies in debt and misery. Or why every single corporation’s business model is modeled after the humble leech. Or why we can’t do a damn thing about issues that 60-70 percent of the population say they want action on, decade after decade.

Only one side of our Left-Right divide really views the world in terms of Friends and Enemies, and it’s not us. The right-wing wants what the Trump campaign showed us voluntarily in Madison Square Garden. The left-wing wants to give even the Red states healthcare and bodily autonomy and freedom of religion.

And the liberals, the “centrists,” the “moderates,” the people Mayor Pete is appealing to? They want to, well, go back to brunch. To go back to normal, I guess. Whatever that is. Back to “civilized” behavior, I suppose. Where there’s no conflict. Or where conflict and disagreement is suppressed by “professional” norms and procedures.

Here’s a newsflash, folks. During the oral arguments on Dobbs, there were no fistfights. Suited lawyers engaged with robed justices on matters of precedent and implications. It was all quite civilized and according to legal norms. All that mattered in the end was who had the numerical superiority. The quality of the arguments didn’t matter. The precedents and the implications didn’t matter. These were smokescreens and fig leaves. Bad-faith bullshit proffered up mostly by amicus briefs that allowed the ideologues the cover to do what they knew they had the power to impose at long last. They just covered it with civility and law-talk.

Ditto the Colorado ballot case that plainly read the 14th Amendment. Ditto the immunity decision. Ditto every single decision the SCOTUS Six has been handing down in its frenzy to remake America into a caste system.

You can’t find a more civilized and nonviolent8 forum.

We really don’t have legislators beating each other with their walking sticks much these days. Most state legislative sessions are quite civilized and nonviolent, as are our federal proceedings. So are our corporate boardrooms. I guess things are fine, then. Sure, sometimes they do things that are bad, so we call them out. We accuse them of being heartless or uncaring or hypocritical or dooming the economy or flouting the wishes of the voters. By golly, our Facebook posts will certainly set them straight for their malfeasance.

I know, I know. This is unfair to the millions of progressives out there, trying to raise awareness and urge decent people to wake the hell up and get even slightly more involved. I’m one of them, too. Mainly because I live in Red Kansas, which, by the way, might be trending something like 43 percent Harris, which absolutely stuns me until I remember that even 49 percent Harris still means that my presidential ballot here means absolutely nothing thanks to the winner-take-all Electoral College. Great system.

But there’s this pernicious delusion out there, this notion that elections are the ne plus ultra of civic life, and, by implication, that the candidates and politicians are our avatars, our saviors who will pull us back from the brink or send us over the edge. We gear up for November every four (or maybe a little bit every two) years, then more or less hibernate until the next time, just following the news maybe and sharing some outrages here and there.

Look, the dynamics are well-known. If Harris wins, most of us will go back to sleep. Trump will be denied, so we’ll have been saved from the Bad Man. Some—many? impossible to say, really—on the Left argue that a Harris win will be terrible for precisely this reason. To these folks, Harris is too neoliberal, too corporate, and too pro-genocide to be anybody’s savior. She only seems oh-so-progressive in contrast to Trump and the Right, and there’s a lot of validity in that. It’s not hard to seem, even feel, like a brave progressive when the low-hanging fruit is “Women are human, not chattel.” And despite the fact that she’s run probably the best presidential campaign I’ve ever seen in my life, if she loses, I’m sure the knives will come out to blame either her or the Left for such a loss. (Yeah, you fucking ghouls—blame Palestinian-Americans in Michigan for not being morally able to pull a lever for a member of an administration that’s enabled Israel to exterminate everyone in their family back in Gaza.)

And if Harris wins? The rest of the folks on the Left—those who are grudgingly supporting her on the strength of the argument that, well, whether or not we get Reconstruction after the Civil War is done, the first task is to shoot the Confederates (as Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò put it so well on the Know Your Enemy pod)—these folks are looking to continue pressuring a Harris administration to do more for humane causes over the next four years. And guess what? Every…single…time…they speak out in criticism of her administration for the next four years when she falls short, liberals desperately in fear of a Trumpist resurgence in the midterms or 2028 will scold and chastise them: You want the right-wing to win? Why are you giving them ammunition? We have to support our President! It’s the best she can pull off, given this, that and the other constraint she faces! I know this because everybody did it with Biden whenever he dropped the ball or screwed the pooch.

Same old, same old. There’s never a right time to lodge a criticism from the Left, while any time is the right time to lodge a cautious criticism from the center-right. We should always advise folks to move further and further to accommodate the right-wing, otherwise they won’t win the elections. And if they don’t win the elections, then we lose everything (which will be an ever-constricted, ever-stingier list of things because we keep capitulating to the right and under-bus-throwing the Left). And we’ll lose all of that because we haven’t done shit in between elections to build up the consciousness, the vibe, the organizations, the institutions that can keep us from always being on the brink of doom come Election day.

Aren’t you tired of this? Aren’t you just bone weary of democracy at stake thanks to Republicans and their insanity? Yes, Republicans. They are the current channel in which most of the sewage of blatant white supremacy, Christian nationalism, authoritarian yearning, reality denial, hostility to governance, bad-faith lawfare, rank misogyny, and entitled grievance flows.9 They allowed their party to become its home and vehicle, and I can see no incentive or structural force signalling that it will revert to something sane.10

Guess what will happen in the next midterm election and in 2028. Democracy will once again be on the ballot. And Fox News and the zillion niche imitators on all the influencer platforms will insist to the short-term memory impaired voters that such talk is all hyperbole. How many cycles of this before the gaslighting works?

And how long before it really becomes gaslighting? I mean, if the Democrats have to accommodate more and more of a right-drifting polity every election to prove that they are not “radical Left socialists pushing the woke agenda” just to squeak past the post and eke out an increasingly difficult and stacked Electoral College win, how long can we say that the Democratic Party remains in any way responsive to what the people want? Leftists have been making this argument for some time now, and the longer this dynamic continues, the harder it is to disagree with them.

Meta-Politics and Vibe Wars

When all the sane normies go back to brunch after an election, Fox News and their ilk go back to work. They spend the next two to four years shaping the national vibe. Whether paid by Russians or doing it for the lulz, those guys never shut up. They flood the zone with shit 24/7. They preach incessantly to your dad, your nephew, to your frightened sister-in-law, your pastor, to your retired Honeywell aerospace engineer neighbor. Those folks chat at work with their pals and share dreck on Facebook. It builds.

There’s a concept in anti-fascism studies called meta-politics. It has to do with the idea that politics is always downstream from culture. That is, people don’t care about politics; they care about…well, people stuff. Music and movies and normal things. But if you can create music and movies that carry a fascist vibe or message to folks, you start to steer them into the right mindset for fascist politics.11

Or—and this is where we get stupid-seeming shit like people shooting Bud Light cans and freaking out over M&Ms and Mr. Potato Head—if you can’t create a cultural artifact to draw folks into fascism, you take an existing, normal thing and read into it some nefarious political agenda that feeds folks into fashy thinking (“Let’s demonize and literally fight those evil people who are trying to subvert Real Americans’ values”). Then you’re taking the cultural stuff, in this case pop culture, and using it as an entry point into people’s brains to get them into your twisted politics.

Right-wing media in all its manifestations does this all. the. time. It’s super easy and super cheap. You don’t have to be any kind of academic super genius to come up with it, and you don’t need a fancy degree to grasp it. You just have to know the dots and allow some basement dweller with a podcast mic to connect them for you in ominous and outraged tones. Who doesn’t know Mr. Potato Head? Nobody cares about Mr. Potato Head anymore, of course…unless he’s weaponized into a sign of the encroaching woke mob coming to take away your beloved…root vegetable-based children’s toy. (I hate this timeline.)

Multiply that a zillion times for a zillion cultural offerings across a zillion influencers, boosted by nitwit nihilists like Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson, and you start colonizing the brains of people who just don’t follow politics much.

That kind of campaign creates…a vibe. Like the vibe that the economy is garbage when it’s manifestly not. As opposed to the true fact that our economy is an uneven, Darwinian, capitalist lottery with massive wealth disparity and no social safety net, because we love to hate people below us, who don’t vote and have no voice. Or the vibe that, since we don’t crap on women quite as much as we used to, they are now winning some zero-sum game against men, so we should elect a rapist to show them who’s boss.

Can Kamala Harris and the Democrats wage a vibe war? That’s uncertain. They rely too damn much on legacy media, while the Right has its own media and wages a blitz campaign across every niche platform in existence. And as we’ve seen, legacy, ostensibly truth-telling, objective, media have caved and capitulated or cowered in the face of Trump. (This, too, has a long history, dating back to, like, the 1970s when conservatives started targeting the press for “liberal bias” to make them especially gunshy and twitchy. Seeds bear fruit if you tend them, people.)

More, the essence of vibe wars is lowbrow with virtually no learning curve—you don’t need to know anything about government policy or political actors to make the argument that Mr. Potato Head is a sign of the woke agenda…you just need to know a kid’s toy and a cloud of conspiracist vibes about said woke agenda. By contrast, to call out the bullshit of right-wing bad actors, you kinda need people to know who, say, Jack Posobiec is, and what kind of insanity he just pulled. Or JD Vance, a guy with only 18 months in government and a book under his belt that only East Coast libs knew until Ron Howard got suckered into making that dumb movie about it. As any late-night comedian’s on-the-street interview segment can show, not a lot of people in America are terribly familiar with the actual folks who make laws and policies in America, much less what kinds of nonsense they did in the last mainstream news cycle.12

But Bud Light? Everybody knows Bud Light.

There are two bits of good news here for nascent vibe warfighting by people who want to fight the right-wing. First is the fact that so many of the big players on the Right are grotesquely rich narcissists who crave attention. Like Elon Musk. Elon’s a cultural product everyone pretty much knows. Hell, he’s entirely a fabrication of culture and hype. All we have to do is connect him to a vibe of anti-democratic awfulness. I know, I know, a lot of us are there already, but the Democratic Party is not. The Democratic Party is a herd of cats with no message discipline or vibe-sense, and when they do get some semblance of message discipline, they don’t know how to play jazz with it: riff on your specifics, but always bring it back to the overriding theme.

Ditto for the Democratic constituencies under their tent. The vibe the forces of democracy need to create is one where people hear a name—of a foundation or think tank, a political party, a person—and get “Fuck that guy” energy. Because he or they are trying to destroy democracy. An automatic, aversive vibe that repels. Not just “negative partisanship,” but gut-level rejection of a worldview that is based on accurate, though perhaps dimly recalled, resonances of hostility to democracy and decency to people just trying to be people in this harsh world.

One thing all these interest groups could do is supplement their comms with bigger pictures and better messaging. Most of these outfits—be they anti-poverty, pro-voting, pro-homeless, pro-LGBTQ, racial justice, environmental, what-have-you—typically offer dispatches and newsletters highlighting legislative and issue developments. That’s great, but that’s for wonks. They need to be tying all of that stuff in to the larger vibes or worldviews at stake here. The fight going on. Use their members’ and supporters’ concern for those specific issues as an entry into an understanding of the larger context of the fight between what the far right is selling and what the world could be. And steal a page from the Harris social media team, from the early days, some of the snarky, blunt, youth-targeted stuff they were putting out. The more of these coalition partners singing their own parts in the same harmony, the better the chances for a general vibe shift we have.

How did the Right get so adamant and entrenched? One of the big factors was newsletters. These mimeographed and photocopied broadsides had underground circulations that would boggle the mind, and they were off the chain with the crazy. They demonized and radicalized millions over the course of the 20th century, converting entire family lines to far-right, racist, libertarian causes. Today it’s YouTubers and think tank weasels and talk radio (still).

We don’t have to do any of that insanity, but we do have to make larger contexts clear, and we do have to drop the stultifying civility tone that makes fighting for a progressive, egalitarian world where we actually fix problems fun and funny and easy to grasp. Sure: link to the new ProPublica piece exposing the latest heinous fuckery, but by golly, put it in the context of people who want the heinous fuckery versus the people who want nice things. Teach the history—we have Tik Tokkers who were too young to have seen the “grab her by the pussy” clip now old enough to vote circulating that audio to educate one another on “history” only eight years distant. Such are our memory holes, folks. Don’t assume otherwise.

We’ve seen message coordination either led from or at least blessed by the top before, but it’s usually been done most effectively by Republicans. A sitting President is the leader of her party, and all the constituencies that backed her want continued access and influence, and if they cannot see how a unified campaign, over literal years if not decades to connect their foci to larger messages about preserving and better achieving a pluralistic, multiracial egalitarian democracy against the various nightmares the Right pushes, then we’re doomed to see disarray and eventual loss to some version of reorganized Trumpism one day.

A bully pulpit is usually intended for the public audience, but President Harris could also be a bit of a bully toward her own supportive constituencies, urging them to get on board a long-term unified strategy to connect whatever their various causes are to the fundamental and essential values of freedom and equality and competent, accountable democratic governance in America. Over time, such arm-twisted convergence of messaging, diffusing through these groups and institutions can help to counter the incessant anti-democratic noise of the right-wing’s firehose of falsehoods.

Don’t Get Brunch, Get Radical

As so many have reminded us, radical simply means “at the root.” So what’s at the root of this death spiral? The answers are pretty easy. Climate change? Fossil fuels. Do-nothing government? Structural barriers like the Electoral College, the Senate, the size of the House, gerrymandering, money-as-speech, gutted voting rights, the Supreme Court.

What preserves those barriers and causes? A lot of stuff. A desire to preserve something called normalcy. A bunch of outdated ideas about how things are supposed to be and work. An absolute truckload of misinformation and disinformation. A fear that the wrong or bad people will get a leg up on us, the righteous and good people.

If you don’t like the description above, then don’t resemble it. Don’t be a voice for moderation and sensible centrism and preservation of a status quo that doesn’t work anymore, if it ever did. Harris’s appeal is 80 to 90 percent “we’re not going back” and the remainder is some stuff about what she’ll try to do going forward. But structurally and politically, almost all of that forward stuff will be stymied or at least an excruciating slog with maybe some pyrrhic victories along the way. If Biden’s economic policies are an attempt to “refill the pools” drained by Trickle-Down, racist, plutocratic politics since Reagan and the Southern Manifesto (and they kinda are), he’s really only been working with a garden hose, and the GOP has been trying to kink that line at every opportunity. You can’t undo decades of ruin in four years,a nd it’s bonkers to think you can in this system.

Therefore, your options are to be patient and steady and keep supporting this boring good-government stuff while the opposition pulls every atavistic lever to foil it all and regain power to end the game entirely…or to advocate like crazy for a better system. That’s radical, and you have to get willing to be a radical, to advocate for daring solutions, to run risks of looking foolish or naive or idealistic or utopian. You have to actually go back to school and learn about these “crazy” ideas movement activists are promoting because they fuel the “vibe” that counters the vibe Fox News sells. The worldview of decency and human dignity and mutual aid that actually stands a chance of saving us in the long term, not electoral saviorism every two or four years.

You have to rediscover the moral, emotional roots of why we should have a multiracial, egalitarian, pluralistic democracy in America, and what those things imply, even if it means running over our sacred cows and chopping them up into hamburger.

The sanitized, professionalized, institutionalized imagined consensus that fuels the return to normalcy and brunch will doom us.

The fear of fighting—fighting hard but honestly and bluntly, day in and out, over the next four years or the next generation plus, including relearning how to fight beyond the paradigm of mere electoral politics and its parasocial saviorism—is like Mahatma Gandhi deciding that nonviolence was the answer, but never developed a moral-spiritual theory as to why and certainly never spreading that theory to the masses.

It ends up being seen as—and then becoming—empty propriety and spinelessness with nothing at its core, no happy warrior, no principled Atticus Finch, stalwart sheriff holding off the lynch mob, no admirable figure whatsoever, just a null space if not an abject craven in the end.

Know Your Place

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Assuming she wins, how do we break out of this cycle?

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