Pivot to Liberalism
Some unsolicited post-election advice for the arts and letters.
In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency. Weeks prior, the United Kingdom overwhelmingly voted for Leave. While I had cast a ballot for Gary Johnson and didn’t have a strong opinion about the EU, I posted on social media, “Let’s hear it for the defeat of Team Everyone Who Disagrees With Us Is Racist.” I hoped the losses would cause progressives to moderate their language, distance themselves from identitarianism, and start trying to connect with Americans based on shared humanity and common concerns.
They did not. In the course of the attenuated Harris-Walz campaign, Hillary Clinton, she of the “Deplorables” debacle, characterized Trump’s appearance at Madison Square Garden as “actually re-enacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939,” thus likening him and his supporters to Nazis. Harris affirmed in an interview that Trump fits “the general definition of fascist.” Biden responded to a remark from a roast comedian characterizing Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage by saying, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his [namely Trump’s] supporters.” Walz attempted to characterize conservative voters as “weird,” which was bold, considering that the Biden-Harris administration has produced scenes like this.
And that’s leaving aside the Vice President herself.
The consistently sharp-aiming Babylon Bee ran the headline Biden Calls On Deplorable Garbage Nazis To Tone Down The Rhetoric.
Those remarks exemplify an attitude of progressive politics that originated with the first Obama campaign and has worsened since then. In 2016, Emmett Rensin warned his fellow progressives about The smug style in American liberalism.
It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them.
In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.
It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.
As
noted last month, the Liberal Smug of the twenty-teens has degenerated into Millennial Snot.The egalitarian utopia of secular enlightenment liberalism has not arrived and never will, and the resentful sense of superiority that results in the modern liberal is all he’s got left. Liberalism has no moral lodestar, no ideal to point toward. It doesn’t really believe in anything. It purports to love everyone, but it can only love a faceless abstracted other. It can’t love its own drunk uncle, not even at Thanksgiving. All it has is bitterness toward the outgroup, who are defined by their wrongness. Whether it’s the soviets executing capitalist “wreckers” in the street, or skinnyfat libs owning the chuds on Twitter, the animus is the same. It’s all they’ve got. Millennial snot is the apotheosis of this resentment, the terminus of liberalism: A sadistic, juvenile sneer that serves to belittle and patronize the other – no longer as a means to some higher ideal, but as an end in itself.
The arts and letters have followed that sixteen-year trail of elitist self-isolation. I recounted the worst moments of the related history in a recent essay for FAIR.
Yesterday, more than anything else, was a repudiation of that ethos: wokeness, DEI, elitism, condescension, manufactured consent, left-identitarianism, reparations, socialist adjacency, de-growth, de-policing, anti-Occidentalism—the whole cultural cluster that I call postliberal progressivism.
Nota bene: Normal, sensible Americans hate identitarianism whether of the left or right varieties. Everyone who is not a clinical sociopath has an innate sense of fairness and supports meritocracy when it’s based on fairness.
Normal, sensible people have good feelings about the country they live in, particularly when that country is as admirable as the United States of America. They do not like the denigration of its founding principles and origins.
Normal, sensible Americans do not single out Israel for excoriation and make excuses for terrorist entities like Hamas. When others direct their denigration of Israel at Jews, normal, sensible Americans recognize it as bigotry.
Normal, sensible Americans want a functioning, kind society with trustworthy institutions that can accommodate a broad range of views. They do not like it when those institutions become captured by activists who hate them.
Normal, sensible Americans dislike bureaucrats and do not want to be ruled by them. They want to get on with their lives without undue fuss and try to advance without undue impediment. They want to succeed honestly and fail honestly if they must.
Normal, sensible Americans despise being told what to think or say.
Normal, sensible Americans dislike being hoodwinked, even for a good cause.
Normal, sensible Americans do not hate themselves or each other.
A second Trump administration does not guarantee or even promise a new age of truth, freedom, and goodwill. On the contrary, he spouts untruths reflexively and is notoriously rude when it suits him. He failed to drain the swamp before and may fail to do so again. What he may do is stymie the advance of postliberal progressivism.
Remember a few months ago when Harris was brat and her campaign was about joy? Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people, says an old saw, but that was too much humbug even for the American people. It was never clear what Harris actually stood for besides a Harris presidency, and on the issue that should be most important to us in the arts, freedom of expression, she was demonstrably terrible.
My advice to the arts and letters is this: Do not double down like you did in 2016. Reject postliberal progressivism. Instead embrace liberal progressivism. Fight oppression from an ethos that embraces tolerance, equality, individual rights, and market economics. Fight Trump, even, but do so as a liberal progressive, and repudiate these whackadoodles who gave us 2+2=white supremacy, Queers for Palestine, and the rest of that nonsense as degrading to your cause. You may never come to liberal conservatism, and persist in finding us libertarians incomprehensible, but we can be friends, I promise.
In the meantime, let’s hear it once again for the defeat of Team Everyone Who Disagrees With Us Is Racist.
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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art Can Help by Robert Adams. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.
I'd argue that yesterday, more than anything else, was a repudiation of the $100 Aldi bill.
As to wokeness, DEI, elitism, condescension, manufactured consent, left-identitarianism, et.al., these strike me as issues for those who spend a lot of time on the internet in all its myriad manifestations. Those who spend the preponderance of their days "IRL" just don't really encounter that kind of stuff, -I don't, and I work at a university. What I do see, daily in fact, are homeless people with substance abuse problems and mental health issues. Every morning when I go for a run in my small, Midwestern college town, I dodge two people sleeping under the train bridge. I do not encounter bearded ladies or men in skirts with anything approaching that kind of regularity. Nor did I hear any of the two candidates mention anything about mental illness, homelessness or the crisis of meaning that frequently precipitates the kind of drug use correlated with the former two. I did hear a lot of vague and pointless talk about "gender affirming" care that affects basically no one.
As to the world of arts and letters, undoubtedly those tiresome and absurd sociological formulations have "colonized the discourse" as they say, but lame identity art shows at the MCA or MFA probably have little if any sway over the electorate. My hope is that there is a realignment in art and society toward the beautiful. Prioritizing the beautiful is also a prioritizing of the true and the good. Its what you might call a "win/win". Beauty can, and in many historical cases, has, thrived in even the most oppressive of political regimes -feudal Europe or Japan both spring to mind. Beauty is the constant companion of those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Sadly, our culture is about as blind and deaf as they come.
As a normal sensible American I’m going to enjoy fewer articles about what’s wrong with the other side