The Left is about to hand Trump, and Trumpism, more political success. There are reasons for this that have been creeping into contemporary life for the last three or four decades. Notwithstanding this evolution, understanding how this has unfolded gives us the tools necessary to prevent the disaster.
I’ve been an educator since 1992. In my time in the classroom and in administrative capacities, I’ve been amazed at the Left’s inability to think and act strategically. Disorganization has been a key characteristic of the Left for some time. Emotions rather than discipline always appeared to be the center of gravity for “liberals” while focused, often absolutist approaches to the world’s blurry reality characterized so much of contemporary conservatism.
Of course now we’re in a different situation with the current US Republican Party giving tutorials on how to implode and offer up candidates that build their personal brands on fealty to an autocrat. Trump is a problem, but he’s also a symptom of a party whose orientation around grievance and binary thinking allows for his words and coarseness to resonate. It’s often argued that this distorted approach to communication was born out of Newt Gingrich and his idea that the Dems are not just GOP opponents but rather, they are enemies to be destroyed since they threaten the healthy function of our democracy. To be sure, Democrats and their relative disorganization and Republicans with their relative uniformity, have given rise to a simple, albeit inaccurate, modeling of how to approach decision-making: Nothing works (Dems) versus Our Way is the Only Way that will work (GOPers). It doesn’t take much of an interpretive stretch to see how when the latter gains ground, resistance is not only baked into the debate, but the debate also becomes a blood sport rather than a negotiation toward a desirable non-zero-sumness.
This arena affords little chance for anything other than a series of emotionally bloody messes, which serve to accentuate the misguided orientations and creates openings for dictatorial manifestations on both sides. Unconsciousness begets unconsciousness. Furthermore, this situation has spilled into other liberal democracies around the world giving permission and legitimacy in a collective increase in authoritarian leanings around the world.
But this isn’t just the Right’s problem. Nor is it all the Right’s fault that we find ourselves in this situation. While the Right’s current manifestation may be ugly, xenophobic, violent, and lack any mechanism for nuance, the Left has abandoned the idea of universal humanism as a byproduct of its embrace of faulty post-modern theoretical approach to meeting the world in just ways. This kind of strategic separation from our once shared sense of humanity into tribal-centric identities have cursed the Left for at least three or four decades.
I can recall, for example, how Michel Foucault was offering a series of lectures during the first few weeks of college in 1983. I was aware of his name and how he and a few other public intellectuals were publishing works that the smartest among us were talking about. Checking out bookshelves at gatherings was all too often seen as a way to at least superficially understand a party’s host. I’ll admit that I had plenty of these books on my shelves, but hadn’t read most of them. Facade. Shallow. Wannabe. I did read most of them later, but no matter. It was fakery on my part, I thought I could hide. Regardless, so much of the “important reading of the day” felt way above me, but I wanted to play on this intellectual field. So I attended a talk or two. Read an article or two. Attempted another book or two, but came away from my swim in the day’s philosophical pool only slightly wet. I couldn’t figure out how to get into the deep end.
What I did come away with was a sense that the “grand narratives” I’d grown to value (partially because of my experience as a Christian, partially because of the values in my home, partially because injustice needed to be opposed) were vast approximations of experience. Thinkers like Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and some others discounted as covers for continued oppression. At the time, this made sense to me. I entered Berkeley as a white, cis-gendered, straight male, who was painfully aware that I didn’t do a damn thing to deserve the position of power I was born into. There was guilt in the background of my every achievement as I studied and deconstructed my past. Because of this, these Post-Modernists were able to pull at my rational AND my emotional centers of gravity, unify them, and exploit their position deep within my heart and mind. I welcomed this since I saw this as an evolutionary step any college freshman should be willing to make. It was why I was at school, anyway; to learn what I didn’t know or hadn’t yet faced, whether it was comfortable or not didn’t matter. In fact, learning, in my experience, was rarely comfortable. So Foucault’s work on me must be doing something important and appropriate. At least that was my thinking at the time. Bit his admonition that Grand Narratives were useless sounded like yet another Grand Narrative. Just like in Buddhism, attachment to non-attachment is still attachment. Foucault and his ilk were merely offering up a performative contradiction.
Grand narratives of the uselessness of grand narratives aside, I was rethinking the idea that the Big Story of what we shared, might not be as full and complete as I’d imagined. Never mind what the wisdom traditions say, interpretations of anything are deeply rooted in power. So are decisions and institutions. Gender and race, it was being argued, are marginalized so that the dominant hierarchy could stay atop the heap of steady injustices that had been inflicted on “others” for centuries. Our job, as students, was to call this truth out and question the dominant hierarchy so that we might make ours a more just world.
Sounded good to me. Plus it was pretty simple and played into the unsteadiness brought on by the position I unwittingly held in an unjust world. I could, it seemed, lead in ways that allied with the knowledge that there were valuable, and comparatively small narratives, that had value but were marginalized and forever beyond the frothy edge of the grand narratives that saw themselves as complete. I saw, and knew, the partiality of universalism and how it systematically silenced variance by pointing to itself as a valid and perpetual story through which we should all see ourselves. For all time.
Celebration of what we shared as One Big Earth was just fine. But there were different perspectives. The climate crisis was as real in 1983 as it is now, forty years hence, but do those of us in the “powerful” West have a right to tell the “powerless” in the developing world that they have to abide by strictures against, say, carbon emissions in equal ways. If we’re insisting that sub-Saharan African nations abide by the same emissions standards for which the West is advocating, doesn’t this put them (Blacks, Asians, LatinX populations) in a state of developmental disadvantage. Isn’t this a case, despite its intentions, of the Powerful subjugating the Powerless?
So it went. Successfully, I would argue. Recent pushback, notwithstanding, I see the Post-Modern roots of this tree going very deep. So deep that they were able to nourish profound growth on the fertile soil of a Post-Modern world. Universalism gave way to what Yascha Mounk, author of The Identity Trap, sees as a Strategic Separatism that offers membership, voice, and a degree of alignment within groups. This tribal centrism is nothing new, but whereas we might have seen it outliving its usefulness with the rise of modernity, we can see how it’s back in ways that have surprised, even generated fear, among so many. Put simply, if a person can appropriately identify with a group, and then let this grouping take on foundational meaning for them in ways that supersede the grand narrative of what he, or she, might share with other humans, then they can participate in a re-authoring of meaning, based on the alignment they now have with their identified tribe. The tribe’s interpretation, and its gravitational pull, offer refuge from an increasingly complex world. The tribe can simplify things; make the complex issues of the day a little less burdensome. The tribe can come up with its own mythologies and propagate them, especially if the logarithms of social media assist this inertia.
Rather than unify around a vision of modern liberalism, where the sanctity of each individual, their respective vote, voice, and participation in their life experience was not predicated on their tribe, we have gone in the other direction, and normalized a mockery and disdain of what binds us together as people. With this in mind, I’m imagining that several readers of this will immediately see my words as insensitive because I have no idea what it’s like. How could this representative of the power structure, this oppressor, think he has the right to say a thing about what the oppressed experience. On the one hand, I understand this position and have great empathy for what so many people have experienced at the hands of oppressors. But I’m arguing that this kind of reactionary, tribal-centric viewpoint doesn’t do much to help us transcend, and yet never forget, the injustice and see the good in each other. Instead, we’re being encouraged to view our respective realities through carefully crafted lenses that clarify our differences ahead of what keeps us together as a family sharing this planet and this shared experience.
This isn’t to say that race, and its experiential offering, doesn’t matter. It does. And history is replete with horrific injustices that we should learn from precisely so that they not happen again. Race is a critical part of our story. But it’s not the whole story. by definition, it can’t be. If it is seen as the whole, dominant orientation, it will only serve to divide us. The same is true of class. In the Marxist approach to meeting global challenges, getting beyond class didn’t serve the ideal. To assume that our reductive labels of race, gender, or sexual preference, might do otherwise is a tough sell, at best, delusion, at worst. And this delusion can’t help but lead all of us into a gaping maw of deeper confusion, which leads to fear, which leads to hate, which leads to violence and an orientation around tribal and political sensibilities that reflect our fear instead of our hope. This, then, leads tribes to collectivize and share angry voices that can mask their fear, which then vote to elect those that can not only re-articulate the fear, but motivate the fearful to engage their rage in ways that reestablish the hierarchies that have led to so much oppression in the first place. The Left should take note of this. So, too, should anyone who shares a concern that liberal democracies are not guaranteed to survive. By scolding those who don’t see things the way you do, even if you’re blind to many of the gaps in your ideology, you cede power to your opposition, thus handing them elections.
This isn’t to say that the Right is wrong, necessarily. There are plenty of conservative thinkers whose articulations, while significantly different than mine, are sound in their logic, their reason, and their appeal. These thoughtful individuals sharpen and lift our discourse in ways that generate deeper understanding and offer clarity, if nothing else, of opposing positions. The is good. This should be welcomed in a society that values openness and rigorous debate a way to better approximate paths that lead to truth. Freedom of speech, among other things, helps this process of understanding along. What I am concerned about is that this view isn’t actively shared or put on display in ways that get us to think as a people. Instead we’re looking for who, and what, to believe; bound by our own certitudes masking our curiosity in ways that only lead to war. In this way we currently find ourselves dealing with the Left’s unconsciousness which is giving the Right a chance to appeal to the very worst in us by adhering to its own grand narratives that have served to divide and conquer humanity for millennia. While this tragedy isn’t limited to the experience of those who live in the US, it is put in front of us each day as a percussive partisan dissemination of information that distorts our sense of self and other, regardless of who we might vote for. What we’re left with involves little more than the celebration of an individual who is a reflection of us at our very worst seeking to lead us into a self-important, egomaniacal, narcissistic image of who we should never want to be.