On Living Through the End of Something
Further thoughts on the dawning era of right-populist politics
My previous post was an attempt to make analytical sense of our new political normal, in which right-wing populism is a consistent competitor for power. In this post I’m going to sketch on a broader canvas some thoughts about the same phenomenon, reflecting on where I think we are in the longer arc of history.
I’ll begin by being blunt: I think Donald Trump is probably going to beat Joe Biden in November. I also think the right-wing RN, led by Marine Le Pen and her protégé Jordan Bardella, is going to do quite well in the elections centrist French President Emmanuel Macron has (foolishly) called for late this month and early July—and that similar parties and movements around the world will continue to thrive over the short-to-medium term, winning electoral contests and setting the terms of political debate throughout much of the democratic world.
This doesn’t mean they’ll always prevail. Sometimes they’ll lose. At other times they’ll win and then lose the next time elections are called. My point, then, is simply to say, as I did in my last post, that right-wing populism is here to stay. It’s a part of our political reality now. A big part.
A Melancholy, Long, Withdrawing Roar
Why do I think this? It’s not just election results and polling data. Something has shifted. The political world in which we live is not the same political world in which I grew up (in the late-Cold War 1970s and ’80s) or the one in which I learned how to orient myself intellectually and professionally (in the post-Cold War ’90s and ’00s). Those were decades close enough in time to the centrist-liberal consensus of the mid-20th-century postwar decades that its assumptions shaped the boundaries of the possible by default.
That is no longer the case. Having observed the rapid fading of the postwar consensus as a pundit over the past decade, I’m reminded of Matthew Arnold’s well-known line about the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of retreating religious faith in the mid-19th century. Like a receding wave yanking at my feet and ankles, forcing me to recalibrate my balance to avoid falling backward onto the wet sand, I’ve felt the pulling away of a presence that once surrounded me, something taken for granted that is no longer there as it once was, with the absence growing more obtrusive with every passing year.
I’ve written before about something analogous in the much narrower Straussian intellectual world—how students of Leo Strauss in the 1990s (I was one of them) nearly always ended up being center-right liberals, but how many of those coming out of Straussian graduate programs today gravitate to the populist right, with a few actively defending or advocating explicitly fascist or otherwise tyrannical forms of politics. In most cases, those different cohorts of students had the same teachers teaching them identical texts of political philosophy. Yet the lessons each cohort took from their educations are very different. Why? The answer, I think, is that the surrounding context—the subject of this post—has changed rather dramatically over the past 30 years. And that change has altered the way the same ideas are being received by today’s young people.
I sense the change every time one of my formerly Republican (Never Trump) friends launches into Reaganite formulations about the U.S. being the leader of the free world. Or starts asserting that we’re the indispensable nation, with a solemn duty to defend democracy abroad, starting (but not ending) with Ukraine. Or rhapsodizes about the importance of free trade, open markets, liberal immigration, and generous asylum policies.
I’ve taken all of those stances at various times in my life. I still support some of those policies now. But they hit the ear differently than they used to. Can you hear the change? Where they once sounded bold, confident, muscular, like they could bowl over anyone who stood in their way, inspiring multitudes to stand a little straighter and puff their chests out a little farther as they saluted the American flag and teared up at the earnest expression of American moral idealism—now they ring a little hollow, a little too pious, a little too self-satisfied, a little naive and stale, a little like a script handed down through the decades to be read by a frail, 81-year-old president who looks like he could fall and break a hip at any moment. It sounds like a dogma, a creed recited by rote, its doctrines grown tired from overuse and inadequate engagement with reality.
Some will say this is just a confession of my own evolving views or preferences: I used to be more centrist, and now I’m drifting toward Trumpist populism. But that isn’t the case. I’m responding to a change I sense all around me. The old rhetoric doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t resonate or move people, or at least not as much or as many people as it used to. How do I know? Because, at home and abroad, politicians who explicitly reject these positions are winning elections, showing that other policies, other appeals, other rhetoric, other ways of thinking about the world, the economy, and who is allowed to join the polity, are gaining traction. Those still taking the old positions have been forced into a defensive crouch as they struggle to avoid losing contests for political power.
Backlash Against the European Flight from Particularism
Why has it happened? Writing in Persuasion about last weekend’s European elections, Yascha Mounk put it most starkly: “Voters simply don’t trust mainstream parties to control immigration.” In a thread on Twitter/X, David Leonhardt of the New York Times said something quite similar with somewhat greater emphasis on the American context. The whole thread is worth reading, but this may be the most important point: “A central challenge for mainstream parties—and a central part of any strategy for weakening the extreme right—is finding a position on immigration that doesn't simply involve telling voters that they're wrong.” Or racist. Or xenophobic. Or that their concerns are morally illegitimate and their worries make them bigots.
But I’d put the core issue in even broader terms: We’re living through a backlash against universalism (often denounced in polemical terms by right-populists as “globalism”).
The European Union began as a trading bloc, but by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a moral project fueled by elite distaste for (even revulsion against) the nationalistic sentiments these elites had become convinced were the source of all the crimes of the European past, including imperialism, racism, fascism, and genocide. What Europe needed was an inoculation against these sentiments, and the EU would be the vaccine, giving the continent a collective goal of striving to overcome particularistic attachments and the cruelty, suffering, and oppression they supposedly implant and encourage. Nationalistic sentiments would be sublimated into the transnational idea of the EU, with the EU itself eventually expanding without limit as the leading edge of a world without borders or walls impeding trade, the free movement of people, products, capital, and labor.
Yet the vaccine didn’t take. Or rather, it empowered the very sentiments it was devised to combat and overcome, just as historian Tony Judt predicted it would all the way back in 1996.
That’s because the entire project was misconceived, as was the metaphor of a vaccine. Particularistic attachments aren’t like an ideological virus invading and harming an organism from the outside. They emerge organically from the human soul. I naturally love myself more than others, my family more than other families, my community more than other communities, members of my church more than those of other churches, and fellow citizens of my own country more than those from other countries and cultures and civilizations. These sentiments can and should be tempered. Generosity and openness to others can and should be cultivated. But that work cuts against the grain of our nature. It takes considerable effort. It needs to be undertaken wisely, recognizing its limits and alive to the danger of backlash.
No one who’s studied the history of political philosophy or spent time reading political history should be surprised where Europe finds itself today.
Parallel Arcs of History
The American story has a different shape but ends up in much the same place.
If the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 hadn’t produced a decades-long surge of immigration to the United States,…
If conventional wisdom in favor of free trade hadn’t contributed to a precipitous decline in American manufacturing (along with the vanishing of good jobs and the decay of communities across the country),…
If the Iraq War (and broader foreign policy agenda of the post-Cold War years) hadn’t been justified by ever-more abstract and sweeping Reaganite rhetoric while culminating in disappointing or inconclusive results in theaters of military battle across the globe,…
If the Democratic Party hadn’t moved rapidly leftward on a range of social and cultural issues over the past 20 years,…
If none of those things had happened, maybe Nikki Haley or someone like her would be the Republican nominee right now. But they did happen. And so Donald Trump is the nominee once again, and the incumbent president is a (very cautiously) walking embodiment of a waning and faltering consensus that’s rapidly withdrawing with more of a whimper than a roar.
No one who’s studied the history of political philosophy or spent time reading political history should be surprised where America may well find itself on the morning of November 6, 2024.
Endings and Beginnings
Even if Biden manages to eke out a victory that’s primarily a function of Trump’s personal loathsomeness, we are living through the end of something. The question for us, as it was for Alexis de Tocqueville writing in the wake of the French Revolution roughly two hundred years in the past, is how we will respond to the new reality dawning all around us. We can try to bury our heads in the proverbial sand, pretending the future is poised to deliver a return to a vanished past. Or we can accept where we find ourselves today and work to build something decent within it, as Tocqueville toiled to do in his own time.
It's hard work, with no guarantee of success. But we can be sure of one thing at least: If we don’t attempt it, those who champion indecent alternatives are bound to prevail, stamping their image indelibly upon the era beginning to unfold before us.
I completely understand and empathize with the feelings underlying this post, but I also am not sure what purpose it serves in its current form. It accurately describes real and substantial failures of governance over the last 70 years but leaves out the way that the understandable backlash to those failures has been stoked, warped, and channeled by people who know better into largely unrelated culture war grievances as a distraction from not only continuing but escalating economic inequality. It validates the reliance on vibes over job performance in evaluating candidates for the most powerful office in the world while making only passing reference to Trump's manifest psychopathy and none to his obvious cognitive impairment or blatant, historic corruption. From my reading, leaving all of these things out suggests that support for Donald Trump is a natural and rational response to what voters have experienced. It's not. There's an entire conservative media industry that's been building up to this narrative for decades, and that's not the same thing as calling the consumers of that media dumb or bigoted. When you flatten everything down to "neo-liberals were dumb and mean so obviously Trump" you let a lot of really terrible actors off the hook and foster a wildly over-broad mistrust of institutions. It's so much more complicated than that, and I worry that you're playing into the hands of the "burn it all down" crowd.
I certainly understand being depressed at a time like this, Lord knows I'm medicated, but this just feels intended to demoralize. To what end?
I tend to think that people are not moving into authoritarian populism because they are opposed to universalism or globalization. I think they are opposed to the ways in which our oligarchic-controlled nations have viciously exploited their populations to obtain an extraordinary degree of wealth and power. If universalism had been based in a “fair deal” for our populations, where the amazing wealth created was more widely shared (mainly through more equitable taxation), people would not be revolting and looking for leaders who will challenge the norms that have enabled/empowered a largely self-centered super-wealthy elite to amass and wield obscene fortunes by virtue of national policy — which they effectively control NOT through elections but through their domination and control of economic — and especially tax — policy regardless of who is elected.
The focus on cultural issues is largely a distraction of manufactured agitprop. Americans, and many other peoples are of a generally “live and let live” disposition. This means they are disposed to give their neighbors some space to live their lives and expect the same in return. But if they can’t actually make a living and are robbed of opportunity and agency, they eventually get really unhappy and, in the right circumstances, they resist and rebel.
Our challenge is not universalism or globalism per se. It’s plain, old fashioned exploitation, elite self-dealing, and, increasingly once again, territorial conquest. Trump has surprisingly positioned himself as the “one who can fix things” for average people. He promises them agency and catharsis. And then, all of the world’s bad guys, including Putin, Xi, Kim, Netanyahu, and leadership in so many other countries, are making it exceptionally clear that they have accumulated such wealth and power that they hold themselves above any normative values that mere citizens have embraced, whether “universalist” or “particularist.” Their abject brutality and indifference to the fate of ordinary people has shown our younger generations that there is not much daylight between people who are exploited and marginalized economically and politically, and those who can be simply bombed into oblivion. Hence, much unrest on campuses and elsewhere.
So, I repeat: Our challenge is not universalism or globalism per se. It’s plain, old fashioned plutocratic exploitation, self-enrichment, and, increasingly once again, ego-driven territorial conquest.