Post-Election
Another debacle. Another round of rationalizations, minimizations, self-exculpations. Harris lost because she got a late start. Because of anti-incumbency sentiment. Because voters were misinformed about the border, the economy, the crime rate. Because “this is who we are” (i.e. sexist and racist). Because she represented change, and some people can’t handle the fact that the country is changing. Besides, the final result was actually quite close, Republicans will make a mess of things, and Trump will not be on the ballot in the future. Democrats just need to dust themselves off and tweak their messaging a bit.
In these postmortems, several things especially struck me. First, that Trump voters were largely treated as a monolith, with no distinctions made between MAGA true believers, Republican nose-holders, Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump swing voters, disaffected Latinos, and so forth. Second, that those voters tended to be characterized in extreme terms and using the instruments of armchair psychology (e.g. people choose fascists because their brains have been paralyzed by populist voodoo), their professed motives not to be taken seriously or even inquired about. Finally, that there was little sense that the election was a choice, that Harris also needed to be subject to analytic pressure, and—what was clear to everyone who stood at more than a millimeter’s distance from the force field of liberal groupthink—that she was in fact a cipher, a weathervane, a politician with few convictions and none not disposable at need, a lightweight far out of her depth, a disaster had she been elected, not a female Obama or even black Hillary but something like a West Coast John Edwards, another courtroom performer to subtract whose ambition would be to leave a pretty smile.
Harris lost, it seems to me, for lots of little reasons and one very big one: because she represented an exhausted establishment. That exhaustion was already apparent by 2016, at which point it was bipartisan. That year the major parties proposed to offer us as presidential candidates a second Clinton and third Bush, the latter so lifeless his handlers felt the need to append an exclamation point to his name. Jeb! was crushed by Trump; the Democrats shuffled along until the party found its symbol in the zombified corpse of Joe Biden. Now the entire establishment, together with the hostility and resentment that it has so richly earned—and this was the meaning of Dick and Liz Cheney’s endorsements—is concentrated in a single party.
It is the party of institutionalized liberalism, which is itself exhausted. I mean the whole edifice: the foundations, the think tanks, the nonprofits, the academic disciplines in their current incarnation, the organs of the media and culture industries. As I write this, A Complete Unknown, the Dylan movie, recently arrived in theaters. Contemporary liberalism, in which I’m including what’s now called progressivism, had its wellspring in the period depicted there, the dawning of the youth revolt, the antiwar movement, the rights revolutions. Sixty years on, having long ago entered its decadent phase, it has come to the end of its possibilities. Its spirit has become bureaucratized, its beliefs dogmatic, its gestures rote. Its picture of reality, unchanged in fundamental ways since then, is badly out of date. It is no longer on “the right side of history,” as its adherents assume. It made history, but now it is history.
I do not mean that the values of liberalism are obsolete. I believe in them still. I mean that its creative force is spent. It isn’t thinking anymore, if thinking means taking the risk of surprising yourself. The Harris campaign had policies; it didn’t have ideas. It ran on what it was against. The academic left is still operating within an intellectual architecture that was laid down in the 60s and 70s. The left-of-center magazines, it has been pointed out—The New Republic, The Nation, The Progressive, Vox, Slate—used to represent a range of liberal and left opinion. Today they’re more or less the same. Progressive slogans once expressed specific ideas. We knew what Ban the Bomb meant, or Take Back the Night. Now they are Rorschach blots: We Are the 99%, Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, Defund the Police, The Future Is Female, Trans Women Are Women, From the River to the Sea. The progressive ideology, what every good person is supposed to believe, is conspicuous for having refused to name itself, to acknowledge that it is an ideology (a reason that “wokeness” took hold). It is, one grasps, to pass as simple common sense—something that, by definition, one does not need to think about. What is the world that’s meant to take the place of capitalism, empire, the West, the state? I still don’t know.
Rather than responding creatively to evolving circumstances (technological, cultural, demographic), institutional liberalism has adopted the traditional strategy of discredited establishments: coercion. Debate is quashed. Dissenters are shunned. Norms of language are enforced and, as if to induce a kind of learned helplessness, continually altered. Mechanisms have been implemented to suppress “misinformation,” which sometimes means deliberate falsehoods and sometimes embarrassing truths. The masses have been instructed to take direction from their betters, to shut up and listen to Rachel Maddow, Queen Latifah, and the New York Times editorial board. On every major issue in the 2024 election—affordability, the border, crime, woke excess, the fact that Biden’s brain had evidently turned to mashed potatoes—the response of Democrats and their allies in the media was to gaslight the electorate. None of these, apparently, were problems. We’d been misinformed.
Now look at the right. Make no mistake: I despise the right, especially now. But it is undeniably abuzz with energy and creativity. I am far from the first to point this out. There is Trump’s primitive vitality. There is the heteroglossic ebullience of his language, as Blake Smith has described it, so different from Harris’s aphasic salad of nervous bureaucratese. There is the festive exuberance, according to every unbiased report I have seen of his rallies, that he inspires in his fans, in contrast to the fleeting sugar high, the astroturfed “joy” (or Joy™), of the Kamala succession. There is the proliferation of philosophies and pseudo-philosophies and lifestyle formations and scenes, a Cambrian explosion of strange new species: Silicon Valley transhumanists, manosphere bros, post-liberal Catholic integralists, anti-corporate conservative policy wonks, health freedom libertarians, Dimes Square scenesters, MAHA moms, neo-pagans, alt-rightists, natalists, tradwives, TradCaths—a new counterculture. Yes, much of this is loony or malevolent (though no more so, in retrospect, than utopian communism), but that is not the point. The point is that it is alive.
Nor is it just the right. The liberal establishment picked the wrong time to stake its position on the suppression of dissent, because the strategy depends on maintaining a monopoly of legitimate discourse. The internet, needless to say, has rendered this untenable. Instead, the most interesting and certainly the most courageous voices on the left half of the spectrum have been driven, en masse, from mainstream outlets and institutions. The resulting constellation of figures was first known as the Intellectual Dark Web, then as the heterodoxy. I’m not sure any term suffices now—so vast, with the emergence of podcasts and Substacks, and of legions of new voices that have bypassed the mainstream entirely, has the thing become. But right wing it is not.
In fact, it may be that the aptest name for the phenomenon I am describing—the eruption of creative energy outside of the inert progressive blob, and in reaction to it—is the not-left. The not-left, such being the paradoxes of our time, includes not only the new right-wing menagerie but also no shortage of traditional liberals, Bernie-style progressives, even Marxists. It also includes a lot of people (and this is part of its vitality) who evade existing labels, and even more who do not care about them. Driven from the mainstream left, the heterodox have been welcomed, in the spirit of debate and exploration, in many precincts of the new right. Ventures have been launched—publications, conferences, institutes—that are dedicated to embracing a diversity of views. Old categories are crumbling. Old institutions are being supplanted. Old forms of status are becoming obsolete. There is ferment everywhere except the blob.
The not-left, like the left in the 60s and 70s, is the locus of openness, playfulness, productive contention, experiment, excess, risk, shock, camp, mirth, mischief, irony, and curiosity. As opposed to solemnity, self-censorship, defensiveness, literalism, and prudery. The left is “no”; the not-left is “yes.” The left is “post-,” the prefix of imaginative depletion. The not-left is “neo-,” the sign of new beginnings. The left, the surveys tell us, is depressed and pessimistic. But of course it is: not because the present is grim (it often is), but because without creativity there is no vision, and without vision there is no hope. The left is losing the young, and not just young men. From 2020 to 2024, women under thirty swung to Trump by eight points.
It comes to this: the left has made itself the enemy of the life force—of vitality, of eros. It fears it and it wants to shackle it. It feels, with a deep, instinctive revulsion, that it is incompatible with goodness, with morality. So it subordinates it to morality, or rewrites it in its terms. We see this with sex, that famously anarchic drive. We also see it with art, which now must be not true or beautiful but good, or goody-goody. If it is not, or the person who made it is not, then it’s not just canceled; it is not good art. The belief appears to be, more broadly, that only good people—that is, liberals—can do impressive things, that morality and excellence are coextensive. That is why the spectacle not just of Hemingway or Yeats (or a thousand other modern and contemporary artists), but even more of Zuckerberg or Bezos, is so disturbing. Bad people aren’t supposed to achieve greatness. It violates the liberal’s sense of cosmic order.
But what if excellence not only diverges from goodness but trumps it? What if we care more that the movie is great than that the director is bad? Which, of course, we do. Morality is a limping thing. We keep having to preach it because we keep failing to honor it, not just in our actions but in that which we value in others. Whereas love of excellence does not need preaching (except perhaps in the life-denying cul-de-sac that the hypertrophied crypto-Calvinism of contemporary progressivism has jammed us into, where everybody gets a trophy so nobody’s feelings get hurt). Because excellence, and the vitality that drives it, is what brings the future, moves the species forward.
I know I’m sounding awfully Nietzschean, but I mean to sound Berlinean. I do not think morality—meaning what Nietzsche called slave morality, liberal/Christian morality, what many now call social justice—should be discarded. Obviously. I just don’t believe it’s everything. I believe, with Isaiah Berlin, that our values aren’t all perfectly compatible, that we cannot get them in a neat little stack, cannot have it all and have it all at once. Truth, beauty, justice, equality, freedom: these exist, to some extent, in tension. And one more, which we do not talk about but which is not reducible to any of the others. Vitality. Energy. Eros. The life force. And without it we are doomed. Certainly, the left is doomed.
Some liberals appear to sense that there’s a problem. Shortly after the election, in a long, hand-patting column in the New York Times, David Wallace-Wells assured us that a Democratic return to power “probably doesn’t require a huge shift in the basic mood of the country but probably does mean liberals need to find some ways to look like outsiders and upstarts again.” This was something, but not much, a version of the messaging argument (look like outsiders and upstarts?), and as such it failed to grapple with the nature of the crisis. More promising was Chris Hayes on the New Yorker podcast. After the host remarked that “there was a Joe Rogan of the left; his name was Joe Rogan, but he felt alienated,” Hayes said: “Here’s my three-word take-away. Be more weird. Do different things, try different things, talk to different people…Engage more with heterodoxy…Seek out the strange and weird and bust out of the straitjacket.” Then, with a laugh, “he says on the New Yorker podcast.”
But that is the dilemma. The institutions of the liberal establishment have too many barriers—economic, sociological, psychic—to busting out of their straitjacket. I thought of Hayes when I was listening to Andy Mills on Tara Henley’s podcast not long after. Mills, who was a co-creator of The Daily podcast at the Times (and who was later hounded out on flimsy grounds, another talent lost), said, “after the 2016 election… [o]ur editor-in-chief, Dean Baquet, he put it really elegantly. He said, ‘We largely missed one of the greatest stories in American politics in a generation. We can’t do this again. We need to make changes so that we can understand the electorate, understand the country that we’re reporting on.’” And yet, Mills continued, they did it again. They missed that Trump was likely to win last year, and why.
The individuals who populate these institutions simply cannot do what’s needed, even if they wanted to. It will take new people. It will take a revolution on the left, a massive act of creative destruction. There’s a battle outside raging. Your order is rapidly fading. Keep your eyes wide, don’t speak too soon, for the times they are a-changing.
