Winging It

This past weekend, I listened to a podcast. It was something of a profile of yet another right-wing internet personality. That part of it, frankly, was boring. Where it was interesting was where it touched on the reaction to such people by their critics. Here, I would like to have seen it go deeper, because it's become a fairly broad phenomenon, and I would like to see a more thorough analysis.

The podcast profile noted that there's little point in the American Left pointing out that someone is a racist, an anti-Semite or even a fascist if that person leans into those labels. And people have started leaning into them because there is now a substantial audience for whom the terms racist, anti-Semite and fascist have come to mean: "Has our best interests at heart." I've made this point before, and while yes, it's cynical, I have yet to have anyone tell me it's broadly inaccurate. People don't have principles. They have interests. Because eating is good, and principle is inedible. Accordingly, for a person who finds a modern day state that values pluralism, tolerance and diversity is not working for them, naming people as openly hostile to those values carries no shame.

FiveThirtyEight had a couple of headlines that illustrate this: "Is This The Indictment That Really Hurts Trump?" and "Will Three Indictments Prove Too Much For Trump’s Campaign?" The underlying expectation, which I've heard from any number of media types, is fairly clear; the idea that, sooner or later, the drumbeat of criminal accusations against Mr. Trump will grow loud enough that voters will begin to look elsewhere. But there's never a real reason why anyone expects this to happen. After all, Republican voters aren't supporting Mr. Trump's bid to return to the White House because they want or moral or legal exemplar. They support him because they understand that his re-election is the best way to safeguard their interests. And Mr. Trump understood this from the beginning. When he remarked that "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible," he was referencing more than his popularity; he was expressing the sense that people viewed him as vital enough to their interests that they'd be willing to overlook, excuse or explain away whatever they had to. Or simply fall back upon the age-old idea that what's right in the world always draws unjust opposition.

And in an age of intense negative partisanship, this works for people, because they understand events in the world around them through their partisan viewpoints. No matter what happened during the Trump Administration, it was better than what would have happened during a Hillary Clinton Administration. And no matter what happens in the Biden Administration, it's worse than what would be happening in a second Trump term. This is the reality that people live within. Not because they're somehow out of touch with the truth of what's going on around them. But because their perceptions start with their understanding of whether things are being done to help them or to hurt them, and they go from there. It is, in a way, the ultimate triumph of politics. Causes are no longer inferred from effects; they're simply matters of faith. And it's difficult to argue with faith.

And the American political system has, for any number of years now, behaved in a way that reinforced people's faith that it couldn't, or simply wouldn't, look after the interests of all of it's citizens. That government was liable to being captured by some or another interest group and turn its efforts towards benefiting that group at the expense of others. The American Right has managed to convince itself that it's their turn to have others benefit at their expense. And the far Right says that if someone is going to dominate, and victimize others, it's better to be the victor than the victim. It's not a difficult message to sell to people who have been left behind by "progress" that feels like little more than someone else taking what was once theirs.

What I've found interesting about the common critique of Trumpism, the far Right, and the like is that it doesn't make the point that a pluralistic, diverse and tolerant democracy is going to do a better job of helping the majority of people meet their needs than a "fascist" dictatorship or racially-based caste system (and then take steps to concretely show this). Rather, it (like a lot of institutions, really) simply repeats, over and over, that the people who are being asked to give something up in the service of a more pluralistic, tolerant and diverse world have enough to share without missing any of it. Their subjective lived experience that this is not true is dismissed as deluded or condemned as a commitment to injustice.

Donald Trump understood this, and by doing little else than telling people that their subjective feeling that they'd been left behind was a deliberate outcome created people who were unjustifiably hostile to them, rode a wave of resentment all the way to the White House. (He just may ride it back there next year.) And in his wake, a number of people have come to understand that people's broad disaffection with their circumstances in life, and the idea that those circumstances are just and/or their own fault, offer them a path to fame and wealth. Of course, this didn't start with Donald Trump; but I do think that his sudden and somewhat unexpected success with it boosted it in a way that may not have happened had the votes in 2016 fallen in a slightly different manner.

A good number of journalists and political commentators don't seem to understand this. They understand liberal democratic institutions as the self-evidently correct way to go about things, and thus that people have a responsibility to them that overrides their own wants and needs. Perhaps it's a belief that progress should always move in one direction, such that any deviation from the correct path can only be the result of something being deeply wrong. But nothing in the world is genuinely self-evident. The changes that have occurred throughout human history have come from people pursuing what they understood their interests to be at the time; those who managed to succeed altered the landscape for those around them.

Even if one believes that things aught to be a certain way, that is not enough to bring it about. Rather, the state of the world is something that must be worked for. The American Left tends believe in their vision of pluralism, tolerance and diversity enough to demand that they be the norm, but not enough so to put concerted effort into showing they would work for everyone. Or, at least, for a large enough segment of the populace that there's a consistent majority who would vote to maintain them. The forces of illiberality understand their audience, and what their audience wants from them. Moreover, they also tend to understand how to prevent the opposition to them from actually being effective. Preaching to the choir podcasts are little more than a way to allow the audience to congratulate themselves on their commitment to what's right and proper. What's needed is action that shows people that a liberal democratic world is both necessary and sufficient to bringing people the lives they want to lead.