Kelly's Heroes

Donald Trump and John Kelly

We’re all Civil War re-enactors.  As the most dramatic and consequential chapter in our tortured racial history it compels our concern and provokes our passions. But we seem unable to deal with it maturely. Instead of facing it and learning from it, we succumb to its distortions and lies. Instead of settling it, it unsettles us. We fight it every single day, and it always wins. And on October 30, White House Chief of Staff, General John Kelly recklessly threw himself into that fight, responding to a question about Civil War monuments by saying:

I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now where it’s different today. But the lack of the ability to compromise led to the Civil War and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand with where their consciences had them make their stand.

But this is monumentally foolish. The entire history of the American republic before the Civil War is one of endless compromises aimed at reassuring the South that slavery would not be disturbed. The precipitating cause of the war was the election of a profoundly conciliatory and compromising president who merely wished to prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories, and promised to leave it alone in the states where it already existed.  We compromised our ideals for decades, but that ultimately proved incapable of preventing war with people prepared to fight to the death to maintain such a monstrous evil. And apparently we need to be reminded that General Lee (who was a gallant soldier, but a brutal slave-master) led an army intent on destroying the United State in the service of that evil.

But why do we need to be reminded? How does an intelligent person like Kelly manage to overlook such glaring truths? The easy answer from liberals is: deliberate racism. In this view Kelly finds Confederate generals admirable because they’re the heroes of white power over black bodies. Maybe he even likes slavery!  But this is cheap and irresponsible; there is no evidence that beneath Kelly’s bland exterior there beats a cold racist heart. Indeed, there’s a better, a more subtle explanation, and it’s the reverse of the liberal accusation. It’s not that Kelly admires men like Lee because of their white supremacy; it’s that he goes easy on their white supremacy because he admires them.  And he admires them because it’s too painful not to. That is, to admit Lee’s evil is to admit American evil and that’s something a conservative can never do. Slavery and racism are central to the American story, and the inability to accept that is central to American conservatism.

And what’s true for Kelly is true for the millions more – in the South and elsewhere – who perceive the Civil War in the same way. Some of them are indeed motivated by outright racism, but most are simply unable to concede that America committed such grievous crimes. It’s probably true that most people in most countries are similarly unable to face up to their own national sins. But Americans find it particularly painful, since we invest such emotion in the view of ourselves as noble and enlightened crusaders fighting for democracy and truth. How can the shining city on the hill have a rotten foundation?  Downplaying American racial sin to preserve American idealistic self-image is older than the republic itself.

Rutherford B. Hayes, who ascended to the presidency
in 1877 by agreeing to a backroom deal that ended the
federal guarantee of the rights of African Americans

It’s because the Civil War presents a direct threat to that self-image that we continue to fight over it so bitterly. And in the period after the war, known as Reconstruction, we dug ourselves deeper. When the South lost it faced a profound moral choice: either concede the horrible wrongness of its war aims, or preserve its self-image by pretending it fought for other more respectable reasons, and by suppressing the ex-slaves as lesser creatures whose rights need not be respected.  We all know what it chose. And, crucially, it asked the rest of the country to share its mythology. Or rather, it demanded widespread acceptance of that mythology as the price for white reconciliation. In effect, southern whites presented northern whites with a choice of their own, “Side with us or with our ex-slaves; you can’t have both.” And we all know what they chose. The mythology became the consensus, and black Americans paid the price.

Kelly, and the millions who agree with him, are still making that same choice. They callously disregard and minimize the death and destruction visited upon black people under slavery, Jim Crow, and even now, all to preserve white unity and white pride. But unsurprisingly, callousness is not a constructive strategy. It’s what impels conservative denial about the continuing harsh reality of black life in America today. It pushes whites toward white identity politics, even white nationalism, even outright racism. Its suppressed guilt makes conservatives bitter, defensive, resentful, angry.  It allows them to be manipulated by malevolent hucksters like Donald Trump. Conservative denial is the very poison that is killing us.

But liberals are immune because they’ve opted out of the old consensus. That’s what makes them liberals! Starting in the 1950’s and 60’s they determined to expand the New Deal economic and social success story – which had until then been limited to whites – to include all Americans.  In effect they rejected the white southern Reconstruction-era choice as a false one and determined to side with everyone.  But southern and conservative whites refused – even at this late a stage – to honestly face their historical and current crimes, and liberals, in frustration and desperation, gave up the project of shared prosperity.  After the Civil War, northern whites reconciled with southern whites and blacks suffered.  But now white liberals side with blacks and reconciliation suffers. We’re all Reconstruction re-enactors.

But that’s partly because liberal reluctance to surrender American unity has turned into wild-eyed enthusiasm.  Liberals are happy to see themselves as the good guys, the protectors and allies of black people, and even happier to see conservatives – particularly southern white conservatives – as the embodiment of all American evil. Increasingly, liberals see America itself as so essentially compromised by racial evil that anyone would be foolish and naive to bestow upon her any hope or loyalty. But liberal racial sanctimony, like conservative racial denial, is really about unresolved guilt, about attempting to remove oneself from American sin. Conservatives childishly pretend it doesn’t exist; liberals face it but project it entirely onto the political Other. Conservatives hold onto American idealism by denying it’s less than ideal, liberals hold onto it by psychologically and politically removing themselves from America. The liberal response is more forgivable, of course, since they do face the truth, and they do hold onto their idealism. But they do so at the cost of alienation from their own country, that is, from themselves. And that detachment makes it too easy to indulge the darker aspects of that idealism and go crusading against conservatives like Puritan ministers railing against Satan. But unsurprisingly, shaming is not a constructive strategy. But it is an inevitable one when you’ve concluded that the only way to hold onto your idealism is by rebuking your own country.

And that’s how we’ve hardened into our two sad, familiar camps, defined by our respective dysfunctional reactions to the horrible contradiction between our national ideals and our national crimes. But callous denial and aloof sanctimony are not our only options.  The only hope, and it’s a slim one, is for liberals to see the damage they do when they so fundamentally deplore their fellow countrymen. Liberals, as the conscience of America, must be the more mature party here. If they can face up to American sin, can’t they face up to their own? It’s true that many conservatives are still outright racist, but most are not, and calling them all racists and labeling them as essentially evil does enormous harm to our national life. It degrades the discourse and increases mistrust and resentment, it hardens people in their resistance.  It confuses the symptom, racial resentment, with the disease, national pride, and it angers people who simply want to believe in themselves and their country. It plays into the hands of white nationalists and unscrupulous politicians. Conservatives have foolishly conflated believing in America with believing America has never really done anything wrong, and they badly need to educate themselves on the distinction. Many, out of stubbornness or animus or ignorance, never will.  But many could, and liberals need to give them the space to do so.

And as liberals, the only effective way we can educate is by example. We can do all three things at once: hold onto our ideals, squarely face our country’s sins, and honestly accept that they’re our sins, that we’re inextricably American too. Honest judgment of American history will never get a fair hearing if it’s not joined to a deep commitment to America itself, since no one will hear criticism from someone they don’t trust. And we can be a little more forgiving of those who find it so difficult to hear.  If liberals cannot transcend their own misunderstandings, if they cannot graduate to a more mature and constructive engagement with our terrible history, if they can’t accept that redeeming America means redeeming actual Americans, and if they can’t meet them as equals and as fellow Americans – if they can’t do all this they won’t be honestly addressing our deepest problems; they’ll only be perpetuating them. 

The Third Party

These people are not conservatives

Conservatism is dead.  If you don’t believe me, listen to the man who killed it.  Here’s Donald Trump at a recent Republican event in California:

I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?

Let that sink in.  Since at least the time of Ronald Reagan the GOP has been the furiously self-proclaimed party of conservatism.  And in the last few years Tea Party grassroots conservatives have crusaded against their own Republican establishment for being insufficiently fanatical in ideology and tactics.  But now, when given the opportunity, those same grassroots true believers have chosen for their nominee a man who not only diverges markedly from conservative doctrine, but who explicitly dismisses conservatism as irrelevant!  What gives?

Trump’s triumph has rudely revealed that there are really two Republican Parties, both of whom think of themselves as the true conservatives and the other as traitors to the cause.  What we think of as traditional conservatism, the conservatism that has dominated the party for decades, the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan, is a program of free markets and free trade, scaling back the welfare-regulatory state, and maintaining American supremacy in the world.  Think of Reagan crushing the air-traffic controllers union or George W. Bush attempting to privatize Social Security.  The conservatives have a libertarian view of the federal government and a Social Darwinist view of capitalist success and failure.  Their core constituency is the investor class, and for decades these Reaganite conservatives have run the Republican Party, and they’ve run it for the benefit of that class, with the casual assurance that what benefits investors will eventually benefit everyone else.

But it turns out that much – perhaps even a majority – of the Republican constituency means something very different when they call themselves conservative.  For them conservatism means the blind conviction that America is the best country on Earth.  They see everyday, straight, white, Christian, American men, with their simple moral toughness, as the backbone of society and the best people in the world.  Some of those men regret the demise of the traditional American social structure, in which racial, sexual and religious minorities deferred to them, while some simply worry – not entirely without reason – that they’re now disdained and despised by American elites; and in practice the two perceptions readily blur together.  But either way, for decades the basic premise of this conservatism is that the social status of those men is unfairly under assault, and they’ve looked to the Reagan conservatives to protect and assert it. 

These white working class conservatives weren’t really interested in lowering capital gains tax rates or cutting Obamacare subsidies, though they made a good show of caring about such things.  Indeed, these conservatives actively support the welfare state; they’re all too anxious to receive the Social Security and Medicare benefits their Reaganite masters yearn to curtail.  And they particularly object to the free trade and lax immigration policies of the Reaganites, policies that send good jobs overseas and drive down wages at home.  But, for decades the conservative intelligentsia, in the think tanks and the magazines, on talk radio and Fox News, underwritten by big money, has worked to indoctrinate the grassroots in the intricacies of conservative dogma, while enforcing ideological rigidity among conservative politicians.  The populists may have been dissatisfied, but they couldn’t very well vote for liberals.

But Reaganite conservatism hasn’t kept its promises. Trump hasn’t really killed it, it was killed by its own abysmal failures, particularly the War in Iraq and the Great Recession.  It couldn’t survive its comprehensive inability to protect the interests and values of white working people.  It’s actually been dead since 2008, but tricked out to appear healthy with hefty doses of donor money, media bombast, and undying populist aversion to cultural liberalism and its racially and sexually suspicious beneficiaries.  What Trump has done is kill the illusion of conservatism.  As a man ignorant enough to overlook ideological considerations, rich enough to be indifferent to movement money, and self-assured enough (to put it mildly!) to dismiss received notions of propriety, he was perfectly constituted to override the conservative establishment and express and exploit the blunt instincts of those unhappy white populists, instincts he precisely shares.

And now that he’s exploited those instincts all the way to the nomination, they constitute the new conservatism.  The old conservatism, however, came to own the party through a very different strategy.  The Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatives had to fight for years against the moderate Eisenhower establishment Republicans who controlled the party in the post-war years, and who had made their peace with the New Deal and Cold War stalemate.  Convinced that both the welfare state and international communism could be aggressively rolled back, they worked the grassroots, the media, the think tanks, the elections, etc., as they slowly took over the party from the inside.  Their first big triumph was the nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964.  In 1968, segregationist and Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace pulled white southern conservative populists out of the New Deal coalition when he ran for president as an independent, and they never went back (not at the presidential level).  Richard Nixon – who brilliantly straddled

Governor Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to 
prevent the enrollment of black students 
at the University of Alabama, 1963

the moderate vs. conservative divide – added them and their white northern collaborators to his own coalition four years later.  At the same time, northern moderate and liberal Republicans – i.e. Eisenhower, Rockefeller and Lindsay Republicans – left the GOP for the Democratic Party.  And though Goldwater badly lost his general election, Nixon’s and Reagan’s cynical and skillful campaigning brought the white populists securely into the conservative movement and the Republican Party, leaving the Reaganites in charge.

But conservatism has now split in two, or rather it has reverted to its two naturally antagonistic groupings, with each side considering itself the heirs of Reagan and seeing the other as the successors of the hated Eisenhower-ish moderate establishment.  Both groups are technically conservative, given their belief in innate natural hierarchy.  And that means that neither group is really libertarian, or classically liberal, though some conservatives perceive themselves to be; in practice they don’t defend individual freedom against social coercion.  And neither group is Burkean, or classically conservative in the aristocratic European sense, in that neither affirms pragmatism or conciliation; both groups are intensely idealistic, even utopian, consisting of righteous, low-church crusaders working to create the City of God on Earth.  And both groups hold to a Social Darwinism that sees society’s winners as virtuously deserving their winnings.  It’s just that Trumpians believe that the natural aristocracy consists of those aforementioned straight, white, Christian, American men, while the Reaganites believe it’s successful capitalists.  Trumpism is about identity, Reaganism is about money.  And the Trumpians are less principled, more expedient, more willing to play dirty to advance the interests of their tribe.  Such is the logic of tribalism.

We can agree – with Donald Trump! – to call the Reaganites the True Conservatives, since they’ve claimed the title for so long, and they probably are closer to the classically conservative Burkean ideal, with their worship of plutocrats as aristocrats born to rule at home and abroad.  A true Burkean would condemn Reaganite worship of free markets as destabilizing and intemperate.  But a true Burkean would even more forcefully reject Trumpian recklessness and thoughtlessness; as he would reject Trumpian majoritarianism, not because it fails to respect liberal individual rights, but because it fails to defer to its rightful aristocratic masters.  So even with their right-wing inegalitarianism, it’s fair to call the Trumpians Populists, since they share much substance with left-wing populists, in particular instinctual embrace of the popular and the everyday, and animosity toward the rich and powerful.

Given these ideological incompatibilities and conservatism’s abject policy failures, it was quite likely that something like Trumpism would come along and topple Reaganism from its precarious perch at the top of the GOP.  But the Trumpian revolt, unlike the Reaganite overthrow of the moderates, has occurred in one fell swoop.  That’s because they didn’t have to conquer someone else’s party; they didn’t have to convert anyone, or bring in like-minded outsiders, or drive out ideological opponents.  The party has been theirs for the asking all along.

Of course, the Reaganites fought against the Trumpian takeover tooth and nail, caucus vote by delegate count, negative ad by convention rule.  They’ve been on top so long, and they’ve spent so much time and energy convincing themselves they’re America’s ordained saviors, they can’t let go of the political party meant to be the instrument of that salvation.  And there are still Reaganites among the grassroots; that’s who voted for Ted Cruz.  Some have accepted their new subordinate status within the exotic new right-wing order and are supporting Trump as an evil lesser than Hillary.  But some diehards are promising to sit out the general election, some are working to deny Trump the presidency, some are considering a true conservative third-party campaign, and some are so unhappy with Trump they say they’ll even vote for Hillary!  Of course, much of the Reaganite opposition to Trump has less to do with the Trumpian program and more to do with the man himself, with his flagrant irresponsibility and doltish ignorance.  Though it’s hard not to wonder if some of those never-Trump folks would so adamantly oppose an irresponsible and doltish nominee who toed the Reaganite line.  After all, most of them defended Sarah Palin.

But Trumpism – with or without the man himself – is here to stay.  Reaganism is dead.  Because of its complex of think tanks and media outlets, the Reaganites will continue to make noise and influence the discourse for some time to come.  But for a long time to come, no GOP nominee will be openly advocate free trade or looser immigration policies.  And many supposedly conservative politicians and media personalities have already happily pledged support for Trump, demonstrating that they were really populists – or shameless opportunists – all along.  Even some of the right-wing media and think-tank crowd have turned out to be populists.  Some politicians, like Paul Ryan, are trying to finesse the differences.  Rush Limbaugh has shown himself just as brilliant at straddling the present-day Reaganite-Trumpian divide as Nixon was at straddling the Eisenhower-Reaganite divide of his day.  When there are full-fledged, self-consciously right-wing populist think tanks to confront the Reaganite ones, the dying roar of Reaganism will wind down to a whisper.

In the grand history of the United States, it may turn out that the ultimate role of modern conservatism will be to give birth to a powerful and resentful white populist nationalism.  Nixon and Reagan thought they had stolen Wallace’s power, but maybe all they really did was unleash it.  It’s likely that Trump is the Goldwater of right-wing populism, not it’s Reagan, and he’ll come in for a solid defeat in November.  But a smarter, shrewder, more presentable Trump is waiting in our future.  We may be saved from that coming populist Reagan by the continuing demographic shifts transforming our society, shifts that seem likely to make white nationalism an electoral dead end (at least at the presidential level).  But can anyone – other than demagogues, fanatics, and fools – desire greater racial polarization and animosity?  A popular white nationalist movement, even one with no chance of winning the presidency, can bring nothing but division and destruction and horror.  And, for the moment, it’s a white nationalist movement with a reckless sideshow clown as its leader. We stare, more starkly than we have in a long time, into the sinister side of our collective unconscious; we walk dangerously close to the edge of the deep, dark American abyss, with little more than Hillary and her bland, neo-liberal platitudes to keep us from falling directly in. 

The Great Comeuppance

Poetic Justice with bad hair

The conservative shuffle over to populism has finally broken into a run.  Unending economic hardship and liberal cultural triumph have torn the white middle class away from their neglectful conservative masters.  While those affluent overlords were swooning over no-capital-gains-tax fantasies and drinking themselves deep of Social Darwinist ideological purity, their downscale cousins were weathering decades of lowered wages and lowered expectations.  The America those workers knew, that sustained them and valued them, has been dying, and they’ve become desperate for a solution.  Now a large section of the supposedly conservative base supports a candidate who has argued for raising taxes and lowering pay for the rich, who opposes free trade and cuts to social welfare programs, and who condemns the influence of money in politics.  Donald Trump is what happens when the interests and sensibilities of such a large constituency are consistently ignored, marginalized and disdained.   Trump is the blowback from conservative failure.

Conservatism has always had a troubled relationship with its own base.  Modern American conservatism began in the 1950’s as a small intellectual movement that coalesced around National Review magazine, which argued over such things as whether the great British conservative Edmund Burke supported tradition per se, or as a means to protect ordered liberty.  They wrote homages to the British ruling class and Generalissimo Franco’s enthusiastically Catholic fascism – hardly positions likely to garner widespread support in a country with such a small-d democratic political culture.  Their anti-welfare-state positions gave them ready-made supporters among the rich and the business community, but little more.

So they went shopping for a constituency.  Their first lucky break was McCarthyism.  The conservatives were staunch anti-communists (opposed to socialism in general and Stalinism in particular) and they were quite happy to support a demagogue who accused liberal Democrats of being Soviet spies.  But McCarthyism was about more than overblown fear of communist subversion, it was also a movement of small town working whites against supposedly unpatriotic Northeastern establishment technocrats.  It was the first stirring of right-wing populism since the decline of the Father Coughlin and the America First crowd in the early 40’s.  That is, it was a base of support conservatives could use to attack the New Deal.

But McCarthyism collapsed and the conservative movement had to keep shopping.  This time they found a more reliable constituency: segregationists.  Opponents of civil rights shared conservative hostility toward the liberal federal government, and conservative’s natural deference to traditional social hierarchy meant they had no compunction about throwing their intellectual heft behind an explicit defense of white supremacy.  In the internal Republican fights of early 1960’s they supported Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a thoroughgoing conservative who forged an alliance of business interests and segregationists by strongly denouncing both the New Deal and civil rights legislation.  By the time Goldwater had become the Republican nominee in 1964, the ideology of modern American conservatism had hardened into implacable resistance against the three main threats to traditional American order: international communism, the welfare state, and racial integration.  Conservatism was now an alliance of the capitalist class and white supremacists, held together by a program of resistance to the federal government.

As the 1960’s progressed and liberation movements sprung up for not just blacks, but for women, Latinos, gays, etc. conservative opposition to racial equity broadened into opposition to all egalitarian social movements.   Shrewd Republican politicians like Nixon and Reagan rode white middle class resentment of those movements all the way to the White House.  The segregationists became the Moral Majority, then the Conservative Coalition and, finally, the Tea Party; but they were always the same rightward-leaning portion of the white working and middle class base, afraid of social change and looking to conservative politicians to halt it.

To achieve political influence and power, conservatism turned itself from a genteel ruling class intelligentsia into a broad populist movement.  But it sold its soul to do so.  It chose expediency over intellectual integrity, and it consistently appealed to the darker impulses of its base.  As the situation called for it, it invoked the threat of Stalinist feds, shiftless Negroes, family-hating feminists, child-molesting gays, welfare bums, union thugs, etc.  It portrayed liberals as snooty, condescending, feminized aristocrats, sipping lattes, nibbling French cheese, disdaining working class values and wasting working class tax dollars on undeserving populations.  Conservatism excused, justified, and encouraged the worst American instincts, and thereby undermined its self-proclaimed project of moral renewal.  It became gutter populism.

Gutter populism in the service of cynical capitalism, that is. In policy, conservatives stuck to reducing the social safety net, de-regulating the market, and allowing the unobstructed flow of capital, goods, jobs and workers around the world.  The cliché has it that conservative politicians promised the base they would protect traditional family values while all they were really interested in was free-market economics.  That’s true of course.  Reagan made the decision early in his presidency to prioritize undoing the New Deal, not the Sexual Revolution.  But it’s not just that conservative office-holders fought half-heartedly against abortion while fighting like demons for upper-end tax cuts; it’s that they pursued economic policies – free trade, relaxed immigration, social insurance privatization, de-unionization – that working people generally oppose!  And working people haven’t been too crazy about the results of those policies: stagnating wages, the replacement of high-paying manufacturing jobs with low-paying service jobs, the immiseration of small-town and rural America.  At the end of the day, conservatives gave them nothing.

To keep working whites in their electoral coalition, conservatives had to do two contrary things: keep the populist fires of resentment and paranoia burning high, but keep them from spreading over into resentment of the rich.  They called a market-friendly healthcare plan socialism; they warned of death panels; they questioned the first black president’s religion and birthplace – all to frighten and anger the base.  They insisted the terrible liberal threat justified the most ruthless tactics – shutting down the government, undermining the government’s credit, stonewalling all compromise – and condemned as insufficiently conservative anyone who dissented.  And all the while they denounced resentment of the rich as envy, progressive taxes as class warfare, reliance on social insurance as irresponsibility, and the slightest trace of pragmatism or moderation as profoundly un-American.

Needless to say, it’s not easy to both intensify and contain populist passion.  Eventually, something had to give.  In theory, conservatives could have directed economic policy more toward middle class interests, as many reformicons have been urging.  But no, that would have undercut the central premise of American conservatism, that individual wealth results from the highest personal virtue.  And for a long time it seemed that thoroughgoing ideological conservatism was spreading and consolidating among the white middle class.  Tea Party activists sure made a good show of hating government programs.  But no, both the traditional populism of American whites and their own real and pressing material interests made genuine widespread conservatism improbable. We are led to the startling revelation that a great deal of the conservative base has never really been conservative.  In particular, they never accepted the notion that what is good for the rich is always good for the rest of us.  It turns out they hate Wall Street as much as they hate Washington and Harvard and Hollywood.  This has all been a terrible shock to the conservative chattering classes.  After spending decades indoctrinating the rubes, firing up their hatred of the liberal establishment and the cultural establishment and the Republican establishment, those rubes now direct that hatred, ironically enough, at their real enemies, those alleged conservative masters themselves!  Working whites have stopped pretending to be conservatives, they’ve stopped fooling both the conservative movement and themselves, and they’ve gone home.

To be precise, they’ve come to the realization that American elites don’t really give a damn about them.  Conservatives promised American unity, prosperity and peace, all while inviting jobs overseas, allowing banks to crash the economy, and invading a country that posed no threat to us.  They carelessly discarded American jobs, American prosperity, American lives, and – maybe worst of all – American promise.  The sold it all for a few extra points on the Dow.

But liberals haven’t done much better.  Conservatives may have had ulterior motives for accusing liberals of elitist condescension, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong.  Since the time of Jefferson and Jackson, American populism was generally a phenomenon of the left, i.e. regular people fighting against exploitation by a rich and powerful elite.  But American populism ruptured in the 60’s when the Civil Rights movement put liberals and working whites at odds.  This is the part of the story we didn’t mention above: conservatives were able to attract large number of whites in the 60’s and 70’s because liberals were so willing to let them go.  At first liberals had tried to turn economic populism for whites into economic populism for everyone.  But many whites resisted full racial equality and began voting for thoroughly conservative politicians who, as we noted, were quite happy to profit from white resentment.  Liberals abandoned the project of broadly shared prosperity and instead focused on cultural emancipation for everyone who wasn’t a straight, white male.  That emancipation was and is a tremendously worthwhile goal, but excesses in pursuit of that goal further alienated the white working class that until then had been the heart of the liberal base.  Liberals and whites walked away from each other, each convinced the other had shown itself to be unworthy of friendship.

We still live amongst the wreckage of that Great Rupture.  Race, as always in American life, has poisoned everything.  Post-60’s liberals, twisted round by white guilt, abandoned sober color-blind integration for the romance of black nationalism and multiculturalism.  They rejected the heroic and hard task of assimilating blacks into the American mainstream and settled instead for the cheap tokenism of affirmative action.  That is, they chose sanctimony over results.  And, crucially, they condemned all dissent as abject racism.  They so over-reacted to rampant racism, militarism, fundamentalism and patriarchy that they started to wonder if there was something dark lurking at the heart of American culture.  They became suspicious of patriotism and religion and the military per se, and even of the American people themselves.  They adopted a host of problematic cultural attitudes – post-patriotic, post-religious, post-color-blind, post-gender – that were unpalatable to middle America.  They still pushed for programs to help workers – universal healthcare, family leave – but they came to culturally mistrust the very people their economic policies were designed to help.  And after a while they even abandoned those policies.  Many became New Democrats like Bill Clinton, promoting privatization and free trade and curtailing government programs.  They rejected American culture from the left and pro-worker policies from the right.  They became caricature anti-populists.

All these concerns come together perfectly on immigration.  This is one issue on which conservative and liberal ideologues agree: the more immigration, the better.  Conservatives are happy to remove constraints on the labor market, and consequently drive down wages and benefits.  And their free-market dogmatism prevents them from seeing the economic injury caused by flooding the market with cheap labor.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by the lazy and irresponsible desire to avoid honest competition, and nothing matters more to a conservatives than allowing competition to prove one’s moral worth.  Meanwhile, liberals are eager to prove their humanitarian virtue by rejecting any American immigration policy that might particularly benefit Americans.  Their love for the foreign poor blinds them to the damage done to their own countrymen.  Indeed, their cosmopolitan detachment protects them from any pedestrian concerns about American workers or – grab the smelling salts! – American culture.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by racism, and nothing matters more to liberals than proving they’re not racist.  Conservatives have no consideration for American workers as workers, but liberals have no consideration for them as Americans. 

And working people of all races are starting to understand that the people running the country are not looking out for them.  Indeed, when you consider the takeover of American politics by rich donors, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that almost nothing constrains elites from pursuing policies that actively hurt working people.  And history and ideology have conspired to leave working people, and working whites particularly, with no responsible leadership.  Both conservatives and liberals pretend to be populists during election time, and liberals even make half-hearted attempts to help working people; but there is no political movement that fights for the interests of American workers as American workers.  Indeed, elites would condemn as vulgar and unrespectable any politics that was both patriotic and pro-worker.

This is where the white middle and working classes finds themselves.  Liberals have abandoned them to the gutter populism in which conservatives have so cynically invited them to indulge.  And behold the result: Donald Trump, the genuine gutter populist!  Decades of gutter populist propaganda, combined with genuine economic pain, and good old-fashioned Puritan paranoia have left working whites bitter, angry and desperate.  Many of them are still right-wing populists, fearing blacks and feminists and gays and Muslims.  That hasn’t changed just because they now perceive the damage that conservative policy has done them.  That’s why they should gravely worry us.  And following Trump won’t exactly improve that.

Looking for a real leader

But they love Donald Trump because he perfectly speaks to their fear and desperation.  He shares their deepest instincts: that it’s regular working Americans who make America prosper, that America is strong and good and our standing in the world should reflect that, that economic and political elites have been ignoring those first two points, and at their peril.  Unfortunately, he also shares their darker instincts: that America is morally superior to every other country, that regular Americans are the best people in the world, particularly straight, white, Christian, male breadwinners.  He’s been rightly called the American id, the strutting embodiment of all those impulses.  But part of the reason his shtick works so well is that he’s little more than id himself!  He lacks a coherent ideology or set of policies because all he has are those nationalist instincts and a gigantic, monumental, indestructible faith in both them and himself.  He’s not just looking out for working white people, in cultural sensibility he is them, but independent and strong enough to fight like hell.  He’s not just a genuine gutter populist, he’s a determined gutter populist.  They delight in his irrepressible contempt for decent propriety.  He’s the cocksure naughty boy, breaking all the rules, smirking as the children cheer, and sneering at the grownups who try to shame him.  He is the national will to tear everything down and dance on the rubble.

We may even see – God help us! – President Donald Trump if enough independents feel sufficiently marginalized and desperate.  But it need not have been this way.  It’s conceivable – isn’t it? – that  we could have had a constructive and enlightened populism, one that picked itself up out of the gutter and fought for the interests of all American working people.  Or does the damnable intransigence of racial hostility make that impossible?  Both conservatism and liberalism, in their current forms, have eagerly exploited and exacerbated that hostility.  Neither is capable of addressing the current crisis, which is at bottom a crisis of political imagination.  Both are too rigid, too wedded to blind and implausible ideologies, too comfortable in their institutional power, too removed from the realities of American life.  They fight their petty, scripted battles over the heights of American society, while the foundation rots beneath their feet.  They have become irrelevant.

It’s unclear where working whites will go now.  They broke with conservatism when they came to understand that the system cannot be indifferent; it can only work for them or against them.  That is, they now know – in their experience and in their bones – that their economic condition is a function of more than just their own actions.  When they make this simple fact an explicit doctrine and a rallying cry and an organizing principle then they will have become full populists.  What they will do with that populism, whether it will be a force for preserving and promoting the best of America, or whether it will degrade and destroy – we don’t know yet.  Only disaster can result if they allow leaders like Trump to drag them further into the gutter.  They have the potential to become a powerful force for unmediated white authoritarianism, and that’s an outcome too awful to contemplate.

If there is to be a constructive populist alternative, an inclusive, color-blind, mature populism, it can ultimately come only from a reconstructed liberalism.  Bernie Sanders has taken liberalism halfway there, with his stress on economic concerns over cultural ones, and his nascent and inchoate economic nationalism.  The rupture between liberalism and white working people must be reconciled, and that can only happen when liberals come to understand the centrality of our shared American identity.  And maybe a program of working class unity could reduce racial tension.  Maybe such a movement could address our actual problems and offer real solutions.  Maybe it could remind us all who we are to each other, what we owe each other, and what we can accomplish together.  Maybe it could elicit the better angels of our nature.  And maybe, finally, it could tell us how we can be healed.

Iraqi Reality and Conservative Denial

Jeb Bush cannot escape his brother's record

When Jeb Bush was asked on Fox News whether he would have ordered the invasion of Iraq knowing what we know now, he fumbled badly, but he crystallized a new conservative consensus on the issue.  That consensus consists of two points.  First, the intelligence available at the time was unmistakable that Saddam had an active WMD program and had ties to al Qaeda.  Second, the Bush administration’s acceptance of that faulty intelligence and its decision to invade was an honest mistake, a mistake that any reasonable person would have made given that intelligence.  The inescapable conclusion (though some still try to escape it) is that we should not have invaded, that the momentous cost did not cover the dubious benefit.  Other than pathological denialists, everyone now accepts that conclusion, and there’s a definite satisfaction in such a broad acceptance of a truth that had for so long been so strenuously denied.  This is big: movement conservatives now admit the war was wrong.

But despite conservative progress on this issue, there’s still a long way to go.  That is, the two points of the conservative consensus are simply false; they’re evasions, alibis that allow conservatives to concede the undeniable folly of the war without conceding that Bush and his advisors were the source of the folly.  But they were.  They deliberately pushed the country into war and misrepresented the facts to do so, and most conservatives were complicit in that dishonesty.  And if Bush was merely misled – instead of wrong or foolish or dishonest – then why weren’t we all misled?  Many people, most of them liberals, understood the weakness of the case against Saddam at the time, and tried desperately to stop the war before it began.  The new conservative consensus concedes those people were right, but it provides no explanation why.  More importantly, given that the wrongness, foolishness and dishonesty of the war were all too apparent at the time, why did anyone support the war?

Consider the different categories of supporters.  The naïve: those who trusted the president, as Americans generally do on questions of war and peace.  The cowed: those afraid to appear weak on defense issues.  The vengeful: those whose rage at the humiliation of 9/11 had not been assuaged by the war in Afghanistan.  The bullies: those eager to throw around American weight, to prove we’re still the big boys.  The obsessed: neo-conservatives and their ideological companions, who had been fixated on the destruction of Saddam since the First Iraq War of 1991.

But why were neo-cons, and conservatives in general, so obsessed with Saddam, so eager to go to war that they ignored the facts?  Many neo-cons had been making the case for years that America needed to reassert herself militarily, that American might, resolutely asserted, could help pacify a chaotic world.  And, more importantly, it would bring America back to those martial virtues – self-sacrifice, fortitude, resolve, assurance – that had made her great.

Those virtues had been undermined by the self-doubt and timidity that had overcome us after the failure of Vietnam.  Yes, Vietnam.  Other than the relatively minor Iraq war of ’91, we had not kicked ass in any serious way since the fall of Saigon.  Before Vietnam, almost no American doubted the manifest truths of American exceptionalism, that America and Americans were morally superior to other countries, that our military actions are always justified and always motivated by pure benevolence, that we were always victorious because we were good and God was on our side.  It’s all quite foolish, of course, but it’s not easy to give up the fairy tales of childhood, even our national childhood.

But conservatives are determined to never give them up.  And 9/11 afforded them the perfect opportunity to reassert them.  Our enemies were purely evil, our massacred countrymen were entirely innocent, and the barbaric and vicious attack on our homeland filled us with righteous wrath; the dead called out for justice and our wounded pride called out for vindication.  But, the subsequent destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that had protected and nurtured al Qaeda did not satisfy that wrath.  Why not?  Maybe it was because it didn’t include American troops marching into a defeated enemy capital and instituting honest American administration.  Nothing can compete with the sight of American boys confidently parading through the rubble of Tokyo and Berlin.  So Saddam could be the new Hitler and Baghdad the new Berlin.

A president looking tough

But somehow, inexplicably, it all went wrong.  The natives refused to be pacified.  They broke out in savage fighting, among themselves, and against those honest American boys.   Conservatives hadn’t buried Vietnam, they’d exhumed it.  Vietnam had been a study in hubris, but Iraq was a study in denial, the determined refusal to accept the lessons of Vietnam.  And long after the successful invasion turned into a failed counter-insurgency, conservatives refused to accept that a complex reality had defeated their simple dreams.  But now – thank God! – they’ve arrived at a way to think about the war that preserves their American mythology.  You see, it wasn’t just Bush who was misled by the intelligence.  The new consensus doesn’t just exonerate Bush, it exonerates America.  So much rests upon that thin reed of “faulty” intelligence!

And really, it exonerates conservatism.  Or rather, it’s a failed attempt to exonerate it.  Because, at bottom, the conservative instincts of unreflective assurance and belligerence – shared by elite neo-cons and grassroots conservatives – were the real source of the Iraq disaster.  Bush’s faults are the faults of conservatism itself: the elevation of action over reflection, brazenness over wisdom, toughness over prudence, appearing tough over being tough.  These are the faults of wounded adolescent pride, and they are the faults of American excess.  The real question that needs to be asked of presidential candidates and of anyone with any influence over American foreign policy is not, “What would you have done if you had know then what we know now?”, nor even “Why did you support the war at the time?”  The real question is “Do you share those foolish instincts and honor that discredited mythology?”  Because anyone who does, or surrounds himself with advisers who do, should be mistrusted and rebuked, and disqualified from high office.