I want to challenge some of his conclusions — which feels a little bit cheap because I don’t claim any better vision of the ground ahead for US politics. But his essay raises a number of questions, and I hope that they may help understand the broader project, so I’m starting with the final entry.
Appropriate Pessimism?
First, as context Burke, is broadly pessimistic about about politics. Seeing the broader sweep of liberal change run aground with no obvious way to re-invigorate it.
To speak in this moment about how to remake a sociopolitical structure of feeling that follows on and reimagines the liberal-progressive mindset that I believe has more or less finally come to the end of its viability must in some way seem less like an agenda and more like a thought-experiment, wishful thinking meant for a time other than the one we live in.
I suspect many of our differences may be primarily ones of emphasis and temperament. I share many of Burke’s concerns, but I am generally more optimistic. I suspect that the normal practice of trying to muddle through as best we can will be mostly adequate. It will be far from the best possible solution; many people will struggle or die compared to a world in which we had ideal ability to plan, strategize, and coordinate.
Compared to Burke I would say that the presence of a number of serious problems does not imply that we are seeing a complete collapse or that, “the Democratic Party as it stands needs to be torn down and rebuilt, as part of a general remaking and refurbishment of a liberal-progressive structure of feeling.”
In other words, if both Burke and I think that we’re in a boat that’s taken on water, I would be inclined to bail and check the seams rather than preparing the lifeboats1.
Red Queens Race?
From that perspective he repeats a version of a line I had been skeptical of before:
[The present Democratic Party] is led by people almost wholly out of touch with the on-the-ground realities of their own coalition, the ramshackle alliance the party tries to assemble every two years to win re-election. At the top, the party only understands that coalition through the lens of campaign experts, fundraisers, and pollsters. They perform gestures towards their base the way a pinball player jostles the machine and hopes to avoid tilting—they know the angles, they know where the triple-bonus points are. The voters are down there in the machine, the political class is up there hitting the buttons. But the pinball machine needs service: some of the bumpers don’t work anymore, there are magnets pulling the ball between the flippers, and the tilt has become way more sensitive.
This prompts a number of questions. First, and perhaps least important, who exactly does Burke imagine as the liberal-progressive coalition, and how is that defined?
Second, how much does what Burke is describing feel like a surprise or are these perennial challenges. It can be useful to look at international comparisons. Burke is addressing the situation in the U.S., but is aware that these are international trends.
I was recently reminded of Peter Mair’s Ruling The Void, which describes precisely these problems. My memory is limited, but I will rely on this summary
Mair’s contention is that this has become a hollow victory. Our notion of democracy, he explains, is being “steadily stripped of its popular component”. In particular, political parties are dying, with alarming consequences. Reasonably static until 1980 (except in the UK, where it was already falling), party membership almost halved in the ‘80s and ‘90s. By the millennium, the average total party membership in a Western democracy was around 5% of the population, approximately a third of what it was in the 1960s. … The decline has slowed now, but only because there is nowhere left to go.
This trend was not only severe but also ubiquitous. “Mass politics rarely moves in concert”, Mair notes, but there is true cross-national convergence here, and it doesn’t end with party membership. Anti-political sentiments abound. Party allegiance (not membership but the more general sense of ‘being’ Tory, Labour, Social Democrat, etc.) has fallen. Support for parties of protest has increased. Electoral turnout has also declined, although nothing like as precipitously as party membership. Average Western European turnout fell from 82% in the early 1990s to 76% today (though it remains much higher than in the US). Electoral troughs in this period were unusually deep: 11 of 15 European democracies recorded their lowest ever turnout since 1990. All in all, we honour democracy more in rhetoric than in reality.
While it’s possible to identify specific strategic and tactical mistakes on the part of political parties a 60-year cross-national trend suggests broader forces at work. One element of any story about common interests becoming less popular is simply that there are more options for how people spend their time, how they find community, and where they locate meaning in their life. I also think that Dan Davies comment about business which I recently quoted applies to government and political parties as well.
Every new idea in management seems to come as a reaction to the previous generation’s attempts to find the right way to solve these two problems without taking on too much in the way of overhead costs. And for the same reason, the management practices of the previous decades will always seem hilariously dated. The complexity of the environment is always increasing, and technological progress means that there will always be new ways of getting information from where it is generated to where decisions are taken.
We may be in a Red Queen's race in which institutions are constantly under stress as they try to adapt to a more complex environment.
A Force That Gives Us Meaning?
I would also ask how Burke is thinking of politics and what are the inputs or outputs? We can talk about politics as a process of making policy decisions — in which the inputs are candidates, parties, activists, elections and the outputs are laws and regulations. There is another sense in which politics is the act of living in community — the inputs are individual lives and the outputs are a sense of citizenship, of shared purpose, history, and collective future.
I have the impression that Burke is more concerned with the latter but it occasionally reads as if he sees the failure of citizenship as reflecting policy mistakes, and I think that confuses two fairly different conceptions of politics. I think there are challenges at both levels, and they are likely to have different solutions and that it’s worth being attentive to those differences.
Burke is interested in what it means to try to be politically engaged in a constructive way. He wants to look beyond the immediate fights of the day:
Even if we are thrown back into a situation where our sociopolitical lives are about reacting to and surviving an order of things that is relentlessly hostile to our existence, I think there is value to asking—even as a thought experiment—what we need to be in order to be viable, coherent, and relevant in the present. To not put the work of reconstruction just on the party leaders, with us waiting patiently for the roll-out as if we are passive consumers who have paid for a service.
I offer an extended quote to give a sense of what issues concern him, and how he constructs the thought experiment.
First, that in this structure of feeling, the local should matter most to how you think about the problems you want fixed, the relationships you need to sustain most, the help you want from the world beyond your world. You should be living where you are, making a life in place. . . . global scales of life affect us profoundly, but we can’t live with a social world that is global. We have no institutions of global life prepared to respond to community needs or will, no emotional and intersubjective infrastructure to act through.
…
The only way you really learn what other people think is by being a person in place, unperformatively and unpracticed. By showing up and being where you are entitled to be, just as you are, your principles, passion and social being fully visible and inhabited, not playacting in a game of discursive beneficience that you otherwise don’t feel or work from. You need to be who you are wherever you are, unannounced, unheralded, without engraved invitations or a sponsoring non-profit community group.
…
A thought that extends from this one: the notion of a politics that is instantiated online, coordinated online, realized online, has been a death trap for the liberal-progressive mindset. You have to be online to learn things, to manage reputations, to cultivate cultural longings and conversation, to promote yourself and your work, to be aware of threats and possibilities that are developing somewhere else. But politically, or in the coordination of sociality? Online is an energy vampire: it absorbs, it smothers, it tricks, it diverts.
There’s much to like in that vision but I’ll note that it isn’t a solution to the problems mentioned above. I think there’s value in trying to take a longer view but this seems to handwave away many of the earlier concerns. For example, the essay opened by talking about the (national) Democratic party but that vision of localism would suggest largely ignoring the national party and working on other things.2
Secondly what strikes me is how much that vision reminds me of conservatives who have been appalled by Trump and seeking alternatives. For example I remember David French making the rounds for Divided We Fall which argued for localism as a way out of divisive national arguments3. But it particularly makes me think of
‘s writing on “The Permanent Problem” in which he tries to imagine a path towards economic independence and away from an oppressive monoculture.All of the above leads me to the conclusion that capitalism has overshot. To achieve the goal of material plenty, mass mobilization into a vast, impersonal system of market-mediated specialization and exchange was essential. But to move from here to mass flourishing, we need to recognize that this system has been carried too far. We currently expect that most able-bodied adults will organize their lives around paid employment, with all the burdens on vital personal relationships which that imposes, despite the fact that for most people paid employment does not provide adequate economic security, development of capacities, sense of control, status, or satisfaction. Rising to the challenge of the permanent problem requires that we find a better way.
I am skeptical about the practical challenges of realizing his ideas, but it makes me curious to what extent Burke sees common ground among people outside of the, “liberal-progressive mindset”
The correct width of a margin?
I find myself conflicted about the question of trying to root politics in specifically local connections. On one hand, it has a lot of appeal. I grew up listening to a number of political singer/songwriters4. That milieu also had a strong tendency towards localism for both political reasons, and as part of the Folk Revival. For example I was recently listening to a 1988 song by Charlie King & Martha Leader (who sang a number of political and labor songs) with the chorus, “We’re Newfoundlanders not Canadians, not by a damn sight yet.”
But, as I’ve aged I wonder to what extent that impulse works better as a critique than an organizing principle. It’s worth encouraging people to build and be active in local community and local institutions, and that requires some persuasion. As Burke notes it’s far too easy to be absorbed by discussions of national politics that are largely passive5. Yet, now, I also think about a comment by Tom Nichols6
I once wrote that after Trump’s election I could never be as partisan as I once was. I was sometimes radicalized by some of the positions of the left, adopting the mirror image of their extremism as a way of staking out my own turf. In so doing I probably pushed others to the left, in the stupid synergy of tribalism that is now out of control. There was an unseriousness to this kind of dueling-with-hand-grenades, and I was part of it.
Back then, this kind of partisanship didn’t seem like a problem: In the Before Times, we still argued over politics instead of whether communist Muslims had taken over our Venezuelan voting machines with help from the Italian space program. I felt like it was safe to throw elbows and do some partisan high-sticking; I believed that we were all in a giant bouncy house called the Constitution, a place where we might bump skulls or sprain an ankle now and then but where there were no sharp edges and there were only soft landings.
I don’t believe that anymore.
I feel a bit of that concern reading Burke’s essay. It is absolutely true that, “we can’t live with a social world that is global” but I would feel much more comfortable imagining a new localism if I thought that the broader global society was functional — if I thought of it as expanding the margins and creating space for people to live with less anonymity and more connection. But I’m less comfortable thinking of it as a lifeboat escaping a broader collapse7.
I don’t share Burke’s pessimism but, to the extent I do, I’m not sure that the proposed solution alleviates that concern.
Finally — In all of this, I am focusing on the parts of Burke’s essay that raise questions for me. But there is much more in his writing which is smart and inspiring. It’s worth reading the whole thing
So that is really what we need: a mindset that puts everyone who holds it into view and into relation, where solving your own problems and making yourself well and whole are always already part of solving our problems and making ourselves well and whole.
I might also reference Timothy Burke’s prior essay Fighting For the Ancien Regime
Because we didn’t see our ties to the establishment as virtue and we didn’t understand that our forms of power were important for defending what we had already achieved, because we had a reflexive and attachment to the idea that we were in no way powerful, that our share of the status quo could only be found in some future progress, never even partially achieved, we were unready to wake up in the year 2016 and discover that we were not only a part of an ancien regime threatened by a mob, but that we actually wanted to defend that regime rather than rush to join the mob at the barricades. It would have been better if we’d defended it that way long before this moment. But it will help even now if we recognize that this is part of what we’re doing: defending a structure of manners, of virtues, of practices, of expectations, of constraints and outcomes, against people who either don’t recognize that this structure is important for them or from people who genuinely do not benefit from that structure.
I’m overstating this slightly. While I was working on this post I saw this hilarious piece from W. Kamau Bell which uses as a metaphor for National politics a scene in which the band Metallica is facing a dilemma which he summarizes.
The band breaks up, and the individual members deal with the inevitable pain that comes with a break-up.
The band stays together… and the collective deals with the inevitable pain that comes with that.
Part of what I’m seeing as a tension in Burke’s essay may simply reflect the fact that there is no painless solution.
One challenge is that it isn’t really possible to unilaterally opt out of national politics.
The Kamau Bell essay linked in footnote 2 touches on this as well.
It occurs to me that this is a trope of cyberpunk fiction; a small number of protagonists living in the shadow of the faceless mega-corps an dystopian arcologies.
I don't know and I can't say—all I can say is that repudiating Progressivism is the wrong path. In the U.S. in particular the term is a slur, thanks in no small part to Clinton NeoLiberals who fling it about like Joe McCarthy did "Communism!", because the people it most benefits have been brainwashed into thinking it means a lack of choices, painful taxation, and heavy oppression.
The first person I saw who seemed able to make the people who reject Progressive ideas and principles rethink their stance, even a little, was Sen. Bernie Sanders—he didn't say it was easy, he didn't say it would be cheap, but he DID say with everybody pulling together we could succeed. Watching a not-insignificant number of Republicans discuss supporting an old man who openly admits to being a "Democratic Socialist", not because they necessarily believe what he's offering but because they believe him, was a welcome shock and pleasant surprise for me.
By contrast, what his primary opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton offered was "More of the Same that You Hate So Much Because it Benefits me! Me! ME!"—she didn't even get behind raising the Minimum Wage until she saw how popular it was with voters when BERNIE did it, because it might make corporate profits a bit less bloated....
Joe Biden has, all things considered, leaned closer to Bernie than Hillary as President—not near close ENOUGH, but further than I believed he was capable of bending. That's why I'm willing to give him a second chance, especially given the alternative is Donald "Looney Tunes Hitler" Trump.
I ride hard for Bernie Sanders, because he's willing to work for people like my largely-Republican family, and convince them that his solutions WORK. Unfortunately he's old—older than Joe Biden, who is being beaten down by the Mainstream Media narrative that he's a doddering senile fool, while conveniently handwaving away that Donald Trump is only a couple years younger and clearly has his brains leaking out his ears! (In case you wondered by he REALLY wore that Maxi-Pad on his ear at the Republican Convention.)
What we need is not more appeasement of the Right—er, "Center", but more young, energetic Bernie Sanderses spreading the Progressivism-For-All message. I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the start of that, even though her youth, attractiveness, and Latina heritage results in UGLY Lust/Hate Fantasies in the curdled brains of the Right and Center! If she can continue to navigate that successfully, she could be the start of a new Progressive direction for either the Democratic Party, or whatever takes its place....