A house divided against itself cannot stand.
―Abraham Lincoln, 1858
Trump won. That should have been impossible by historical standards. Never before has a sociopath with no public-service record taken the presidency. This happened despite the Democrats running a top-flight candidate with an economy nearing full employment.
Something was fundamentally wrong with the country. Half the problem sits on Trump’s side and lies out of our reach—Fox, Limbaugh, lingering racism, anti-intellectualism, and so on. But these forces were not able to stop the country from getting more liberal before Trump took power. Since 2007, we’ve elected our first Black president, reelected him, approved gay marriage, and legalized marijuana in many states. And even after Trump won, Obamacare went from neutral to 51%-to- 40% in favor. On top of that, over the last 24 years, the electorate has gone from about 15% non-White to about 28%.
With the political landscape shifting our way both long-term and short-term, why do we suddenly have the most anti-democratic president in our history?
If we’re honest with ourselves, we know we should have won—big. And if we change track, I’m sure we could. Carping at the Republicans will not fix this. It’s up to us to look in the mirror and fix what keeps us weak.
The danger is greater than at any time since the Civil War. But it’s political, not economic. Neither our Democratic Party nor our democracy is near collapse, but if Trump wins a second term, all bets are off. The Republican Party is now completely under his control. On the day the House voted to impeach him, the best multi-poll average of his net favorability reached its highest point since his first two months in office.
With another term, he’ll pack the courts with far-right conservatives who will be in power for decades, and like any strongman, he is packing the government with sycophants who will follow orders, legal or not, since he can pardon anyone.
If Trump is reelected, the same forces that are polarizing and weakening our party now will likely tear the Democrats apart. That, combined with a corrupted Republican Party, is the danger we’re facing if we lose the presidency again in 2020.
Our Polarization Helps Trump
Trump’s strategy is polarization. First, he increased Republican polarization, which was already getting out of hand due to the Tea Party. With the nomination in hand, he went after the nation, and he’s never stopped. He has no understanding of statesmanship or making the country great again. His one focus and only strategy is playing to his base and a few sympathizers who he hopes to recruit.
In this age of negative partisanship, the best way to rally your base is to make them hate and fear their opponents. That means polarizing his base, and that polarizes us. But we should resist that. When they hate us, we usually hate back. Which is exactly what he wants. Our hatred galvanizes his base better than anything he can say himself will make them vote in large numbers.
Now stop and think. If polarization has been a winning strategy for Trump since he entered the race in 2015, should we join him in polarizing the country, or should we fight polarization?
Of course, most Democrats want to fight it as do a great many independents and Republicans. They dislike the acrimony and know instinctively that a country full of hate does not favor democracy. But there’s a faction of our Party that thrives on polarization, both internal and national, just the way Trump does. No, their politics is nothing like Trump’s politics. But both extremes thrive on polarization.
Part 6: Left Mythology Traps describes a set of polarizing myths generated and believed by Democrats. The most transparent of these is the myth of the Overton Window (Ch. 27). It holds that extreme radical positions are all we need to create radical change. In fact, the popular, sometimes radical website Vox.com tells us that while extreme positions are good, “unthinkable” positions are even better. Well, of course. Everyone without a brain knows that.
But if that were correct, Trump’s extreme views would be making Democrats more conservative. I don’t see that happening, and the evidence is that extreme-left views push the left to the left and the right to the right. That causes national polarization.
A similar fate befalls the myth of the bully pulpit, even though it’s far more believable. Presidents who use their bully pulpit to sway public opinion almost never succeed, and often have the reverse effect because they stir up the opposition. But the greater problem this time is internal. When radicals see that a Democratic president is not performing miracles from his pulpit, they conclude he is probably working for Wall Street. Similar delusions cause radicals to deprecate candidates who aren’t the preachy type.
Another myth holds that anyone in the establishment—either because they’re rich or have a position in the party—must be corrupt. Bernie Sanders, in particular, has pushed this myth hard, which is ironic when you consider his current hero. He claims FDR was a “great, great president,” models his democratic socialism on FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, and runs ads that imply they are almost twins. Yet FDR was well above the 1% cutoff financially and probably the most establishment Democrat ever. Sanders could not be more hypocritical on this score, and he is using the myth to tear down the Democratic Party.
Sanders is also promoting the myth that FDR’s policies were “democratic socialism” in an attempt to distance himself from his true socialist past. This has led many if not most of his followers to believe socialism is just a nicer kind of capitalism. In fact, almost none of them seem to know what socialism actually is or that Sanders is still an honest-to-Marx socialist or that socialism is the most unacceptable political label for a presidential candidate.
This myth causes Berniecrats, almost none of whom are actually socialists (or “democratic socialists”—the same thing), to disparage Democrats who know what socialism is and therefore reject the label. And it tars the party with a label that conservatives have always used to attack Democrats. The Republicans are holding their fire, hoping Sanders will be nominated and salivating over the chance to use their horde of anecdotes concerning his past socialist missteps. One of these was cutting a deal with democratic socialist Hugo Chavez, who he later called a “dead communist dictator” (Ch. 5).
Delusions Rule
The more desperately we care about social change, the easier we are to fool. That’s not the whole story, but there’s a lot of truth to it. In the 1850s, the Xhosa people of South Africa were sorely oppressed by the British. In April 1856, 15-year-old Nongqawuse saw a vision and prophesied that if the Xhosa would kill all their cattle and live righteously, the spirits would sweep the British into the sea and replace their cattle with healthier ones. So they killed more than 300,000 head of cattle, and three-quarters of the tribe starved to death.
This was an extreme but classic millennial movement of which there have been hundreds. Desperation leads to gullibility. You may think that the fault lay with the unsophisticated Xhosa, but remember that the very sophisticated Germans of the 1920s bought the myth of the Thousand-Year Reich that would rule the world. That turned out even worse. But still, such things could not happen to sophisticated Democrats. Or could they? Part 2 shows how easily California’s far-left Democratic establishment fell for Jim Jones, America’s worst mass murderer. So it should be no surprise that many Democrats are falling for more benign millennial movements promising a quick trip to the Promised Land. The worse things look, the more attractive such myths will become.
Everyone seems to want rational explanations, usually based on economic problems, for why we are caught up in our present political malaise. Such real-world inputs do play a role, but their effects are filtered through something akin to mass psychosis. So logic and theories can explain a little when applied by the wisest among us. But that doesn’t help those of us who get sucked into bogus explanations because we can’t tell who to believe.
There are two partial escape routes from this predicament. First, learn that delusion is the dominant player in politics. Second, learn to be cautious and when to be most cautious.
The first escape route teaches us to fight polarization by cutting everyone some slack, at least until we really know who them well. Most people are trying to do what they believe is right, and when they fail it’s simply because they’ve been deceived. They have “good intentions,” even when they’re on the road to hell.
Practicing this simple rule (cutting some slack) goes a long way to depolarizing us. It makes us see what seemed to be evil enemies as just mistaken adversaries. That applies equally to fellow Democrats and Republicans. And when we are less polarized, we stir up less polarization among our adversaries. Yes, there are some sociopaths, but they comprise only a small percentage of the population. Most folks want to do good.
Political and Moralistic Traps
The second route out of the predicament of mass psychosis is learning when to be cautious and when to be most cautious. So Parts 2 through 4 take a close look at the three most important kinds of Political Traps. As Part 1 explains, most of these can easily lead into the Moralistic Trap.
Political Traps, by themselves, lead to issue polarization, which is not helpful but not deadly. The purity trap, however, leads to emotional polarization—hatred for one’s opponents. Political Traps convince people they know what’s right. Moralistic thinkers believe that what’s right is so obvious that it is obvious to everyone. That ridiculous assumption lands them in a purity trap: They think anyone who disagrees with them cannot possibly be mistaken, so they must be immoral. This causes them to see their opponents (quite often other Democrats) as evil enemies.
Political Traps come in a number of identifiable types. And looking at a sample of each of the three most common kinds will make it easier to recognize them as we encounter new ones. So Part 2 presents six charisma traps. The most important and surprising one of these is Donald Trump. Lacking appropriate skills, much of his popularity is based on his charisma. That’s a valuable lesson because his charisma is invisible to most Democrats, so they fail to understand much of his appeal.
But charisma is not some universal property; rather, it is the ability to form an emotional bond with an audience. So any particular case of charisma depends as much on the audience as on the leader. Charisma traps are also important because they are the basis of the appeal of demagogues.
Part 3 looks at populism traps. Populism is one of the simplest ideologies, and it is particularly dangerous because it appears to the casual observer to be more democratic than our representative democracy. But as our Founding Fathers knew well, it is the vehicle of demagogues, and it fails to protect minorities. So they built in our checks and balances specifically to prevent populism.
The danger for those on the left is that they are predisposed to believe populism is progressive. Consequently, when Sanders supporters see populist tendencies in Trump’s base, they become hopeful for a revolution based on a progressive merger of Tea Partiers and Berniecrats (Ch. 16). This is delusional. And in such times as these, chasing electoral delusions is dangerous.
In fact, there is an irreconcilable difference between right- and left-wing populism. Trump’s right-wing populism is based on the culture war, while Sanders’ left-wing populism is based on a crude Marxist economic analysis. In Trump’s populism, liberals and progressives are part of the elite, and many of the one-percenters are hard-working rich who are part of “the real people.”
Part 4 covers the Overton window myth, the bully-pulpit myth, and a few other examples of the third kind of Political Trap, the mythology traps. Because these were discussed above, we can move on to the new identity politics.
The New Identity Politics
The new identity politics started developing in the 1970s and grew out of the Black Power Movement and postmodernism. The former was explicitly based on revolutionary Marxism. The latter was based on a strange mixture of German and Italian neo-Marxism, Maoism, and a couple of philosophers associated with Nazism. All of that was filtered through an odd collection of elite French intellectuals.
Needless to say, the resulting ideology is completely foreign to American political thought. It shares virtually nothing with liberalism, progressivism, or even socialism, and it rejects outright the civil rights approach to identity politics. It even rejects the accomplishments of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.
In contrast to the civil rights movement, which would see freedom from police harassment as a basic civil right that should be extended to minorities, the new identity politics sees it as a White privilege that Whites should feel guilty for having.
While civil rights protesters were proud of their exceptional bravery when confronting the Klan and the Southern police, identity politics protesters typically demand protection even from sympathetic liberals—even minority liberals—who simply question whether their approach is helpful.
A central message of this new politics is that if any member of a minority group feels offended by a White person, then no matter what actually happened or what the White person intended, the White person has “perpetrated” an offense—a microaggression. This view has deep roots in French postmodern “philosophy.”
Prioritizing the subjective over the objective has now been taken to such an extreme that all of science is discredited as “masculinist stories,” and we now find the National Science Foundation funding feminist glaciology to the tune of $700,000. These grants produced a paper that claims that male scientists do not put up their satellites to measure ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica but rather to make “claims of objectivity” that are “akin to the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere.’ ”
This denial of science is actually part of a much broader denial of truth and the Enlightenment in general, all of which some postmodernists have now realized is very helpful to Trump. But an even worse effect of the new identity politics is that its many excesses are the most prized material of all right-wing “news” outlets. And there is nothing better for getting Trump’s voters out to the polls come November 3, 2020.
Radicals versus Liberals
Polarization splits the Democratic Party between radicals and liberals. Radicals recommend policies that are further from the status quo. But recommendations (and demands) are a dime a dozen, so this attribute of radicals tells us little. A deeper view of the radical-liberal distinction can be traced to Max Weber, a founder of sociology. That view provides far more insight and also provides a compromise solution that gives us the best of both worldviews.
The radical “ethic,” according to the noted radical Michael Kazin who is an expert in radical thought and history, and also according to Weber, takes a purist approach. The radical does what’s “right” according to his utopian view, even if the outcome is harmful to the radical cause. For if there is harm, it is the fault of others. Kazin and Weber both compare this to a Christian form of thinking. Man should follow God’s laws, and God will take care of the consequences.
The liberal ethic is strategic. A liberal should do what will produce the best outcome, taking account of the fact that Trump will play dirty. The compromise solution, which I recommend, is to be a radical liberal. Imagine the ideal outcome, but realized there’s no magic shortcut, and getting there will require strategic compromises and a lot of hard work and patience.
Not the Time for a Hail Mary
If you’ve got the ball on your own 50-yard line and there are 5 seconds left in the game, you may as well throw a “Hail Mary” pass and say your prayers. But no one does that with a lot of time left on the clock. It makes sense only when failure will do no harm.
But even the radicals know that our political game will continue. What they don’t know is that trying for a “political revolution” is like throwing a “Hail Mary” pass. They think that electing Sanders or maybe Warren will take us all the way to the “Promised Land,” and failing will doom us to defeat.
They “know” that this time is different. There’s never been such a dedicated honest leader before. But followers of every one of the hundreds of millennialist movements have thought the same things. And none succeeded.
So if you know someone who is hellbent on trying such a crazy experiment at the worst possible moment in the country’s history, you might remind them of the words of Sanders’ lifelong hero, democratic socialist Eugene V. Debs: “I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads.”
It’s time to resist Trump, not by being the noisy, toothless enemy he needs but by quietly doing the one thing he cannot abide—having us disengage from his polarizing antics. Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite West African proverb applies: “Speak softly but carry a big stick. You will go far.” Understood properly, that adds depth to Michelle’s wise maxim, “When they go low, we go high.”
Though our path has been rocky, we have followed it ever higher for more than two centuries. Now our progress has been blocked, and the path itself could vanish before our eyes. Ending the current catastrophe would reopen the door to progress. That would be miracle enough. We must work together, take courage, and grow stronger. That’s what winning takes—nothing less.
Ripped Apart
