Good day.
The subtitle of this brief essay refers of course to the influential (but terrible) Michael Anton article which by now I’m sure most of you have read or at least heard about. In the following months, we should all expect a liberal counterpart to that MAGA polemic, probably more than one. Centrists will urge, exhort, attempt to shame us into voting for a second Biden term, and yet it’s clear that a lot of these exhortations will fall on deaf ears. Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan won’t be turning up and turning out for Genocide Joe. So-called progressives who want a ceasefire in Gaza won’t forget this moment, and their support will be tepid at best. To paraphrase Gramsci as everyone seems to be doing these days, morbid symptoms1 are threatening to overwhelm the body politic before the new order can be born. An uncomfortable fact is the likelihood that the opening days of that order will take place under a second Trump term. Let’s spend a few moments analyzing what that might mean.
In a recent NYRB essay, the journalist Mark Danner concludes an examination of Trump’s performative politics of grievance by quoting another journalist whose coverage of Iraq and Syria led him to say this: “(those wars) had been premised on real grievances, real oppression, real violation … Were large-scale violence to erupt in the US, it would be something different: a war fueled not by injury but delusion.”2 This is both true and untrue. The conditions diagnosed in the MAGA break with both paleoconservatism and neoliberalism are real. The causes of those conditions, of course, are ridiculous, which is I think the point that Danner is trying to make here. It’s possible to have both one and then the other, that is, to acknowledge that the current conjuncture is one in which old neoliberal verities are being exposed as a form of class warfare, and also to acknowledge that part of that warfare means the production of ideologies like “conservative nationalism.” Think of MAGA as a r/w reaction to neoliberalism’s fragmentation, a blatant attempt to shore-up social and racial privilege against the brutal nihilism of hyper-capitalism. So yes, there is “delusion” at the level of the production of ideas, about the causes of our current malaise: in fact, it’s the same old class war, albeit in intensified form as the contradictions of the alleged consensus become more untenable and unbearable. Here, the Left has generally failed to break through, that is, to tie the existential awareness of contradiction and misery to deeper structural causes. And so what we are left with are typically infantile narratives, Manichean stories about Deep State government workers who want to immiserate ordinary Americans because … well, why exactly?
To provide an answer, I’m reminded of Bernard Bailyn’s well-known argument about republican Americans being positively possessed by liberty’s fragility and vulnerability. Freedom everywhere was (in their minds) threatened by power, which rapaciously prowled the political world looking for innocent victims. This is an idea that has lasted well beyond the 18th and 19th centuries: in fact, it could be called an American idée fixe that (perhaps because of its ubiquity) remains patently underexamined. If power everywhere seeks to prey on liberty, the question remains: What motivates power? The answer “more power” is of course simply circular. In the end, we have a form of metaphysics whereby power becomes something like elemental evil, a force to be feared and opposed because of its essence. This is infantile and apolitical, and it has much to do with the essentially puerile nature of much of American thought. This tendency — a kind of gravitational or inertial pull that exists at the level of culture — explains a lot about MAGA “delusion.” Ideology is easy; critique of ideology is hard.
At the same time, a second Trump presidency would be disastrous. The Danner article I just mentioned makes that very clear. I spoke (or have written here) before about the “aporia of the contemporary condition,” or the utter untenability of both candidates as well as the pathetic option of a third-party protest vote. Liberals who are tempted to engage in Anton-level histrionics about the “election of a lifetime” should engage in a John Rawls-style exercise and imagine themselves behind a veil of ignorance about the demographic composition of their audience. They should then imagine that some of their interlocutors are Muslims and/or Arabs from Michigan (or really anywhere): would they feel as comfortable and righteous hectoring and berating Palestinian-Americans who have lost family members to IDF bombs? There’s no question that liberal/centrist Democrats retain a sense of reverence for the rule of law, and it’s equally clear that Trump wants to throw out that law in favor of something like soft authoritarianism. The problem (of course) is that that rule of law has been transformed into something like an engine for reproducing class privilege. In fact, “reproducing” is probably not the right term, since under neoliberalism the arrow of concentration always has to be pointing up: in this world, ideology bears down ever more powerfully and forcefully as these contradictions become ever more untenable.
i.e. genocide in Gaza, ridiculous and unsustainable levels of consumer debt spurred in part by real estate speculation, massive inequality, climate catastrophe, the student loan farce, and so on. This point is probably pretty obvious.
Danner, “The Grievance Artist,” in New York Review of Books, November 02, 2023, pg. 85.