The article seems to treat the right’s attack on institutions as the cause of the crisis. But to many people, it looks more like a reaction to what those institutions had already become. The institutional left came to dominate universities, media, NGOs, the bureaucracy, and much of government. It used them to advance ideological goals, then described the project as neutrality, expertise, inclusion, democracy, or the rule of law.
Nationalism is not some new postmodern pathology. It is a normal and often healthy form of solidarity. The backlash is not simply a rejection of truth or universalism. It is a reaction against institutions that shifted power away from national self-government, left many working-class communities worse off, treated patriotism as suspect, and made once-mainstream views sound morally illegitimate.
My problem with your reaction narrative is that the phenomena allegedly causing the reaction well predate the reaction. Let's put the date of the reaction at Trump's first election in 2016. Were universities leftwing then? Sure. Were they much more leftwing than they had been for decades? I'm doubtful. Take the "mainstream media." By the time I came of intellectual age in the '90s, complaints about a liberal-biased media were common. It was a central gripe on Fox News and talk radio, dominated by the right. Republicans have been bitching about the networks, the New York Times, and NPR since forever. Had they become markedly more biased just prior to 2016? I don't see it. Take "government" and "the bureaucracy." Obama was a pretty normal Democratic president who did normal Democratic things, like health care reform. He was also an eloquent patriot. Before him, we had a pretty normal Republican president who did normal Republican things. Hillary would have been another normal Democrat. Once again, a vast federal bureaucracy -- in reality, a quite professional one -- long predated 2016.
You mention "working-class communities." And yet it's really hard to trace the rise of Trumpism to, say, lost manufacturing jobs. The Clinton years represented a time of free trade and continuing decline in traditional unionized private sector jobs (largely due to automation). And yet, those years also represented a high point in positive feelings about the economy. Clinton's job approval numbers on the economy were through the roof. His economy -- one of tech-fueled growth, low unemployment, low inflation -- was, despite the long term trends that saw the biggest private sector domestic employer move from General Motors to Walmart, nearly universally acclaimed.
Your point about making "once-mainstream views sound morally illegitimate" is a good one, but it largely postdates Trump's first election. I think Trump + Covid + Floyd broke a lot of brains all around, fueled above all by social media, a poison that turns everyone into Mr. Hyde. Before then, French theory had been confined to zoos.
It's hard to overstate just how destabilizing Trump's first election was to so many -- not just young lefties who eagerly signed on to a disastrous woke orgy, but, say, boomers (in the case of my parents and their friends, real boomers, in their '70s), who would never have imagined such a crass, venal piece of shit in the Oval Office. And people like him?? For them, it's as though Trump revealed who their fellow Americans really are, and they want to throw up. The other side clocks that, and here we are. So many hurt feelings!
The timing point is fair, but I don’t think it answers the argument. These changes were not static, and they did not appear overnight. They built gradually, and reactions to gradual changes also take time.
The fact that people complained about universities, media bias, bureaucracy, and elite cultural power long before Trump does not make the complaints wrong. It may simply mean the process had been going on for decades. The real question is whether those institutions became more ideological, more moralistic, and less willing to tolerate dissent over time.
I also agree that Clinton, Bush, and Obama were relatively normal at the presidential level. But that is partly the point: electoral politics still created some balance. The deeper shifts were happening elsewhere — in elite institutions and in the economic order: trade, deregulation, China integration, Walmartization, and rising inequality. Some of the benefits were real at first, but the costs accumulated later.
So I don’t think Trump, Covid, Floyd, and social media created the crisis from nothing. They accelerated it and revealed it. Trump lit one of the fires, but the gas was already there.
Fair, and I realize that I left out of my story an account of Trump's first win. If it wasn't all the things you're saying, then what was it? You suggest, it was those things, but that it took time for discontent to accumulate. Perhaps. I do think, though, that there was an obvious force that allowed it to accumulate rapidly and all of a sudden, which is social media. I suggest that Trump's personality, his use of social media, and the larger emerging social media ecosystem allowing for more personal engagement with negative messages (not incidentally involving quite a bit of wild conspiracy shit) wholly outside the gated mainstream media is what turned a set of views that long predated him -- a set of views we now call MAGA -- to go from Pat Buchanan levels of support to a White House-winning force. Meanwhile, liberals (progressives, really), under the sway of just the same dynamics, set about doing everything possible to make matters worse, seeming to validate what had been basically false and asinine caricatures before.
In short, I buy Fukuyama's "It's the phones, stupid" thesis. We are not having national civic conversations about jobs or immigration or any issue of actual importance, much less any legitimate concern among "working-class communities." What a joke. We are in the midst rather of idiotic temper tantrums, sour moods, and cultural resentments, all of which are pretty well removed on both sides from a realistic view of material conditions.
Fair, and I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I agree that social media and Trump mattered. Social media made existing distrust more visible, emotionally intense, and harder for the old gatekeepers to contain. Trump sensed that distrust and voiced it in ways other Republicans would not. He was rewarded for it.
Media and progressive institutions reacted with alarm, which confirmed to many of his supporters that the old gatekeepers hated them and feared the issues they were raising: immigration, work, status, crime, national identity, cultural authority, and the contempt of the expert class. That pushed Trump further, which confirmed progressive fears, which then confirmed his audience’s distrust.
If Trump had not existed, I don’t think the old Republican consensus would simply have continued untouched. The revolt likely would have found another vehicle, just with a different style and tempo.
So yes, social media and Trump mattered. But I don’t see either as the prime mover. In history, I tend to think structures matter more than any one platform or any one person, however disruptive either may be.
It didn't help that the Democrats ran Nurse Ratched against Trump. If it's as though Trump revealed who their fellow Americans really are, that might be because our fellow Americans were informed by the KKK -- Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka! ;-)
That Damon Linker has chosen to ally himself with the Persuasion “brand” is a sign of healthy growth. Yes, postmodern politics has become in Hobbes’s formulation “nasty, brutish, and (hopefully) short.” I would offer just a slight variation on the use of the term “objective.” I prefer “inter-subjective,” for the reason that objectivity arises only when there are two (or more) minds that cohere on a perspective and that in turn they find others who share that perspective. It’s the long road to universalism, but short cuts may not prove as effective.
One of Trump’s most influential internet-troll supporters, Mike Cernovich, said in a New Yorker interview in 2016: “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”
Either Linker is terminally confused or I am. I don't have any use for French theory and I am an Enlightenment junkie. But in the case of Trump and MAGA, and such principles as we can infer from our autocracy's governance, they affirm the analysis of Foucault and company, who said that Western "democracies" profess universalism but instead function as agents of white colonialist hegemony. Linker wants to shoot the messenger: the world today increasingly lives down to the postmodernists' cynicism that power alone is our geopolitical stance. The United States now evinces overtly rather than covertly the doctrine of "Might makes right" at a level that American postmodernists of the 1990s never imagined was possible. We don't have to abandon universal values just because French intellectuals said they had always been a sham. But we do have to acknowledge that, whether or not we deserved their opprobrium when they first called us out, they have proven to have predicted the sorry state of Trump's America.
Brilliant piece of writing. Your summary of the 1990s postmodern consensus perfectly tracks my educational journey as a political philosophy major at Williams College in the early 90s. The leftist postmodernists had arrived and were systematically undermining the very ideas that underpinned a liberal arts education.
"Yes, some of [nationalism's] ideological boosters, like the Israeli-American philosopher Yoram Hazony, are committed to national solidarity as a positive and even necessary foundation for properly conservative politics. But it’s more common for contemporary nationalists to treat the constriction of solidarity to the nation as a response to a collapse of faith in higher and broader ideals of universalism."
That's a false and misleading distinction. Hazony explicitly rejects anything resembling a liberal or pluralist construction of nationalism (along with the ideals of the Enlightenment or a polity as envisioned by Locke).
That's what Hazony's "Jewish nationalism" -- ultimately, his core value -- is all about. It's why I find him so dangerous -- as a Jewish American, a disciple of Spinoza, Einsten, Judah Magnes, and Isaiah Berlin.
(This has been going on among us Jews since the days of the Maccabees vs the Hellenists -- and it injects an element of precarity into our relationship with Christianity, right down to this very day.)
It looks like the hole in the liberalism boat came from the elevation of reason as the guiding principle. We have to admit that liberal universalism is a religion.
Take the famous sentence
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"
I am interested in this sentence because it admits to its religious character at the beginning.
This does not mean that within every human being there is an inner American trying to get out, there is more than one system in which oppressive power can be diffused, we need humility and flexibility without throwing away our religious fundamentals.
I fear it is too late, the playground academics who promoted post-modernism will regret the end of liberalism, one gets the impression they are not too happy with the Frankenstein they have created: Donald Trump.
They don't regret this outcome. They've always yearned for their final confrontation with fascism, which they consider inevitable (unimpeded by liberalism) as envisioned by Marx.
The article seems to treat the right’s attack on institutions as the cause of the crisis. But to many people, it looks more like a reaction to what those institutions had already become. The institutional left came to dominate universities, media, NGOs, the bureaucracy, and much of government. It used them to advance ideological goals, then described the project as neutrality, expertise, inclusion, democracy, or the rule of law.
Nationalism is not some new postmodern pathology. It is a normal and often healthy form of solidarity. The backlash is not simply a rejection of truth or universalism. It is a reaction against institutions that shifted power away from national self-government, left many working-class communities worse off, treated patriotism as suspect, and made once-mainstream views sound morally illegitimate.
My problem with your reaction narrative is that the phenomena allegedly causing the reaction well predate the reaction. Let's put the date of the reaction at Trump's first election in 2016. Were universities leftwing then? Sure. Were they much more leftwing than they had been for decades? I'm doubtful. Take the "mainstream media." By the time I came of intellectual age in the '90s, complaints about a liberal-biased media were common. It was a central gripe on Fox News and talk radio, dominated by the right. Republicans have been bitching about the networks, the New York Times, and NPR since forever. Had they become markedly more biased just prior to 2016? I don't see it. Take "government" and "the bureaucracy." Obama was a pretty normal Democratic president who did normal Democratic things, like health care reform. He was also an eloquent patriot. Before him, we had a pretty normal Republican president who did normal Republican things. Hillary would have been another normal Democrat. Once again, a vast federal bureaucracy -- in reality, a quite professional one -- long predated 2016.
You mention "working-class communities." And yet it's really hard to trace the rise of Trumpism to, say, lost manufacturing jobs. The Clinton years represented a time of free trade and continuing decline in traditional unionized private sector jobs (largely due to automation). And yet, those years also represented a high point in positive feelings about the economy. Clinton's job approval numbers on the economy were through the roof. His economy -- one of tech-fueled growth, low unemployment, low inflation -- was, despite the long term trends that saw the biggest private sector domestic employer move from General Motors to Walmart, nearly universally acclaimed.
Your point about making "once-mainstream views sound morally illegitimate" is a good one, but it largely postdates Trump's first election. I think Trump + Covid + Floyd broke a lot of brains all around, fueled above all by social media, a poison that turns everyone into Mr. Hyde. Before then, French theory had been confined to zoos.
It's hard to overstate just how destabilizing Trump's first election was to so many -- not just young lefties who eagerly signed on to a disastrous woke orgy, but, say, boomers (in the case of my parents and their friends, real boomers, in their '70s), who would never have imagined such a crass, venal piece of shit in the Oval Office. And people like him?? For them, it's as though Trump revealed who their fellow Americans really are, and they want to throw up. The other side clocks that, and here we are. So many hurt feelings!
The timing point is fair, but I don’t think it answers the argument. These changes were not static, and they did not appear overnight. They built gradually, and reactions to gradual changes also take time.
The fact that people complained about universities, media bias, bureaucracy, and elite cultural power long before Trump does not make the complaints wrong. It may simply mean the process had been going on for decades. The real question is whether those institutions became more ideological, more moralistic, and less willing to tolerate dissent over time.
I also agree that Clinton, Bush, and Obama were relatively normal at the presidential level. But that is partly the point: electoral politics still created some balance. The deeper shifts were happening elsewhere — in elite institutions and in the economic order: trade, deregulation, China integration, Walmartization, and rising inequality. Some of the benefits were real at first, but the costs accumulated later.
So I don’t think Trump, Covid, Floyd, and social media created the crisis from nothing. They accelerated it and revealed it. Trump lit one of the fires, but the gas was already there.
Fair, and I realize that I left out of my story an account of Trump's first win. If it wasn't all the things you're saying, then what was it? You suggest, it was those things, but that it took time for discontent to accumulate. Perhaps. I do think, though, that there was an obvious force that allowed it to accumulate rapidly and all of a sudden, which is social media. I suggest that Trump's personality, his use of social media, and the larger emerging social media ecosystem allowing for more personal engagement with negative messages (not incidentally involving quite a bit of wild conspiracy shit) wholly outside the gated mainstream media is what turned a set of views that long predated him -- a set of views we now call MAGA -- to go from Pat Buchanan levels of support to a White House-winning force. Meanwhile, liberals (progressives, really), under the sway of just the same dynamics, set about doing everything possible to make matters worse, seeming to validate what had been basically false and asinine caricatures before.
In short, I buy Fukuyama's "It's the phones, stupid" thesis. We are not having national civic conversations about jobs or immigration or any issue of actual importance, much less any legitimate concern among "working-class communities." What a joke. We are in the midst rather of idiotic temper tantrums, sour moods, and cultural resentments, all of which are pretty well removed on both sides from a realistic view of material conditions.
Fair, and I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I agree that social media and Trump mattered. Social media made existing distrust more visible, emotionally intense, and harder for the old gatekeepers to contain. Trump sensed that distrust and voiced it in ways other Republicans would not. He was rewarded for it.
Media and progressive institutions reacted with alarm, which confirmed to many of his supporters that the old gatekeepers hated them and feared the issues they were raising: immigration, work, status, crime, national identity, cultural authority, and the contempt of the expert class. That pushed Trump further, which confirmed progressive fears, which then confirmed his audience’s distrust.
If Trump had not existed, I don’t think the old Republican consensus would simply have continued untouched. The revolt likely would have found another vehicle, just with a different style and tempo.
So yes, social media and Trump mattered. But I don’t see either as the prime mover. In history, I tend to think structures matter more than any one platform or any one person, however disruptive either may be.
It didn't help that the Democrats ran Nurse Ratched against Trump. If it's as though Trump revealed who their fellow Americans really are, that might be because our fellow Americans were informed by the KKK -- Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka! ;-)
That Damon Linker has chosen to ally himself with the Persuasion “brand” is a sign of healthy growth. Yes, postmodern politics has become in Hobbes’s formulation “nasty, brutish, and (hopefully) short.” I would offer just a slight variation on the use of the term “objective.” I prefer “inter-subjective,” for the reason that objectivity arises only when there are two (or more) minds that cohere on a perspective and that in turn they find others who share that perspective. It’s the long road to universalism, but short cuts may not prove as effective.
One of Trump’s most influential internet-troll supporters, Mike Cernovich, said in a New Yorker interview in 2016: “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”
Either Linker is terminally confused or I am. I don't have any use for French theory and I am an Enlightenment junkie. But in the case of Trump and MAGA, and such principles as we can infer from our autocracy's governance, they affirm the analysis of Foucault and company, who said that Western "democracies" profess universalism but instead function as agents of white colonialist hegemony. Linker wants to shoot the messenger: the world today increasingly lives down to the postmodernists' cynicism that power alone is our geopolitical stance. The United States now evinces overtly rather than covertly the doctrine of "Might makes right" at a level that American postmodernists of the 1990s never imagined was possible. We don't have to abandon universal values just because French intellectuals said they had always been a sham. But we do have to acknowledge that, whether or not we deserved their opprobrium when they first called us out, they have proven to have predicted the sorry state of Trump's America.
Some of us are asking, "What went wrong." You're suggesting that they foresaw what's unfolding now as inevitable, according to plan.
Post modern thinking is interesting but has so many problems 😎
Brilliant piece of writing. Your summary of the 1990s postmodern consensus perfectly tracks my educational journey as a political philosophy major at Williams College in the early 90s. The leftist postmodernists had arrived and were systematically undermining the very ideas that underpinned a liberal arts education.
Damon writes:
"Yes, some of [nationalism's] ideological boosters, like the Israeli-American philosopher Yoram Hazony, are committed to national solidarity as a positive and even necessary foundation for properly conservative politics. But it’s more common for contemporary nationalists to treat the constriction of solidarity to the nation as a response to a collapse of faith in higher and broader ideals of universalism."
That's a false and misleading distinction. Hazony explicitly rejects anything resembling a liberal or pluralist construction of nationalism (along with the ideals of the Enlightenment or a polity as envisioned by Locke).
That's what Hazony's "Jewish nationalism" -- ultimately, his core value -- is all about. It's why I find him so dangerous -- as a Jewish American, a disciple of Spinoza, Einsten, Judah Magnes, and Isaiah Berlin.
(This has been going on among us Jews since the days of the Maccabees vs the Hellenists -- and it injects an element of precarity into our relationship with Christianity, right down to this very day.)
It looks like the hole in the liberalism boat came from the elevation of reason as the guiding principle. We have to admit that liberal universalism is a religion.
Take the famous sentence
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"
I am interested in this sentence because it admits to its religious character at the beginning.
This does not mean that within every human being there is an inner American trying to get out, there is more than one system in which oppressive power can be diffused, we need humility and flexibility without throwing away our religious fundamentals.
I fear it is too late, the playground academics who promoted post-modernism will regret the end of liberalism, one gets the impression they are not too happy with the Frankenstein they have created: Donald Trump.
They don't regret this outcome. They've always yearned for their final confrontation with fascism, which they consider inevitable (unimpeded by liberalism) as envisioned by Marx.