DANIEL T. RODGERS: What Next for Liberalism?
The Americans who
brought the Obama era so suddenly to an end were a mixed lot. Many were
straight-ticket Republicans who would have voted for any nominee the party put
forward. Others were moral traditionalists for whom the chance to vote on the
Supreme Court’s composition was the only thing that counted. Some were racists,
empowered by the taunts of the nominee and the fury of his rallies. But what
impassioned the core of those who swung the Electoral College balance, it is
clear in retrospect, was a sense of being outsiders in their own land.
Those alienated voters
saw themselves as the bone and sinew of the nation: white men who did not have
college educations but who made things and were loyal to the nation, who
thought they had acted out the American dream only to find themselves shunted aside
by an African-American President whom they had come to loathe, by women who are
more successful than they are, by nonwhite and immigrant competitors for jobs
and public favor, by global capitalists, distant government officials, and
cosmopolitan intellectuals who scorned them, and by the poor who lived on their
tax dollars. They had been waiting in line for years for their time to arrive
only to see others cut in line ahead of them, what sociologist Arlie Hochschild
calls the “deep story” they tell themselves.
They are the resentful because
whiteness and patriotism no longer pay out as they used to. Although they live
in an echo chamber of self-confirming social messages, they feel themselves
voiceless. That is why, in spite of their anger at the global capitalism that
made Donald Trump’s fortune, they felt empowered when a man of his super-wealth
and media stardom spoke the words they know they are not supposed to say in
public themselves.
A reckless right-wing
media gave them a crucially important boost to victory. So did the utter
trivialization of issues as the lines between politics, news, and entertainment
virtually disappeared. In hindsight it is clear that liberal mistakes also
mattered. The most important success of the Obama Administration, stemming the
potentially catastrophic effects of the 2008 Wall Street crash by co-opting its
major players, fed into a story that the Democratic Party and big money had
become all but inseparable. Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speaking fees only
reinforced a narrative in which the big institutions called the tune and other
people paid. Obamacare, so hopefully begun, turned out to hold vastly more
political liabilities than any of its architects imagined. The speed at which
gay rights moved through the courts generated far more backlash than almost any
liberals anticipated, alienating not only those unnerved by the threat to the
family ideal they themselves were struggling to hold onto but those who felt
there was no room for conscientious dissent from a centrally imposed
juggernaut.
The family leave and
welfare policies that Hillary Clinton championed so passionately couldn’t salve
Trump’s supporters’ sense that the family as they knew it was under siege: that
the culture wars had finally come home. Many of the economic planks in the
Democratic Party program were not pitched for them. The new high tech,
energy-efficient, solar-powered economy that liberals promise to promote didn’t
have obvious room in it for workers like themselves.
Liberals’ assumption
that their political destiny lay assured in the demographic remaking of the
population turned out to be a self-wounding illusion. White rural and small
town Americans with high school degrees but not a college education may
be a diminishing fraction of the population. But there were enough of them
to turn the election. And every whiff of evidence suggesting that the
Democratic Party had written them off to care more about minority lives than
their own added fuel to their resentments.
The result was a vote
in which anger overrode optimism, a corrosive sense of failure overrode hope,
and in which the very impracticality of a Donald Trump presidency proved one of
his strongest drawing cards. He would not improve politics, his supporters told
interviewers. He would blow it up.
hat will liberalism do
in the new, terrifying world these resentments have made? At the congressional
level there is urgent work to be done to block the most reckless, punitive
efforts of a Trump presidency. Obstruction is essential, but it must also be
combined with liberal alliance with enough Republican Party centrists to shape
an agenda that could possibly forestall the economic and social disaster that
Trumpism portends. For the short run, a temporary centrist coalition in
Congress is an imperative, hard as it may be to achieve.
For the long run,
liberalism will have to moderate some of its ambitions. Donald Trump’s America
will be more insular than any since World War II. It promises a fortress
nation, drawn back from hopes of alleviating the turmoil of the world, back
from the global economy, back from concern for what others, outside America,
might think. The cosmopolitan, globally ambitious liberalism that has been a
backbone of Democratic Party policies since 1942 will have to readjust.
Liberal
internationalism was already in trouble before 2016, torn between reliance on
force and reliance on diplomacy, unable to make the dream of universal
democracy and human rights take root in a world of recurrent chaos and
perpetual war. “Make us safe” was the Trump campaign’s radically simplified
answer.
Liberal ambitions to
manage and reengineer a society as complex as the United States may need to be
tempered as well. .. read more:
http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/43/what-next-for-liberalism/
