Maximal Angst Despite Minimal Cause
Quite often, political fights are about attitudes rather than issues and polices.
While our politics are not always aligned, I’ve enjoyed Ezra Klein’s work for going on two decades now, dating from when we were both starting out blogging. Even though he was just an undergrad at UCLA and I had finished my PhD several years earlier, I found his writing insightful and, most of all, fair. That still characterizes his work, and especially his eponymous podcast, today.
Sunday, Steven Taylor recommended the May 6 episode, an interview with Matthew Continetti, titled “Donald Trump Didn’t Hijack the G.O.P. He Understood It.” Today, I would recommend the May 13 follow-up, “What Does the ‘Post-Liberal Right’ Actually Want?” featuring political theorist Patrick Deneen. But my point isn’t so much to encourage you to listen to the show as to use it to illustrate a common theme in American political discourse: a tendency to make sweeping charges about one’s political opponents despite comparatively marginal grievances.
Deneen is a highly successful scholar. He’s a year older than me and finished his political science PhD the same year as I did. In his case, at Rutgers, a fine but by no means elite university. His dissertation, “The Odyssey of Political Theory,” was awarded the 1995 American Political Science Association Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Philosophy. He immediately parlayed that into a two-year stint as the speechwriter and Special Advisor to Joseph Duffey, the Director of the United States Information Agency under Bill Clinton. He then spent seven years as a professor at Princeton before moving on to Georgetown for another seven* and finally to his current post at Notre Dame. He has also published several books, most notably his widely-praised (including by former President Obama) 2018 Yale University Press volume, Why Liberalism Failed.
Klein interviewed him on his podcast about that book and found much common ground. In the relatively short time since, though, he’s noticed something:
Deneen has moved towards embracing something more like total political war, counseling conservatives to abandon niceties like pluralism, to use the power of the state to crush their enemies, and to treat this moment at every level as a civilizational struggle. In an essay called “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Conservatism,” Deneen describes the world he sees. Quote, “the national trajectory over the past 75 years has been one of a continuous movement to ever more extreme forms of liberalism.” And that, if you’re liberal, may sound good to you, but he doesn’t think so. He writes, “liberalism’s internal logic leads inevitably to the evisceration of all institutions that were originally responsible for fostering human virtue, family, ennobling friendship, community, university, polity, church.” In another essay, he writes, “liberalism offered to humanity a false illusion of the blessings of liberty at the price of social solidity. It turns out that this promise was yet another tactic employed by an oligarchic order to strip away anything of value from the weak.”
And as that quote suggests, Deneen doesn’t see the problems of modern America as an accident. He sees it as malice. Take a speech at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. In it, he attacks America’s ruling elites, “who have mutually benefited from the decimation of the working class of all races in this country, and of all geographic regions of this country. The full flowering of the reality of this ideology reveals it to be an ideology of rapine and plunder, the stripping of the wealth from a ship that they are sinking, while busily stocking the lifeboats until the last moment, when they will be able to cut loose.” If you see your enemies like that, if you see them as that sinister, but also as always winning, as having an almost unbroken record of success, well then, of course, the stakes are high. Of course, you would do almost anything to defeat them. But for all the force of Deneen’s rhetoric, for his fury at people like — I mean, I guess me, who he believes have destroyed the country he loves — I often find it hard to figure out what he’s actually saying should be done, what he would do or counsel others to do with the power he wants the right to win and wield so ruthlessly.
Over the first hour or so of the conversation—already long for the podcast format—a pattern emerges: Klein asks for specific examples of Deneen’s grievances and is answered with calm but longwinded discourses into the generalities. While he and Klein very much agree that various social ills exist, Klein keeps pressing his guest as to what it is that Democrats/progressives/his adversaries have done to cause them. And he’s answered with more calm but longwinded discourses into the generalities.
More frustratingly, it becomes clear that Deneen isn’t really a conservative in any meaningful sense of how the word is used in American politics other than on social issues. Indeed, he’s a combination of wistful for an imagined set of policies John F. Kennedy might have espoused but didn’t; a populist who longs for a German-style system of support for tradesmen, mothers, and farmers; and a reactionary unsettled by the vast social changes over the period of roughly our lifetimes. And it’s not just the LGBTQ stuff that has so many social conservatives roiled right now but no-fault divorce, abortion, and the general breakdown of some fantasy version of family life.
And, through it all, Klein continues desperately to try to “steel man” Deneen’s argument because he’s genuinely trying to understand where it’s coming from. At roughly the 67 minute mark, we finally get to this:
KLEIN: . . . I read you as having two primary levels of critique here. And one level of critique is that over a long period of time, a set of policies and cultural understandings have come into force which have given people too much choice, and given people too much cultural license to exercise that choice in ways that have really weakened institutions for people in the bottom half of the income scale, let’s say. So we have geographic mobility that takes people out of the communities they grew up in, and they move to big cities where they can make more money.
We have no fault divorce and gay marriage, which allow people to form or unform family units in ways where you think the default, at the very least, is in the wrong place. We have a general view that people should go off and find their loved ones wherever, and we can kind of keep going through. So one question I’m interested in there is around what choices you think we have today that we should have less of. But on the other level — is I think you believe that all these choices have created a kind of elite class that is so detached from guild, ward and congregation, as you put it, that they are now a corrupt elite. They cannot possibly represent or help guide the people they need to represent, or help guide, because they have no authentic connection to them. And it’s that connection of a high choice society, creating an elite, making fundamentally different choices, that you see as the fundamental corrupting force.
Did I get that in a way that is recognizable to you at least?
DENEEN: Yeah, that’s actually probably better than I could have put it myself, but yes. And you know — that in some ways, the rise of the success of that elite class that you — the second point — has considerably relied upon precisely the weakening of the institutions of guild, ward, and congregation. In other words, what liberated this increasingly — let’s say, cosmopolitan, globalized, urban ruling class, was precisely the weakening of those institutions that might once have been sort of the limiting features in which they would have likely led their lives. So the very thing that might be regarded as the sources of success by that ruling class, it turns out, is premised upon a set of consequences that has fallen and rebounded with profound negative effects upon the people who are not members of that class.
Essentially, it comes down to Deneen not liking how American society has come to be, and, while he tends to blame it on the Left, he really blames it on some vague Elite Class. Indeed, it turns out he rather likes Joe Biden—and even Bernie Sanders—but not some vague Other Democrats that he thinks are (it’s not clear which) running or going to run the party.
There’s much more to unpack from the episode but the post is already long. Honestly, the whole thing is rather baffling to me and, to his credit, Klein just continues to engage, probe, and look for shared points of understanding from which to proceed.
Given that Deneen’s policy preferences seem much more closely aligned with the Democrats, against whom he rails, than with the Republicans, who he urges on to fight a no-holds-barred, salted earth war for survival, the only explanation I can come up with is that his stance is visceral rather than rational. What finally came to mind is Julian Sanchez’s 2009 post “The Politics of Ressentiment” (which, to complete the circle, was itself a reaction to Matt Continetti’s attempts to defend Sarah Palin from her critics, of which yours truly was one) and especially this observation:
The secret shame of the conservative base is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.
Deneen is, as noted at the outset, a very successful academic. Despite less than elite beginnings, he has held tenure-track jobs at three of the most prestigious universities in the country. And yet, he recognizes that his views on social issues are not only out of step in those circles but, frankly, looked down upon as backward, if not bigoted.
Indeed, most of what he seems to call for—which he only articulates when Klein painstakingly pries it out of him—isn’t so much different public policy but a change in elite attitudes. He wants those who chose to stay in rural America despite the lack of jobs to not only somehow be provided high-paying, high-status jobs without them having to leave their roots or go to school but also for their lifestyle to be accorded the same—if not more—respect as those who leave to go to Harvard Law and make managing partner in a Manhattan firm. This is, to say the least, a challenge. And yet he seems to think there was some golden era when this was the norm.
We ultimately get to this exchange:
KLEIN: And so you really have a model here, where if you’ve got in a bad populace, if you’ve lost your common culture — and I think you believe that’s true, that people are taking too many drugs, and getting divorced too often, and watching too much porn. And it’s become a weakened culture, and you think the elites are corrupt and out of touch. Is this something, at that point, you can do through democracy?
I mean what is your relationship, then, to political change, particularly once you believe that kind of both the demos and the governing class are different kinds of, but interlinked, disasters?
DENEEN: So the record of human history is not necessarily a hopeful record of the score. And so there is some cause, maybe considerable cause, for pessimism. That quote that you just read — once those conditions of a kind of common culture and a culture that cultivates, once those have broken down, it’s almost always the case that especially when you experience the divide that we have, which is — it’s increasingly a class divide — that the likelihood is either some form of oppression by one class or the other class.
And I think that’s — in many ways, that describes our politics today. It’s a politics of fear of being governed either by the populists or by the elites, and that’s — it’s not, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that’s underlying a lot of the panic of our politics today. So it’s either a kind of impending tyranny, and or some form of a civil war, a stasis, whether it’s a kind of hot Civil War or cold Civil War.
I don’t want to simply just arrive at a pessimistic conclusion. And that’s why I try to frame this in terms of, if we don’t want our elites making the people worse, and the people in some ways making the elites worse, especially by a kind of panicked effort to dismiss or cordon off those populist concerns and demands, then the hope lies in both making each other better.
And here, I’m not sure — I don’t have any crystal ball to suggest what the possible mechanism might be. But I do think it will be probably a combination of two things. It would be a combination, number one, of the populist threat forcing elites to behave better, forcing the managerial elite to govern on behalf of the condition and concerns of everyday people, forcing them to concede, in some way, some of the benefits of their position, and a fear and a defensive posture may result in some beneficial outcomes.
But I also think that it’s not unlikely — and I guess I would place myself in this category — it’s not unlikely we will see something of a rebellion from within the elites. And this is always the case in revolutionary moments. Revolutions aren’t just the people picking up pitchforks and overthrowing the elites. It’s someone like a Lenin, who grew up as an elite, who becomes a kind of class traitor and calls out the deficiencies of his own class.
And I do think that there are growing number of voices from the managerial elite who are deeply concerned about the corruptions that we’re seeing in our own institutions, and are calling for and demanding and amplifying, I think, the charges that you’re seeing coming from the populist direction. So I think, in some ways — again, I can’t say what the mechanism will be, but I think if there is going to be some kind of improvement rather than a kind of devolution, it’s probably going to come — it would have to come from both directions.
This is just incredibly radical while at the same time coming across as wildly unfocused. Because, again, it’s not really any specific set of policy outcomes or institutional reforms that Deneen is after. Rather, he wants an elite that thinks as he does that somehow simultaneously treats the working class as equals while elevating their tastes to elite levels.
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*Reading between the lines, one presumes he failed to achieve tenure at both institutions. Given his prolific publication record, one presumes it was a “fit” issue. I suspect the fact that his PhD was from comparatively lowly Rutgers didn’t help. And, certainly, his weird brand of conservatism would have been out of place at both institutions.
Maybe it’s just COVID brain fog but I really can’t make any sense out of what Deneen is saying.
Which I guess is what you’re getting at, he’s all over the place and it’s just not coherent from a political standpoint at all, at least not as far as I understand American liberalism and conservatism.
Which isn’t to say my understanding is necessarily correct, but I think it’s at least reasonably so.
Anyway, not much to add, except to say “good piece, James.”
@Mikey: Thanks. And yes. Deneen is an incredibly accomplished political philosopher. Yet his complaints here are just incredibly vague and seemingly internally contradictory. Which I take as an indication that they’re coming from somewhere visceral rather than analytical.
Shorter summary of Deneen: “Old man yells at clouds”
@James Joyner: James, this is characteristic of the Right these days. Assuming for the sake of argument that the Right was ever different.
As Charles Pierce would suggest:
“So, when I talk about the prion disease that afflicts the Republican Party, and the conservative movement that is its only life force any more, I do not use the metaphor idly. The party has lost what’s left of its mind.”
Misquoting Churchill, I’ve said before of modern conservatism,
They believe they can somehow arrest a changing culture by destroying Democrats.
Its all visceral and not much logic to it. When feeling snarky and discussing their concerns with conservatives I just link this below. (Just a bit more seriously it also depends upon looking back on a world that never really existed as some kind of ideal model. There never was a world where you let rich people work with no limits on what they do ie regulations of some sort, where they dont place themselves first.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr_yaZQmRzA
Ah yes, the evil “urban ruling class” keeping the salt of the earth, morally superior rural folks in chains.
So the previous cultural oppression was freedom because by default it put me at the top of the food chain, but today’s cultural oppression is absolute tyranny because… It makes me uncomfortable?
Be afraid, be very afraid.
TBH, I don’t think he has the slightest idea of what he wants to say.
@OzarkHillbilly: No edit function, correction:
So the previous cultural oppression was freedom because by default it put him at the top of the food chain, but today’s cultural oppression is absolute tyranny because… It makes him uncomfortable?
@James Joyner:
I believe you’ve figured it out, James, even if it is incoherent. I believe this is what it would look like for a very bright political philosopher to have a strong visceral reaction to society being icky and then trying to craft that in an intellectual package.
To leverage a recent popular thread, it would be like a Vulcan explaining logically why they are madly in love.
Two thoughts:
– I have a great deal of distrust for any line of thought that cannot get down to specifics, whether it be politics, art, engineering or science. In the end if you can’t answer, “but what would a specific individual do specifically differently, and why?” then you are likely, knowingly or unknowingly, just spouting bullsh*t.
-Arguments from fear and anger are always suspect. Actually, I would go even farther. When someone* is afraid or angry or both their mind latches onto extreme and simple ideas that would never withstand a calmer, more reasoned analysis. Worse, once such a meme has infected the brain, any time you think of it you are likely to get back into that angry and/or fearful mindset. It is extremely dangerous when people who need certainty above all else fall down this whirlpool.
*I don’t exclude myself from this in the least. Knowing it’s a thing doesn’t make me immune. In fact, the reason I’m still married today is that more than twenty years ago I was arguing with my wife about something and I was having that “righteous anger” moment where my point was so correct and inarguable and I had this almost out of body experience where I mentally looked down on myself from a height and realized my point was actually trite and self serving and it was only the anger that was making me think it was unassailable. And at that moment I though, “Oh, that whole “righteous anger” thing? That’s the cause of a lot of human misery.” Since then I’ve seen this in myself and others many, many times. I’ve been fortune enough that I’ve mostly been able to calm down before having such discussions with my wife.
I hadn’t thought of Dineen in a long time. I remember he was associated with a blog called Front Porch Republic which looks like it is still around. And included writers such as Rod Dreher, Andrew Bacevich, etc. I always kind of categorized them as isolationist, leave-me-alone, monastic-adjacent traditional conservatives (if that term has any agreed meaning these days). Which I always responded, fine, but only if you leave us alone too.
I think what makes them confusing is that they are mixing up the extremist, far right elements who want to have power with their own tendencies for reclusiveness. It doesn’t mix. How a elitist, sacrilegious, profane, vain, philistine (if not the Anti-Christ) figure like Trump gets their support just baffles me. If there is anyone more culturally more elitist it is Trump and his spawn.
He comes across incoherent because he is.
I listened to this yesterday and it was both fascinating and maddening.
Some thoughts.
1. I think deep at the root of all of it is likely a very conservative Catholic faith that enthrones a very specific idea of family.
2. He is so caught up in his own style of philosophizing that he doesn’t really see the need for any practicality at all.
3. He has an idealized idea of what he would like society to look like and is working backward, vaguely.
4. He really wants a differently structured elite, and is willing to use (again, vaguely) authoritarian means to get there.
5. He takes too seriously the environment in which he works and lives, as if a random law review article or intellectual chit-chat of really smart undergraduates equals true insight into American liberalism in some comprehensive way. (For example: yes, you can find people talking on college campuses, especially in philosophy departments, about how the family is a “tool of the patriarchy” but the reality is, that most American liberals are in stable, monogamous heterosexual relationships or they aspire thereto). He also never addressed when Klein noted that gay marriage is a pro-family policy choice (but, of course, see point #1).
Here are some facts: crime rates in America are not high by any historical standard, murder rates are less than the previous generation, immigrants are a net positive for the national economy, abortion rates are lower than in 1970, heterosexual white men are the largest demographic among sex crime criminals, divorce rates for evangelicals are higher than for the non-affiliated, etc. Politicians get ahead by not holding up a mirror but by inverting these facts.
An inside baseball observation: it is also simply the case that institutions at that level only tenure a relatively small slice of the TT faculty and that folks in those circles often move from one elite school to another as we see here before settling in.
At the end of the conversation Deneen recommends Tom Holland’s 2019 book Dominion- How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. It’s the one concept I wish Klein had time to discuss with Deneen.
I’m curious how much of Deneen’s argument hinges on the nostalgic restoration of his experience of Christianity.
Reading only your excerpts of the longer podcast, Deneen sounds more like the crank at the end of the bar after his 5th Bud than a Rutgers (a good school) Ph.D. But it also linked up with something in the Klein podcast with Matthew Continetti.
Continetti talks about George Wallace and the appeal of Wallace. He points out that today, we mostly consider Wallace in terms of his racism and support for segregation, but he points out that this was only part of his appeal to social conservatives (who, at the time could be Dem or R). The other parts of Wallace’s appeal were that he despised liberal elites and elites in general and favored big government that helped people make their lives easier (for which he was hated and feared but the National Review conservatives).
Deneen isn’t espousing something that is particularly new and it does go back before Wallace. In 50+ years, some things haven’t changed, Dems are evil because they’re, well, pointy headed liberals who espouse change, today’s Dems have emerged from central casting and are still pointy headed liberals speaking academicese. The conservative mob, still wants stuff from government and the conservative establishment doesn’t.
To make it all worse, Deneen and others have adopted this ‘war’ framing that makes a confrontation-compromise-move forward model impossible. Plus since what the mob wants is so disjointed, contradictory and often unpopular, it makes it hard to know where to begin.
@Sleeping Dog:
It is pretty clear that the end result of the Republican Party Southern Strategy is that Republicans are rebadged George Wallace supporters. The political genealogy is there for all to see.
People forget that George Wallace had appeal well beyond the South.
I did not listen to the podcast. I did read the excerpts. And these showed Klein at his best (he can be inconsistent in this…because he’s a human).
He was generous and curious with Deneen. And as James noted (Deneen did too), he steelmanned his guest’s positions. The result* is that Deneen was able to articulate his positions in a non-defensive manner and air out his thinking (emoting) on a range of issues.
This allows us (the audience) to understand and evaluate Deneen’s positions, as put forward by Deneen himself, and not some bastardized version of them.
It also allows Deneen to hear himself articulate his positions. This is really important. I wouldn’t be surprised if, having heard and felt himself (struggle to) put forward these positions, Deneen updated, refined, softened, etc many of them.
I know that has been my own experience, and I suspect that is true for others. This is a key value of steelmanning.
I think it’s good for all sorts of reasons (fair play, manners, etc). But even if you reject those, it is good strategy. And it is all too rare. Instead, we get a lot of this.
*Again, I did not listen to the podcast, and am going only by the excerpts.
@Sleeping Dog:
This is a good point. “and others” includes a lot of OTB commenters.
@MarkedMan:
I find myself very often reading something and wanting to scream at the author, “Give me an example.” or trying myself to construct an example. We learn by generalizing from specific cases to general observations. But it’s easy to get lost in generalization. It’s necessary to come back to the concrete occasionally. If you can’t illustrate with an example now and again, I get to assume you’ve lost the handrail and don’t yourself understand what you’ve written.
I still read TAC occasionally, trying to understand conservatives. I think their root cause sin is generalization. No cigar can be just a cigar. If a news article omits some detail Dreher thinks important, it can’t possibly be laziness, or editing, or deadlines. Dreher will drop ten thousand words forcing it to fit into his view of a vague, but omnipresent, leftist plot to destroy American traditional values in order to control how Americans think. (That last bit being pure projection by Dreher.)
@Scott:
Absolutely. Continetti goes on to talk about how Nixon and his political operatives, after the 68 election could capture the Wallace voter, who just wasn’t in the south. What got labeled the “Southern Strategy,” entailed actually capturing blue collar voters, who were then Dems, throughout not only the south but the mid-west and northeast. Nixon’s plan had 3 components, attack Dems as smug elites, law & order dog whistles and broad government programs aimed at supporting the lower and middle working class. Remember, Nixon proposed a version of a national health insurance plan that was more progressive than Obamacare and he proposed a national basic income in the runup to the 72 election. After reelection, Nixon was of course, consumed by Watergate and neither went anywhere.
Continetti goes on to say that Trump became the political heir to Nixon, building his campaign on similar themes and adding immigration. Of course Trump never proposed any expanded goverment programs, but did keep in place Medicare and SSI.
@Mimai:
Are you saying our sh!t doesn’t smell?
Yes, we are all subject to rigidity from time to time, some more frequently than others. Years ago I was a partner in a business and our attorney had a saying to the effect; A bad compromise is better than a good day in court. If that theory were applied in politics today, we’d be better off.
@Steven L. Taylor: Thanks. Your analysis seems like a Rosetta stone.
Which means that he comes across like a garden-variety smart Republican. I mean, there’s no really insight there, unlike some others I’ve read. Just angst.
I particularly enjoy “he takes the environment in which he lives too seriously”. Which is, of course, the environment in which you live, as well. I too, have heard of, for instance, families that will refuse to assign a gender to their newborns, as a means to avoid oppression. I don’t know if these were members of the Philosophy Department, but the odds seem high.
Once upon a time I would get exercised at this sort of thing, but then I realized that media, especially social media was seeking out extremal views and amplifying them. No matter what unusual opinion you might care to imagine, there’s someone out there espousing it.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I have been forced to think more about the Catholic treatment of divorce lately and it’s so infuriating for many reasons. But one is the Church says you shouldn’t (may not) divorce and yet people do. I assume some people divorce for shallow reasons, but, frankly, once one spouse says they’re out (with or without valid motives), it is pointless and probably damaging to everyone involved for the other to fight that. The reaction of the Church is to punish everyone involved in perpetuity because the Church wanted another outcome. I can think generally of a lot of reasons why encouraging continued marriage is good and I am familiar with even more actual experiences indicated that a particular marriage needed to end and perhaps could not be ended soon enough.
Trying to take this idea a little more broadly, there are all sorts of “better” ways to live your life, but you know what, that’s not how we live our lives. Insisting that everyone make “better” choices is not a strategy to get better outcomes, it’s just a way to get angry that people around you are doing it right.
@Joe: Indeed. it seems to me that wanting a particular idea. or arguing for its benefit is all well and good, but some level of practicality needs to be taken into consideration.
My 32nd wedding anniversary is next month, and in December will be the 37th anniversary of our first date. We had three kids. I fit the “ideal” of family that Deneen is preaching. But I know full well examples of people for whom forcing them to stay married would have been torture. And I know of others who simply would not have been happy in that arrangement.
For all his talk of “human flourishing” he seems more than willing to force people to behave a certain way because it is divinely ordained (I am pretty sure he used the word “divine” at one point). Forcing people to live the way YOU think they should live is not, IMHO, fomenting human flourishing.
@Jay L Gischer:
Yup.
Plus, there simply has to be space to understand that what some rando says (or what they say in a very specific context, like in a debate in class or over beers at the pub near campus) is not the way to understand mass attitudes.
I’m just as brain fogged as anybody here, but through the haze, I get what he’s thinking. And Dr. Taylor’s observation about a strain of Catholicism shaping his argument seems spot on to me. I’m still conservative enough to lament the apparent decline of the structures he regards as normal or traditionald, but where we part is that the shortcoming isn’t political. I see it very unambiguously as a spiritual/moral decline–yet one that the society is free to embrace to whatever benefit it feels the alternative provides. We “common clay of the American West” do not need elites to drive us to the brink of societal failure; we’re quite capable of getting there ourselves and have been spending significant portions of my lifetime doing it.
So yeah, the society IS broken and, moreover, is broken in the manner which we have chosen to break it. Liberal politics would probably be more helpful for ameliorating the damage to the lower classes except that what I keep hearing from the stalwarts on the thread here is “FUCK THOSE INGRATES!” As to the conservatives, well considering that they are essentially the central office of “FTI,” I’m not as confident as Deneen in the value of their contribution.
Always comes down to better people. Where to find some? Your guess is as good as mine.
On the other Church hand, I never have been married.
This guy doesn’t take the freedoms and choices of other people seriously. If you think liberal totalitarianism exists, you have to make a case for why it still has power. You can’t talk about the limiting institutions which have been destroyed without talking about their limits and what they did. He just kind of waves his hands and assumes it’s an error in understanding the world, and so that’s we have gay marriage rather than Catholic bliss or some shit.
@Sleeping Dog:
MAGA/Tea Party voters seem a natural constituency for Democrats, who’ve actually done things for them: SS, Medicare, Obamacare. But Democrats can’t satisfy their “disjointed, contradictory” demands by actually doing things. So they fall prey to GOPs who are happy to pander to, and amplify, their worst instincts and lie to them about intending to do anything substantive.
@James Joyner: “Deneen is an incredibly accomplished political philosopher.”
Which does not reflect well on the practitioners of political philosophy, since this is an incoherent rant, basically suggesting that political violence is the only possible answer to a set of problems he can’t articulate.
I also think this podcast shows the limits of Klein’s style. Because he poses very good and thoughtful questions, and Deneen won’t answer a single one. At some point it would have been interesting to see Klein point this out to him…
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I often the think when people talk about the 1950s, they mean the New Deal 1930s as a moment when society might not have been broken. The 1950s more or less had the same loneliness, marital ennui, and disillusionment we have now. The 1930s was right before the blast of post-war consumerism and suburban isolation. There was the vague dream of an actual future that was not bound to money and acquisition.
@Mimai: “. I wouldn’t be surprised if, having heard and felt himself (struggle to) put forward these positions, Deneen updated, refined, softened, etc many of them.”
Yes, I’m sure the man whose entire political philosophy is “we should have a violent revolution to stop people from being allowed to make choices I don’t approve of” really moderated his thinking after a long conversation in which he refused to acknowledge the potential costs of his wishes.
@Joe: ” But one is the Church says you shouldn’t (may not) divorce and yet people do”
For now. But Samuel Alito is going to be on the court for a few more years…
@gVOR08:
Yes, but this is where the attack on those pointy headed elites and the other is so effective, as those appeals are more primal than the appeals to benefits that a progressive politics can bring them.
Populists always try to make people angry, coherency is optional and usually undesired. Modern technology (last 30 or so years; rise of cable TV and audience fragmentation into more distinct echo chambers, the Internet in general, social media in particular, etc…) has given them a bigger megaphone than ever before. The result is cohorts of entire generations who are angry at vague concepts like “liberals”, but not only can’t articulate specifics, can’t even recognize that they should be able to get to those specifics. But they are angry, and aren’t going to take it anymore…even if the closest they can get to defining “it” is “elite liberal culture.”
It’s so frustrating. I have a family member whose Facebook posts consist of two types. Type 1 puts her firmly in the camp of pro-union, pro-healthcare, pro-assistance to the working class and anti-corporation/anti-1% politics. Type 2 consists of…MAGA, and Trump in particular is the greatest thing ever. She sees no contradiction, and it doesn’t matter what is pointed out in regards to which parties and presidents support which policies, liberals suck and are destroying America and only Trump can save us. Trump’s only political skill was recognizing, capitalizing, and amplifying on that anger and being vague enough that everyone who was just generally angry could believe he was on “their” side. There is no particular policy or goal, just…anger. 1984 is so depressingly prescient-time to hate!
@wr:
In my experience, planting seeds, engaging people respectfully where they are at (as opposed to where you demand them to be), etc is far more likely to change minds and behavior than the common alternatives. Though I concede that it may not deliver the same dopamine punch of self-righteousness.
I think a lot of Deneen’s type of thinking comes, quite simply from lashing out at the changes that have already taken place, not of morality or ethos, but of technology and the results of that technology. Birth control means that being under the dominion of a man isn’t the safest way for a woman to protect herself and her offspring. Someone finding a new way to do something faster, cheaper, more precisely can be a surer path to riches than getting ten more acres and another 5 cows. These things are going to change what we value and therefore change our morality and ethics and there is nothing Deneen can do to stop that, other than by erecting a Cargo Cult image of a real man in the hopes it will bring the Old Ones back.
Productive, useful conservatism could be defined as recognizing the value in traditional things and fighting to make sure we retain that value, building and guiding changes where necessary to achieve that continuity. Fearful, simplistic conservatism could be defined as blindly clinging to past rituals and traditions even when the world has changed sufficiently that those rituals and traditions will not and cannot meet the same needs. Deneen seems to fail squarely into that second category.
We are so far removed from the Steel Drivin’ Man, John Henry, that we forget why the story had such an impact. Up until the moment John Henry laid down and died, a large, strong man could carry a premium in the market. He didn’t have to smart, or sociable, or adaptable. A person who showed up every day and lifted more than anyone else had a significant value, and an entire work ethic and definition of manhood was built up from that strong silent type, showing up every day, not complaining, doing the same thing everyday – a definition that was not about teamwork, or improvement or anything else. Because of our conservative nature that ethos persisted long, long after that ceased to be a formula for success. Fearful, simplistic conservatives want to force things like that back into our ethos, but it is impossible. The world has moved on. When we need raw strength we look to a machine, not a Steel Drivin’ Man. And we need ethics and morality that are useful in the world we live in, not the world that once was.
@Mimai:
… or the raw certainty of anger…
@Steven L. Taylor: Congratulations! My wife and I managed 10 or 11 years of which I would speculate that neither of us was content in the relationship on the same day more than half a dozen times. A waste of 2 people.
@Modulo Myself: Indeed! I’m reminded of a Carly Simon verse: “their children hate them for the things they’re not; they hate themselves for what they are.”
@James Joyner: “Thanks. And yes. Deneen is an incredibly accomplished political philosopher. Yet his complaints here are just incredibly vague and seemingly internally contradictory. Which I take as an indication that they’re coming from somewhere visceral rather than analytical.”
Or that he is lying about his real goals and real motives.
@wr:
Since it would be difficult (presumably) to ban divorce, I wonder if the SC would make a start with, say, a 6:3 ruling forbidding no-fault divorces.. (purely hypothesizing).
@Mimai: “In my experience, planting seeds, engaging people respectfully where they are at (as opposed to where you demand them to be), etc is far more likely to change minds and behavior than the common alternatives.”
This is not some guy sitting at a bar chatting over beers. The is a professor of political science who has taught at the most elite schools in the country and he is spouting the philosophy that has been the basis of his life’s work. A conversation on a podcast, no matter how pleasant, is not going to change the way he thinks.
@Assad K: “Since it would be difficult (presumably) to ban divorce, I wonder if the SC would make a start with, say, a 6:3 ruling forbidding no-fault divorces.. (purely hypothesizing).”
All they have to do is say that divorce isn’t deeply rooted in our culture, and thus it can be outlawed.
And yes of course that’s a laughable argument. But that’s the subtext of Alito’s Roe reversal — “Yes, we all know it’s absurd to base this on the ravings of a 17th century witch hunter, but I’ve got the power to do whatever I want so you can go screw.”
@Just Another Ex-Republican:
In her mind there isn’t a contradiction. TFG and the RW populists are offering her puppies and ponies. They share her hate of liberals and they promise they’ll take care of her. Hawley, Rubio, Trump and others make all sorts of noise (infrastructure week!), but don’t deliver, but continue to tell her/them that they will. If she asks what will Dems/liberals do, she hears SSI! Medicare!, but those happened 90 and 60 years ago. If she asks what have Dems done lately and what do they want, she hears a lot of stuff intended to support one of the various Dem tribes, of which the white, working class are not included. She hears that Dems want to spend billions on forgiving student loans, which only a small portion of the population will benefit.
And as Dr T keeps telling us, it isn’t about the message its about cultural ID and that makes her an R. Among her Facebook friends, probably dozens of them hold the same contradictory views, so she is indeed secure in the knowledge that she is right. Until we find a way to crack that cultural ID, so that she and others will listen, all the great messaging won’t work.
@Mimai:
Also that engagement may need to happen multiple times before you crack through the existing bias.
One significant takeaway for me is that Deneen vocalizes something I’ve observed for quite a while: Conservatives behave as though they are losing, even though they aren’t generally losing elections.
And, as he says, they believe they are losing. They lost on divorce, on SSM, on abortion. They are winning on many fiscal issues, except people like Deneen don’t value that.
Meanwhile churches are losing membership, and the “tradesman” is a figure from a bygone era, mostly. Which they understand as a loss, as well.
All of which reminds me a few times when my teenage daughter would say something intended to be really hurtful. You know, “I hate you!”. Because I insisted that she do her homework or something. As a parent, I tried to just let that wash over me.
Health care for everyone. An end to the pandemic. Limiting climate change. Controlling pollution.
But of course, having said all that, I can guarantee all she would hear is, “Free medicine for people who don’t work. Masks and forced vaccinations with 5G chips. Electric cars that don’t go Vroom VROOM! Regulations.”
Raises hand, “We’re not dead yet.”
@Jay L Gischer:
You might want to take a look around. There are plenty of them (us!) out there.
@Mu Yixiao: Can’t speak on behalf of tradespeople per se, but the workers in my former industry are making what I made 40 years ago–provided they still have union contracts.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Don’t convince me, convince her.
@wr:
Perhaps not. Which is why I wrote: “I wouldn’t be surprised if, having heard and felt himself (struggle to) put forward these positions, Deneen updated, refined, softened, etc many of them.”
And yet minds and behavior do change — in response to small and large experiences. It is often difficult to predict what will start the process and what (if anything) will tip the scales.
A podcast conversation with a pleasant, generous, and charitable host? I’ve seen “smaller” things turn the tides. For intellectual titans and lightweights.
We do know what approaches are almost certain to inhibit change….indeed, those that tend to intensify the interlocutor’s grip on their current perspective. And those approaches look a lot like this:
If not better angels, think strategy.
Klein usually interviews people who have a better clue about what motivates them — so a bizarre, weird subset of the populace that is motivated more by ideas than feelings.
Deneen definitely slipped through the cracks, having the outer trappings of an intellectual but no intellect. (Ok, that’s harsh, I’m sure he’s very good at organizing the dishwasher or something)
This seems like the worst of both worlds, honestly. I’d rather see him hunt down the folks in the classic “fuck your feelings” photo and have a conversation with them.
Quick: is this a right winger whinging about divorce or a left-winger whinging about capitalism?
It’s not a fantasy that middle class families used to have the woman stay at home.
For those women who want to work outside the house, this has been a change for the better, of course. But for a lot of families that would prefer to have one parent stay home to watch the kids, it’s a financial impossibility these days.
That’s just straight up decline of the middle class.
It’s being linked to all sorts of other changes that happened at about the same time, so there are people who think increased acceptance of gays is damaging the family unit more than rising housing prices, but the loss of the single-breadwinner family is not a fantasy in any way.
@Sleeping Dog:
Very true.
Plant seeds. Water. Light. Fertilize. Wait.
(nothing happens?)
Try again.
Or give up.
A podcast conversation with a pleasant, generous, and charitable host? I’ve seen “smaller” things turn the tides. For intellectual titans and lightweights.
We do know what approaches are almost certain to inhibit change….indeed, those that tend to intensify the interlocutor’s grip on their current perspective. And those approaches look a lot like this.
The guy is a public intellectual who had a book blurbed by Obama, but what he needs is a generous and charitable interlocutor to help him see the errors of his revolution against liberalism. You make it sound like he’s a 19-year old skinhead raised by a family who were in the Aryan Nations rather than an affluent white guy who has been treated wth decency his entire life. What’s going to change his mind isn’t the art of discourse–it’s going to be something horrifying and destructive, like witnessing the carnage of his revolution against liberalism.
What conservatives hate and fear above all IMO is something I’ve harped on: they are alarmed at the loss of particular status for men. You simply cannot tell half the human race that while for the last 10,000 years there were many duties or positions specific to men, and now there are none, and not expect that to create problems.
Women have childbirth, a function that is obviously important and unique to females. What do men have that compares? Nothing. You could stick men in a matrix-like dream state where we produced sperm and did nothing else and humanity would be just fine. Without women? The race is dead in less than a century. We aren’t just irrelevant, we’re a net negative, a net drain on society.
@Gustopher: is right. It’s not a fantasy that middle class families used to have the woman stay at home.. The flip side was that men handled most of the work outside the home, and that is no longer the case, so WTF is a man for? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there is a surge of interest in transgenderism and asexuality and pan-sexuality, it’s society adapting to the utter irrelevance of men qua men.
It’s reductive and dismissive to talk about ‘the patriarchy.’ This is about individual men, not a societal structure. This is simple: what do we tell our sons is their unique contribution to society? We are ignoring the problems of men in society, and it is a dangerous thing to do.
And also, no I don’t know how to fix it.
@OzarkHillbilly: Also @Mu Yixiao. I apologize. I did not express myself clearly.
There definitely still tradesmen around, and yet there are far fewer of them than there were in the days of my youth. Whole trades, such as typesetting, have disappeared. (I have a sort of relative who once worked as a typesetter for offset presses, you know, the ones with metal slugs and such. The profession died off in the switch to digital).
Carpentry and plumbing have not disappeared, but they have altered and rarified. I once had a discussion with a young man where he described how difficult it was going to be for him to become a civilian electrician, after learning to do it in the Navy. This is not how it used to work.
That’s just a couple examples. Fishing, a big deal where I grew up, is very different now, and employs fewer people. My father and two uncles were sailors – marine engineers. We now operate more ships than ever, on smaller crews than ever.
If there are any “elites” who made these things happens, it’s corporate elites. But I doubt even they had the ability to change this general trend.
@Michael Reynolds:
You know, if you’re just trying to represent a mindset in the abstract, I endorse this. People do feel this way.
AND, I am not a net negative. Not for my family, not for my community. Not for the culture. Neither is any person, male or female, who wants to be otherwise. This statement is a highly binary, black and white, all or nothing. It contains many assumptions about what human worth is based on that I reject now, and have always rejected.
If a man adopts a child, and provides that child with sustenance, comfort, stability and safety, I think that’s far more significant than dropping a sperm load. A man (and a woman) did that for me, and I will always be grateful. Families are made by choices, not by gametes.
@Modulo Myself:
No, I make it sound like he’s a human. A privileged and accomplished one at that. And still a human. And humans are nothing if not predictable in what they regard as incentives and how they respond to them.
I don’t mean to mischaracterize your perspective, so correct me if I have this wrong. But you seem to be suggesting that affluent white guys are unable to change their minds unless there is carnage and destruction.
History does not support that position. To be sure, carnage and destruction can indeed change minds. And so can lots of other things. And for affluent white guys too.
Another implication of your perspective (again, assuming I understand it) is that we should hasten the revolution against liberalism. Indeed, that we should amplify its horrifying, destructive carnage. After all, that is the only way for affluent white guys (the very people who hold power) to see the error of their ways.
@Jay L Gischer: Again, it’s not simply the erosion of opportunities; erosion of economic security is part and parcel of the whole package. Case in point: a while ago a sink overflowed in my apartment and the property management company called a plumber to clear the drain. The plumber they called and I had a conversation where he told me that a major regional plumbing contractor had contacted him wanting to know if he would be willing to change jobs. The new company was willing to “go as high as $20/hour” provided he had his own tools and his own truck. They didn’t seem to realize that they were attempting to hire a guy who was already making $6k/month (plus overtime for after hours work–like my job) and had both his truck and his tools provided by the company he worked for.
I see lots of similar offers when I check Craig’s List in the “Skilled Trades” section. Luddite checks the “Paralegal” section and finds that $20/hour is more than lawyers are willing (able?) to pay. Everybody keeps wondering why their jobs are going begging though.
I’m definitely in the @Mimai camp. A political identity is a social thing, not an intellectual thing, as Prof. Taylor has often described. Which means that if it changes it will e via a social process, not an intellectual one.
Of all things, the alt-right does this better than a lot of the liberal internet. They soft pedal so much and ask “what if?” a lot. The validate identity things a lot too.
How did people get pulled into the People’s Temple? Members spotted people that seemed lonely and invited them to a church social where they played frisbee and ate potato salad. And maybe there was a bit of a prayer, but it was a very light hand.
Identity is a social, emotional thing.
I can appreciate that not everybody is going to be capable of being Ezra Klein though. People have hurts and hangups that can interfere with that.
@Michael Reynolds:
We could keep the women as non-conscious fetus incubators, just as easily we could make men into non-conscious sperm generators.
I’m not saying the rest of your argument is necessarily wrong, but your example is terrible. And leads to the Matrix.
Women entering what was considered a “man’s space” meet with enormous backlash. Gamergate was very dumb, but showed this very clearly.
I think we need a couple of very dangerous, very masculine things that only men can do — to cull the herd of the dumbest men. Chainsaw juggling on top of a 50 foot tree, perhaps.
I also think you are underestimating the effect of race with your constant harping on men’s roles though. It’s white men’s roles.
@Gustopher:
When you hear hooves think horses, not zebras. I understand that you and most people think it’s about race, race is the herd of horses. But I don’t buy it. I don’t have the energy to list all the straws in the wind, but I’m pretty sure I’m right about this. That’s not to dismiss the importance of race, but I think that’s more niche, less central to identity than sex.
I think men are legitimately in trouble, and we’re ignoring it because in this case it actually is zebras.
@Michael Reynolds: Clearly, the relative loss of power by men is part of the issue. Any loss of power by a dominant group will trigger a response. But the evidence is quite strong that race is the key issue. Again, I would suggest the work of Liliana Mason–but there is plenty of other evidence.
We know, for example, that many working-class and even poor whites resent government programs that would help them because those programs also help “undeserving” minorities.
Indeed, a lot of the behaviors we are seeing track well back into the period before women were fully in the workforce.
I would also note that when the right-wing talks about replacement, they are talking race, not gender.
But, yes, male loss of power is part of the equation, given that complex social phenomena are rarely monocasual.
@Michael Reynolds: “This is simple: what do we tell our sons is their unique contribution to society?”
I don’t have a son, but if I did I’d try really hard to impart to him that his unique contribution will be defined by what he does and not by the shape of his genitalia.
@Mimai: “But you seem to be suggesting that affluent white guys are unable to change their minds unless there is carnage and destruction.”
A wise man once wrote that it is very hard to get someone to change his mind when his paycheck depends on him not changing his mind. That’s definitely the case here. Unless you think that the people who buy his books to read him declaring the necessity of genocide against liberals will buy the one where he says you know what, gay marriage is fine.
@Michael Reynolds: Black men don’t seem to be having the same breakdown. (With the exceptions of Kanye West and Clarence Thomas)
I don’t think gender is unimportant, but it doesn’t explain everything.
There are more Latino men and Asian men veering into the far right, white-nationalist-lite organizations, but relatively small numbers.
I believe it is more of the European descent Latinos than indigenous descent Latinos, which fits in more with the “we love European heritage and culture” side of those organizations, and might be the shifting of the definition of “white”. Not sure why we have a prominent Filipino White Supremacist in the PNW though.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of prominent women in white supremacy and QAnon circles — aside from the MTG and Boberts, as you look at the stories of local officials doing dumbs things to try to Stop The Steal or Fight The Globalist Pedophiles, it’s women as often as men.