Published at 17:43 on 18 November 2024
Everyone has one. Most everyone has already offered one. The vast majority of the postmortems very conveniently excuse the postmortem author’s pet views and place the blame elsewhere. Also very conveniently, the blame tends to be placed on some camp the author has never liked very much in the first place. Mind you, this doesn’t automatically invalidate the blame being laid, but it does put it into context.
It is clear to me that there is more than one underlying cause. Following are what I see as the causes, in rough order from most to least significant.
A Morally Compromised Political Culture
This is the elephant in the room that not many people are writing about. Of those who have mentioned it, most are on the right of the anti-Trump movement, and those inevitably don’t get very far into it. It tends to be limited to short harrumphs such as “we are an unserious people,” or “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
Ideological convenience explains it all. Moral decline (and the foolishness of the many) have long been pet issues for conservatives. So they look for it, and they find it.
They find it because, of course, it exists. Despite all the criticisms that can be levelled at the Democrats and other actors in this historical episode, the fact remains that many people, across the political spectrum, were saying exactly what kind of person Trump was and what the likely consequences of a second Trump term would be. Some of these warnings were coming from those who had served in the first Trump administration and were based on personal experiences of interacting with Trump. The warnings grew to be very explicit, correctly identifying Trump as a fascist.
In response to all these warnings, many voters decided that fascism was just fine, or that all of this talk about of fascism stuff was simply overblown. The latter belief was generally driven by American exceptionalism (“don’t be silly, that can’t happen here”), which just goes to show how exceptionalist rhetoric itself plays a key role in the moral decline.
With the exception of the far left, American exceptionalism is a popular belief across the political spectrum in the USA. It is particularly popular amongst conservatives. And here we have the reason why, while there have been conservative voices pointing out this cause, they tend to touch on it only briefly. More detailed examination is likely to reach conclusions ideologically inconvenient for conservatives.
Not only is American exceptionalism largely a myth, a good part of the moral decline comes from neoconservatives, and it turns out that never-Trump conservatives are invariably neocons. Because of course they are: of all the flavours of conservative, it is the neocon for whom opposing Trump is the most ideologically convenient, since Trump’s isolationism directly conflicts with their belief in the necessity of an American empire. Yet it is their own advocacy of empire that led them to draw up the Project for the New American Century, to advocate that the George W. Bush administration lie its way into wars of choice, and to defend the use of war crimes such as torture and extrajudicial executions in that war.
Those who most tend to point out moral decline are, in other words, themselves the chief architects of that decline. Worse yet, it is the fallout from the wars of choice they advocated which helped make the isolationist aspects of Trump’s platform appealing to so many. (I know, I have talked to Trumpers, and they very commonly bring up isolationism and opposition to neoconservatism as some of the things they most like about their candidate.)
Social Media
Social media balkanizes people into echo chambers where information can circulate without any regard to its factual accuracy. It thus corrodes the political fabric by helping to destroy respect for (and even awareness of) facts. Facts allow at least some sort of shared social project to emerge. If, for example, budget deficits are increasing, you are going to get people talking about deficits, talking about whether or not they are too high, and talking about strategies for paying them down.
Absent fact-driven debate, there is nothing but warring camps, who will not tend to even agree on what needs to be talked about, much less what needs to be done. Debate becomes meaningless, democracy becomes meaningless, all that matters is for one camp to get enough power that it can force its will on everyone else.
Social media therefore aids and abets the growth of right-wing extremism. And it turns out that this is a testable proposition. One country, France, got social media well before (as in, decades before) the rest of the world did. And in France, right-wing extremism became a major political force well before it did in any other first-world democracy.
It gets all the worse when one of the largest social media networks is owned by a fascist who uses it to promote fascist beliefs.
Democratic Party Incompetence
Just look at the basics of the current situation. We had a clown car of at best minimally-suitable candidates in 2020. Eventually an elderly man with delusions of a past era of consensus and unity still existing came to the top of the heap, and by some miracle managed to prevail in the general election. The administration of the resulting presidency operated in large part under that delusion, refusing to acknowledge the reality of ascendent fascism and its historical mission in dealing a death blow to that fascism. As such, the crimes of the fascists were insufficiently prosecuted, and the fascists politically survived.
All the while this was going on, the elderly man grew increasingly elderly and began to exhibit signs of senility. The response of the Democratic Party was to gaslight the nation about the senility, close a circle around the president, and run him for reelection, as if nothing untoward was going on. It all collapsed spectacularly with the worst performance in the history of televised debates, and the party was forced to patch together a last-minute alternate strategy. Which, not entirely surprisingly, proved inadequate to the task.
I have said it before and I will say it again: the Democratic Party is one of the world’s most incompetent major political parties.
Sometimes the incompetence gets bad enough that I doubt it is purely coincidence. And indeed, it is probably not a coincidence. Having the more left of two major parties be incompetent is valuable to the bourgeoisie, as it means advocates of left policies will lose fights that they really ought to have won. And given that egalitarianism is the prime motivating force of left-wing politics, this helps preserve the wealth and power of the bourgeoisie. The USA has a largely privatized political funding system, and an ineffectual left party is likely to be better at selling itself to well-heeled potential donors than an effectual one.
Activist Left Incompetence
Of course, this is the camp I identify with the most, and it is politically convenient for me to rank it as the least significant factor. But I honestly believe it is, for the simple reason that the activist left is not very large in the USA. Heck, the left in general is not very significant in the USA, which stands alone as the only major democracy in the world without an electorally viable social-democratic party.
But still, the activist left has a problem. Its rhetoric has degenerated to the rhetoric of the academic left, mostly geared to pursuit of in-group status, and increasingly irrelevant to those not already existing within its inward-looking circles. I have written about this before.
It is possible to evaluate this economically, in much the way as I did for Democrats above. As with an incompetent Democratic Party, an incompetent activist left is valuable to the bourgeoisie. Left activists exist in capitalism and as such are also motivated by economic self-interest. Perhaps the most lucrative career available to a leftist who wants to make a career out of their leftism is to become a tenured professor at a major university. Salaries and benefits are generous, and the principle of academic freedom valued by liberal society means that one’s unconventional views will be tolerated, even respected.
The academic left has been a thing since approximately the Seventies (it was a natural destination for a subset of the student left of the Sixties). It has been producing volumes of literary output of dubious value, largely inscrutable to outsiders, ever since. It is only relatively recently, however, that its values have become so dominant in the activist left generally. I suspect social media to have played a role in this.
What It Was Not
Right now, the debate largely seems to be within the Democratic Party itself, as to whether the centrists or the progressives were at fault. A pox on both their houses. It is my contention that a competent candidate from either camp could have prevailed if backed by a competent party, and in a political culture that was not seriously morally compromised. Either a centrist or a progressive would have had pet items in their platforms to tiptoe around (they would be different pet items, of course), but a competent candidate would be able to do that, particularly if backed by a competent party apparatus.
One thing in particular it was not, and that is a refusal to go full Trumper against identity politics. The latter has long been part of the Left (it goes back at least as far as Engels writing about the importance of ethnic self-determination for the Poles in his 1892 preface for the Communist Manifesto). Suppose the Democrats successfully managed to become as anti-trans as the Republicans, then what? Well, the Republicans were the genuine article, and could campaign against the Democrats as a cheap knockoff of it. Plus they would pick some other identity politics thing and go big against it. There would always be something to drag out.
Again, a competent campaign could have retaliated in kind. But it should at this stage be abundantly clear that we don’t have a competent Democratic Party.
What we need to do is to address the real causes, and given how these lie at the very roots of our political society, this is not going to be either easy or simple. It is certainly not going to be accomplished by having the weaker of the two parties of a dying political order settle a soon-to-be-irrelevant intraparty spat about which of their two major factions is most at fault.
