Harris meets the Daddy Gang, Trump’s movie moment, and Jill Stein’s contradictionsRead More
The US is not the only country with a revolution at its heart, but it is the only one with the ideal of an abstract, consenting or not-consenting individual. The only way such an atomised arrangement can hold together for any length of time is if there is an unspoken and non-abstract substance surrounding it; the warm air through which the storm moves.
From the 1780s to around 1910, that was the dual force of whiteness — the idea that Black people, even after emancipation, were not real Americans — and the frontier and the possibility of land. With that, the US could culturally withstand the huge immigration influx from 1865 to 1924, which undermined its Anglo-Celtic dominant ethnoculture. But that meant a re-heightening of the race border between Black and white, with Jim Crow laws — until these too were legally overturned in 1964 amid what was really a second liberal revolution.
It is this revolution that is the cause of the current transformation of politics. When the first liberal revolution occurred — the 1776 one — a whole lot of categories were relatively stable due to the limits of nature, travel, communications, etc. Society was more important than the individual in making social life, race was essential, men and women were not in question as fundamental categories, and so on.
The revolution thus had limits it did not have to impose on its spread and its transformation of everyday life. But when the second liberal revolution came along, those limits were rapidly falling away. The drafters of the First Amendment thought calls to insurrection should be protected by it; no-one thought pornography, or advocacy of abortion, should be.
One could multiply such unseen limits many times, as one has seen them fall away one by one over the past six decades. Such a new regime of life has become the home, the ground, of the newly tertiary educated groups, just as it has made those outside that feel homeless and ungrounded in their own country. The system has generated its own category-five storm.
But the storm isn’t Donald Trump. It’s the liberal onslaught that people see him standing against. He is the fragments people are shoring up against their ruin, to quote another self-promoting Yankee rich boy. The ruin is a “hyperliberalism”, which is perceived as making every aspect of life political, and thus making life unlivable — if “living” is a synthesis of the assumed, familiar and customary, sitting beneath the contested and novel.
That is why these elections have come to seem more of a fight for life, even more so than elections that pitted political-economic leftism and modernisation such as FDR’s New Deal. Even though the systemic and structural differences in policy were much greater, the common agreement was deeper on what life was, even among enemies.
That has gone now, and at the same time as it has gone, so too has the structural mechanisms — a post-war social democratic system oriented towards contesting unfairness — that provided an alternative source of solidarity and shared purpose and value. Historically, America is now on the coast of the wide Sargasso, and — hey, Q was right — the metaphor is coming for it.
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Publish date : 2024-10-09 13:13:00
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