Liberals: Stop the Masochism

Tim had an interesting conversation with George Packer last week. You should listen to it in its entirety. I want to interrogate one small point of their discussion.

Packer seems to take the Antonio Gramsci view of our moment: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”¹ I think it’s accurate to say that Packer believes the old American order has run its course. And further, that conservatism and/or the Republican party has realized this fact and presented a new vision for society, while liberalism and/or the Democratic party has not.² Here’s Packer:

We liberal democrats, that is to say, believers in liberal democracy . . . have a real problem because we’re now constantly in this defensive posture of trying to protect the rule of law, due process, free speech, all of those values, which I’m not prepared to get rid of. . . .

At the same time, what are we prepared to change? We cannot live in the twentieth century forever. There must be some way in which the Democratic party or the opposition to Trump has to “think anew,” as Lincoln said, and “act anew.” Trump did that—in a terrible way, but he was recognizing a kind of used-up status quo, and that’s why so many Americans threw out their own sense of what’s decent and supported him.

I don’t want to say that Packer is wrong, because this isn’t a right/wrong kind of conversation. In some ways, his understanding is almost certainly correct. But in others, it’s askew. Today I want to give you three arguments:

• Trumpism was not entirely³ rejection of a status quo that no longer served people’s legitimate needs.

• The American order as we knew it from, say, 1979 to 2015 was tremendously successful.

• Liberalism’s great liability isn’t “wokeness.”⁴ It’s a lack of self-confidence bordering on masochism.

This is a long one. In the comments I want your theories of why liberalism is so weak today. But first, I hope you’ll take the ride with me.

(1) Trumpism wasn’t about being left behind.

If I’m interpreting Packer correctly, he believes that by 2016 the economic politics of zombie Reaganism were a dead letter. He views Trump as more symptom than cause of what followed; a reaction to ennui stemming from the old conservatism no longer treating people’s concerns seriously. Whatever Trumpism’s flaws—and to be clear, Packer does not like Trumpism—he sees conservatism’s new illiberal project as an attempt to address such concerns. Here he is again, talking about the underpinnings of MAGA:

They have attached themselves to a vehicle of destruction . . . but they were thinking radically. They were reactionaries who wanted to get rid of so much of the modern world and return to a Christian republic or some good society that I wouldn’t want to live in. But they were willing to do it because they felt that the modern world had failed to provide the good life to all of us.

I’m not sure this is correct. ...