Starting with the political parties, it has been asserted that we have a duopoly, that is, two parties in complete control of who makes as a candidate. Add to this that the national party has enforced lockstep compliance from its elected ones, when in the past each party had regional differences, it was inevitable that this type of governance would arrive. It has already arrived at the state level. Katherine Gehl and Mark Porter has preposed using a Pick Five primary using ranked voting and Ranked voting for the election. Insures a majority vote.
'Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity.
'Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.
'That sense of “shared fate,” as the scholars put it, arises in part because rich and poor tend to cross paths often, which Mr. Jacobs has noticed even in his own rural community, Vassalboro, Maine, population 4,520.'
A comment on semi-fascism: Was Hitler merely a semi-fascist before the Enabling Act? No, he just hadn’t yet achieved his ultimate goals. This term “semi-fascism” cuts the salami too thin.
Trump is the consequence, not the cause, of the political establishment’s failure to provide for the safety and general welfare of most working Americans.
This essay makes me think about the paradox at the heart of today’s politics. If the real lesson is that liberal democracy must reckon with human fallenness, you’d expect America’s most religious citizens—those who explicitly affirm the doctrine of human sin—to be the strongest allies of restraint, humility, and forgiveness. Yet in practice, the most religious voters are often the most loyal to Trump, whose politics sanctify anger and revenge.
Instead of channeling fallenness into humility and self-restraint, much of American religion has been rechanneled into grievance, tribal loyalty, and retribution. That’s exactly the inversion the Founders feared: passions not contained, but unleashed—and now wrapped in religious justification.
If the antidote to liberal naïveté is recognizing human fallenness, then we also need to ask: why has so much American religion stopped restraining the dark passions and started amplifying them?
I'm here because I am a staunch anti-populist. But that does not seem to be the only principle here. I see the terms “liberal” and “liberal democracy" repeatedly as if this were the ideal shape of society and government and the promoting of which is the purpose here. I don’t think “liberal democracy” should be considered the goal because it is impossible to define EXACTLY what it is and what it means, and it is not shared by everyone. There is, however, something that America and all Americans already have that is far more concrete and was actually intended and designed to protect us from tyranny – the Constitution. Strangely, in this entire article there is just this one single, albeit tangential, mention of the Constitution: ‘“Although we may not like to hear it, proponents of the Constitution repeatedly insisted that, when it comes to our character, Americans aren’t exceptional,” writes Robert Tracy McKenzie, a professor of U.S. history at Wheaton College.’ The explanation for how and why “it’s happening here” is as simple as someone finding and exploiting weaknesses in the Constitution. Our constitution is a wonderful thing, but it has its flaws and weaknesses, and it is TOO DAMN HARD TO CHANGE. I know of numerous ideas for amendment and a number of drives for this one or that one but it just ain’t happenin’—except for this very dangerous Convention of States movement. I think that what we need is a concerted drive to get one amendment pushed through by the “conventional” method, that is, the people demanding passage by Congress and then ratification by the states. Hopefully, this would have the double benefit of a positive change and taking the wind out of the sails of the CoS movement. I personally think that the one amendment we need if we can have only one is OneTerm@aTime.
The term "liberal democracy" is actually quite confusing and is IMO only used by two types of people.
The first is socialists, trying to advocate for their own brand of authoritarianism by borrowing the term "liberal."
The second is just your typical political illiterates who don't really know what they're saying. They oppose authoritarianism, sure, but they support the state control of all our lives, from education, to healthcare, to finance, to energy policy, etc. Just total confusion about the subject of politics.
The founding ideals of modern Western civilization are LIBERAL. This means support for individual rights and rights-protecting government in politics, which means capitalism in economics. That's what liberal actually means.
We know that this is the ideal shape of society because even implemented imperfectly and by incompetent people, it still has produced the highest standard of living in human history. Imagine what we could achieve if we actually had people who knew what they were doing in politics?
The author of this article asks, "Why Is the American Experiment in Trouble?" I think the answer is because the political discourse is utterly overrun by political illiterates and authoritarians.
Liberal democracy balances individual rights and democratic deliberation. By deliberation a people reaches agreement on the appropriate role of government in dealing with public goods etc. Liberal is also used in the US to mean left, which tends to argue for a greater role for government within a context of basic individual rights. You are obviously not a left liberal, but it is a view compatible with liberal democracy, as seen in many European polities.
Thanks for writing - I enjoyed it reading it, as I'm one of the liberals tribe (mostly). Still - can't but think "you are too easy on yourself".
Procedurally - eye for an eye is not a bad cooperating strategy. In fact, on repeated prisoners dilemma, the tit-for-tat is a very solid strategy. (maybe even the best) This is excellent on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM. The idea that US liberals (different from UK liberals) failed b/c of "too rosy view of human nature" is tad too self-serving, don't you think? Maybe this mea culpa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSa52TR9tCA by avid Brooks will be useful as a refresher? In pursuit of virtue, one is especially blind for their own failings. "Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience." (AS)
I live in the UK, and here the process of introspection is further behind. I have only seen this one https://ft.com/content/b82bb503-21bb-4d64-8f72-6c6801f3b196. There are more skeletons in that closet of pants shitting cowardliness. Didn't think liberals of old actually had super sunny view of human nature. Why would they - they were fighting for freedom, that was sorely lacking in most of human history up to the point. As for contemporaries having "too sunny view" - maybe they are of a different kind. Or maybe they just say they do, but most of the time their revealed preferences tell somewhat less flattering story. Ukrainians seems to me to be the last liberals with a fire in their bellies, of the "Give me freedom or give me death" kind.
To come back to the question as to "why". More likely the answer is because the system stopped improving the lives of ever greater numbers of people.
I disagree. I believe there are horrible people that surround the taco and there is a small portion of crazy militant wack jobs -the number has definitely grown since he came down the escalator- but his largest supporters are people who watch reality TV and believe in aliens! The heritage boys…they’re scary, no doubt about it, but most maga are racist, ignorant people who vote.
The rest of the country is now witnessing, once again, what happens when you are not engaged and do not vote!
My adult kids have only known insanity in politics their whole lives- beginning with 9-11-01. They feel there is nothing they can do to change anything and voting is worthless since swing states decide who wins 🤷🏻♀️
Things MUST CHANGE in this country-if we ever get a chance again…
A wonderful handful of book summaries! As a conservative I have never had much faith in human nature. A skepticism only reinforced the longer I live. Maintaining a Stoic perspective keeps me from falling into cynicism and nihilism.
The Republican vision of a permanent Republican majority began to gain traction with the election of 1992 when Bill Clinton was sworn into office. The mid-term election of 1994--- which was the first public relations campaign based on a national party propaganda piece called "The Contract With America." Newt Gingrich understood that as long as Tip O'Neill's adage about all politics being local prevailed Republicans could never get the power to dominate the government. Like Trump's "Project 2025" the Contract was formulated by The Heritage Foundation. Only 13% of the Contract's promises were ever met. "Project 2025" has been much more successful.
The Democrats in response also began to increasingly nationalize their campaigns. From then on forward the only thing that mattered was securing a chamber majority and negotiating (compromising) with the other party as little as possible if at all. The goals of both parties became dis-empowering the other. Voters had to hate and distrust one or the other of the parties. The acrimony increased into the hyper-partisan revenge fest we see today.
The 21st Century National Socialists in ascendancy today see their primary purpose to permanently dis-empower what they call "The Left." "The Left" is an elastic term which basically includes anyone who questions or tries to challenge whatever their agenda is on any given day. Conservative firebrand Liz Cheney is "left." John McCain is "left." Mitt Romney is "left." and so on so forth blah, blah, blah. All of which is intellectually dishonest and irrational but a simple and convenient way to dispose of any meaningful engagement with ideas dangerous to the "inner party." Just call it "woke" and pay no more attention to it.
The goal of the election of 2024 is to dis-empower the Democratic Party permanently at the federal level and in the states where they currently hold absolute power. But even if they fail, even if the Democrats were to win back a slim majority in the House and Senate they will still be stopped by Trump's veto power and The Republican Supreme Court. The Democrats will never have the power to undo the damage that has been done in two years without winning every general and mid-term election--- for at least a decade. And probably not without a demagogue of their own.
Recovery from rage is possible. However the people who need recovery most will, like their alcoholic brethren, deny they have a problem. They also get too many benefits from their rage
Rauch mentioned that the book was "from a Christian publisher", so maybe not. And either way, given the truth about human history it's unfairly masochistic toward our species.
Rational people will always win because they get how drugs work. Trump does not get how drugs work and as he and his kind will be forever in this resentful doom loop of eating the seed corn provided by the intellectuals. And we can go from drugs to any other thing the willfully ignorant are trying to destroy 😬
John Hibbing uses a similar arguement, the role of personaltities, general anxieties etc. https://www.amazon.com/Securitarian-Personality-Motivates-Matters-Post-Trump/dp/0190096489
Starting with the political parties, it has been asserted that we have a duopoly, that is, two parties in complete control of who makes as a candidate. Add to this that the national party has enforced lockstep compliance from its elected ones, when in the past each party had regional differences, it was inevitable that this type of governance would arrive. It has already arrived at the state level. Katherine Gehl and Mark Porter has preposed using a Pick Five primary using ranked voting and Ranked voting for the election. Insures a majority vote.
Do any of these books address the idea that the popularity of this sort of vengeful populist politics has something to do with optimism or pessimism about the country's economic future, as in the article at http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/07/10/when-and-why-nationalism-beats-globalism/ by Jonathan Haidt? From what I have read the case for this is not just about people's predictions about their own economic future (many Trump voters are doing OK personally), but also a sense of what's going on in their own surrounding community, as in the article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/29/business/rural-studies-american-politics.html which says:
'Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity.
'Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.
'That sense of “shared fate,” as the scholars put it, arises in part because rich and poor tend to cross paths often, which Mr. Jacobs has noticed even in his own rural community, Vassalboro, Maine, population 4,520.'
A comment on semi-fascism: Was Hitler merely a semi-fascist before the Enabling Act? No, he just hadn’t yet achieved his ultimate goals. This term “semi-fascism” cuts the salami too thin.
Trump is the consequence, not the cause, of the political establishment’s failure to provide for the safety and general welfare of most working Americans.
This essay makes me think about the paradox at the heart of today’s politics. If the real lesson is that liberal democracy must reckon with human fallenness, you’d expect America’s most religious citizens—those who explicitly affirm the doctrine of human sin—to be the strongest allies of restraint, humility, and forgiveness. Yet in practice, the most religious voters are often the most loyal to Trump, whose politics sanctify anger and revenge.
Instead of channeling fallenness into humility and self-restraint, much of American religion has been rechanneled into grievance, tribal loyalty, and retribution. That’s exactly the inversion the Founders feared: passions not contained, but unleashed—and now wrapped in religious justification.
If the antidote to liberal naïveté is recognizing human fallenness, then we also need to ask: why has so much American religion stopped restraining the dark passions and started amplifying them?
I'm here because I am a staunch anti-populist. But that does not seem to be the only principle here. I see the terms “liberal” and “liberal democracy" repeatedly as if this were the ideal shape of society and government and the promoting of which is the purpose here. I don’t think “liberal democracy” should be considered the goal because it is impossible to define EXACTLY what it is and what it means, and it is not shared by everyone. There is, however, something that America and all Americans already have that is far more concrete and was actually intended and designed to protect us from tyranny – the Constitution. Strangely, in this entire article there is just this one single, albeit tangential, mention of the Constitution: ‘“Although we may not like to hear it, proponents of the Constitution repeatedly insisted that, when it comes to our character, Americans aren’t exceptional,” writes Robert Tracy McKenzie, a professor of U.S. history at Wheaton College.’ The explanation for how and why “it’s happening here” is as simple as someone finding and exploiting weaknesses in the Constitution. Our constitution is a wonderful thing, but it has its flaws and weaknesses, and it is TOO DAMN HARD TO CHANGE. I know of numerous ideas for amendment and a number of drives for this one or that one but it just ain’t happenin’—except for this very dangerous Convention of States movement. I think that what we need is a concerted drive to get one amendment pushed through by the “conventional” method, that is, the people demanding passage by Congress and then ratification by the states. Hopefully, this would have the double benefit of a positive change and taking the wind out of the sails of the CoS movement. I personally think that the one amendment we need if we can have only one is OneTerm@aTime.
The one amendment we need is to make amendments easier
The term "liberal democracy" is actually quite confusing and is IMO only used by two types of people.
The first is socialists, trying to advocate for their own brand of authoritarianism by borrowing the term "liberal."
The second is just your typical political illiterates who don't really know what they're saying. They oppose authoritarianism, sure, but they support the state control of all our lives, from education, to healthcare, to finance, to energy policy, etc. Just total confusion about the subject of politics.
The founding ideals of modern Western civilization are LIBERAL. This means support for individual rights and rights-protecting government in politics, which means capitalism in economics. That's what liberal actually means.
We know that this is the ideal shape of society because even implemented imperfectly and by incompetent people, it still has produced the highest standard of living in human history. Imagine what we could achieve if we actually had people who knew what they were doing in politics?
The author of this article asks, "Why Is the American Experiment in Trouble?" I think the answer is because the political discourse is utterly overrun by political illiterates and authoritarians.
Liberal democracy balances individual rights and democratic deliberation. By deliberation a people reaches agreement on the appropriate role of government in dealing with public goods etc. Liberal is also used in the US to mean left, which tends to argue for a greater role for government within a context of basic individual rights. You are obviously not a left liberal, but it is a view compatible with liberal democracy, as seen in many European polities.
Thanks for writing - I enjoyed it reading it, as I'm one of the liberals tribe (mostly). Still - can't but think "you are too easy on yourself".
Procedurally - eye for an eye is not a bad cooperating strategy. In fact, on repeated prisoners dilemma, the tit-for-tat is a very solid strategy. (maybe even the best) This is excellent on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM. The idea that US liberals (different from UK liberals) failed b/c of "too rosy view of human nature" is tad too self-serving, don't you think? Maybe this mea culpa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSa52TR9tCA by avid Brooks will be useful as a refresher? In pursuit of virtue, one is especially blind for their own failings. "Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience." (AS)
I live in the UK, and here the process of introspection is further behind. I have only seen this one https://ft.com/content/b82bb503-21bb-4d64-8f72-6c6801f3b196. There are more skeletons in that closet of pants shitting cowardliness. Didn't think liberals of old actually had super sunny view of human nature. Why would they - they were fighting for freedom, that was sorely lacking in most of human history up to the point. As for contemporaries having "too sunny view" - maybe they are of a different kind. Or maybe they just say they do, but most of the time their revealed preferences tell somewhat less flattering story. Ukrainians seems to me to be the last liberals with a fire in their bellies, of the "Give me freedom or give me death" kind.
To come back to the question as to "why". More likely the answer is because the system stopped improving the lives of ever greater numbers of people.
Thanks Mr. Rauch. Very insightful observations. My guess is you can pronounce acetaminophen.
I disagree. I believe there are horrible people that surround the taco and there is a small portion of crazy militant wack jobs -the number has definitely grown since he came down the escalator- but his largest supporters are people who watch reality TV and believe in aliens! The heritage boys…they’re scary, no doubt about it, but most maga are racist, ignorant people who vote.
The rest of the country is now witnessing, once again, what happens when you are not engaged and do not vote!
My adult kids have only known insanity in politics their whole lives- beginning with 9-11-01. They feel there is nothing they can do to change anything and voting is worthless since swing states decide who wins 🤷🏻♀️
Things MUST CHANGE in this country-if we ever get a chance again…
Surely influential Democrats and liberals also suffer from these maladies.
Bad people wanted power and they made a plan to take it.
The Science of Revenge? Well, that’s a very interesting theme.
A wonderful handful of book summaries! As a conservative I have never had much faith in human nature. A skepticism only reinforced the longer I live. Maintaining a Stoic perspective keeps me from falling into cynicism and nihilism.
The Republican vision of a permanent Republican majority began to gain traction with the election of 1992 when Bill Clinton was sworn into office. The mid-term election of 1994--- which was the first public relations campaign based on a national party propaganda piece called "The Contract With America." Newt Gingrich understood that as long as Tip O'Neill's adage about all politics being local prevailed Republicans could never get the power to dominate the government. Like Trump's "Project 2025" the Contract was formulated by The Heritage Foundation. Only 13% of the Contract's promises were ever met. "Project 2025" has been much more successful.
The Democrats in response also began to increasingly nationalize their campaigns. From then on forward the only thing that mattered was securing a chamber majority and negotiating (compromising) with the other party as little as possible if at all. The goals of both parties became dis-empowering the other. Voters had to hate and distrust one or the other of the parties. The acrimony increased into the hyper-partisan revenge fest we see today.
The 21st Century National Socialists in ascendancy today see their primary purpose to permanently dis-empower what they call "The Left." "The Left" is an elastic term which basically includes anyone who questions or tries to challenge whatever their agenda is on any given day. Conservative firebrand Liz Cheney is "left." John McCain is "left." Mitt Romney is "left." and so on so forth blah, blah, blah. All of which is intellectually dishonest and irrational but a simple and convenient way to dispose of any meaningful engagement with ideas dangerous to the "inner party." Just call it "woke" and pay no more attention to it.
The goal of the election of 2024 is to dis-empower the Democratic Party permanently at the federal level and in the states where they currently hold absolute power. But even if they fail, even if the Democrats were to win back a slim majority in the House and Senate they will still be stopped by Trump's veto power and The Republican Supreme Court. The Democrats will never have the power to undo the damage that has been done in two years without winning every general and mid-term election--- for at least a decade. And probably not without a demagogue of their own.
Recovery from rage is possible. However the people who need recovery most will, like their alcoholic brethren, deny they have a problem. They also get too many benefits from their rage
Rauch mentioned that the book was "from a Christian publisher", so maybe not. And either way, given the truth about human history it's unfairly masochistic toward our species.
Rational people will always win because they get how drugs work. Trump does not get how drugs work and as he and his kind will be forever in this resentful doom loop of eating the seed corn provided by the intellectuals. And we can go from drugs to any other thing the willfully ignorant are trying to destroy 😬