“Reactionary centrists” are “self-declared moderates who claim equally to oppose extremes on the right and on the left.” Their untenable position conflates fascist power-holders with progressive resistors to authoritarianism.
However, some progressives, such as Jan Werner-Muller, also conflate reactionary centrists with criticism of the left, and complain, “Hard-hitting criticism is reserved almost exclusively for the left.”
He avers, “You are under no moral obligation to become a fan of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, but to equate them with Trump means contributing to the destruction of democracy.”
And then, with biting sarcasm, Werner-Muller insists that reactionary centrists are weakening the resistance by promoting the narrative that “we failed to pay attention to the ‘left-behind;’ that we must book political safaris in Appalachia; and we must closely study Hillbilly Elegy to demonstrate compassion for the heartland.”
He proclaims, “Behind the ostentatious displays of ‘we failed to listen’ is also a profound narcissism: if only we acted (or at least talked) differently, all would be well.”
That is an implicit acknowledgment that narcissism does not just characterize Trump and the right, but contaminates the left to a significant degree as well. That doesn’t make right wing extremists and progressive leftists equivalent, but it does speak to the deeper source of Trumpism, which is shared by both the right and the left.
It’s true that for weak-minded or dead-hearted liberals (no longer an oxymoron), “finding fault with both sides equally” is standard operating procedure. But the idea that they are influential in sustaining Trumpism because they perceive “a global vibe shift in favor of the right” is ludicrous.
So we have two straw men. Reactionary centrists set up a false equivalency between the extreme right, which is fanatical and has power, and the left, which is ideologically divided and has little power.
And influential progressives make reactionary centrists into a straw man because “hard-hitting criticism is reserved almost exclusively for the left.”
Like all straw man arguments, the ploy is to over-simplify the position of one’s opponent (often to the point that the opponent doesn’t recognize their position in the argument), and then attack the image that’s been created in order to avoid confronting criticism.
So with regard to the national and global political crisis of rightist extremism, progressive complainers about the marginal influence of centrist reactionaries are also missing the mark.
They hold out the hollow hope that the resistance will suffice and American democracy will be restored, and a renewed citizenry and re-established legislative branch will enact the “post-Trump radical reforms which US democracy desperately requires.”
There are a number of problems with banking on a “post-Trump” world.
The first is that when authoritarianism has taken hold in a formerly (nominally) democratic nation, the conservative/liberal, right/left, traditional/progressive paradigm becomes irrelevant. The deterioration of democracy is too deep for recovery of the norms of the collapsed system.
Is thinking about a post-Trump world essentially any different than the “return to normalcy” that Joe Biden offered and largely delivered? How did that work out?
Continuing to think and act in terms of the old paradigm, as progressives are ideologically committed to doing, impedes the radical changes that they accuse reactionary centrists of hindering.
Besides, it’s a much more dire situation now. Since Trump wasn’t indicted for inciting the mob and trying to steal the 2020 election, an increasingly mad Donald, who has convinced himself that he actually won in 2020, is absconding with ballots and calling for Republicans to “nationalize” the midterms in 15 Democratic states so he can “legally” steal the election.
Second, given the rigidity of extremists on the right (and all extremists are by definition ideologically rigid), there is little point in wasting energy and time criticizing fascists like Trump, Miller and their ilk.
It has nothing to do with their “agency.” They simply are unable to listen. The limits of reason must be acknowledged.
Third, progressives don’t actually want radical change. By definition, they want a return to and continuation of the socio-political progress that existed before the extremists and authoritarians were voted in again.
In their worldview, there are setbacks to be sure, but “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” With all due respect to Martin Luther King, that truism has been proven untrue.
The universe is indifferent, and the crumbling moral systems of the past cannot arrest humankind’s slide into self-made darkness. The question is, can anything change the basic course of man?
Fourth, the political dimension is the manifestation of the “will of the people” in a democracy, or, in an autocracy, of the power dynamics and institutional structures based solely on force. In either case, politics is not the source of a political system but the expression of a society.
The United States is a nation formed on the principle and premise of “we the people” — “a republic, if you can keep it,” as Benjamin Franklin said. But the basic equation has shifted from what pre-Civil War truth there was in a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” to our utterly degraded state of corruption, with a president who disdains even the pretense of the rule of law.
There are still exceptions at the local level of course, and the local level itself may be an exception to America’s current rule by despots. But the hope that local resistance and genuine community response, as Minneapolitans have demonstrated the last few weeks, will be sufficient, is wishful thinking.
The parts cannot re-coalesce into a whole once the whole has been sundered.
Fifth, “identity politics” has not simply “gone too far,” as reactionary centrists hold, but is flawed at its core. National and global pluralism is based on the illusion that shifting sands of ethnic, national and religious identification can be woven into pleasing patchworks of nations in a harmonious world.
Identifying with particular groups (the essence of tribalism and its modern-day equivalent nationalism) goes unquestioned and unchallenged. Fragmentation becomes “diversity,” which, rather than remedy racist and unjust power structures, elicits a reaction from nationalists and nativists who mourn the loss of an America that only ever existed in their minds.
Christian nationalists, who form the core of Trump’s proverbial base, are driven by the loss of meaning and coherence of their belief system. They have a desperate need to impose a vision of America that the founders found repugnant.
Even so, progressives aren’t asking themselves a crucial question: What part did we play in the emergence of authoritarianism? The answer for too many is little or none. Which means that they played an unseen part.
In a culture and nation acutely attuned to consumer desires, where civic responsibility has shrunk to near non-existence in the pursuit of happiness through more and more stuff, do Americans have the government we deserve?
If so, was the philosophical foundation and political architecture of an American Republic an illusion from the beginning? Or has the Enlightenment simply run its course, and life is demanding radical changes in thinking and feeling?
Even these questions have become secondary, since Americans have, as Franklin feared, lost the Republic.
Progressives insist that it has not been lost, and that we can return to the upward arc of the moral universe that reached such joyful heights with the election of Barack Obama.
Of course, for those who were dis-illusioned by President Obama’s doubling down in Afghanistan, his administration’s extrajudicial drone attacks all over the world, as well as the velvet-gloved mass deportations, our disappointment inoculated us against the shock that Hillaryites felt at the first election of Donald Trump.
Long unaddressed darkness and deadness at the core of the American body politic (beginning with slavery and the decimation of indigenous peoples) has come to a head with the re-election of the tyrant Trump after the Biden interregnum, and with this last hellish year.
Yet progressives continue to believe in the myth of the United States — the traditional story that underwrote our identity as American that even the Civil War didn’t sunder. That’s why they cling to the expectation of post-Trump, when normalcy will again return, and with it the illusive chance for “radical reforms.”
But with an unprovoked attack on Iran and regional war in the Middle East looming on the horizon as the ultimate distraction, progressives who are looking away from present dangers are foolish to imagine they’re seeing glimmers of hope for a post-Trump nation and world.
Is wishful thinking making the left as blind to the depth and scope of the intensifying crisis as reactionary centrists?
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