Podcast recommendation: "Big, Impersonal Institutions Are Failing Us. Loyalty to Our Communities Might Save Us."

“George Bailey [from It’s a Wonderful Life], in today’s world, would not stay in Bedford Falls. He’d be the first person to get out, go off to Harvard, get a job in finance, live his life in the suburbs of NYC, and retire and die in Florida. He would never go back the Bedford Falls. Having a sense of loyalty is to say, I have some kind of obligation to this place, and in return, this place has some kind of obligation to me.”

Careful: Liberalism might not mean what you think it does. This is an excellent conversation. There are ideas; there are no miracles. It is an informative 45-minute podcast if you have the spare time to listen.

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Big, Impersonal Institutions Are Failing Us. Loyalty to Our Communities Might Save Us, at Strong Towns

“The freer we are, the less we feel we control the mechanisms of our liberty and individuality.”
— Patrick Deneen

It’s no secret to our regular readers that Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn is an avid reader. In fact, every December, Chuck shares a list of highly recommended books from the year that’s winding down—and in 2018, at the top of his list was Why Liberalism Failed by University of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen.

If partisan alarm bells (or a partisan cheering section) just started ringing in your head, hold up—Deneen is not talking about liberalism in the sense of the modern left-right divide. He means liberalism in the sense of “the liberal Enlightenment,” or as Deneen puts it in this week’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, “the philosophical political project of modernity.”

The centuries-long liberal project treats society as a collection of autonomous individuals, and governments as social compacts whose primary purpose is to protect individual rights. Think, for example, of the Declaration of Independence: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The promise of liberalism is to free individuals from each other: from the tribal, religious, and communal bonds that once ruled our lives.

The problem, according to Deneen, is that there is a paradox at the heart of that project. The freer we are from traditional social structures, the more powerful and encompassing must be the two mechanisms modern humans have invented to free us from those structures: the state and the market.

To the extent that there is a crisis of liberalism today—and the evidence for that lies in the political turmoil facing many Western countries—Deneen believes it may be because we feel more powerless than ever to meaningfully control or affect the course of either of those entities. Many of us treat national politics as largely a spectator sport, are cynical about the relevance or impact of voting or activism, and harbor a pervasive sense that market forces, far from bring shared prosperity, are leaving many of our communities behind as well.

What’s the answer? Deneen has no five-point plan. But he does urge us to take a hard look at the value of community—of living lives that are embedded in a place, and not shying from the interpersonal obligation that this entails. Elite culture in America teaches us to “look for the exits,” says Deneen, but there is value and meaning to be found in forging the deep bonds of community in the place you are rooted, even when that is an uncomfortable or self-sacrificing thing to do.

Deneen has his critics, but both his argument and its critiques fall outside of well-worn partisan ground. There is plenty here worth listening to and considering for Strong Towns advocates interested in the kind of localist revolution we talk often about: building deeply resilient, prosperous places from the ground up, through local action, without depending on either Washington or Wall Street for deliverance.

An essay the Adamites won't read: "Our movement must base itself on a politics capable of confronting both Trump and the rotten elite liberalism that enabled his rise."

Here in Floyd County, the only mantra local Democrats have been able to muster is Make Monetization Great Again.

They'll wail and moan about Trump, then without even washing their hands, praise Jeff Gahan for promoting luxury at the expense of the most vulnerable, as in the instance of public housing "reform."

I'd say this sort of inattention to basic ideological hygiene can spread disease, except the rot's already so pervasive that it probably doesn't matter.

Politicking Without Politics, by Paul Heideman (Jacobin)

Democratic elites are delusional — you can’t subdue the reactionary right without a robust alternative political vision.

For a distillation of the Democratic Party’s self-conception today, one could do worse than consult Nancy Pelosi’s recent pronouncement: “We don’t have a party orthodoxy — they [the Republicans] are ideological.”

For some time now, this view of the political divide — Democrats are consummate pragmatists, Republicans are rigid slaves to dogma — has predominated in elite liberal circles. Hillary Clinton, after all, centered her campaign on competence and experience far more than any actual conception of politics.

And despite the resulting disaster, this desire to have a politics without politics — this strategy to build a coalition bereft of any clear values or principles — has continued to animate liberals’ opposition to Trump. Democrats really believe, it seems, that they can subdue the reactionary right without articulating any alternative political vision beyond prudent governance.

SNIP

Over the longer term, the fruits of the Democrats’ strategy are even more troubling. In framing their opposition to Trump as non-political, Democrats are perpetuating the crisis in American liberalism.

Obama initially appeared to be liberalism’s savior, promising to redeem it from its abject failures during the Bush years. But eight years of managerial centrism left the party hollowed out both institutionally and ideologically. Without any real challenge from the left, Obama never strayed far from the path laid out by the banks and tech companies that funded his campaigns. While his personal gifts allowed him to win very high approval ratings for a two-term president, his policies did little to alleviate the growing misery in many parts of the country. Obama’s inability to rewrite the political and economic rules of the game ensured that any candidate who lacked his talents would be unable to stitch together the same coalition.

It is this continued fidelity to American capitalism, this unwavering commitment to keeping things more or less as they are, that stands behind the Democrats’ apparent fear of ideas. Any actual attempt to advance the principles that loom large in the American liberal imagination would entail some sort of confrontation with capital, and the Democratic Party, bought and paid for by capital, is unwilling to contemplate such a step.

FINAL SNIP

Fortunately, the alternative to Democratic vapidity is not hard to find. It has reverberated through much of the popular resistance to Trump’s presidency. When thousands of people gathered at JFK Airport to protest the Muslim ban, they didn’t make an hour-long subway trip to stand in the cold because they thought Trump was being hypocritical or unpresidential. They gathered because they felt Trump had infringed on core values of egalitarianism and fairness. They were moved by a basic sense of injustice. They were moved, in other words, by politics.

While the liberal evasion of politics gives the impression that the Democrats have no ideas they are confident enough to defend, mobilizations like the refugee solidarity protests do the exact opposite. When thousands of people assemble with signs declaring “Refugees are Welcome Here,” they stake out a political ground that directly confronts Trump. They provide a political pole capable of further mobilization.

"Technocratic liberalism prides itself on having no ideology to speak of — which is itself the most dogmatic ideology of them all."

For a very long time, I persisted in the increasingly threadbare notion that lesser-evilism "worked" for me; therefore, according to Tony Blair, it "mattered."

But it wasn't working, and what ultimately matters to me is voting "for" rather than "against."

This article explains it rather brilliantly. Youthful local Democrats are urged to read it, seeing as their elders probably won't.

Twilight of the Technocrats? by Luke Savage (Jacobin)

Technocratic liberalism prides itself on having no ideology to speak of — which is itself the most dogmatic ideology of them all.

 ... This is the technocratic fallacy exposed. Behind every political claim or prescription, no matter its source, lies a set of assumptions (conscious or otherwise) about what the horizons of politics are or what they ought to be. And more than anything else these assumptions, and the political narratives that follow, are shaped by the social and cultural outlooks of the people who hold them.

This is why, if we truly want to understand the politics of the technocratic liberal center, we need look no further than the milieu they emerged from ...

SNIP

... For all its pretensions of transcending the schism between left and right, the Third Way shift amounted to a hostile takeover of the center-left by a new generation of center-right technocrats whose main achievement was welding a refurbished lexicon of liberal progressivism to the processes already initiated by the likes of Thatcher and Reagan.

To this end, the political grammar of figures like Clinton and Blair synthesized and dulled many of the traditional idioms of liberalism, conservatism, and social democracy, redeploying them in the service of manifestly neoliberal causes. A sweeping, pro-corporate agenda of labor outsourcing, privatization, financial deregulation, welfare reform, and means-testing was implemented on the back of antiseptic management-speak incessantly declaring itself loyal to no ideology at all.

What “worked” became the kinds of regulations and investments that would most benefit industries like tech and finance, what qualified as “ideological” being anything out of sync with the professional managerial class and its various political, cultural, or economic outlooks.

"It's not about immigrants, it's about ideas."

A bit of thought provocation on Super Bore Sunday.

Younge: "If the liberal left is going to challenge (Trump) effectively in the coming years, then it must learn the lessons of its defeat."

Let's view this sentence in bold.

"The Democratic machine does not need a tune-up—it needs a complete overhaul."

Has he quit yet?

Donald Trump Is Not Too Big to Fail, by Gary Younge (The Nation)

His victory illustrates the weakness of the Republican Party, not its strength. And despite his braggadocio, he’s vulnerable.

... Fortunately, while the right is emboldened, it is not ascendant. Trump’s victory illustrates the weakness of the Republican Party’s leaders, not their strength. They wanted anyone else, and now they are unable to control him. He openly derides and baits them. Notwithstanding his braggadocio, he remains vulnerable. His agenda is no more unassailable than his victory was unfathomable.

But there is nothing inevitable about his demise. If the liberal left is going to challenge him effectively in the coming years, then it must learn the lessons of its defeat. The Democratic machine does not need a tune-up—it needs a complete overhaul. For far too long, it has been too arrogant, complacent, or contemptuous (and sometimes all three) to make an argument beyond “at least we’re not them.”

The reason why Trump was able to attain power is not because he had better ideas, made better arguments, had greater organizational capacity, or even spent more money. The reason he was able to win was because those charged with opposing him offered not hope, but the status quo, in a country where inequality between rich and poor and black and white is growing. He won because his opponents believed their own PR. Hubris sent them to Arizona when humility would have kept them in Pennsylvania. He won because, emerging from a period of economic crisis, the multimillionaire businessman whose catchphrase is “You’re fired” looked less like a representative of the establishment than the liberal who claimed she represented the interests of the poor. If he is stupid, then what are we?

"How do liberals halt the march of the right? Stand our ground and toughen up."

The author writes primarily from the British perspective, but the gist of it remains intact, and echoes Michael Moore's points about available tools and a willingness to act.

Opposed to what's coming down? Great, but you may find it necessary to stop whining and actually do something.

I've shortened the ten points to a bullet list. Be sure to click through and read the gritty details -- and please stop bitching about 2016. We need to be ready for 2017, campers.

How do liberals halt the march of the right? Stand our ground and toughen up, by Matthew d'Ancona (The Guardian)

To all you despondent liberals, Labour centrists, Tory modernisers, remainers, social justice warriors, social justice worriers, and everyone out there fretful about Brexit, depressed by Donald Trump, and scared of the alt-right, here is my festive message: get off the ground, you wusses. Put down your gingerbread lattes, and put up your dukes ...

 ... here are my 10 tips for liberals of all kinds hoping to stop the march of the right in 2017:

1. Defend your ground, aggressively
2. Colonise your opponents’ language
3. Lead, don’t follow
4. Heed grievances – but don’t appease
5. Stand up for immigration
6. Stand up for integration
7. Fight the next battle, not the last
8. Don’t make a fetish of “unity”
9. Challenge the public
10. Be patient

"My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense."

NAC modification of cartoon by Mr. Fish, from the article.

Bring out your dead ...

Denial is not a river in Egypt, although in Nawbany, you'll hear it played more often than "I'll Be Numb for Christmas."

We Are All Deplorables, by Chris Hedges (TruthDig via Common Dreams)

My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common. Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy. They also nourish the magical thinking peddled by the con artists in the Christian right, the state lotteries that fleece the poor, and an entertainment industry that night after night shows visions of an America and a lifestyle on television screens—“The Apprentice” typified this—that foster unattainable dreams of wealth and celebrity ...

 ... I finished my book with a deep dislike for megachurch pastors who, like Trump, manipulate despair to achieve power and wealth. I see the Christian right as a serious threat to an open society. But I do not hate those who desperately cling to this emotional life raft, even as they spew racist venom. Their conclusion that minorities, undocumented workers or Muslims are responsible for their impoverishment is part of the retreat into fantasy. The only way we will blunt this racism and hatred and allow them to free themselves from the grip of magical thinking is by providing jobs that offer adequate incomes and economic stability and by restoring their communities and the primacy of the common good. Any other approach will fail. We will not argue or scold them out of their beliefs. These people are emotionally incapable of coping with the world as it is. If we demonize them we demonize ourselves.

CounterPunch: "The Neoliberal Prison: Brexit Hysteria and the Liberal Mind."

Thanks to Bluegill for the prompt.

CounterPunch is a monthly magazine published in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as "muckraking with a radical attitude". It has been described as left-wing by both supporters and detractors.

This alone: "The Brexit vote is a huge challenge to the left to face facts."

The Neoliberal Prison: Brexit Hysteria and the Liberal Mind, by Jonathan Cook (CounterPunch)

The enraged liberal reaction to the Brexit vote is in full flood. The anger is pathological – and helps to shed light on why a majority of Britons voted for leaving the European Union, just as earlier a majority of Labour party members voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

A few years ago the American writer Chris Hedges wrote a book he titled the Death of the Liberal Class. His argument was not so much that liberals had disappeared, but that they had become so coopted by the right wing and its goals – from the subversion of progressive economic and social ideals by neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoconservative doctrine in prosecuting aggressive and expansionist wars overseas in the guise of “humanitarian intervention” – that liberalism had been hollowed out of all substance.

Liberal pundits sensitively agonise over, but invariably end up backing, policies designed to benefit the bankers and arms manufacturers, and ones that wreak havoc domestically and abroad. They are the “useful idiots” of modern western societies ...

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

"If you (literally) disintegrate a society’s physical setting, as sprawl has done, you tend to disintegrate its culture as well."

Who are the local conservatives and Republicans who'd like to join the dialogue about these purple topics?

I can think of plenty of them in leadership positions who can't and won't, and yet many of us on the shop floor agree as to broad concepts during social media chats.

Where are you? Let's have a beer. Forget the parties, because there are coalitions waiting to be built.

Painting the Town Purple, by Jeff Turrentine (On Earth)

... Which is why it’s always satisfying when left and right amicably agree to come together over a sustainability issue that was previously thought of as the province of “the environmental movement” (whatever that term has come to mean). Not long ago, I came across a remarkable quote: a one-sentence condemnation of urban sprawl that astutely links its ethos of physical decentralization to the breakdown of certain civic ideals, like community and neighborliness, that we hold dear.

If you (literally) disintegrate a society’s physical setting, as sprawl has done, you tend to disintegrate its culture as well.

True enough, I thought—and well put, at that. The sentence appeared in a white paper on sprawl’s social costs. That one of its three authors was Andrés Duany, the architect who coined the term “New Urbanism” to describe a set of urban-planning principles emphasizing density, centrality, walkability, and shared civic amenities, came as little surprise. But upon reading the names of Duany’s collaborators, I’ll confess that my first thought was that a politically minded copyeditor was playing a practical joke. Could it really be the case that helping Duany make his anti-sprawl, pro–smart growth argument were Paul M. Weyrich, cofounder of both the far-right Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority, and William S. Lind, the conservative critic who has spent the last quarter-century since the collapse of the Soviet Union railing against an insidious “Marxist culture” that’s still hard at work corrupting America from within?

Lakoff: " Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth."

Long but recommended reading for Chairman Adam ... to be fair, for all of us on the "left" side of the aisle.

 ... George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. In Communicating Our American Values and Vision, he gives this precis: "Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic."

Leading to this expression of what it means to be a Hoosier in Pence-istan, circa 2015:

 ... In fact, there is no centre: the more progressives capitulate, the more boldly the conservatives express their vision, and the further to the right the mainstream moves.

I was directed back to Lakoff after too long an interregnum when I stumbled on this article, and the "strict father family" framing explaining why the chickens vote for Colonel Sanders.

The following is a Truthout interview with Professor George Lakoff about his latest effort, THE ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!, to convince progressives to “frame” their political language and appeals based on deep-seated and active values. These are positions and actions that most of the public supports, but absent appropriate “framing” often vote their fears instead of progressive beliefs. It is necessary to ground a nurturing politics for the common good and core values in language and a moral foundation that appeals – rhetorically and emotionally – to the better selves of voters.

You write, “remember that voters vote their identity and their values, which need not coincide with their self-interest.” I remember writing a commentary on a poor congressional district, let’s say about 98 percent white, in Kentucky. Most of the residents were on food stamps, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid – or all of them. However, they have voted in recent elections by landslide majorities to re-elect a congressman who opposes food stamps and supports cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Can you elaborate on how this can occur?

A single moral worldview dominates conservative policies in every domain of life – family, personal identity, sex, religion, sports, education, the market, foreign policy and politics – what I’ve called strict father morality. Your moral worldview is central to how you understand your life.

In a strict father family, the father is in charge and is assumed to know right from wrong, to have moral as well as physical authority. He is supposed to protect the family, support the family, set the rules, enforce the rules, maintain respect, govern sexuality and reproduction, and teach his kids right from wrong, that is, to grow up with the same moral system. His word defines what is right and is law; no backtalk. Disobedience is punished, painfully, so that children learn not to disobey. Via physical discipline, they learn internal discipline, which is how they become moral beings. With discipline they can become prosperous.

If you are not prosperous, you are not disciplined enough, not taking enough personal responsibility and deserve your poverty. At the center is the principle of personal responsibility and moral hierarchy: those who are more moral (in this sense of morality) should rule: God over man, man over nature, parents over children, the rich over the poor, Western culture over non-Western culture, America over other countries, men over women, straights over gays, Christians over non-Christians, etc.

On conservative religion, God is a strict father; in sports, coaches are strict with their athletes; in classrooms, teachers should be strict with students; in business, employers rule over employees; in the market, the market should decide – the market itself is the strict father, deciding that those who have financial discipline deserve their wealth, and others deserve their poverty; and in politics, this moral system itself should rule.

Conservatives can be poor, but they can still be kings in their own castles – strict fathers at home, in their personal identity: in their religion, in their sex lives, in the sports they love. Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth.

Back to Zoe Williams at The Guardian for a brief sketch of the nurturant-family model.

... The nurturant-family model is the progressive view: in it, the ideals are empathy, interdependence, co-operation, communication, authority that is legitimate and proves its legitimacy with its openness to interrogation. "The world that the nurturant parent seeks to create has exactly the opposite properties," Lakoff writes in Moral Politics. As progressives identify failures of logic in the conservative position, so it works the other way round (one of Lakoff's examples: "How can liberals support federal funding for Aids research and treatment, while promoting the spread of Aids by sanctioning sexual behaviour that leads to Aids?").

Inauguration 3: "Obama's Inauguration Speech: A Primer."

When even a conservative commentator like David Brooks is compelled to concede that Barack Obama’s second inaugural speech "surely has to rank among the best of the past half-century," one making a strong "argument for a pragmatic and patriotic progressivism," then it's been a fairly good day. As usual, Charlie Pierce gets pride of place in summarizing Barack Obama's speech.

Obama's Inauguration Speech: A Primer, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

... The president's second inaugural address was as clear a statement of progressive principles as a president has given since LBJ got up there and shoved the Voting Rights Act and the words "We shall overcome" right up old Richard Russell's ass in 1965 ...

... The speech was a bold refutation of almost everything the Republican party has stood for over the past 40 years. It was a loud — and, for this president, damned near derisive — denouncement of all the mindless, reactionary bunkum that the Republicans have come to stand for in 2013; you could hear the sound of the punch he landed on the subject of global warming halfway to Annapolis. But the meat of the speech was a brave assertion of the power of government, not as an alien entity, but as an instrument of the collective will and desires of a self-governing people.

Inauguration 2: "The President liberals were waiting for is (finally) here."

Maybe, maybe not. That scratching sound you hear is coming from the heels of right-wing obstructionists, digging in.

The President liberals were waiting for is (finally) here, by Chris Cillizza (Washington Post)

... The question going forward is whether President Obama will make good on the progressive agenda he outlined today. Does he push hard on climate change or some sort of broader energy policy? Does he cut a deal with Republicans on immigration reform or go it alone believing they will follow? On guns, will he accept a smaller-bore version of the legislative proposals he outlined last week or go for the whole enchilada (or something close to it)?

Those questions are, at the moment, impossible to answer. What we do know: In his second inaugural speech, President Obama forcefully embraced the sort of progressive agenda for which liberals — and Democrats more broadly — have long pined.

"Many conservative Americans have seen their livelihoods threatened by the very neoliberal economics their party seeks to extend."

See: Chickens, Colonel Sanders, et al.

The world as seen by Republicans, in a land of myth and amnesia; US conservatives are increasingly keen to interpret their country's woes primarily in terms of threats from abroad, by Gary Younge (Guardian)

... But while liberals are more likely to see the roots of this crisis as domestic – growing economic inequalities, religious zealotry, corporatisation of media and politics – conservatives are increasingly keen to perceive the primary threat as external: immigrants, Islam, foreigners and foreign trade.

"Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?"

Considering the identity of the author, I was prepared to be annoyed with this piece. In the end, I am annoyed, but at least he took a stab at balance in the end.

Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?, by Ross Douthat (New York Times)

... Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.