What Is Politics About?

Not just material well-being

I am a member of a writers’ group which consists largely of middle- (or not so middle-) aged and center- (or not-so-center-) left journalists, biographers and historians. (No, we’re not all Jewish, but almost.) One of us is writing a book, which we discussed last week, about the way that the cult of money has overtaken and corrupted our great cultural institutions. At one point I realized that the one thing all of us agreed on is: this is politics. The great question of politics, that is, is the just use and distribution of scarce resources.

Had we been writers of the same generation on the center-or-not-so-center-right, our great subject would have been, rather, the most effective means of expanding the economy so as to eliminate, or reduce, the problem of scarcity. A shorthand way of expressing the distinction is that my group would have thought of themselves as modern welfare-state liberals while the others would have called themselves classical free-market liberals.

And neither of us would have been able to make sense of contemporary politics.

American politics has been organized around a struggle between the two liberalisms since the time of Teddy Roosevelt and the progressives. Both sides would say that democratic politics boils down to a debate over the economy. But why do we think that must be so? In much of Europe, Christian Democratic parties made secularism, or laicism, a fighting issue for much of the twentieth century. The same could be said of non-Western democracies like India. Liberals of both varieties wish to see fights over values and culture relegated to the private sphere; but the fading of liberalism, the civic religion of the post-war world, has brought these fundamental questions to the heart of politics.

Make. . .Something Great Again

People Want Meaning

In 2016, I wrote a long piece about Poland, which had emerged from Soviet control to take its place as a modern, prosperous nation. Warsaw had become a city of cafes and fine restaurants. The ruling Civic Platform party, I wrote, “had little ideology beyond keeping hot water in the tap.” Poland appeared to inhabit Francis Fukuyama’s post-ideological liberal cosmos. And then, shockingly, the anti-liberal Law and Justice Party had unseated the modernists (for a second time) by running against immigrants and “Brussels.” Intellectuals were bewildered. It turned out, as one of them put it to me, “people wanted history, they wanted glory, they wanted meaning.” They weren’t satisfied with dependable hot water.

That was, in retrospect, the year that politics changed. When the English voted on Brexit, the Remainers said, “You’ll destroy the economy,” and the Leavers said, “We want to restore Great Britain to its glory.” The Leavers won. And of course Donald Trump sailed to victory in the Republican primaries by trampling on Reaganite free-market ideology, and then defeated Hillary Clinton, the welfare-state liberal part excellence. Those Polish, English and American voters weren’t making economic choices, even if they had persuaded themselves that their choices would not have harmful economic consequences.

Liberals could only see in the new politics of culture a massive scheme to distract working-class voters with the shiny bauble of “values.” Perhaps the earliest expression of this materialist claim was Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, What’s The Matter With Kansas? It was, Frank argued, self-evident that the humble folk of Kansas should be “flocking to the party of Roosevelt,” as they had in 1932, since the Democrats continued to offer real solutions to the plight of the working and middle class. Instead, they had drunk from a poison compounded by right-wing evangelicals working hand-in-glove with the capitalist class, who had “discovered in the great right-wing groundswell an easy shortcut to realizing their ambitions.” Values were the veil that hid the reality of material interests.

I very much doubt if liberals would have so insistently relegated questions of culture to the private realm had the culture reflected the values of conservatives. But of course our great universities, foundations, museums and press outlets were fundamentally secular and progressive. We would have said that they reflected a national consensus, but Donald Trump appears to have intuited that that wasn’t so. Liberalism was hegemonic, but perhaps not majoritarian. And people who felt shut out or disrespected by those institutions were ready for Trump’s siren song.

We Can’t Leave Meaning To The Illiberals

In his second term in office Trump has opened a full-scale war on the liberal bastions of culture–on Harvard, NPR, Paul Weiss and no doubt many more to come. He has sought to seize control of cultural institutions that he accuses of “wokeness”--the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress and even, recently, the National Portrait Gallery. Trump focused so obsessively on the culture that the introduction of an actual budget bill last month offered a strange kind of reassurance that politics as we once knew it still existed.

Am I exaggerating? Wasn’t Trump elected to lower the price of eggs and reduce illegal immigration? Won’t he be punished for straying from his mandate? Fifty-eight percent of Gen Z men did not vote for Trump because they were mad about inflation; nor did so many Black and Latino men shift to the right because they were sick of seeing migrants at the border. No doubt anger over issues of masculinity and gender has a good deal to do with the loss of steady jobs and dignified work; but it also has to do with masculinity and gender. And since that’s what makes those voters angry, that’s what they think politics should be about. They didn’t vote for Trump because they wanted him to destroy Harvard, but they’ll still celebrate its demise.

What then? Accepting a politics of values doesn’t mean capitulating to nativism, paleo-masculinity and intellectual intolerance. Defending the autonomy of universities, law firms and museums comes first. That said, the value-neutrality of liberalism leaves it vulnerable to figures like Trump or Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski who exploit the craving for a more personal politics. (The progressive left does have an answer to this question, but the American people are plainly not on board for gender fluidity, expressive individualism and intersectionality.)

You can acquire policies but you can’t acquire values. A generation ago, Third Way Democrats like Al From used to call on party leaders to use less technocratic and more value-laden language–”family,” ”faith,” “honor.” That never took because it was artificial. Real values well up from below; they are not imposed from above, though they can be orchestrated and manipulated from above, as Donald Trump has proved to a fare-thee-well.

At the very least, liberals have to stop telling Kansans that they’re suffering from a mass delusion. And they must accept that the tax-free status that cultural institutions enjoy confers an obligation to speak to, and for, a broad swath of Americans rather than a narrow elite. And I would say something more, inspired by our writers’ group discussion: we need to push back against the rampart marketization of everything, the hollowing out of enduring truths in favor of branding and cynical positioning. Beyond that I hesitate to go. We may have to wait for a leader of our own who, like a benign version of Trump or Kaczynski, will find what is already there.