David Brooks is the latest author to realize that the MAGA playbook was largely laid out by left-wing would-be revolutionaries:
Last year, a writer named James Lindsay cribbed language from The Communist Manifesto, changed its valences so that they were right wing and submitted it to a conservative publication called The American Reformer. The editors, unaware of the provenance, were happy to print it. When the hoax was revealed, they were still happy! The right is now eager to embrace the ideas that led to tyranny, the gulag and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Interestingly, the right didn’t take the leftist ideas that were intended to build something; they took just the ideas intended to destroy.
Brooks' list of the left-wing ideas Trump & Company have coopted includes:
Postmodernism. "Many postmodernists argued that there’s no such thing as capital-T Truth. Statements are constructed narratives for the imposition of power. What matters is whose narratives gain social dominance. As Jonathan Rauch noted in a brilliant essay in Persuasion, Donald Trump, who probably has never heard of the postmodernists, took that idea and ran with it."
Anti-Globalization.
Belief that America is dominated by a shadowy Power Elite.
Critical Theory. "This intellectual hodgepodge that emerged from something called the Frankfurt School built on Marxism and influenced the New Left over the past two generations. One of its tenets is that the supposedly neutral institutions of society are simply shams that the elite use to mask their grip on power."
Identity Politics. "This is based, first, on the idea that your group identity explains your worldview more than your individual consciousness. It is based, second, on the idea that history is a struggle between oppressor and oppressed groups. It is based, third, on the idea that victimized groups are innocent and oppressor groups are evil. You are defined by how much your group is oppressed. Over the last few decades identity-based departments flourished in American universities — women’s studies, African American studies, etc. Trump took this idea and flipped it on its head. Now cultural studies professors are the evil oppressors, and evangelical Christians are the persecuted oppressed. As so many have noted, MAGA is identity politics for white people. It turns out that identity politics is more effective when your group is in the majority."
A Gramscian Focus on Culture (hence the attacks on universities, NPS, the Kennedy Center)
Here is Brooks' summary of American politics in this moment:
We now have a group of revolutionary rightists who have no constructive ideology confronting a group of progressives who let their movement be captured by a revolutionary left-wing ideology that failed.
As I said last week, everyone who calls for tearing down our existing system, on whatever basis, is actually working for a Fascist takeover, and the only way to fight that takeover is the defend the systems that we have. It doesn't matter if you dislike much about our political economy, if you don't want dictatorial Trumpism, you had better shelve those objections and fight for the status quo.
6 comments:
As I said last week, everyone who calls for tearing down our existing system, on whatever basis, is actually working for a Fascist takeover, and the only way to fight that takeover is the defend the systems that we have.
This is a fallacy on multiple levels.
Worse, it goes against all of history. Appeals toward Centrism and the status quo have never once halted Fascist advances.
Anonymous said: "This is a fallacy on multiple levels. Worse, it goes against all of history. Appeals toward Centrism and the status quo have never once halted Fascist advances."
100%.
John, the problem isn't that Trump and the Republicans are dismantling American democracy and need to be stopped (though I admit that's bad). No, the problem is that American democracy has proven to be too fragile, too easily subverted, to be left 'as it was'.
Of course, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I agree, the corrective to right-wing authoritarianism isn't left-wing authoritarianism. But the institutions that make up America's democracy have proven themselves inadequate to the job of protecting themselves from pervasive social media and colossal amounts of money. SCOTUS isn't a judicial body but a partisan one, Congress doesn't represent the people collectively but whoever lobbies the hardest, and the President doesn't serve the state but only himself.
The institutions can be preserved, but they do need to be reformed. There needs to be transparency and accountability. Standards should be set in law, and when broken, sanctions should be enforced fairly and consistently.
None of this is about culture wars or identity politics, but about wanting a democracy that works and represents everyone. If the Left is where the desire for reform is coming from, that's interesting, but hardly a reason to block any such reform.
@Appeals toward Centrism and the status quo have never once halted Fascist advances.
This is untrue. Centrism has been resisting Fascism for as long as centrism has existed. It resisted the monarchist plot of the 1790s. It resisted calls for LIncoln to become a dictator during the Civil War. It resisted McCarthyism.
Wherever bourgeois democracy exists, it is under attack by authoritarianism. So wherever it survives, it has successfully resisted.
John
But the left isn’t trying to shore up the weaker points in our democracy, instead it has set its sights on alienating and leaving out potential allies.
But then, Im a centrist and a moderate too
Lisa.
@Anon
Who, exactly, is supposedly doing this? I routinely hear Centrists complaining about "the left" in a nebulous sense, but (as in this case) they almost never actually name any real people or statements or actions.
Centrist commenters will talk all day about Trump did this, or Vance did that, and analyze it, or criticize it, or point out some silver lining to it. But weirdly, in my experience, they never stop and openly state "Trump is actively working to tear down our system - they instead whine about how some nebulous "left" is supposed "calling for tearing down our system", despite absolutely no mainstream liberals of any significance doing anything of the sort.
Centrists will calmly observe how the sitting Republican president is openly embracing Fascism and Authoritarianism in clear and obvious ways, and how everybody in the entire country knows and recognizes it...
...and then turn around bloviate about some wholly non-specific "Left" engaging in some inexplicable vagueness about "tearing the system down", which absolutely no one of any political relevance in mainstream liberal politics comes even remotely close to saying... but that's how it "feels" to the Centrists, it seems, so that's apparently all that matters?
Murc's Law. Look it up, and do some naval gazing. People love to blame the "the Left" for "alienating and leaving out potential allies". But at the exact same time, they have no such disgust or judgement for "the Right" actively and openly working to gleefully destroy Democracy in broad daylight.
Because the default assumption in America is that "the Right" is like a natural disaster - like a rabid dog which is powerless to stop itself from biting people, there's no sense in being outraged when it rips out someone's throat, because "it was a foregone conclusion". Republicans are allowed to actively engage in wickedness and evil because they are treated as having no agency - they're a force of nature, unable to be held accountable to anyone or anything.
...and thus, when something awful and deeply foreboding is done by the Republicans, like stripping hundreds of millions of American women of their reproductive rights using the corrupted Supreme Court as a bludgeon... the only people who get blamed are "the Left" for somehow not doing enough to stop "the Right", who actually did the deed.
I swear, you could have a Republican stab a Centrist in the face, and the response would be a shocked and dismayed outcry that "the Left" who "allowed" it to happen.
By "monarchist plot of the 1790s", I can only assume you mean the Jeffersonian claim that the Federalists were Monarchists?
...i.e., the clear case of political hyperbole and factional mudslinging, which no reputable historical authority anywhere takes even remotely seriously as a real thing that actually was in any way true?
Lincoln somehow "resisted Fascism" - despite the clear consensus of historians being that Fascism did not exist prior to World War I? How utterly fantastical.
You refer to "calls for Lincoln to become a dictator" - are you referring to the calls to have the national election temporarily delayed? Because there were, indeed, mainstream political figures who suggested that course of action - but none of them were Fascists, or were working under agenda that would be shared by the Fascists later on. That said... as for literal calls for Lincoln to become a dictator? No serious mainstream proposal existed toward that effect - fringe elements, at best, making a suggestion no one would ever take seriously. I'd hardly call that "The March of Fascism" being checked.
Moreover, perhaps I am mistaken, but was it not the norm for Republics up to that point in history to delay elections in the event of a major crisis such as a civil war? I know you are an inveterate American Exceptionalist, but continuously for more than two centuries preceding our revolution, both the Dutch and the Polish-Lithuanians were operating their own republics (both as Major Powers of Europe, even!), and I'm fairly confident that A] both of those republics sometimes suspended elections during national crises and B] they absolutely weren't Fascists, despite that fact.
And then... McCarthy? You seriously want to suggest that McCarthy was a Fascist? John, I'm sorry, but you've made it abundantly clear you don't have the first clue what actually constitutes real Fascism. Anti-Communist sentiment alone, no matter how vitriolic or taken to what extremes, does not a Fascist make.
I'm afraid all of these mistaken claims have only weakened your argument.
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