Corey
Robin

Good to see you blogging again.

“The US is nothing like the societies where we know what happens when politics falls apart, including Europe in the 1930s, which is often held up as a warning for what might be around the corner. Contemporary America is far more prosperous than other states where democracy has failed in the past, however unequally that prosperity is distributed. Its population is much older. Civil disorder tends to happen in societies where the median age is in the low twenties; in the US it is close to forty. Its young people are far better educated, or at least educated for much longer. Its levels of violence, though high by 21st-century European standards, are low by any historical measure. Its frustrations are those of a country where all this is true and yet still things are going badly wrong. These are First World problems. That doesn’t make them any less serious. It just makes it much harder to find historical precedents for what comes next” (David Runciman, LRB, 1 December 2016).

“One fact that has to be assimilated by both Labour and the Democrats is this: when Bill and Hillary arrived in Washington in 1992 they had little money. Now, despite remaining notionally in public service throughout, they are worth many millions of dollars. Tony and Cherie Blair were not obscenely wealthy when they arrived in power in 1997. Today they are worth more than $75 million. Consider the working-class voters whom the Clintons or the Blairs exhorted to vote for them in the 1990s: they are probably worse off now than they were then. In effect the Clintons and Blairs surfed on their grievances and inequities, making themselves rich and leaving their voters in the dust. This hasn’t gone unnoticed, which is one reason the old politics is no longer working” (R.W. Johnson, LRB, 14 November 2016).

“we have that sense that we are face to face with some deep, dark truth of the republic. …[that] those of us who insist that the horribles of the world should not and cannot have the last word, are somehow naifs, with our silly faith in the Enlightenment, in politics, in the possibility that we can change these things, that politics can be about something else, something better. I find that sensibility deeply conservative…”

So good to hear someone say this, and so well! If one (on the left) believes that there even is such a thing as a fundamental ‘deep dark truth’ about what an entire country is – or about what humanity itself immutably is, for that matter – then that person is rejecting the most basic Enlightenment values – pretty profoundly conservative! How ridiculously can we reify? Very, apparently.

Everything is contingent, particularly in the long run. And the EC is Contingency Itself.

The liberal hysteria post-election is exactly that. To me, it primarily serves the necessary psychological task of avoiding a lot of soul-searching and tough questions about what the Democratic party actually is, the folly of the decision made by the elites to force Hillary on us, the fact that every major media outlet got the election shockingly wrong, the self-serving orgy of nonsense produced in the echo chambers of the “left” which blinded us not only to how shitty a candidate Hillary was but that the Democrats were botching the entire election with their self-assured arrogance. Nope, none of that’s the problem. It’s that Trump is literally Hitler. I’m old enough now to remember when “anyone but Bush” was a legit political slogan. I’m also old enough to see where that got us. It seems to me the Clinton crowd would like nothing more than an “anyone but Trump,” political front for similar reasons: so we can go on electing the same center-right neoliberal politicians we always have.

I fully support your efforts to draw historical continuity between the GOP, Trump, and conservatism more generally. When so many people were posting “this isn’t the country I thought it was” right after the election, my only thought is “What are they smoking?” America is, was, and always will be a crazy, dysfunctional place. A country which started out as a slave state engaging in a slow motion genocide of Native Americans was never innocent, by any definition. Just where is this supposed “America” these people thought they knew?

I like the way he says “I loathe its belligerent confidence that it (fear-politics), and only it, understands the true awfulness of the world”. It’s as though the more fearful and pessimistic we are, the more politically correct we are.

So it seems as though this “fearfulness” is, at least sometimes, not true fearfulness but an appearance or pretense of fearfulness. Yes, twe do need to be careful not to be too OPTIMISTIC, but being as PESSIMISTIC (and fearful) as possible isn’t the answer, either. (This is true in both political and personal life.)

We don’t have to compare T. to Hitler in order to protest or revolt against him. He’s bad enough as he is.

(Also, though, to be fair: some people truly do fear, and might even fear DEFENSIVELY (as though trying to beat him to the punch). Such people might not be PRETENDING to fear but, rather, TRYING to fear. Not very well-directed, either, indeed.

The electoral college victory was a the result of large numbers of people voting with gleeful irrationally, and succeeding within a system deliberately corrupted by the “victor,”. If you mean to direct ire at hopelessness and nihilism – say so. Or, for those of us who do not draw on broad philosophical background, more specifics about what or who qualifies as operatic overreaction . Other than some youngsters in the anarchist camp, I don’t know anybody whose lives are so empty they ache for resistance to existential evil. It is interesting frthat venues such as the new Yorker are revisiting the roots and expressions of fascism. Even overstated, the possibilities of trumps narcissism, the alt-right at his shoulder, corporate oligarchs in cabinet positions, and the full reactionary force of the gop unleashed – well, I look for every historical & structural analysis I can find to understand our times, but it is an open question that enlightenment reason, except in favorable conditions, holdz back institutional entropy, let alone the irrationalities of. human greed, and ideology. But perhaps reason is the only method to reduce and repair the stresses that allow them to seep out the cracks. But what do I know? All I want to know right now is why.. And what do we do?

Good post, we are not under hyperinflation, we lack the history of Tsar’s and Prussian Kings, so I think we are just back under a more narcissistic George W. Bush for a while. At least I hope that is the case, regardless best to battle back as you say with rational policy and politics as nothing fundamental has changed. Lots of fear out there though.

I don’t remember who said it, but “fear concentrates the mind”. Although unpleasant, it isn’t entirely dysfunctional.

I also think history is contingent on chance events far more than we would like to think. Trump in my opinion is a kind of idiot savant. He really knows how to get a certain sort of class/culture/mindset to strongly identify him as one of them. Part of that process was his ability to take resentments to a kind of absurd extreme, which makes him seen to these people as a sort of unedited personal truthiness. And these people feel let down by clever elites, who in their opinion use reason and education not to solve problems, but to benefit at their expense. So we are left with a situation, where he uniquely seems to be able to operate well outside of the bounds that we thought constrained our social/political/legal organization. So we clearly are in a bit of an unprecedented situation.

Security types are aghast. He doesn’t share their concerns about traditional enemies, such as Russia. Couldn’t be bother with presentations of potential nation threats etc. This isn’t Bush on steroids, or Reagan on steroids, its something far less predictable.

The Russians are responsible! Comey is responsible! Trump is the Fifth Horseman of the Big A!

Spare me. The task remains what it always has been. It doesn’t much matter if you’re a Child of the Enlightenment or a Buddhist, the task remains what it always has been, and we are all expendable in its service — something to remember when we’re feeling histrionic.

The part of me that was trained (long ago in the dark ages of the 1970s) as a political scientist completely agrees with this. The part of me that relies on the ACA for health insurance is very fearful–enough so that I do not sleep well at night and haven’t since the election. That’s not the fear Corey is talking about of course. But I think that some of the people who are writing about ‘fear’ in his sense are simply going operatic and really mean to focus on these more mundane issues. It is the inability to avoid arias that is the problem in other words.

Bingo, well said.

FWIW, a wonker like Yglesias is just running the mirror con: that Enlightenment is not in the acknowledgement that we are fallible and that no “truth” can ever be “proven”, and that we have to develop methods and institutions to transcend our own cognitive limitations, but that politics is ultimately a domain of logicking our way to inevitable conclusions. That said, I am in awe of your definition of the politics of fear, and your characterization of “putative realism” is a perfect illustration why somebody like JM Greer, for all his interesting observations, strikes me as somebody who does not reason “in good faith”. Personally, I go with Shaw to reply to both extremist positions: all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

However, we part way on the “fucking electoral college”. Institutions, procedures and other “plumbing” of an open society are certainly of extreme importance. But, pace Brecht, you do democracy with the people you have, not the people you wish for, and if “None Of The Above” or “No To Imcumbents” are not recognized as a reasonable response to unacceptable choices, then no institution will withstand our individual and collective folly.