For Whom the Bell Tolls

time marches on

Marinating as I often do in the intellectual squalor of the Internet, a few things have seeped into view between all the bad-faith arguments and empty bloviating. And I think the image these things paint, fuzzy and incomplete as it may be, is a warning about a future not many people are talking about.

Over the past few years, my thoughts have been as susceptible as anyone’s to sliding, if not flying, toward the outer extremities of the political compass. My frustration with the lack of movement on — or even serious commitment to — from government on almost any pressing issue, while our leaders twiddle their thumbs or shuffle paperwork over a collapsing economy and all the social issues that go along with it, has driven me to seek answers and explanations outside the spectrum of the usual experts on the Right or the Left.

Of course, I’ve gone so far left I’ve practically left the map, but plenty of people have gone in the other direction as well, as is obvious by the rising tide of Fascist-style nationalism here and throughout the West. But the exploding political polarization across our society isn’t a problem that’s gone wholly unnoticed, even if it has gone wholly unaddressed by anyone in a position to do anything about it. The thing is, I’m not sure I really blame our incumbents for their lack of action on this — or any other — front. I think it’s time to collectively admit something deeply uncomfortable.

Liberal Democracy has Failed.

As you might expect, I spend most of my Using Words Pretentiously time online in generally Leftist spaces. And a topic that comes up fairly often in those spaces is how (and whether) to attempt to build a workers’ revolution by bridging cultural and political gaps betwen extreme elements of the Left and the Right. Personally, I think that’s a fool’s errand (to say the least), but I have spent some time thinking about it anyway because, after all, who doesn’t like a good pipe dream? But, again, this discussion has been had to death. It isn’t what I’m getting at.

To be sure, most of the economic and actually many of the political frustrations that tend to extremize people tend to be the same across the spectrum. Workers on the Left share, at heart, many of the actual goals that workers on the Right have. But the cultural divides are just too great to span, in my opinion. The narratives that explain the root causes of frustrations and disenfranchisement on the Left and Right are just incompatible, and since those narratives lie at the heart of the way many people identify themselves, well, you get the idea.

One thing, however, that people on both the Left and the Right immediately, wholeheartedly, and without hesitation agree on is that they have absolutely no use for Liberals. And while it’s often said that “Conservatives” in America don’t understand what a “Liberal” is, I think that’s not actually true. Sure, in mainstream Republican jargon, when a Conservative says “Liberal,” he’s talking about basically anyone who wants free healthcare or renters’ rights or workers’ protections or anything else that’s obviously good for society. And it’s true that in shouting down those things, they’ll use words like “freedom” and “small government” and “natural rights,” which are the definition of classical Liberalism.

Republicans aren’t stupid or confused.

So, at first glance, it seems like Republicans just don’t know what Liberalism even is, because they are Liberals. Except, they’re not. I think that Liberal-sounding rhetoric — which, you’ll notice, is quickly decreasing in volume as the GOP falls into a Fascist abyss — was always just smoke and mirrors anyway. More and more rank-and-file Republican voters and even elected politicians are very clearly angling to do away with Liberalism — not just the Social-Democrat variety they have always hated, but the classical, “Keep government out of my bedroom” kind, too.

Republicans are at this very moment praising autocrats like Vladimir Putin and referring to Donald Trump as “My King”. They openly detest the entire notion of majority rule — you know, democracy — because their arbitrary white-skinned tribe is in danger of becoming less than a majority. They reject the legitimacy of obviously legitimate elections (unless their guy wins them), and they’re willing to physically attack the government in order to disrupt the democratic process.

This is not the behavior of a momentarily crazy people who lack confidence, this is the calculated and philosophically rigorous behavior of anti-Liberal Conservative Monarchists.

Democrats, on the other hand…

Democrats, in response to this, hold committee meetings and file writs and do interviews on TV, because that’s what you do in a Liberal Democracy where everyone respects everyone else’s rights and believes in arriving at a best-guess estimate of the truth by careful deliberation and good-faith debate. See, the Democrats haven’t quite gotten the memo yet that the system they’re trying to save is already a corpse.

But as the GOP slides irretrievably into all-out monarchism, the Democrats are left as the only party in Washington that even believes in classical Liberalism — and, by extension, Liberal Democracy — anymore. And structurally, they’re really not cut out to lean “left” of anything. They’re completely owned by corporate interests and as the party charged with being the adults in the room, they kind of have to be small-c conservative just to keep the lights on around this increasingly haywire country.

For electoral narrative purposes, they have to portray themselves as the progressive party — because saying “We’re the conservative party, and the other guys are just plain Fascists” doesn’t go over well with the focus groups the Democrats love to use. But the fact that they’re not progressive in real life, for some reason, doesn’t ever seem to percolate through to most of their voters. Either those voters are still too middle-class to notice everything going to hell in a handbasket, or more likely, the last 70 years of Rah Rah America Best programming has worked so well that objectively Conservative voters have convinced themselves they’re the vanguard of human advancement.

Well, all of that really boils down to the fact that insulated, milquetoast Middle Class suburbanite Democrats who don’t actually matter half as much as they think they do are the only people left in this country who believe that Liberal Democracy is a viable system of government. The people on the Right certainly don’t think it is, and people on the Left — me, and probably most of my friends — have already seen behind the curtain and know for a fact that it isn’t.

After all, Liberal Democracy is the kind of system that prides itself on how magnanimous it is to grant universal inalienable rights to everyone on the planet while also being cool with literally owning people as property and, later, bombing those rights into people on the other side of the world. It’s a morally bankrupt philosophy that doesn’t even work on paper, unlike that bogeyman Communism.

So what does it all mean?

I think, and I’m often wrong, it means that this year’s midterms are going to be a jarring loss for the Democrats as they lose the support of more people than they thought possible. I think they’re going to try to compensate for that over the next 2 years by doubling down on their Liberal mumbo jumbo — because they can’t imagine any other way to handle anything — and then in 2024, they’re going to get absolutely slaughtered, and lose everything.

And I think they’ll deserve it, because they volunteered for the job of Last Man Standing, then they let everyone down. They’ll deserve it, but millions of Americans and billions of people around the world won’t deserve what happens after that.