The Center Must Hold
Democracy is the least-worst product of our fallen imaginations
Happy Democracy Day!
Having regular elections means that every election cycle political actors try very hard to induce a feeling of urgent despair that can only be relieved by voting for their preferred candidate. Mountains of money go towards making you feel like absolute shit for eighteen months and making you blame that shit feeling on people who are different than you, people who are some combination of evil and stupid and who one way or another are completely subhuman.
Blaming and destroying others is one of those unshakable pillars of human nature - democratic spectacle is the least-tragic option for its expression besides major league sports. It’s this or it’s blood in the streets. The anger, the hopelessness, every terrible feeling that comes with election season, all of it is normal and inescapable. Political media only amplifies something that’s already always been there.
America’s founders did heroic work in trying to create a political system that would account for this fallenness of ours. Commitment to that system, above the outcome of any particular election, is step one in making our political culture a better place to be. Trump’s refusal to do so is a mortal sin, one of the many reasons why I voted for his opponent.
The Biden administration did a better job than administrations in other countries of getting us out of the pandemic - his administration did a good job with industrial policy, the CHIPS act founding the strong industrial base that Trump falsely promised - his administration did a good job with foreign policy, confronting Putin and (more importantly) Xi. His administration did a bad job on immigration, crudely throwing the doors open in an attempt to do the opposite of the Trump administration. I’m pro immigration, and I also would have preferred to see legal immigration expanded rather than asylum claims handed out like candy. Immigrants (I think) should show up with a deep commitment to acclimate, and we on this side of the fence need to make sure they actually have a place to stay.
So, I voted for Kamala to extend the successes of Biden, to learn from his mistakes, and to keep Trump out of power.
The Left has its excesses too, having achieve institutional/cultural hegemony in many domains and generating new issues of its own. New incentive structures have sprung up around identity politics - you are entitled to compensation based on your asserted identification with social categories associated with present or historical injustices. This has a good moral starting point and tends towards the ridiculous when it doesn’t have an outside. Any cluster of preferences and appetites becomes ground for identity-based justice claims. Do you like pop music? You are a victim of discrimination who is entitled to compensation, since somewhere somehow someone thinks Bach is a better musician than Taylor Swift. Do you experience anxiety, sadness, or boredom? You are ‘neurospicy’, too sensitive and pure for this horrible world, and it’s Fascism to expect you to fulfill your commitments and show up for other people.
What I had to come to terms with was that the social justice wildfires of the 2010s were elite-driven phenomena, the college educated cranking out higher and higher hoops for everyone else to jump through, pulling the institutional ladder up behind us. My generation graduated into a recession without our promised opportunities to carve the world into a more pleasant shape, so we took our frustrations to social media. The Black Lives Matter movement lined the pockets of whichever elites successfully asserted a connection with a marginalized category, and accomplished very little else. The list goes on.
Isn’t equality good? Sure! However, to refer back to my point at the very top, violent assertion of inequality is baked into our being. Societies founded with equality as a core principle only did so with gulags and guillotines. If you value equality, does that make you superior to people who do not? Does valuing equality give you the right to destroy someone else’s life?
With this election, I find myself shaking off my leftist youth, confronting the darkness of human nature, and seeking to do the active work of preserving our Union. It is the least-worst product of the human political imagination, worth the work of protecting, a structure through which our darker natures can restrained and redirected.
No matter what happens over the coming week, that is where you’ll find me.