It is important to admit to the simple asymmetries in the political spectrum when consideration about Sorelian myths arise. The right can use these myths and the left cannot because they have different sorts of political goals and standards, are not symmetrically constituted, and have different relations to the present state of things. The right mostly wants their enemies punished and to slightly tinker with the present order to disadvantage the least off further, make things better for both the middle classes and the wealthy, and to shore up what they see as the great chain of being. The left doesn't agree with what it wants, honestly, but it will generally strive to make the effect of its actions a cumulative change to the production process with the goal of making people happier and will try to emancipate people by giving them more 'control' over social changes. The right is also much smaller and denser, both in terms of dedicated membership and ideological distance. The amount of ground between a Thiel-head, McConnell, and a Blue Lives Matter guy from Mobile is utterly miniscule to that between a DSA alderman, Pelosi, and some quasi-anarchist from Portland. Finally, the right remains very reliable tax-cutters, which means they get sluiced with funds whereas the left is perpetually strapped for cash and made to ask their base for regular injections of cash. All of this means that the right's bar is much lower, which makes it easier to form internal alliances, paste over ideological differences, and cooperate to get boring, inglorious and useful things done. The left's internal disagreements are so great that it can't plaster over them with some shared beautiful, expressive, and non-instrumental fantasy because one of the essential experiences of being on the left is disagreeing with other leftist; questions of efficacy and ends can't simply be answered by pointing out how flustered some conservatives got at seeing a gay man on an advertisement. Another issue is that these sorts of myths are for people for are others' pawns and the left has broadly been paranoid about that since Lenin. The right does not promise the masses emancipation, so it doesn't have any anxiety about putting the knout on people and making them more and more dependent and self-satisfied.
I wonder if Rorty isn’t selling short the left of his era. Looking back from our vantage point the left of 20 years ago had comically little clout compared to the left of today. So Rorty looked at that weak early nineties left and thought “this is pathetic, this is a dead end.” But it wasn’t really a dead end at all and left power has gone up since his time, while the right has never come close to re-obtaining the strength and prestige of the Reagan years.
I think it’s possible that the objective material and social conditions for strong left politics just weren’t present in the 1980s.
The question of these "dark myths" and their applicability as ideological weapons of the left is interesting, and I'll be fascinated to see the conclusions you reach in part 3. I've been thinking a lot about Rorty's critique of the American Left's disdain for America itself since you laid it out in part 1, really trying to drill down into the pragmatic rhetorical moves we would have to make to operationalize this theory into a mass politics. So far as I can tell, the hardest part of this project would be championing and building popular support for certain policies *without then explaining the historical context or ills that necessitate them in the first place.* For instance, your pod co-host Jamelle Bouie has done excellent work on the importance of weakening or abolishing anti-democratic institutions in American political life like the Supreme Court or Electoral College as a necessary pre-condition to any successful Left political project. But explaining why these anti-democratic elements of our political system are bad or clarifying why they exist in the first place *naturally* leads us back to a critique of the Founders and their anti-majoritarian impulses, so the challenge of the left then becomes justifying the cure without ever explaining the disease.
Maybe this is too obvious a point to even bother with, but the asymmetries of our respective programs really gives the right a huge advantage when it comes to deploying dark myths. The right's versions of these narratives all speak to Straussian forms of cultural and political decline, a shining city on the hill brought low by the secular humanism inherent to progressivism and the New Deal. There are rhetorical challenges that come with the task of building a political project that countenances and even seeks to reproduce the crimes of our nation's past, but reactionaries are aided by the deliberate forms of forgetting that exist in all nationalisms and the anti-majoritarian facets of our system that still exist today. By contrast, the American left is forced to fight against the inertia of the country's self-image and its electoral system, demonstrating how omissions in the first reveal still-present flaws in the second.
Of course, nothing in the dilemma I've laid out here is new for American leftists; these are the fundamental conditions that have shaped political agitation in the country for centuries, and the thinkers who Rorty names as heroes all grappled with them in various ways during their own lifetimes. (I didn't catch this detail before you highlighted it, but it's ironic that Rorty would castigate the left for excessive critiques of America's founding and its enduring legacy in a book he named after the work of James Baldwin!) A belief in our nation's goodness derived almost entirely from its role in producing so many thinkers, social movements, and activists who vehemently denied that greatness strikes me as either incredibly cynical or incredibly naive, but maybe this form of reconstituting America's civic past is necessary to producing a better future. Lincoln used a similar rhetorical toolbox to great effect, omitting some features of our nation's origins while emphasizing others in order to push the country onto a new trajectory continuous with the elements in our past which he valued and discontinuous with the elements he did not. FDR accomplished a similar trick during his own presidency, and loathe as I am to admit it, much of Obama's success came from his ability to offer a compelling version of America's history that informed and justified his prescription for the country's future.
The fact that all these restatements of America's past provoked violent backlash (especially when it came to the question of revising the nation's attitudes on race) perhaps suggests some limits to this approach, but I'm not sure that "dark myths" which almost exclusively engage with history in a pessimistic mode are a viable path forwards either. No pressure here, of course, but I'm excited to see you take the question on and resolve 200-something odd years of messaging dilemmas that have plagued the American left in your next post!
Perhaps there is a connection between this idea of power and the form of activism that seems to fight white supremacy (for instance) primarily within left-leaning organizations rather than outside them, and is therefore easily mocked. (See, eg, that recent Intercept article.) That is, if structures of power at the wider level seem so eternal immovable, then you fight where you see an opportunity to change something, anything, and sometimes that is in your own workplace against people who should seem like your allies. It may look self-defeating, but what else are you supposed to do?
The past three posts got me to sign up for a paid membership.
I wonder if the downsides of the “cultural left” derive less from a gothic mythology, and more from a lack of any mythology at all. Rather than a new kind of original sin, there is a sort of nihilism that comes out of that Foucauldian framework; or, perhaps better epitomized by the post-modern Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome analogy. That post-modern subjectivity, where nothing is concrete, can leave a frustrating taste in one’s mouth, as though we cannot do much other than self-crit.
On a brighter note, anecdotally as someone currently involved with DSA and local leftist projects, it seems Rorty’s “reformist left” is making a come back, with some semblance of myths to boot. DSAers’ praise for and sharing of Kelley’s “Hammer and Hoe,” the call back to New Deal aesthetics with AOC’s GND posters, and the prevalent romantic view of the historic CIO motivating new young leftists to unionize their work places. These examples seem to point to a new bourgeoning reformist mythology growing on the left, at odds with the self-crit, cancel-hungry wokeness of the post modern cultural left.
Another perhaps more mundane way of viewing the success of current right-wing myths, I suppose, is they have almost entirely appropriated the idea of rebellion, of non-conformism, of radical movement and of individual rights.
Pretty much every reformist idea coming from the left - because it’s tied to institutions that are held in contempt - is viewed by the fascist right as conformist. Because the political morality of the American right is entirely based on an individual concepts of rights (essentially, philosophical libertarianism, which of course also opposes any governmental measures that would actually make individual rights equally accessible to all), they have successfully convinced themselves - and in terms of their programme of radical destruction they’re probably right - that they are the true social rebels. The left has entirely lost this ground. If someone writes a 60s-style protest song now, it’s a fascist.
This doesn’t mean they’re indifferent to institutions - indeed, their goal, well underway, is to capture them, if only to destroy them or re-make them in their image. It just means that the extreme right has taken possession of the *idea* of revolt and rebellion, which is an animating emotion and principle of the highest - and nowadays, most dangerous - order.
How this state of affairs came out - the institutional and political failures that created the conditions for this to happen - is another topic, and no doubt readers of this newsletter have pondered long and hard on the matter. Right now, however, there’s probably pretty good evidence that, over the coming years, American will be lucky to preserve even the most basic institutional preconditions of a functioning democracy, let alone a social democracy. The extreme right is just getting started, and they’re doing it under the propulsive banner of “rebellion”, however misleading and mendacious.
Rereading this and I got a little off topic, but I typed it all so I’m going to leave it.
I think that for the most part what the right terms “wokeism” is really an empathetic response by people on the left who want to give agency to traditionally oppressed groups. For some, it certainly seems to become a power play and a personal religion, but I think these cases are the exceptions which get pounced on for propaganda purposes. There’s a triteness to the BLM signs and the rainbow flags in some overwhelmingly white, cisgender neighborhoods, and like religion it’s easy to mock, these things are part of we go about creating a comfortable, inclusive society. I don’t think you can have a functioning society without some sort of civil religion, and demanding tolerance is a necessary part of that. But every major religion has had to go through some period of persecution. The First Council of Nicaea wasn’t until 325 AD, and by that measure Progressivism has until the end of the 21st century to form a preliminary consensus.
It is important to admit to the simple asymmetries in the political spectrum when consideration about Sorelian myths arise. The right can use these myths and the left cannot because they have different sorts of political goals and standards, are not symmetrically constituted, and have different relations to the present state of things. The right mostly wants their enemies punished and to slightly tinker with the present order to disadvantage the least off further, make things better for both the middle classes and the wealthy, and to shore up what they see as the great chain of being. The left doesn't agree with what it wants, honestly, but it will generally strive to make the effect of its actions a cumulative change to the production process with the goal of making people happier and will try to emancipate people by giving them more 'control' over social changes. The right is also much smaller and denser, both in terms of dedicated membership and ideological distance. The amount of ground between a Thiel-head, McConnell, and a Blue Lives Matter guy from Mobile is utterly miniscule to that between a DSA alderman, Pelosi, and some quasi-anarchist from Portland. Finally, the right remains very reliable tax-cutters, which means they get sluiced with funds whereas the left is perpetually strapped for cash and made to ask their base for regular injections of cash. All of this means that the right's bar is much lower, which makes it easier to form internal alliances, paste over ideological differences, and cooperate to get boring, inglorious and useful things done. The left's internal disagreements are so great that it can't plaster over them with some shared beautiful, expressive, and non-instrumental fantasy because one of the essential experiences of being on the left is disagreeing with other leftist; questions of efficacy and ends can't simply be answered by pointing out how flustered some conservatives got at seeing a gay man on an advertisement. Another issue is that these sorts of myths are for people for are others' pawns and the left has broadly been paranoid about that since Lenin. The right does not promise the masses emancipation, so it doesn't have any anxiety about putting the knout on people and making them more and more dependent and self-satisfied.
FYI, Part 1 of this series is what moved me to a paid subscription and this addition did not disappoint.
I wonder if Rorty isn’t selling short the left of his era. Looking back from our vantage point the left of 20 years ago had comically little clout compared to the left of today. So Rorty looked at that weak early nineties left and thought “this is pathetic, this is a dead end.” But it wasn’t really a dead end at all and left power has gone up since his time, while the right has never come close to re-obtaining the strength and prestige of the Reagan years.
I think it’s possible that the objective material and social conditions for strong left politics just weren’t present in the 1980s.
The question of these "dark myths" and their applicability as ideological weapons of the left is interesting, and I'll be fascinated to see the conclusions you reach in part 3. I've been thinking a lot about Rorty's critique of the American Left's disdain for America itself since you laid it out in part 1, really trying to drill down into the pragmatic rhetorical moves we would have to make to operationalize this theory into a mass politics. So far as I can tell, the hardest part of this project would be championing and building popular support for certain policies *without then explaining the historical context or ills that necessitate them in the first place.* For instance, your pod co-host Jamelle Bouie has done excellent work on the importance of weakening or abolishing anti-democratic institutions in American political life like the Supreme Court or Electoral College as a necessary pre-condition to any successful Left political project. But explaining why these anti-democratic elements of our political system are bad or clarifying why they exist in the first place *naturally* leads us back to a critique of the Founders and their anti-majoritarian impulses, so the challenge of the left then becomes justifying the cure without ever explaining the disease.
Maybe this is too obvious a point to even bother with, but the asymmetries of our respective programs really gives the right a huge advantage when it comes to deploying dark myths. The right's versions of these narratives all speak to Straussian forms of cultural and political decline, a shining city on the hill brought low by the secular humanism inherent to progressivism and the New Deal. There are rhetorical challenges that come with the task of building a political project that countenances and even seeks to reproduce the crimes of our nation's past, but reactionaries are aided by the deliberate forms of forgetting that exist in all nationalisms and the anti-majoritarian facets of our system that still exist today. By contrast, the American left is forced to fight against the inertia of the country's self-image and its electoral system, demonstrating how omissions in the first reveal still-present flaws in the second.
Of course, nothing in the dilemma I've laid out here is new for American leftists; these are the fundamental conditions that have shaped political agitation in the country for centuries, and the thinkers who Rorty names as heroes all grappled with them in various ways during their own lifetimes. (I didn't catch this detail before you highlighted it, but it's ironic that Rorty would castigate the left for excessive critiques of America's founding and its enduring legacy in a book he named after the work of James Baldwin!) A belief in our nation's goodness derived almost entirely from its role in producing so many thinkers, social movements, and activists who vehemently denied that greatness strikes me as either incredibly cynical or incredibly naive, but maybe this form of reconstituting America's civic past is necessary to producing a better future. Lincoln used a similar rhetorical toolbox to great effect, omitting some features of our nation's origins while emphasizing others in order to push the country onto a new trajectory continuous with the elements in our past which he valued and discontinuous with the elements he did not. FDR accomplished a similar trick during his own presidency, and loathe as I am to admit it, much of Obama's success came from his ability to offer a compelling version of America's history that informed and justified his prescription for the country's future.
The fact that all these restatements of America's past provoked violent backlash (especially when it came to the question of revising the nation's attitudes on race) perhaps suggests some limits to this approach, but I'm not sure that "dark myths" which almost exclusively engage with history in a pessimistic mode are a viable path forwards either. No pressure here, of course, but I'm excited to see you take the question on and resolve 200-something odd years of messaging dilemmas that have plagued the American left in your next post!
Perhaps there is a connection between this idea of power and the form of activism that seems to fight white supremacy (for instance) primarily within left-leaning organizations rather than outside them, and is therefore easily mocked. (See, eg, that recent Intercept article.) That is, if structures of power at the wider level seem so eternal immovable, then you fight where you see an opportunity to change something, anything, and sometimes that is in your own workplace against people who should seem like your allies. It may look self-defeating, but what else are you supposed to do?
The past three posts got me to sign up for a paid membership.
I wonder if the downsides of the “cultural left” derive less from a gothic mythology, and more from a lack of any mythology at all. Rather than a new kind of original sin, there is a sort of nihilism that comes out of that Foucauldian framework; or, perhaps better epitomized by the post-modern Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome analogy. That post-modern subjectivity, where nothing is concrete, can leave a frustrating taste in one’s mouth, as though we cannot do much other than self-crit.
On a brighter note, anecdotally as someone currently involved with DSA and local leftist projects, it seems Rorty’s “reformist left” is making a come back, with some semblance of myths to boot. DSAers’ praise for and sharing of Kelley’s “Hammer and Hoe,” the call back to New Deal aesthetics with AOC’s GND posters, and the prevalent romantic view of the historic CIO motivating new young leftists to unionize their work places. These examples seem to point to a new bourgeoning reformist mythology growing on the left, at odds with the self-crit, cancel-hungry wokeness of the post modern cultural left.
Another perhaps more mundane way of viewing the success of current right-wing myths, I suppose, is they have almost entirely appropriated the idea of rebellion, of non-conformism, of radical movement and of individual rights.
Pretty much every reformist idea coming from the left - because it’s tied to institutions that are held in contempt - is viewed by the fascist right as conformist. Because the political morality of the American right is entirely based on an individual concepts of rights (essentially, philosophical libertarianism, which of course also opposes any governmental measures that would actually make individual rights equally accessible to all), they have successfully convinced themselves - and in terms of their programme of radical destruction they’re probably right - that they are the true social rebels. The left has entirely lost this ground. If someone writes a 60s-style protest song now, it’s a fascist.
This doesn’t mean they’re indifferent to institutions - indeed, their goal, well underway, is to capture them, if only to destroy them or re-make them in their image. It just means that the extreme right has taken possession of the *idea* of revolt and rebellion, which is an animating emotion and principle of the highest - and nowadays, most dangerous - order.
How this state of affairs came out - the institutional and political failures that created the conditions for this to happen - is another topic, and no doubt readers of this newsletter have pondered long and hard on the matter. Right now, however, there’s probably pretty good evidence that, over the coming years, American will be lucky to preserve even the most basic institutional preconditions of a functioning democracy, let alone a social democracy. The extreme right is just getting started, and they’re doing it under the propulsive banner of “rebellion”, however misleading and mendacious.
Rereading this and I got a little off topic, but I typed it all so I’m going to leave it.
I think that for the most part what the right terms “wokeism” is really an empathetic response by people on the left who want to give agency to traditionally oppressed groups. For some, it certainly seems to become a power play and a personal religion, but I think these cases are the exceptions which get pounced on for propaganda purposes. There’s a triteness to the BLM signs and the rainbow flags in some overwhelmingly white, cisgender neighborhoods, and like religion it’s easy to mock, these things are part of we go about creating a comfortable, inclusive society. I don’t think you can have a functioning society without some sort of civil religion, and demanding tolerance is a necessary part of that. But every major religion has had to go through some period of persecution. The First Council of Nicaea wasn’t until 325 AD, and by that measure Progressivism has until the end of the 21st century to form a preliminary consensus.
Feel like the Varieties of Political Experience would actually track quite closely to the Varieties of Religious Experience?