On Superman, Sentimentality, and Citizenship (or, What Gunn's Superman Knows About America that J.D. Vance Apparently Can't Comprehend)

Daniel McCarthy expanded upon his New York Post editorial, the one I responded to previously, in the pages of his journal, Modern Age. His expansion—“Superman After Liberalism”—isn’t a rebuttal to my response, but he tagged me nonetheless, so I’m going to take the opportunity to respond once more…particularly since the way McCarthy is pursuing his case against James Gunn’s Superman provides me with an important contract to Vice President J.D. Vance, who recently, on the occasion of receiving an award from the Claremont Institute, gave a speech on citizenship which was about as antithetical to the deeply American moral sentiments of Superman as I can imagine.

McCarthy’s argument against Gunn’s vision of the Superman character isn’t changed by his expansion, but he does elaborate on his thesis in some interesting ways. He’s not wrong that “the problem of reconciling the exceptional with the egalitarian” has been a subtheme to telling super-heroes stories ever since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster essentially evented the genre (and if McCarthy had either the pop culture knowledge or inclination, he could have made the obvious point that recent comic, cinematic, and television incarnations of Superman—from Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie to Henry Cavill in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel to many, many others—have all taken different positions on how to address this narrative problem). Nor is he wrong—though he is, I think, incomplete—in suggesting that Siegel and Shuster’s original solution, and the one that supposedly served the character so well for decades, was to write Superman as motivated by a New Deal-era confidence in liberalism as a form of patriotism, the result of his, through his adopted parents, “assimilation into Kansas and America as the land of the free.” I don’t see how anyone remotely online—to say nothing of comic books fan over the past 85 years who have (likely unlike McCarthy) actually consumed Superman media—could be unaware of this aspect of Superman’s history, especially given how relevant it is to debates that McCarthy (and Vance) are deeply involved in today.

McCarthy sees the Superman of the James Gunn film as having abandoned this confidence, as American liberalism has also abandoned it (or maybe, depending on how much and what sort of postliberalism McCarthy embraces, it was fated to turn away from it, in favor of identity politics and government-managed pity). Instead, he sees the Superman played by David Corenswet as unexceptional, bland, and weak (McCarthy makes much of how Superman’s unwillingness to kill makes him reliant upon other heroes capable doing the necessary “dirty work”). And while he allows that there probably could have been, even within his framework, a way of telling the Superman story that asked the “right questions,” this one absolutely isn’t it; in Superman, he sees only a left-liberal film that is so frightened that “fascism has already taken over this country” that its titular character lacks “a place of his own,” leaving him to articulate only lame liberal sentiments with no moral strength of their own.

I’ve already talked about how wrong this argument is. The lame liberal sentiments that McCarthy sees in Superman’s wonderful final words to Lex Luthor—

I’m as human as anyone. I love, I get scared, I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human! And that’s my greatest strength.

—could, I suppose, be understood as validating a kind of moral individualism and even fatalism. That they lack much by way of realpolitik thinking, and thus arguably open the door to a hypocritical Machiavellianism, showing a face of kindness and sympathy to the crowd while justifying self-interested actions behind your back, is also perhaps true. (Superman didn’t seem too worried about the fate of his clone, for example.) But of course, it’s not like the downsides—the exclusionary classism, racism, sexism, and more—so frequently present in more rigorously particular moral systems are difficult to identify either.

More importantly, to fail to understand the moral strength—and, on an admittedly somewhat attenuated level, what I think can only be understood as an aspect of self-sacrificing Christian love—that is just as possible to be found within this kind of compassion-driven ethical universalism is a major mistake. It’s one that has been made by haters of Rousseau and every attempt within the context of modernity to follow the path toward moral legitimacy—a civil religion based on rights and consent and small-d democratic efforts to build communities of action and legislation—which he suggested for centuries now. I have no idea if James Gunn or David Corenswet have ever heard of Moral Therapeutic Deism, and I definitely reject the idea that what viewers of Superman saw on the screen is just another version of some self-centered, MTD, make-it-up-yourself-morality. But denying that there is any moral substance, any heroism, to someone who puts forward, first and foremost, kindness and concern and sentimentality and good deeds, absent any explicit patriotic attachment or sectarian confession or nationalist vision, is simply a complete misreading of the moral thinking at work in this long, centuries old, deeply important liberal Christian tradition. It’s a complete misreading of the religious sensibility that, as a resident of Kansas, I still see plenty of evidence of all around me, obtaining in communities and families that are interconnected and wired and far less self-sufficient that many who prattle on about “heartland values” insist on making them out to be, but which issue in friendliness and service and charity nonetheless. And finally, frankly, it is a complete misreading of American republicanism as well.

So now let’s turn to Vice President Vance’s partly thoughtful, but mostly pedantic speech, one that Superman would never be pretentious enough to give. In talking about citizenship, Vance starts by making a serious, complicated point:

Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we're doing [in the Trump administration] is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It's hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.

That social bonds and civic strength develop organically over time through the routines of ordinary life is an undeniable communitarian truth; the whole notion of “social capital” is built upon that understanding. And hence, it’s not unreasonable to see the challenges of ethnic, religious, racial, cultural, and (I think especially) linguistic diversity as genuine ones, ones which immigration restrictions might be an at least partial solution to. There is good research in support of this—but also evenmoregood research that challenges it, making the argument that the obstacles posed by diversity are actually, when one controls for technological distractions and economic barriers which prevent people from interacting as humans (anthropologically social creatures that we are) normally would, quite small, and in any case that such obstacles, absent political polarization, actually fall quite fast.* Robert Putnam, the scholar who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded in a later study that the difficulty Vance highlights is a short-term one, one that—in immigrant societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.”

Presumably, Vance—or at least his speech-writers—are smart enough to know all this. Which means that in holding to this argument, he unintentionally (or, who knows—maybe intentionally!) reveals that his hope through serving in the Trump administration isn’t to fine-tune immigration policy, but rather to change America  away from being an immigrant society at all. And his case for this is plainly ideological—or even, I think, theologico-political, and not in a good way. In the most notorious passage in his speech, he claims:

If you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself. If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

Some of the reasoning here is obviously puerile. (“Must we admit all of them tomorrow?” So, you’re assuming that “hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence”—perhaps in part because their own French or Japanese or Canadian or British or Italian or Australian or Norwegian political cultures have long socialized them to accept similar principles of government by consent and natural rights—actually would all want to come to the United States in the first place?) And some of it worryingly strange. (As John Ganz pointed out, the Anti-Defamation League is hardly a “woke” entity these days, but somehow Vance nonetheless thinks it important to insist to castigate them, suggesting that he really does think that anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and others so-inclined should be given a pass, presumably because they had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.) But the parts of it which bother me the most are, I think, anti-republican in the most malicious way.

The republicanism of Thomas Jefferson has been endlessly analyzed, and no doubt will long continue to be. But broadly speaking, Jefferson’s republicanism was a fascinating—some would say incoherent—mixture of the aristocratic and the democratic, a mixture of Enlightenment confidence, agrarian sentiment, and noblesse oblige. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is not a crystalline distillation of all those ideas, but it does hit all the main points of it, especially as its ideas were later amplified and refined through centuries of American experience and practice. Jefferson’s vision was one of rational human beings exercising their natural right to collectively achieve independence, not solely or even primarily in order to remain virtuous farmers, or to instantiate through the power of a new social contract their own preferred res publica, but simply in order for their personal and communal development, as productive citizens, to be free from the interfering interests of powerful others in their civic spaces. Whatever the inconsistencies one might find in this theoretical framework, it is a substantive one, reflective not of unstated assumptions about some natural necessity regarding borders and identity, but rather of the explicitly stated assumption that a God-and-nature-given sensibility will show the rightness of a free people being able to work out their independence as part of civil order they choose for themselves, absent any distant hierarchy (whether spatially or temporally).

No one actually familiar with the philosophical and historical arguments here can deny that notions of sovereignty—of the right of a people to collectively define and govern their communities, including the borders thereof—were an important component of these republican visions that shaped America’s political culture. But Vance would have us believe that sovereignty needs to be the central concern of anyone concerned about citizenship and freedom:

What does it mean to be an American in 2025? For one, I think it has to mean sovereignty. More precisely, American citizenship must mean belonging to a nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern world that's hellbent on dissolving borders and differences in national character.

The Declaration is by no means a culturally placeless document; among the particulars that Jefferson levied against King George were claims that his actions were stirring up the continent’s native inhabitants to war and allowing the Catholic French to establish a dangerous foothold in Canada. Jefferson was not so idealistic as to ignore all concerns about security and identity. But the power of the document—and really, the power of this kind of liberal republicanism in general—is the way it connects with sentiments of liberty whose natural rightness were, in Jefferson’s view, becoming undeniable with the transformations which moved Western civilization away from the ancient and medieval worlds, and towards a more rights-based one. Jefferson’s embrace of the Enlightenment is hardly defensible in every particular, especially when it comes to race and religion. But the fact that America’s political culture became entwined with Jefferson’s hopes—his belief that, as he put it in one of the final letters he ever wrote, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God”—is inseparable from what this country has meant to the history of the world. To reduce that all to obsessions over sovereignty (and apparently not so much, in Vance’s mind, popular and democratic sovereignty, which is a crucial aspect of self-governance, but rather martial sovereignty, since he seems especially worked up about the fact that “so many young people…say that they would not die for their own country…[or] put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for our common nation”) is a serious conceptual loss.

Fortunately, the history of America is filled with people who have understood this country’s civic self-conception more accurately than Vice President Vance does. President Abraham Lincoln, for one, who in perhaps his greatest and most influential speech, emphasized that the carnage of the Civil War, and the kind of community those who waged it were motivated by, was one characterized by a simple, singular “proposition”: “that all men are created equal.” But also, how about the political theorist, and refugee from the Holocaust, and naturalized U.S. citizen, Hannah Arendt? There’s isn’t a smidgen of flakey idealism to be found in her writing—and yet, her whole understanding of her adopted country began with her appreciation of the power of the demos to build civic spaces and secure liberty through revolutionary action, action which is not dependent upon some kind of prior security, but upon a spontaneity available to all. There is, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader, devout (however flawed) Christian, and democratic socialist, whose commitment to all three of those collections of moral principles formed the pillars of the “beloved community” that he believed all free people ought to and someday would be able partake of, with Jefferson’s words in the Declaration guiding him towards his refusal “to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” And what about Zohran Mamdani, the likely future Mayor of New York City? On July 4^th, he posted his sentiments: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.” And Vance—kind of like McCarthy, come to think of it—found that bland statement of liberal patriotism simply horrifying. “There is no gratitude in those words, Vance ranted. “He dares on our 249th anniversary to congratulate [America] by paying homage to its incompleteness and to its, as he calls it, contradictions?....Who the hell does he think that he is?”

Well, for one thing, he appear to think—if only in terms of structure, not substance—pretty much the exact same way Vance himself thinks, if he were only honest or self-reflective enough to notice it, since our Vice President actually ends his own speech saying “we must get to work”—which I think must mean that even he agrees that the work of American citizenship is, well, “unfinished.” But that’s just more puerile rhetoric from angry man, or at least a man who knows his position in the Trump administration and the plaudits he receives from the MAGA base depends upon his performative anger.

A better answer, of course, is that Mamdani, like all good Americans this summer, may not think he’s Superman, but he’s surely been inspired by Malik Ali, the falafel vendor who believes in Superman, jumps into a crater to help him up during his first tangle with the Hammer of Barovia/Ultraman, and then is pointlessly murdered by Lex Luthor while the latter tries to get Superman to tell him the location of his home. Because Superman does have a home, a place—a place of homely, maybe even “bland” liberal republican and Christian virtues, all that not particularly sovereign stuff about doing good and feeling compassion and treating everyone equally and trying again and again, despite all his and our limitations and mistakes. It’s the sort of place that teaches a person to, when offered a falafel by a vendor after saving someone from being hit by a taxi, accept it gratefully.

Did the Kents introduce Superman to falafels while he was growing up? Probably not—probably he came to like them because he’s just another struggling modern person, appreciating the good food and other good works human beings can achieve. There is a substance to this very American, very liberal, very “bland” struggle. It’s a substance I’m happy to admit is in some ways parasitic upon, and therefore must necessarily connect to, all sorts of deeper traditions and values and visions; there’s a reason why I call myself a communitarian and a civic republican and a Christian, after all. But to allow the fact that the Christianity and republicanism and community attachments of modern Americans (like, I think, James Gunn’s Superman) tend to be rather liberal to become a reason to reject their sources entirely is the worst sort of cutting off your nose to spit in your own face. Of course, when you’re talking about a political movement that’s all about reacting against the America that actually exists, not to reform or improve or correct it but rather to just reject its reality, then maybe that kind of cutting and spitting is what passes for respectable thought. It wins awards from the Claremont Institute, apparently.

A Random Thought on Mikey Kaus

A few days ago Robert Farley, of Lawyers, Guns & Money, posted the latest entry in his wonderful "Oral History of the Blogosphere" project, this one focusing on the once-notorious (indeed, widely loathed on the liberal/left/progressive side of the blogosphere), but now mostly-just-grumbled-over journalist and blogger, Mickey Kaus. It's actually a pretty great conversation, if you're into remembering or rethinking what people were arguing about online and why and how they did it, circa 20001-2010. For me, besides enjoying it as I have enjoyed every previous entry in this series (really, if you're a blogger or ever thought you could be one you should listen to them all), it made me reflect on the enduring relevance of a particular ideological niche, however tiny or incoherent it may seem.

I never thought, and still don't think, the loathing of Kaus was mostly due to the controversial positions he took on the dominant political news items in America in the 1990s and 2000s: welfare reform, criminal justice, immigration, the Iraq War, etc. Rather, I think he was loathed because he insisted--to the minds of the aforementioned liberal/left/progressive pundit class, infuriatingly so--that he was taking those positions as a sincere, if appropriately evolved, New Deal Democrat. In a way, I think Kaus occupies the same much-condemned rhetorical space as Ralph Nader: he's someone who is seen as a betrayer, someone who talks the talk of liberal justice and then engages in public actions and intervenes in public debates that seem, to most liberals and leftists and progressives, to entirely contrary to how the liberal political world actually works.

The first minutes of the conversation with Kaus touched upon the legacy of Charles Peters and the magazine he founded, Washington Monthly, which tutored legions of journalists (including Kaus) in a vision of activist government grounded, as Paul Glastris, Washington Monthly's long-time editor, put it, in "the communitarian patriotic liberalism of Peters’s New Deal youth." There are, out there amid the sprawling, multifaceted coalition that constitutes the Democratic Party, lines of reflection upon the achievements of the New Deal, both scholarly and activist, which seriously downplay the ethical and civic part of that triumph of positive liberalism and egalitarianism. According to those arguments, the greatest achievement of the New Deal was that it laid the foundation for erecting social democratic institutions in America, for which many are still fighting for: to make health care a human right, to make higher education available to all, to put workers in charge of the economy, etc. As a democratic socialist myself, I agree with those lines of argument! But I'm also a sometime left conservative, a wanna-be civic republican, and a fan of both Christopher Lasch and the Point Huron Statement, and thus find myself agreeing with Peters as well. The leadership of the post-New Deal, and particularly the post-civil rights movement, Democratic Party really did focus mostly on achieving liberal justice through building ever-more effective (and ever-larger) redistributive institutions and practices. The way that focus partly (but not entirely unintentionally) combined a very un-New Dealish individualism with outright bureaucratic statism, and allowed a entirely new kind of meritocracy to flourish in liberal circles, thus taking the focus off the cultural and communal aspects of what a genuinely egalitarian and just society must involve...well, that's the critical space which Kaus occupied. Entirely coherently? In a philosophically rigorous way? Open-mindedly, kindly, and without self-indulgent contrarian snark? Not at all; in many ways, Kaus's voice was a profoundly flawed vehicle for this critical perspective on post-Cold War liberalism in America. But to my mind, at least, he was a vehicle for it all the same.

My primary evidence for this is a wonderful book that he wrote, The End of Equality. The book never got the respect it deserved, I think, partly because of the weird moment it arrived (right at the beginning of the Clinton administration; but was the book arguing against what Clinton was doing, or supporting it, or both?), and partly because Kaus's subsequent career--intransigently defending some of the worst aspects of Clinton's welfare reform, obsessing about family breakdown even as income inequality skyrocketed, etc.--retrospectively made the book's insistence that "Money Liberalism" was a non-starter and that "Civic Liberalism" was the way to go seem like Kaus was auditioning George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" a decade before it nominally (though never actually) arrived. All those criticisms are fair. But I still use selections from the book in my Political Ideologies classes on occasion, because I find so much of it refreshingly clear and free of cant. He is frank about his conviction that most of those with socialist aspirations have been unwilling to recognize the incompatibility of "fraternity, community, and idealism" with the lack of "material prosperity" that only rapacious capitalism seems to provide (p. 11); he is genuinely eloquent in asserting that differing levels of health care don't actually matter to the egalitarian legitimacy of society so much as "that everyone wait in the same waiting rooms" (p. 93); and he is downright prescient in warning that, if the goal of the Democratic party continued to be tweaking the tax code in some Rawlsian way so as to make it fairer and increase the size of welfare checks but in the meantime said nothing about the lack of community-feeling and solidarity in America, the end result will a general hardening of whatever egalitarian spirit the revolutions of the 1930s and the 1960s may have left us with:

Americans may be social egalitarians today. But give the affluent two more decades to revile the underclass and avoid the cities as if they were a dangerous foreign country, two decades to isolate their "gifted" children from their supposed inferiors, two decades of "symbolic analysis" and assortative mating, and we might wake up to discover that Americans aren't such egalitarians at all any more. Then politics would be really dispiriting (p. 180).

That paragraph can be picked apart and even partly undermined in multiple ways (that large numbers of younger and mostly liberal-learning people, including young families, started returning to America's cities throughout the 2000s is the most obvious rejoinder, but not the only one). But I read it, and I see the once at least moderately liberal suburbs, filled with college-educated, white-collar-job-holding, mostly well-off Americans, voting for Trump across large parts of America. Dispiriting indeed.

Anyway, this is just something that occurred to me, when Robert unintentionally invited Kaus back into my mind. So I thank him for that.

Left (not Liberal) Conservatism (or Communitarianism, if you Prefer): A Restatement

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Recently, Tablet Magazine published a lengthy essay by Eric Kaufmann, heralding the revival of "left-conservative" thinking, which the author defined as "a conservative view on cultural questions like national identity and immigration with left-wing positions on economic issues like public services." Leaving aside for the moment whether this "intellectual force" is, in fact, emerging (and how we would know it if it was), the genealogy and analysis of this constellations of opinions provided by Kaufmann is interesting. Most politically informed Americans would, I suspect, look at the above definition and think "oh yes, that's what those legendary 'conservative Democrats' are said to believe; I'm sure there must be a couple of them still around here somewhere." But Kaufmann is trying to distringuish something rather different than that, I think, something similar to what long-time observers of American conservatism might remember from the "Red Tory" boomlet of a decade ago. I don't believe he's successful in making his claim, because--to give away the end of the essay--I think his conception of liberal nationhood gets in the way of his explanation of what left conservatism is or could be in the first place. Still, it provides some intellectual history worth surveying, at the least.

Kaufmann builds his argument primarily around the intellectual journey of two important mid-century Jewish thinkers, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, both of whom came of age--like many other intellectuals in their cohort--during an era and in an environment of leftist radicalism, and went on to be influential academics whose Cold War, anti-communist sensibilities were deeply disturbed (though, I think, in importantly different ways) by the unrest of the 1960s. Kaufmann quotes Glazer as saying: "When I came to Berkeley in 1963, I still thought of myself as a man of the left, and for the first few months of the free speech issue, I was on the side of the free speech people....The key issue that labelled me a conservative, labelled a number of us as conservative, were the student unrest issues post-1964." What changed? Years of student challenges to, in Glazer's view, "free speech, free research and free teaching." As Kaufmann sums it up, the problem for Glazer, and many of his fellow former radicals, was that their preferred "social democratic approach was married to political liberalism," and that meant "standing up for bourgeois liberal democracy." Which is, of course, an obvious course for philosophical liberals to take! But if the ideas Kaufmann traces in this article are rooted in liberalism, in what sense is the "conservatism" they might invoke actually "left."

Ideological terminology and labeling never has been and never will be consistent, so it's a fool's errand to ever claim to definitive identify that one set of beliefs are, or only ever could be, "liberal" as opposed to "left" (to say nothing of "conservative"). Still, attempts to do so are instructive, because if nothing else they can provide landmarks for intellectual wanderers. Most "left" intellectual landmarks that have been articulated ever since the French Revolution--which is when this particular phrasing first arose--have involved have involved one of form or another of liberation from cultural, economic, and social forms and traditions which impose hierarchies and distinctions. In other words, the one thing that can probably almost always be said with confidence about the "left" is that it is egalitarian. Aren't liberals egalitarians too? Obviously much contemporary liberalism, as opposed to classical liberalism, has certainly turned its long-standing valorization of the God-created individual as a rights-bearing being in the direction of thorough-going egalitarianism. But the fact that libertarian thinkers, making use of the same philosophical convictions about natural rights and individual dignity as liberals, can coherently advance decidedly non-egalitarian claims, suggests that leftist egalitarianism must have different roots.

Norman Mailer's self-description as a "left conservative" can be instructive here. When Mailer called himself a left conservative in his strange and magnificent The Armies of the Night, he said that he aimed to "think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke." one possible way of articulating this vision (which Mailer himself admitted was an oxymoron which he had to redefine every day) is to say that modernity is different from what came before it (whether you want to date that to French Revolution or the Declaration of Independence or any other landmark). The traditions and communities which Burke defended simply cannot exercise the authority they once did in a world in which individual subjectivity has conditioned our very understanding of the self. Technology, social fluidity, democracy: all genies let out of the bottle. Which all, of course, rings as conservative in the fullest sense. As I once argued in an attempt to make sense of left conservatism more than 15 years ago, conservatives value tradition and community in part because they are the only things that cannot (at least cannot easily) be turned into abstractions which in turn can be taxed away from you or turned against you; to the extent that the modern world sees profits, procreation, wars, borders, religions, holidays, families, markets, marriages, and more as institutions and events best understood, conducted, and transformed in light of some abstract principle--whether that be individual rights or personal conscience or democratic harmony or economic progress--then one could argue that the modern world has gone wrong, gotten away from the instinctual truths and embedded necessities of human existence.

There are possible reactionary responses to this, whether a jihad-like revolt against modernity or a St. Benedict-like retreat from it. But neither of those were Mailer's response. As the above-linked essay explains, Mailer "hoped to subvert most traditions that governed American life," no doubt in part because so many of those traditions were products of "corporate power and its influence on American culture." So his response, instead, was to imagine a Marxist response, carried out on behalf of Burkean communities and traditions. Marxism was and is, obviously, deeply implicated in grand theories of historical determinism and revolution, which Mailer himself condemned ("I become uneasy when I find people drawing up solutions, which is, of course, the great vice of the left, to solve difficult problems, because I think they cut out too many of the nuances"). But you can still make use of Marx's central--and, yes, illiberal--insights regarding alienation, commodification, imperialism, and so forth, without all the historical materialist baggage. Why attempt to do so? Because (and I've suggested before) Marx recognized the anthropological truth of the Burkean (though for him it was really more Hegelian, and therefore Rousseauian) insight into the human connection between personal subjectivity and communal, historical, material reality. Repairing the human consciousness does not mean an eternal project of subjective liberation, world without end, which can never do more, I think, than aim to make the burdens of modernity privately manageable (with that emphasis on the private perhaps explaining the tendency many liberal thinkers have for assuming that the liberation of identities will go hand-in-hand with socio-economic equality). Instead, the true leftist must address the issues of power and production which make the transformations of modernity into alienating, divisive, and dependency-inducing burdens in the first place--and that means taking seriously the communal and traditional spaces where those transformations take place.

(An aside: did I just put Rousseau and Burke into the same sentence? Yes. But the only reason that sounds strange, I think, is that the deep Burkean tradition has evolved into a position which basically accepts the collapse of the modern project: with the end of the authority of tradition comes the impossibility of community, a banal emotivist future, and the likely decline (or violent overthrow) of the West. In short, to borrow a point from Michael Walzer, such Burkeans are the sort of communitarians who think that we are at the point, or nearly at the point, where our communal nature is irredeemably broken up. The problem with this argument, however, is that--given that the human race, even in the decadent liberal West is, well, still here--it implies that community and tradition must not have been part of our "deep structure" after all. Whereas the Rousseauian perspective says, fine, okay, our original nature has been lost, we're in chains. The liberal response is to deny the chains, or insist they aren't relevant to individual life anyway; the conservative response, especially in its more religious iterations, is to say something like, yes, the chains are real, it's a catastrophe, but in a sense the chains have been there since the fall of Adam, so let's just make the best of it until the eschaton. Rousseau's response preserves true conservative seriousness, but rejects the identification of specific social and economic and cultural problems with original sin. Instead, it respects the need for embeddedness and connection by suggesting that we remake our chains. Why can we do that? Because within and through modernity the deep structure abides; we're just having difficulties actualizing it, because we've been so intent in fighting internecine battles within liberalism that we've ignored all the other ways in which we could be responding to the world.)

Kaufmann never mentions Mailer in his piece, which is unfortunate, because the way Mailer expressed his attachment to what he considered a proper conservative sensibility--one which, among other things, made him very sensitive to the need to fight centralizing abstractions and systems, and insist upon the value of realizing equality in terms of empowerment--would have been a helpful correction to Kaufmann's own articulation of the "left conservatism." Kaufmann's historical arguments about the capture of the "adversary culture" by America's corporate class over the past half-century, and how the alignment of those increasingly-elite (and therefore no longer entirely "adversary") conceptions with technological and educational shifts in America's economy over the past 30 years, thus contributing to a deepening of class divides along urban and rural lines--all of those are, I think, both true and worthy of serious thought. But Kaufmann's notion of that which the left conservatives he is imagining want to conserve is rarely actually a matter of local communities or traditions. Rather, the focus is on national stability, particularly ethnic national stability. That high levels of immigration can be a serious challenge for local norms is a truism that no serious person should deny. But to build a model of the conservative sensibility around the nation state, connecting Robert Putnam's important work on social capital to "collective tradition, memory, and nationhood," and posing the proper conservative goal as "a nation-state with a common culture," is to, frankly, ignore the best that conservatism has to offer: a respect for (though not, of course, an unthinking obeisance to) local spaces, and the communal and traditional patterns which emerge there.

Kaufmann concludes with the prediction (or hope?) that soon governing power in Western democracies will be held by--or at least will be regularly and seriously contested for by--"national conservatives endors[ing] left-wing policies such as protectionism, infrastructure spending, and support for welfare programs like Social Security, alongside conservative ideas such as immigration restriction and nationalism." But we know what that is, and it isn't necessarily leftism; rather, it is the redistributive liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society, of America's manufacturing unions in their heyday, of finance capitalism given freedom to expand alongside the American state, so long as appropriate levels of taxation keep schools and programs all fully funded. From an egalitarian perspective, there's much to applaud there! That's part of the reason why, from the 1930s to the 1970s, so many radical democratic and socialist thinkers, with intellectual roots extending back to the populist challenges of the early 20th century, found at least some degree of unifying comfort with the Democratic party. But once American capitalism went fully global, the bankruptcy of that egalitarian bargain was, slowly but surely, revealed, and those on the left (including those with whatever degree of conservative sympathies) found themselves having to either embrace or disentangle themselves from the neoliberalism that eventually become dominant. Kaufmann captures some of this, but the orientation of his argument around the likes of Bell and Glazer, two comfortably ensconced academics, members of an ethnically marginalized but nonetheless (at least within university circles) fully vouchsafed members of the American intellectual elite, perhaps inevitably makes him begin with and return to a leftist (but actually liberal) construction that can only conserve a nationalist conception which the aforementioned New Deal world created as a byproduct. Besides Mailer, he would have done better to seriously consider the historian Christopher Lasch.

Lasch--who, to my knowledge, never used the phrase "left conservative," though the political theorist Ronald Beiner used "left-wing conservatism" to describe Lasch's thought--does make a brief appearance in Kaufmann's argument, serving as part of, in his term, the "Protestant Populist-Progressive" complement to the "anti-communist socialism" which, in the thinking of New York intellectuals like Bell and Glazer, he sees the roots of left conservatism. Unfortunately, his use of Lasch's ideas--which shouldn't be at all unfamiliar to students of American conservative thought, though unfortunately still often is--doesn't serve the man's overall philosophy well. He writes that Lasch "castigated America’s elites for their post-national detachment from popular national identity," but that assumes the Lasch made any kind of argument for a genuine "popular national identity" in the first place, which many readers of the man (myself included) would firmly dispute. It's not that Lasch denied that modern individual subjects can and often do build an identity through, and develop cultural attachments in connection with, a community as large as a nation state; he knew that he had himself (as he wrote in 1954, he recognized that he was "a part of America, whatever that means, except that the one thing it means is that wherever I go I cannot not be a part of it"). But the populism which Lasch called for--a populism that was, itself, distinctly left-conservative, at least if we hold to the idea that one can put together both an insistence upon the equal empowerment, in social and economic terms, of all communities, and an equal respect for the local norms and traditions which democratic majorities within those communities wish to live in accordance with--was never nationalist, never statist, and certainly never ethnic. It was, if anything, both cognizant of (even, in a way that many conservatives never are, respectful of) the moral opportunities which which modern subjectivity and the liberation of the individual self had made possible, while insistent upon the need to never valorize such liberal possibilities as foundational. Eric Miller thoughtfully captured Lasch's mature thought this way:

Populism, [Lasch] wrote, "stands for things most American still believe in and are willing to defend," however submerged those beliefs might be beneath the glitter and gigantism of the market and the state....Against those who had argued that "populism" was merely an ideological haven for racially intolerant, ignorant provincials, Lasch began to recover and define a kind of populist cosmopolitanism....

[T]his required that he first deconstruct the self-image of those who fancied themselves the true cosmopolitans....Whereas democracy's health required a rooted loyalty to particular places, the new elites [of America] were "international rather than regional"....Such upper-class cosmopolitanism was of course the true provincialism, a species more dangerous than the variety the despised lower-middle class might possess. 

Against this faux cosmopolitanism Lasch proposed a vision of citizenship rooted in loyalty to place and kin yet also informed, enriched, and instructed, in a dialectical manner, by the fruits of high culture. "Those who welcome cultural fragmentation in the name of pluralism," [Lasch] wrote...."have lost the sense of 'twoness,' as W.E.B. Du Bois called it, that formerly shaped writers attempting to navigate between the subcultures in which they had been raised and the world culture they had acquired through education"....The liberationist project of the elites, premised on the need to free "the imprisoned self," [Lasch] noted...yield[ed] simply a "detached, formless, free-floating self--a self without prejudices, without a point of view of its own that is put at risk by others....Without a home culture, as it used to be called--a background of firmly held standards and beliefs--people will encounter the 'other' merely as consumers of impressions and sensations, as cultural shoppers in pursuit of the latest novelties. It is important for people to measure their own values against others and to run the risk of changing their minds; but exposure the others will do them very little good if they have no minds to risk." [Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 371-373]

While it might seem to take away from the policy focus of Kaufmann's original argument, Lasch's taking of his populist synthesis of a conservative or communitarian concern for place, tradition, and culture, on the one hand, and the leftist concern for equality and empowerment, on the other, in the direction of the arts is, I think, a much truer way of expressing the potential of this ideological construct than by simply endorsing strong welfare provisions and strong immigration restrictions at the same time. The latter is simply a grab-bag of policy positions that can be construed as representing the interests of some particular demographic quadrant of society, however historically important such a constellation of priorities may have appeared to Cold War American intellectuals at the time. The former, by contrast, can, when pushed, be revealed to incorporate a deep engagement with political and social theory, far more than loose talk about the consequences of the rise of immigration and the decline of unions. As a host of critcs, philosophers, and scholars argued in a symposium on left conservatism over 20 years ago, long before anyone at Front Porch Republic rediscovered the term, left conservatism is a way of articularting, while still recognizing the full, degrading and dependency-creating effects of the racial, sexual, and class hierarchies of our late capitalist moment, some sometimes discomforting and no easily reputed arguments (none of which the participants in the above symposium were particularly sympathetic to, even as they recognized the challenge they posed). First, that materiality matters, which presents real limits up, or at least complications within, any project which equates equality and empowerment with the liberation of the subject. And second that attacking foundations, whatever the (often quite real and necessary) strategic value of doing so, can never on its own create a politics that truly matters to social life.

There is arguably a parallel to all this, if only Kaufmann could have seen it, in the fate of the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. In a recent column titled "The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders," Ross Douthat made the argument that the wave of protests which have arisen in the five weeks since George Floyd's murder, whatever their justice, represent a departure from the democratic socialist vision of Sanders, and its replacement by a leftism that fits right into the ideological movement that Bell, as Kaufmann presents it, sketched out over 40 years ago. Left agitators, according to this prediction, inevitably lose their interest in democratizing the economy so as to empower and equalize conditions for the working class, and focus instead on non-economic hierarchies whose destruction will be more acceptable to cosmopolitan educated members of the capitalist class. The result is a liberalism which consumes the leftist emphasis upon, as Sanders constantly repeated, the deprivations of the billionaire class, thus losing any connection to the poor for the sake of maintaining influence over the educated. As Douthat claimed:

Throughout his career, Sanders has stood for the proposition that left-wing politics lost its way after the 1970s by letting what should be its central purpose--the class struggle, the rectification of economic inequality, the war against the “millionaires and billionaires”--be obscured by cultural battles and displaced by a pro-business, pro-Wall Street economic program....

Now, under these strange coronavirus conditions, we’re watching a different sort of insurgency challenge liberalism, one founded on an intersectional vision of left-wing politics that never came naturally to Sanders. Rather than Medicare for All and taxing plutocrats, the rallying cry is racial justice and defunding the police. Instead of finding its nemeses in corporate suites, the intersectional revolution finds them on antique pedestals and atop the cultural establishment....

[T]his revolution has been more unifying than Sanders’s version--uniting the Democratic establishment that once closed ranks against him, earning support from just about every major corporate and cultural institution, sending anti-racism titles skyrocketing up the best-seller list, even bringing Mitt Romney into the streets as a marcher and inducing Donald Trump to make grudging noises about police reform....All this, from one perspective, vindicates critics who said Sanders’s vision of revolution was too class-bound and race-blind all along....

[But the] anti-racist reckoning unfolding in colleges, media organizations, corporations and public statuary, may seem more unifying than the Sanders revolution precisely because it isn’t as threatening to power. The fact that corporations are “outdistancing” even politicians...in paying fealty to anti-racism is perhaps the tell. It’s not that corporate America is suddenly deeply committed to racial equality; even for woke capital, the capitalism comes first. Rather, it’s that anti-racism as a cultural curriculum, a rhetoric of re-education, is relatively easy to fold into the mechanisms of managerialism, under the tutelage of the human resources department. The idea that you need to retrain your employees so that they can work together without microaggressing isn’t Marxism, cultural or otherwise; it’s just a novel form of Fordism, with white-fragility gurus in place of efficiency experts....

Yes, serious critics of structural racism have an agenda for economic as well as cultural reform. But that agenda isn’t what’s being advanced: Chuck Schumer will take a knee in kente cloth, but he isn’t likely to pass a major reparations bill, and the white liberals buying up the works of Ibram X. Kendi probably aren’t going to abandon private schools or bus their kids to minority neighborhoods. And in five years, it’s more likely that 2020’s legacy will be a cadre of permanently empowered commissars getting people fired for unwise Twitter likes rather than any dramatic interracial wealth redistribution.

I am a cynical conservative, so you can dismiss this as the usual reactionary allergy to the fresh air of revolution. But it’s also what an old-guard leftism, of the sort that Bernie Sanders attempted to revive, would predict of a revolutionary movement that has so much of the establishment on board.


Douthat is honest enough to acknowledge a major hole in his argument: specifically, that "the demand for police reform at the heart of the current protests doesn’t fit this caricature." Which is surely how Sanders would defend himself from this accusation, if he felt inclined to articulate his vision of society in these terms: it is the poor (which includes a proportionally greater number of historically deprived and discriminated against persons) that have suffered so often from police forces which cannot help but be organized more around the interests and priorities of the wealthy; hence, a democratic socialist vision, or really any left vision for that matter, would have to include a challenge to the most visibly coercive of all our racial and class hierarchies.

Yet even with the column's central weakness, Douthat has a point, a point that any properly reflective leftist would have recognize. If the focus of leftism is not simply liberal redistribution, welfare payments, and the recognition of private subjectivities, but rather the public democratization of the social and economic order as a whole, then any movement that is so readily interwoven into the therapeutic managerialism of the corporate and knowledge class, such that Lasch so effectively identified and condemned, has to give believers in real economic democracy pause. And that would include left conservatives. Not so much--as one making use of Kaufmann's articulation of the term might think--because this kind of intersectionality challenges deeply felt ethnic, racial, or sexual hierarchies and thereby troubles our national community. That isn't, I think, a left conservative concern that is worthy of the name. Rather, a Laschian left conservative would recognize that any kind of reform movement, much less a revolutionary one, which allows itself to get centered around emotional or psychological abstractions, as opposed to the material realities of actual social and economic inequalities, whether in education or publishing or policing or anything else, is likely to captured by the forces of capital, and channeled into disputes that, whatever their legitimate need for resolution, will once again fail to connect with the communities where people live, the material lives they live there, and the traditions they build through those lives.

It is those actually existing habits of life which make life worth living. A democratization that does nothing to address the chains and dependencies which restrict and warp the full organic development of those lives, and the attachments they are constructed out of, is only at best a liberal equalization, delivering goods to individuals without much acknowledgement of the communal and local structures they are part of. To the extent that the goods are desperately needed, even a liberal distribution of them is very much worth it, and if the mix progressive economics and conservative politics that Kaufmann sees flowing from the insights of men like Glazer and Bell can effectively, democratically, deliver them, then more power to them. But such deliveries will do little, theoretically anyway, about the place-destroying global unfolding of capitalism; perhaps some small resistance will be made to it, but the neoliberal argument for managed expansion will remain dominant nonetheless. A philosophically consistent left conservatism, such that could be built out of the writings of Marx and Lasch, and perhaps the irascibleness of folks like Mailer and Sanders too, would, I suspect, better serve the human need for both community and equality all around.

A Tale of Two Congressmen (with a 10-Point Constitutional Excursus)

[The Wichita Eagle ran this morning an editorial of mine praising Senator Jerry Moran, one of my senators here in Kansas, for breaking with his party and voting in support of the resolution to deny President Trump the authority to use his emergency powers to claim non-appropriated funds to build his beloved wall along the Mexican border. Since my argument in that piece touches on matters of constitutionalism and presidential power that I've written about before, I decided to expand on my piece below.]

President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency back in February, which--in his view and that of his lawyers, anyway--gave him the authority to spend taxpayer money to build a wall along our southern border (despite Congress not having constitutionally appropriated funds for him to do so), has been, to say the least, divisive. That divide, or at least one aspect of it, played itself out interestingly in my own back yard--specifically, in the responses of two men men who represent me in Congress: Senator Jerry Moran (left) of Kansas and Representative Ron Estes of the 4th Congressional District of Kansas (right). (And yes, I know, as a resident of Kansas I am technically represented by two senators, but everyone who knows him--including most of those who genuinely like and have voted for him--knows that Senator Pat Roberts checked out of the whole "citizen representation" thing years ago, so I'll just leave him aside.)

Moran and Estes are both conservative Republicans, which is unsurprising--this is Kansas, after all, and despite some interesting developments and potentialities here in Wichita, south-central Kansas remains a pretty conservative place. Moran and Estes reflect that; their voting records show consistent support for identifiably conservative causes and the agenda of President Trump. (In Estes's case, his career congressional vote total is 95% in line with Trump; for Moran, it's a slightly smaller 89%.)  But in this particular case, those two interests--call them "conservatism," however defined, on the one hand, and the Republican party and its leader as a vehicle for expressing conservative goals, on the other--parted ways. You can chart the parting by looking at the comments Estes and Moran issued when Congress held a vote to remove the president’s claimed emergency powers in this case, as allowed under the 1976 law which presidents have invoked whenever they've used their emergency power over the past 40 years. When the House voted on the resolution in late February--and passed it--Estes voted against it. When the Senate voted on the resolution last Thursday--and also passed it, thus requiring President Trump to veto this legislation if he wants his emergency powers claim to move forward--Moran supported it. Why?

On my reading, Estes thought this issue was pretty straightforward. In a four-sentence statement, Estes mentioned President Trump by name three times. He spoke of Trump “rightfully exercising” his presidential powers, and of “supporting the president’s actions to address this crisis.” He was, in other words, voicing what probably seemed to him a straightforward political matter. The President of the United States was doing something which he, as a Republican, agreed with, and so as a good member of the president’s own party, he was going to support him. In this case Estes, as I think his statement clearly reveals, understood himself to be spokesperson for the Trump-supporting Republicans of his district; whatever else Estes may or may not think about any of the larger issues involved, to not support Trump’s agenda--particularly an agenda item that Trump emphasized all through his campaign and ever since--would be a political betrayal of those who voted for him. This is the "delegate" model of representation, and it is perfectly defensible.

For Moran though, the issue was anything but straightforward. His statement also mentioned President Trump by name three times. But that was in the course of a 26-sentence long outline of arguments, which wound around some of the fundamentals of our constitutional system (such as: it is “a violation of the U.S. Constitution” if the executive branch spends money that goes beyond “appropriations approved by Congress”), around fears for the future (such as: “this continues our country down the path of an all-powerful executive, something those who wrote the Constitution were fearful of”), and around basic ethics (such as: “the ends don’t justify the means”). To be sure, he made it clear that he basically agreed with his party’s (overwrought) concern about conditions at the southern border. But in this case, Moran’s conservative, Constitution-protecting values trumped (pun most certainly intended) the president’s aggressive claims to do what he thinks he must about those conditions. In this case, Moran was acting in accordance with the "trustee" model of representation: being entrusted by voters to use all one’s resources and experience to make, on their behalf, difficult decisions–which this one clearly was.

What do I, personally, think about that decision? Well, I think it was a good one--building a wall along our southern border is, in my view, a pointless waste of money, a needlessly and stupidly provocative approach to the problem of illegal immigration, a symbolic move representative of a genuinely inhumane way of relating to our hemispheric neighbors and the rest of the world, and contemptuous downgrading of hundreds of miles of precious environmental space. It ought not be built, and so if Congress can slow Trump's moves in that regard, they ought to. But given that, as a conservative Republican, Moran almost certainly disagrees with all of those points (except possibly the first; I suspect he really does have substantive fiscal complaints about the proposed wall), what about the substance of what actually brought Moran to his decision? That is, what do I think of his constitutional reasoning about the need to curtail the expansion of executive power through emergency declarations and the like?

More than 4 1/2 years ago, President Obama's move to essentially legalize millions of technically illegal residents of the United States created a firestorm of "Unconstitutional!" accusations, and I waded in. This resulted in a series of lengthy arguments between my friends Damon Linker, David Watkins, and myself. Rather than rehearsing all the theoretical claims and counter-claims those blog posts laid out, let me just briefly lay out, in the context of Moran's constitutional case for opposing President Trump's claim, how I think about the whole matter now:

1) Moran writes that, in his view, "if the enduring value of the Constitution disappears...Americans will be less free." I don't entirely disagree with that, but I wouldn't make that claim myself.

2) I wouldn't make it because it suggests to my mind a fetishization of the U.S. Constitution, and the particular sort of freedom it supposedly guarantees.

3) But I think if you look at our Constitution, or the very idea of constitutionalism, both historically and theoretically, you can see that it has primary served as a means of invoking (and thus defining, and thus also limiting) a particular sense of "peoplehood" as connected to a particular polity. In the modern, post-Westphalian world of sovereign capitalist states, that means it turns the demos into a creature under contract, plugged into and committed to (and perhaps empowered by, but perhaps also restricted by) a set of procedures by which "popular sovereignty" is expressed.

4) I'm not calling this a bad thing; on the contrary, liberal constitutionalism has been an important way by which a limited form of democracy could be realized beyond self-governing communities and on a mass scale, which has had many good results. Still, it simply isn't the sine qua non of freedom, and no particular constitution, most certainly including our own property-defending one, shouldn't be treated as such.

5) Does that mean I don't think it's a big deal when someone violates the constitution? No, I think it is a big deal--but I may disagree with many in what kind of big deal I consider it to be.

6) One thing that is essential to understand is that constitutions--again, speaking theoretically as well as historically--have been, and remain, performative in a way bodies of law in general mostly are not. Since constitutions generally do not define, and thereby do not either allow or proscribe certain actions, but rather define and thereby either include or exclude certain persons, or particular certain ways said persons may or may not qualify as citizens, or the particular roles those citizens may or may not execute in diverse ways, there is a qualitative element to questions of constitutionalism that is simply besides the point in most other areas of law.

7) This means it is perfectly reasonable, I think, to declare an action both legal and unconstitutional. Someone--say, a President of the United States--could take an action that is arguably within the realm of legal statutes, but has taken that action in such a way, or justified it with such arguments, or made the choice to take that action in such a context, as to reject the norms, traditions, assumptions, or provisos that have developed in conjunction with the performance of the constitution in question. (This, for everyone who didn't bother to click on the links above, is what I said about Obama's immigration order--legal, but not constitutional.)

8) Now, as those norms themselves perpetuate the way in which the constitution in question is interpreted, and as those interpretation and their continued performance necessarily impact the way in which we as citizens understand ourselves to be governed, it is perfectly logical to understand unconstitutional acts to be a threat to the "peoplehood" under which we our governed.

9) So consequently, when President Trump claims he has the inherent emergency-declaring authority to spend money that Congress, which according to the language of the U.S. Constitution is the only branch of our national government which can authorize the spending of money, has denied him, then he is performing the role of President of the United States badly.

10) The law may or may not make room for the legitimacy of his performance. But in acting in this way, he is challenging the one the primary procedures by which, for better or worse, Americans have historically articulated their democratic sovereignty--and while that may not be an immediate threat to our "freedom," it absolutely challenges (yes, in the same way Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and most other presidents also challenged) the premises on which this particular democratic polity was, and still is, imagined to work. So, yes--it is a big deal, and worth trying to stop, for whatever reason.

To go back to Moran--however much our reasoning may diverge, note what is the same about it. Moran is thinking about the U.S. Constitution, about how it functions and what it means. We don't think about it the same way, but his thinking about it, however much I might dispute elements of it, is serious. And it is always impressive to see someone in Congress think seriously about not just the political popularity, or the partisan necessity, of a given issue, but rather about, for example, the danger of establishing a “precedent for future presidents” (as Moran did). Estes’ statement invoked President Trump, and for many voters around here that was enough; but Moran, on the other hand, invoked his “understanding of history,” his “intellect,” and his “gut.” That is a hard decision, and I think it is one deserving of praise.

Not that my praise necessarily matters a great deal. After all, I’m neither a Republican (though I do vote for some on occasion) nor a conservative (though I hold to some conservative views); as such, the core supporters of both men can dismiss these thoughts of mine out of hand. But aside from that, I am also an American citizen and a resident of Wichita, Kansas, and as such, these two men represent me in Washington, D.C. So as someone you represent: thank you, Senator Moran.Though I may often disagree with you politically, this week you’ve earned my appreciation, and my trust.

After Trump #1: Getting Urbanists and Localists Together

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

So at the beginning of the month, when I finally got my election reflections out of my system, I concluded by re-iterating what I said back in November: that whoever won the presidency, the localist alternative to national dysfunction and decline will continue to exist as an option to be explored--or, better, as a demand that must be responded to. Since Trump's victory, the truth of that observation has been reflected in cities across the country. Urban centers, by large margins, did not go for Trump, and it's not hard to guess why: besides the fact that cities are, almost by definition, more religiously and racially diverse than rural areas, they are also the self-perpetuating engines of both global finance capitalism and the education meritocracy, both of which are synonymous with the sort of pluralistic, neoliberal system which Clinton, for better or worse, embodied. So it's not surprising that multiple large American cities--or at least multiple agencies, both public and private, within these cities--have called to resist Trump's agenda (particularly as regards immigration), and that there are people are looking seriously at how urban areas could both legally and financially pull off that resistance. Perhaps this is an example what a Front Porch Republic commenter called the left's "strange new respect for localism" (a respect which is much needed, that's for certain!)--but if so, is it a respect that the usual defenders of local government and local economies will support? My suspicion is that they'll need some persuading on that point--and the nature of city governments, and urban cultures generally, are part of the reason. So, as one small effort to try to organize my thoughts about politics in the Trump era, let me see if I can make the case for why urbanism should, and usually does, comport with localism, and thus why urban-sympathetic conservatives and radical and democratic localists, as we all face 2017, have much in common. 

Let's begin with the basic complaint that so many people have with city government--namely, as the old adage about "City Hall" puts it, you can't fight it. The assumption is that you'll have no voice there, no influence, no way to make your case, no way to seek any kind of reasonable compromise: you're just going to be subject to their red tape, their arbitrary rules, and that's the end of it. As someone who actually serves on a public advisory board here in Wichita, KS, I can testify that's not really true--I have, in fact, seen more than a few determined citizens and citizen groups work with government, make city leaders aware of issues, press their case, and come out winning in the end. But I also know that those circumstances stand out because they're unusual. The more usual model is the random citizen, diligently going about their lives, working at their business, doing their job, raising their kids, pursuing their goals--and running smack into some ordinance or rule or law, one they'd never heard of before and couldn't possibly account for. And when they turn to the relevant authority, such accountings are not forthcoming--just an edict to obey. The understandable frustration which this causes is magnified when the source is not the distant capitol, but a group of people just right downtown. So the anger of the restaurant owner dealing with city agencies, the construction company facing zoning regulations, the solitary individual trying to figure out why they're suddenly subject to the costs of their house being included in a re-drawn flood plain district--yes, that really is common enough to give life to the proverb.

But should we allow such proverbs, however unfortunately accurate they may sometimes reflect our all-too-human sensibilities, to guide our thinking? Especially if one takes seriously localist or republican ideas, if one believes that there is a real value in making use of local knowledge or in civic engagement within one's community, the fact that random inhabitants of a particular place may often find themselves flummoxed by the rules which organize said place doesn't seem like a sufficient reason to complain about either the place or the rules themselves. Unless, that is, one's underlying assumption is some variation on Robert Nozick's (or Ron Swanson's?) nightwatchman state, where the general goal is to minimize all government, no matter what it's basis. In which case, since presumably it will usually be some form of local government that one will most often run into--and hence have it called to one's attention and ire--and since over 80% of Americans live in some sort of urban environment, whether city or suburban, its predictable that city governments get the brunt of this libertarian frustration. And as much as we might prefer to think in terms of populist economic sovereignty or democratic subsidiarity, a plain old pseudo-(but not, I think, actual)-Jeffersonian (or Calhounian) defensive libertarian frustration plays a role in much American localism.

Anyone who has really looked at the history of American political thought knows this. Jeff Taylor's massively detailed Politics on a Human Scale: The American Tradition of Decentralism almost never mentions cities (his focus is almost entirely on the constitutional debate throughout American history over the power of the national government versus that of the states), but when it does, they're depicted as sources of a centralizing, regulating tendency, which was essentially the position taken by Thomas Jefferson, William Jennings Bryan, and many others sympathetic to the mostly agrarian, mostly pastoral (and, in practice, states-right-based) yeoman vision of American freedom. As he puts it early on: "Urban areas include their fair share of decentralists and big-city anonymity provides liberty of a sort, but agrarianism remains foundational to the dispersal of power and independence from the state" (p. 6). So if the true aim of liberty is to free the individual from the sort of sovereign restrictions and complications which states impose, one might correctly assume that cities--with their economies based on trade, manufacturing, and other kinds of financial innovation, thus prioritizing a concentration of distinct laboring individuals and commercial interests over the shared maintenance of productive land, all of which results in conflicts over property and privacy, which in turn necessitates that distributive and divisive arrangements be made--will inevitably be a major site of such restrictions, and thus are to be avoided by friends of liberty. The fact that, in the 20th and 21st centuries, those restrictions have at least nominally moved in an egalitarian direction doesn't make things any better, and in fact more than a few traditionalists might say it has made things even worse. All of which means that urbanism can't really be a legitimate expression of localism, right?

Except...wrong. Consider some caveats--first and most obviously, as I've written about before, there is the fact that cities are almost never, in fact, themselves sources of sovereign authority. As such, their authority may be experienced as centralizing and state-like--but it isn't, at least not entirely. It is, rather, based at least in part upon assumptions which are significantly more organic, historical, pragmatic, even anarchic and "appearential," than could possibly be the case in the imagined community of a modern nation-state. State power acts along lines that are justified constitutionally or contractually (or so we hope!), with a--usually, mostly--accepted civic identity and history aligning with the legal validation of its use of coercive power. While the edicts of a city borrow the form of such justifications, they nonetheless function in the lives of those of us who live in them (which is, as noted above, almost all of us) differently. Why? Because an urban context is rarely experienced as a national or state one, or even as a subset of such. Loren King, in his essay "Cities, Subsidiarity, and Federalism," noted that "when we imagine the coherence of a city, and when we identify with that city and our fellow residents, our imagined coherence and identity are grounded in visceral experiences of the elements of the city....the spatial integration typical of cities is not merely dense but multifaceted and often characterized by subtle forms of interdependence, both of which help to establish an imagined coherence, even a widely accepted identify of some sort, to the city as such." In other words, unless is already ideologically committed to the aforementioned libertarian minimalism, it is simply a social fact that the conceptual operation of urban organization and centralization is different from that of the state. You actually can go to city hall, it is a place that can actually be entered, and city council meetings are contexts where people can actually speak and (at least in theory) be heard--whereas Congress allows no such option to those who visit it, and is on solid constitutional ground in doing so.

The experience of urban interdependence and identification clearly is of a particular sort. Usually involving a degree of anonymity (which Taylor allowed was a not insignificant aspect of personal liberty), often not involving a deeply shared cultural frame of reference, urban interdependence instead fosters a kind of "cosmopolitan ethos." Now that very idea, if you take seriously the observation that an ethos can only be developed by a defined people who express and practice it, and that a defined people--a polis--necessarily have to be possessed of a place, may seem incoherent, not to mention in tension with what I just wrote about city hall. But perhaps that is the complicated truth which so many localists (perhaps in particular those of us reluctant to admit how thoroughly the developments of industrialization and capitalism have transformed our categories of thought) have a hard time admitting to ourselves: that cities, as sites of plurality and commerce and transformation, can have cultures, can have identities which function in at least a pseudo-communitarian way to make up for absence of a sovereign language or historical consciousness or cultural frame in terms of enabling all those city regulations to operate. Sure, the police officer's warrant and city hall's threats of fines enable them to do their work too--but not all of it. Those of us who take seriously the decentralist tradition Taylor writes about assume that Jefferson and Bryan and thousands of other advocates of localized, producer-based economies and communities were not wrong about the idea that, in rural and small town environments, there can be fewer, and thus more effective and less alienating and more humane, forms of government, because the people who make them up and are subject to them are more likely to known to one another, and share certain community-wide perspectives and expectations--they have local knowledge, in other words. Perhaps in cities that local knowledge is somewhat compromised by size and density. But the sense of the place, the shared and participatory identity which the patterns of urban life inculcate, the urban "crews" that Susannah Black has so thoughtfully described, and the foundation for understanding (and at least a minimal level of trust) which both supports and follows from all that? Just because the people in question came together for cosmopolitan reasons rather than due to traditions rooted in village history doesn't mean attachments aren't experienced anyway.

Will those attachments implicitly justify city governments in understanding themselves as serving a body larger than the individual, and one expected to impose a rational order upon its individual residents? Probably often. Yet those attachments will also guide the way that order will be conceived. In his delightful history of urbanism and its discontents, Americans Against the City, Steven Conn makes the argument that cities provide a home for cosmopolitan values which can take on an enriching and even rooted life of their own in opposition to the anti-urbanism more common to American life. Now pick up that idea, and combine it with the argument Jacob T. Levy laid out in his article "Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties" (which later became a component of his excellent book). In that article, Levy emphasizes that an important aspect of the struggle for individual liberty against centralizing governments--and thus, presumably, the real point of any real  (as opposed to merely Confederacy-addled or individual-liberation obsessed) localism--is for individuals to connect themselves with distinct loyalty-generating and interest-establishing political bodies, which would then lead to effective resistance to larger patterns of governance. For Levy, this meant making a defense of those provincial bodies which have historically characterized federal arrangements--and which have, of course, regularly antagonized those committed to more creating a more efficient, more rational and national, system of rule. Levy originally wasn't very sympathetic to the idea that municipalities could play such a counter-veiling role, though not out of any anti-urban animus; he simply didn't see them as having a large enough population, a grounded enough constitutional legality, or a distinct enough economy to serve as a rival concentration of interests to distant and distancing states. As he commented, "if interests don't crystallize into something like an identity or ideology...it seems unlikely to suffice in [presenting an alternative to centralization]." However, Levy hedged on that claim somewhat in his later book, especially as he came to recognize that provinces, states, and counties often reflect a jurisdictionally and constitutionally generated point of view, and thus are often dominated by elites who have an interest in that perspective, rather than reflecting organic local agendas and priorities.
 And that comports with Conn's historical research, which makes very clear just how distinctive the cosmopolitan focus and urban patterns of city life have been in the United States. Maybe, in a country with a thoroughly nationalized media and economy, where rural provinces have been often bankrupted and de-populated by many of those same national trends, yet still possess the constitutional power to present themselves as competitive participants in the national game, perhaps it is cities and city life, and the distinctly cosmopolitan community attachments they arguably generate loyalty towards and identification with, which may provide the strongest challenge to centralization, and the most fruitful source for new localist energy and ideas. As Conn concluded:

[T]he cities that will do well in the next generation...[will be the ones that] have not lost their "cityness--they make room for a sense of civic identity that transcends the boundaries of race or class or ethnicity or religion....[The lessons they teach] in civility and diversity aren't simply feel-good exercises, either. They are essential for a functioning democracy. One of the real strains on our political system now is that, while Americans are mobile, or rootless, or disconnected (whichever your prefer), our political system is still structured geographically....If we want a democracy that works more effectively to define and then address our common good [and, I would add, that means the local common good], then we need to recognize the ways in which cities function to foster that. (Americans Against the City, pp. 303-304, 306)

One of the great obstacles of the post-Marxist left in the Western world has been its debilitating pre-occupation with and internal struggle over whether or how to attempt to build "socialism in one country"--or, to escape dated Cold War terms, how balance global struggles for justice against local needs for community. In this, the internationalist bent of many on the egalitarian side of things has been unfortunately abetted by individualists who see no need to recognize any economic borders whatsoever, much the political salience of localities. This needs to change. Defending urban areas as valid sites for the political expression of localist attachment and thus as a source of counter-veiling identity and democratic power is hardly a solution to global problems (despite the well-intentioned but goofy yammering of a few). But it is, I think, key for people who are rightfully concerned about what 2017 may bring, whether from the left or the right, to learn to recognize that the idea of urban resistance has more in common with the traditionalist defense of local spaces against centralization than they might at first realize (which is not necessarily a defense of all local traditions!), and similarly that urbanism's generally equalizing acts of regulation and organization are, no matter what Joel Kotkin and other defenders of suburbia say, simply not the same as state actions (which is not necessarily a defense of all urban regulations!). Many conservatives have prided themselves on mouthing decentralizing or subsidiarian truisms, without actually practicing themselves; too many liberals and progressives and socialists have, in my view, perhaps because of the aforementioned attachment to thinking in grand and international terms, taken them at their word and simply rejected the lessons which localist ideas have to teach the effort to build up strong communities. In the wake of the election, perhaps the ideologically capacious concept of localism will finally be recognized as not something simply agrarian, or simply urban, but something essential for getting through the systems break-down all around us.