Both times, I meant it. I was being sincere, up to a point. But at the same time, I thought that I would "go on calmly eating good dinners for the next fifty years," to borrow a line from D.H. Lawrence. Whether urging that we ought to bring down the system or warning my contemporaries that it might be wobbling on its stilts, I still believed deep down that nearly everything would continue on -- as I knew it, in my life -- much as it had before.
What is it that feels different now? The accelerating possibility of ecological disaster, coupled with the doubling-down on fascist approaches to dealing with the human consequences of climate change? (Others have said it already, but look to how quickly the United States denied temporary protected status to Hurricane Dorian survivors, and how fast the Bahamian state in turn moved against Haitian refugees within their own borders, to see the cascading effects of restrictionism, nativism, and ethno-chauvinism in response to catastrophe.)
Is it the collapse of any kind of agreed-upon standard of truth or epistemology? In a sense, of course, that's nothing new. But in another, very important way, something has changed. Like it or not, the findings of the Mueller report were complex and vulnerable to varying degrees of semi-plausible "spin." What has emerged from the latest round of Trump scandals is impossible to treat in this manner. So instead, the administration has adopted the mind-bending approach of trying to marry outright denials to self-satisfied admissions -- daring, in effect, Republicans in Congress to care.
The only thing that can save us now, just as the only thing that might have helped us back in 2016, is not a doubling down on the progressive agenda. I don't like this any more than you do, but the fact is that we are in the midst of an existential crisis confronting the philosophical, legal, institutional, and moral underpinnings of liberal democracy in this country, and these need to be shielded first from harm before any grander constructive work can begin.
In some ways the crisis has been a slow death; in others, though, a remarkably quick one ("we have not far to fall," as Edna St. Vincent Millay warned). Here we are after three years of Trump, after all, and the asylum system has virtually been dismantled by executive fiat, the Supreme Court has okayed the "banning" of whole nationalities of people on account of their religion, the administration has barred people from military service based on gender identity, the president has publicly and privately defended and made light of torture, police brutality, extrajudicial killings of migrants and asylum-seekers-- I don't need to give you the whole list.
Plainly, this is not the time for progressives to reach for the stars. This is not the time to finally win big on everything we have always wanted. This is the moment to preserve what remains of the rule of law and constitutional democracy in this country. I say this not because I believe less strongly than you do in the importance of achieving a progressive set of policies. I say it because functioning liberal democracy is the only possible framework in which such an agenda can be achieved, and we will need allies in upholding it who do not share our views in every regard.
That is why I repeat the call: let us form a Popular Front. If Trump is going to nakedly revive terms and slogans from the 1930s that awaken shades of fascism, let us just as boldly borrow terms that stood for the collective resistance to fascism. And let us invite, just as the historical Popular Front did, as wide and diverse an ideological representation as possible. Welcome, anti-Trump Republicans. Welcome, Neo-conservatives and Born-again Christians. Welcome, Thomists and traditionalists and libertarians no less than socialists, progressives, liberals, and atheists.
What would divide us? That should be obvious. The differences of opinion in a coalition of this sort are real and important. We would have to acknowledge that honestly up front. But then we would have to say what unites us: a shared commitment to defending democratic institutions and the rule of law; a belief that the differences of opinions between us, while vast, can and should be negotiated within the framework of the democratic process and a set of universal rights that protect individuals and minorities from unrestrained majority rule.
We could be honest that this coalition would be more in the nature of a temporary truce than a permanent laying down of rhetorical arms. But we could agreed upon a set of things that we are united in opposing: among them fascism, racism, authoritarianism, and corruption.
Of course, not everyone does oppose those four things. The president, for one. Those people would not be welcome in this coalition. Indeed, they are the reason we need a Popular Front in the first place -- to keep them as far away from the reins of state power as possible. But it is important for the left to recognize that many who are not progressives do oppose those four things. And we can find a way to make common cause with them, rather than pushing them aside. This is why a Popular Front is not only necessary, it is also possible.
It would not be easy to create, of course. The likely fractures in such a movement are all too easy to predict. On the left -- the side I know most well, for it is my own -- I can hear the arguments already. Though they would come in various forms, they would all amount to something like the following: We don't want to just beat Trump and then try to get back to 'business as usual.' There is no going back to business as usual. The previous normal was already unacceptable. This is our moment to really change things.
I admit that things are changing. And fast. But do we have even the slightest sign they are changing for the better?
It is a belief so deeply rooted in the left, this accelerationist fantasy, that it often does not even need to be named. It is the reason why so many on the radical left - in spite of their own best judgement and reason - evinced an outright excitement of a kind when Trump was elected. Sure, he was terrible. He was a fascist. But maybe, he's such a terrible fascist that it will convince everyone of how corrupt and deplorable the underlying system has been from the start. It will shake things up, break things down. The winds of change have arrived!
I'm not just talking about my usual target Greenwald. In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, one finds a recollection of an interchange with a progressive climate activist. It is a version of a conversation no doubt many of us had with comrades and colleagues in private in the run-up to 2016, even if few would ever admit to being the author of such remarks themselves. In Alan Weisman's August 2019 review essay, he recounts the following episode:
"Just before the 2016 elections, a respected biologist at an environmental NGO told me she actually considered voting for Trump. 'The way I see it,' she said, 'it’s either four more years on life support with Hillary, or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the pieces and finally start rebuilding.'"But why would having someone tear it all down make it easier to rebuild? Why does the left insist on believing that destruction is purgative? When has history lent us any examples to suggest this is the case?
Progressive policy achievements are -- in their many forms -- essentially an attempt to expand the definitions and the reach of liberal democracy. They seek to make the democratic process more inclusive and accessible. They seek to extend the list of human rights recognized as belonging to all people by birth.
Therefore, to say that tearing down liberal democracy is a recipe for a great progressive renaissance, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, is an absurdity. And a dangerous one, too. Progressivism needs institutions just as surely as conservatism does, if not more so. Without them, it has nothing to grow upon, nowhere to expand or flourish.
The problem with the viewpoint of the unnamed environmental activist quoted above, therefore, is the same that Joseph Conrad discerned in the radical leftist discourse of his day, and which he diagnosed in an author's note, appended to his moving, humane, faultless novel of radical hope and disillusionment, Under Western Eyes:
The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions.True to Conrad's words, human hearts will not be changed for the better, either by the ecological collapse of human civilization or the political collapse of liberal democracy. Hearts will be made much worse by regimes of fear, disinformation, imposed scarcity and autocratic rule. The left and conservatives alike (using the term "conservative" in the sense only of those who deserve to be referredd to by that term) both therefore have a stake in protecting the institutions of our country. Let's join forces for a change, to fight the bigger fish.
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