The Worst of All Worlds

 We are now a full ten years—as of this summer—into the Trump era. A "low, dishonest decade," if ever there was one (to borrow Auden's phrase). And what has continuously struck me about it—pretty much every day for these past ten years—is how completely different it is from every other political or intellectual controversy in which I took part in the past. 

Every other political argument in which I played a role, however slight (or at least—was aware of at second-hand) was between rival interpretations of the same liberal democratic tradition. I remember the days of the Neoconservatives and the Euston Manifesto and the anti–Iraq War protests. There, one always felt pulled in two directions at once. 

On the one hand—one hated the obscurantism and cultural relativism of the far Left, with its creepy willingness to make excuses for reactionary Islamist movements. On the other: one did not want to sound like one was in the camp of the war-mongering Bush administration. Still less did one want to extend any aid and comfort to the Islamophobic, anti-immigrant elements in European politics. 

And so, back then, one was always trying to find some kind of middle ground. And one was constantly exposed to attacks from both sides. The Neocons and liberal hawks accused one of being insufficiently committed to liberal democratic values, because one didn't want to commit an unprovoked invasion of Iraq for the ostensible purpose of promoting them. Meanwhile, the leftists accused one of betraying liberal democratic values by being skeptical toward postmodern "multiculturalist" defenses of Islamism, etc. 

But as soon as Trump came along, all that changed. Here is someone who is an enormous Islamophobe and xenophobic racist and who—at the very same time—traipses around the Middle East telling petro-state oligarchs that they can torture and behead their citizens as much as they want, because he doesn't want to interfere with their culture or pass judgment on what they do. 

Trump loves foreign dictators—and hates foreign refugees who are feeling those dictators. He is the worst kind of jingoist and militarist and chauvinist, while also being the first to advocate capitulation in the face of actual foreign threats from real bullies. He is in favor of foreign wars and imperialism—but only so long as they are not justified by any of the lines that used to work on the "liberal hawks"—lines like "democracy," "human rights," etc. 

Only so long as a war is not waged on behalf of any sort of democratic or altruistic or humanitarian ideal—then Trump can get behind it. 

In short, he ushered in the first time in my life in which politicians and intellectuals were not fighting over who was more committed to the Western post-Enlightenment liberal democratic tradition anymore. Instead, Trump made it easy to combine everyone who had any sort of commitment to that tradition on one side against him—

and what a paltry few we turned out to be!

Trump was the first to come along—since the 1930s, at any rate—and say openly, "guess what, I'm actually just against the whole Western post-Enlightenment liberal democratic tradition. I'm against the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount and against the belief in human dignity and human rights and indeed against any sort of other-directed altruistic moral system whatsoever."

He was the first to simplify our task for us by concentrating all that we opposed on one side against us. He consolidated the worst of all worlds on one side of the political spectrum—the Neo-Nazis and the Islamophobes with the Islamist cultural relativists, the extreme militarist jingoists with the pro-Putin apologists—in short, everyone who hated liberalism, even if for completely contradictory reasons. 

And if you'd told me about this before it happened, I would have said—great news! That makes it easy. I was sick of being pulled in two directions. I was sick of trying to defend my liberal democratic bona fides against people who said I wasn't liberal democratic enough. I would have welcomed the chance for an alliance—a Popular Front—of all democratic forces (and did welcome it). 

What I wouldn't have been able to imagine was how few and weak that unified democratic force would turn out to be, once they were all arrayed on one side for a change. I would never have guessed how few liberal democrats there actually had been, all that time—how deceptive had been the impression of multiplicity given off by the cacophony of our sectarian divisions—how easily seduced many people are—when it comes down to it—by an overt appeal to evil and selfishness, if someone like Trump is willing to make it. 

"Good God! In what an imaginary world we have lived. Have to start quite afresh—all of us," as Arthur Koestler once put it, in his memoir of wartime France, Scum of the Earth. 

Koestler had spent the 1930s living in the haze of what he calls "the Anti-Fascist mystique." He and the rest of the Left had been preparing for the great crusade against fascism—and fighting amongst each other all the time for the mantle of who was the most anti-Fascist. 

And then—when the great struggle finally came—the anti-Fascist forces were nowhere to be found. Stalin signed his pact in blood with Hitler. France folded in a matter of weeks. England alone—which no one had viewed up to that point as a likely bulwark against Hitler, in light of the Munich agreement—stood up and continued to resist. 

So too, the resistance that I thought would be manifold and easy never arrived. The various factions of the liberal tradition that I thought would be unstoppable if they could just cease bickering and unite turned out to be abysmally weak and sparse—maybe less than 2% of the actual global population—once they did finally lay down their arms and join forces together. 

I thought that because we were so various, we would be multitudinous. I preached as much at the time—back in 2016 or so. I said—this is the great moment for the Popular Front to reemerge. Bourgeois liberals and disillusioned Never Trump Republicans and radical socialists of the world unite!

And they did unite. We got the Lincoln Project and the Bulwark and the Brookings Institution all on board. It just turned out that—even when you put them all together—there were still only about ten people involved. 

"And they marched past two by two," Koestler writes—of his own bedraggled wreck of an erstwhile "Popular Front"—at the dawn of the great anti-Fascist struggle they had all spent years preparing for—"the Polish aristocrat and the Jewish pedlar, the French patriot and the German pacifist, the Catholic father and the Communist comrade"—

The Never Trumper and the DSA member; the Neocon and the Neolib, the anti-war crusader and the liberal hawk—one and all—everyone who once fought for the mantle of the true inheritor of the Enlightenment tradition—and won it—and now realizes what a hollow prize it was, and how little good it does us in our very hour of moral vindication—"queued up in front of the Arks." 

"For the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of Heaven were opened," writes Koestler, "And the flood was forty days upon the earth and the waters prevailed upon the earth; but there was still no rainbow set in the clouds."