A Different Game: A New Liberal Playbook
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
This past week, Donald Trump won the NH primary, all but locking up his candidacy for the fall. So we’re fated for a rematch that most Americans want no part of, and the odds are that Trump will come out on top. Of course, liberals will pull out all the stops this election season to prevent that, with dire warnings of the thick fascist cloud descending on the US. And if Trump does win, liberals will certainly marshal every last tactic to prevent him from realizing his desired project of vengeance and retribution. After all, that’s what liberals have to do, in the face of the Trumpist onslaught: we must battle, claw, and scrap with every fiber of our being. As the movie-version Eliot Ness said, “Never stop fighting until the fight is done!”
The thing is, in the world created by the Polarization Industrial Complex, the fight is never done. In fact, the fight itself is the purpose of the system, and its perpetuity is baked in. In other words, as Joshua the computer learned in “War Games,” the only way to actually win is to not play.
The Conservative Pivot
To flesh this out a bit, let’s look back at how conservatism evolved into its current Trumpist format, as that will help us see why liberals themselves need to withdraw from the conflict motif, in order to have any chance of winning the future.
Historians like to point out that American politics has always been divisive and filled with partisan rancor. And certainly, the mechanics of the Constitution and its supporting electoral infrastructure ensure that we will always and only ever have a two-party duopoly that oscillates back and forth, with the parties constantly flipping power between them.
But something changed in the mid-90s, triggered by Bill Clinton. Clinton moved the Democratic party away from its traditional constituency (labor unions, blue collar workers, urban minorities, and women), and started the full-court press for big money donors, who were previously seen exclusively as Republican property. Clinton’s success necessitated that the Republicans themselves change tactics. Led by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, conservatism itself moved out of the country club and into churches, schools, and bedrooms.
The new conservatism, fueled by the rise of cable news and talk radio, emphasized a moral difference between political opponents. As covered in the previous post, a whole suite of dualisms started to coalesce: good vs. evil, urban vs. rural, elite vs. regular folks, right vs. left. Evangelicalism, which had previously just been tolerated by the stodgy Republican establishment, was brought into the core of conservatism, because its moral dualism could be leveraged against the obvious depravity of the womanizing Clinton and his sinful cronies.
Make no mistake, this was a political strategy above all, as Gingrich used the morality-play backdrop to make Republican obstructionism the new name of the game in Congress. Previously, it was a hard sell to claim that your party’s top goal is to prevent the other side from passing anything at all. But if your political opponent can be portrayed as evil and traitorous, then obstruction becomes a patriotic and even holy mandate.
Jumping the Rails
What started as a political tactic has now become an unstoppable conservative adversarial approach to everything. Conservative dualism has overflowed its traditional banks, jumping species from a purely religious context, into culture writ large, sloshing into the arenas of basic identity formation, character, sexuality, and the creation of social institutions. As a result, conservatives have now pushed all-in on their long game. They have been installing conservative judges for decades, which is now paying off in the repeal of Roe v. Wade and of affirmative action. Red states have fully ramped up voter suppression, to maximize the political influence of a dwindling portion of the population. State anti-abortion bans are in full swing, and there will certainly be a push for a national ban if Trump returns to office (Trump himself is not big on the idea of a national ban, but I doubt he’ll stand on principle for anything that might hurt him in any way). And of course, all manner of conspiracy theory is on the table when your political opponents are demonic traitors: election denial, QAnon, liberal baby cannibalism, runaway CRT, liberal pedophilic grooming, great replacement theory, and so on.
There is no doubt that this dualism sells. Tales of moral and religious conflict have sustained humanity for thousands of years. We are story-telling animals, in love with drama, conflict, success, failure, redemption, sacrifice, betrayal, retribution, and triumph. Electioneering has become a huge industry ($14.4 billion in the 2020 election cycle), and the Polarization Industrial Complex has emerged to feed the never-ending demand for divisive content. There is much lamentation about how Americans are too siloed in their information sources. But those silos are not just accidental, random conglomerations of stuff. They are manufactured products and platforms, expertly curated and targeted for maximum profitability and efficacy, administered by huge transnational corporations.
But a problem has emerged in American conservatism: most Republican leaders are still aware that the polarization-dualism game is not supposed to have an end. There is no “victory” in which Dems and libs are forever banished and removed from power. What the PIC does is provide ideological cover for the plutocrats and their water-carriers in Congress, keeping people distracted with conflict while the wealthy and powerful continue to operate the system for their own benefit. The conservative rank and file, however, are not in on the scheme. Since they now see the world in a quasi-religious battle of good vs. evil, they want deliverance now, real and final victory.
This dissonance was on full display in the January 6th insurrection and its aftermath. On the day itself, Republican leaders and Trump himself kept talking tough about stopping the certification process, but they never went all-in with their rhetoric. They were always careful to dance around any actual fomenting of rebellion or government overthrow. But why? Why didn’t the GOP leaders stand up for their beliefs that the election was stolen, and openly call for armed rebellion and removal of the sitting government? The toughest talk that happened was podium-pounding about not certifying, about slates of electors, and equally-dry procedural stuff. Even after the certification happened, why didn’t Republican leaders, including Trump, say “OK everyone, this is an illegitimate government. We want millions of Americans to take up arms, come to Washington, and remove the imposters and traitors from Congress, and re-install Trump as the President, with a loyal and patriotic Congress to match “?
In other words, why didn’t the GOP take the election-theft claim to its logical conclusion, by attempting to forcibly remove the cheating Democrats from offices all over the country? Why did they quickly retreat to the comfortable confines of rhetoric only, giving speeches to empty chambers and talking tough on Fox News to help raise money for the next election? The answer is that it’s all kabuki theater, well-rehearsed and pantomimed conflict, designed to raise money and turn out votes. For political leaders, there is no purpose to partisan passion beyond the endless need for votes and campaign contributions There is no end game, no final victory. Just the next cycle.
This is not to say that Trumpism and partisan division itself are just theatrical and harmless. Of course not. Real damage is being done to women, minorities, the environment, and the economy. And because the PIC works to the advantage of the plutocrats, nothing truly transformational and positive is done for regular people. Americans get just enough help to keep (most of) us out of the streets with torches and pitchforks; but the arcs on major problems are not bending in the right way. We’re not reducing our impact the planet. We’re not making work more dignified and stable. We’re not finding ways to reduce economic precariousness. We’re not finding deep solutions to addiction, depression, stress, and general ill health. We’re not finding ways to provide cheap but quality healthcare to everyone.
The rise of conservative dualism coincided with, and was fueled by, the consumer capitalist dissolution of American society from the inside. Consumer industrial civilization is acidic, as it scours every corner of the globe for profit. Any non-economic store of value, from the natural world to community cohesion to individual free time, is fair game for the corrosive capitalist algorithm. Market mechanisms operate by sucking up all non-monetized relationships and resources, breaking them down to the smallest constituent pieces, and then expelling them back out as commodities that must be purchased for use. The target is immaterial; the results are the same. Things that used to be free, or that we used to do for ourselves, now must be bought in the marketplace. That’s what economic growth is all about: buying back a lot of what we used to handle in-house.
As this capitalist corrosion ramped up from the 80s onward, dualistic conservatism was perfectly positioned to fill the void left by collapsing communities and local economies. Conservatism spun this situation into a morality tale, a purely Christian one: Eden America had been corrupted by the sins of liberalism, with Clinton as an inaugural antichrist figure. In this story, conservatism has been battling the evildoers for the last 40 years (wandering in the desert?), laying the groundwork for the Christ figure of Trump, who will deliver America into the new promised land, and finally squash out the satanic liberals.
This is the worldview that liberals are faced with.
A New Playbook
The question for liberals is not how to combat Trump and other conservatives, but how to combat polarization itself, when your opponents are operating on a totally different plane, playing a game where conflict is seen as a holy act.
The answer is: don’t play.
With the move to unequivocal dualism, conservatives have the luxury of not being tethered to the challenges of trying to live in a pluralistic democracy. So the pressure is off of them. They are not looking to stop the fighting, and rationalizations for outrage and conflict can always be found in a nation of 330 million people. And because conservatives don’t really expect society to get better (this is a feature of evangelicalism, which sees the world as sinful and corrupt), they can carry on the polarization game forever, as long as conservative leaders deliver symbolic and local/state level victories. It doesn’t matter if macro-level improvement happens, because it’s simply not a concern. Or, to be more accurate, the macro-level improvement that conservatism hopes for is not for everyone. As long as the virtuous, chosen ones are rewarded, what happens to the benighted liberal traitors doesn’t matter. It would be best if the unsaved just disappeared.
Suffice it to say, liberals not only can’t win this dualistic game, they just can’t play it. There is no scenario where tens of millions of conservatives are ‘won over’ to liberalism, and neither is there a scenario where liberalism finally triumphs over conservatism for an extended period time, enacting all of its desired government policies in perpetuity.
Instead, we just need to pick up our marbles, step to the side, and draw a new circle. Continuing the game motif, liberals need to start playing three-dimensional chess, circumventing the reality of the polarized playing field, and moving to a different plane of imagination. Conservatism gets its passion and intensity from its easy-answer, dramatic, quasi-religious dualism. The only thing compelling enough to combat this approach is the powerful reality of concrete communities, the embodied utopias of Bigger Home Bases.
All social change is spawned by some type of utopian thinking, be it corporate advertising, religious eschatology, literary fantasies, or secular visions of civic progress. The conservative utopia has no actual point of application for the entire society. Being inherently distrustful of the government and of society in general, its vision can only be enacted in the church, or the small town, or the individual state. It has no universal aspirations, because the hard dualism marks off huge portions of the community as wicked and even subhuman.
But Bigger Home Bases, buttressed by Universal Basic Income, and implemented via Modern Money Theory principles at the federal level, could provide an entirely new presentation of real life, an embodied and operating utopia, a visceral proclamation saying, “Look what is actually possible!”
Please see earlier posts in this blog for background on my proposed blueprint for putting this all into action.
Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on January 27, 2024.
