The Fall of the House of U.S.: Conclusion

Crawling From the Wreckage

What will become of us?

Eight years ago, there was a mini-boom of books by scholars and public intellectuals that sought to alert Americans to the real danger of an incipient fascism, arriving at the same time as a boom of books proclaiming the end of liberalism. (Which were not really the same as what I’m talking about in terms of a structure of feeling, a way of thinking in the world: they meant liberalism as a conceptual underpinning for modern institutions.)

Today, if the books begin to arrive ahead of the events they warn against, they should probably aim to provide practical advice about how to live under a fully ascendant authoritarianism, a prospect which will remain with us regardless of who wins the election in 2024.

To speak in this moment about how to remake a sociopolitical structure of feeling that follows on and reimagines the liberal-progressive mindset that I believe has more or less finally come to the end of its viability must in some way seem less like an agenda and more like a thought-experiment, wishful thinking meant for a time other than the one we live in.

After all, if the worst comes to pass—if Trump not only wins but enacts the more coherent, aggressive and unrestrained version of his more fragmented and incompetent moves in his first administration—then we will not be continuing to debate about our counter-strategies and higher ideals out in the open within a public sphere like the one we have today. Our political choices will be about survival. They will be a reaction to the actions of others, mostly made in isolation from one another. We will not be setting the table, nor be invited to sit at it. In reaction, some people will be stupid, some will be brave, some will be stupidly brave. Some will ruefully pin on the badges of loyalty and say the oaths that the new order requires of them, others will sink into mournful silence and tend to their own business, hoping to go unnoticed. Consider all those futures with love and forbearance, and don’t be too certain yet about what you will choose to do if the hammer falls.

If the Democratic Party happens to hang on and win, I don’t think what the GOP is selling is going away. The remade GOP is now a fully-formed, fully coherent political project that is hell-bent on the seizure of power by any means necessary. It will be with us for some time to come even if it is fended off desperately election after election. After all, it holds effective national-scale power whether or not it wins national elections. The institutions folded into the GOP’s vision firmly control life in half the states, hold sway in many counties in states under Democratic control, in towns all across the map. Its followers are able, even in very small numbers, to harass and terrify public servants and ordinary people in ways that inhibit their actions. The top court of the country is openly an instrument of the GOP’s vision, which will embolden state-level authorities to write laws that attempt to control their citizens who travel or move and which attack the citizens of other states.

On the flip side, even with a Democratic President after November 2024, the present Democratic Party has been badly afflicted by the fading of the structure of feeling I have chronicled in these essays. It is led by people almost wholly out of touch with the on-the-ground realities of their own coalition, the ramshackle alliance the party tries to assemble every two years to win re-election. At the top, the party only understands that coalition through the lens of campaign experts, fundraisers, and pollsters. They perform gestures towards their base the way a pinball player jostles the machine and hopes to avoid tilting—they know the angles, they know where the triple-bonus points are. The voters are down there in the machine, the political class is up there hitting the buttons. But the pinball machine needs service: some of the bumpers don’t work anymore, there are magnets pulling the ball between the flippers, and the tilt has become way more sensitive. And the party’s leaders have no idea how to fix any of that; they barely understand that it’s not the same game that it used to be.

So if we win, the Democratic Party as it stands needs to be torn down and rebuilt, as part of a general remaking and refurbishment of a liberal-progressive structure of feeling. That’s a tricky exercise: we will be living in a house that has fallen down around our ears but is also our only shelter in the storm. It will be necessary: if they win in 2024, then four years after barely surviving, the Democrats will once again have to face off against an authoritarian menace that will not go away until it is very thoroughly defeated, defeated not just at the ballot box but across the totality of civil society. In the interim, they will not only have to become a party that rises from their coalition, the coalition itself will have to re-envision its character and deliver the outcomes that mainstream liberal political parties have failed to secure in almost every country where they continue to tenuously block reactionaries from power. In the UK, for example, Keith Starmer now has about two years to unfuck about twenty years worth of concentrated, programmatic fuckery. If he stalls or gets ensnared in the mess, judgment will come against him quickly where it was slow before. The water is boiling now and the stove is still hot. It’s a tall order no matter which country we’re talking about.

Even if we are thrown back into a situation where our sociopolitical lives are about reacting to and surviving an order of things that is relentlessly hostile to our existence, I think there is value to asking—even as a thought experiment—what we need to be in order to be viable, coherent, and relevant in the present. To not put the work of reconstruction just on the party leaders, with us waiting patiently for the roll-out as if we are passive consumers who have paid for a service.

What could be our structure of feeling when it finally stops living in the shabby waiting room of nostalgia for 1966, or stops patting itself on the back for abolition, democracy, human rights, progress as grand and irreversible achievements? We now know, whatever happens short months from now, that there is no justice, equity or freedom so final, accomplished and transparently worthy—nor even one so partial and halting—that it cannot be unravelled. We are not living on an ascending line or an arc that bends towards our dreams.

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So what would I look for in a new structure of feeling, whether its task is to survive the cold night or to quickly build a new shelter in a tempest?

First, that in this structure of feeling, the local should matter most to how you think about the problems you want fixed, the relationships you need to sustain most, the help you want from the world beyond your world. You should be living where you are, making a life in place. Cosmopolitanism might be an ethos, it might be a pleasure, but it shouldn’t be a materiality. We need to begin to inhabit the materially local the way a hermit crab lives in its shell. We don’t make it; we find it. It is what it is. Like the crab, we will sometimes outgrow our home and need to find a new one. Global scales of life affect us profoundly, but we can’t live with a social world that is global. We have no institutions of global life prepared to respond to community needs or will, no emotional and intersubjective infrastructure to act through. The infrastructures that are global are either evacuated of agency or are all too inhabited by inimical kinds of agency. Living at the proper scale should be preparation for starting to limit, throttle or even break those infrastructures if necessary, or to make them subject to locality rather than the other way around. The global is not going away, but it needs to be fully and consistently domesticated to the local that we all live within.

Second, in that movement into the local, one of the old shells we need to shed is a sense of having already embodied and achieved progress and wisdom as a general affect of our social class and our educational attainment. That understanding of self is what feeds the idea of building bridges, rejoining bowling leagues, holding dinner parties for “bravely debating” with people who have different politics. All those exercises are undertaken as performative, deliberative civic virtue. They are the equivalent of fireflies signaling in the night to find a mate in the dark. The only “conservatives” who show up to such exercises are already half in the liberal-progressive mindset, who crave membership and legitimacy when they are seen by people holding to that mindset. Or, in the firefly metaphor, they are a mimic species who are just pretending to want dialogue in order to find vulnerable prey.

The only way you really learn what other people think is by being a person in place, unperformatively and unpracticed. By showing up and being where you are entitled to be, just as you are, your principles, passion and social being fully visible and inhabited, not playacting in a game of discursive beneficience that you otherwise don’t feel or work from. You need to be who you are wherever you are, unannounced, unheralded, without engraved invitations or a sponsoring non-profit community group. There’s a limit to this and it is already and will be far more an important one: sometimes that visibility gets you killed or hurt, and you are not obliged to that risk out of bravery or just everyday humanity. You don’t have to wear a Pride shirt while walking into a bar full of far-right evangelical bikers. But everyone at risk also knows equally that seeking to be exclusively in enclaves that promise safety can turn quickly into another sort of trap. Our next structure of feeling doesn’t have to be about dispersing from blue enclaves into red territories, because that’s just another version of the impulse to have a dinner club intended to build bridges. The only kinds of understandings across social, political and ethical divides that have power and meaning are the ones that develop relationally over time, that create standing between people, that aren’t undertaken for the one-sided moral development and social capital of the person making the gesture. Be local as much as possible and in as many ways as can be. Live in place.

A thought that extends from this one: the notion of a politics that is instantiated online, coordinated online, realized online, has been a death trap for the liberal-progressive mindset. You have to be online to learn things, to manage reputations, to cultivate cultural longings and conversation, to promote yourself and your work, to be aware of threats and possibilities that are developing somewhere else. But politically, or in the coordination of sociality? Online is an energy vampire: it absorbs, it smothers, it tricks, it diverts. It feeds you little algorithmic pills of momentary success and panics you the way that a child fed through a Skinner box would panic if one day the meals were nothing but prison loaf. It enlists us in narrow, suffocating simulations of solidarity, or it tempts us to mistake really valuable kinds of specific coordination that aligns us with highly particular shared interests and problems with a valid demand for the time and energies of the entire society. The next structure of feeling will be online where that is generative, humane and limited, and offline for the things that matter most.

To quote the great South African jurist and activist Albie Sachs in one of his most provocative statements, culture needs to stop being made—and judged—as a “weapon in the struggle” even if it often factually is a weapon in the struggle. There is a difference that makes a difference between intent and consequence. We need to stop managing culture and art in order to make it mirror the world as we wish it was, in order to make that world something we can buy as a consumer product. We need to start respecting the autonomy of imagination and the slippage between what artists intend and what art ends up meaning. Maybe this is a more general shift: the hubris of thinking instrumentally overall is the deeper problem, that it makes us imagine we are powerful, we are in command, we are leading—the delusion that a vanguardist impulse always encodes into itself. There is everything right with doing your cultural work in a school, a group, an art colony, an avant-garde, to cleaving to a group apart who are are experimenting together. Everything right with trying to be out in front, off to the side, providing the shock of the new—but everything wrong with thinking that you are the general, the star chamber, the command cell, the people who are deciding what we need from culture and what and how culture should have meaning in order to remake language and subjectivity. To deciding who should get to see what they desire and whose desires must be withheld. We have to let that cup slip away from our lips.

The next mindset will stop settling for soft targets, for investing massive organizational and emotional energies attacking institutions or situations where the people involved more or less have to pay solicitous attention to their critics. This calls back to being local. If you live in a particular kind of community, the people and institutions responsible for problems that are local to you are not a soft target. We’ve become prone to the narcissism of imagining that in working from that kind of local struggle we are joining a solidarity, a simultaneity, that makes our local struggle consequential in some greater way, and thus justifies intensifying it in method and demands beyond what the local can bear. We lose sight of ourselves and become unrecognizable where we live, in the contexts we still have to inhabit. There are hard targets everywhere: that’s how the global and national often manifest into local life, like the monoliths from 2001 plopped down, imposing and obdurate, deforming the landscape. The next mindset will need a way to think about those hard targets and need to stop settling for, deferring into, obsessions with the only institutions that are porous to us. They’re porous to us because we are in them and they are at least half partaking of the same structure of feeling; when we crash into them at the warp speed of protest, demands and condemnation, we slam into ourselves.

To come to rest, to be socially real, we also have to give up some of the organizational forms that the left in modernity has periodically had a morbidly romantic interest in maintaining: cells, undergrounds, vanguards, closed executives, star chambers. The kind of power they can secure, the tools they use to secure it, always loop us right back to where we started, or worse. That is, when they are not just lethally naive fantasies that are easily surveilled by the powers-that-be and riddled through with spies and provocateurs who find the pretentions of an underground to be a friendly environment. These political forms are a shortcut only to defeat, to having a better world ripped from our grasp just as we think we’ve taken hold of it. The main strategic requirement for a liberal-progressive vision is as many people as possible wanting it, joining it, assembling on its behalf. That will not happen through tricks, through nudges, through propaganda, or through the adroit leadership of a favored few who somehow see the secret possibilities that cannot be spoken of until they are heroically achieved via clandestine labor.

To achieve the fragile connection between being socially real and present in a local world and being in political fellowship at the biggest scales possible will take an unsparing, honest inventory of who “we” are that eschews simplifications, slogans and mythification. Right now American liberals and progressives are flailing around in our electoral and movement politics because our simplified categorical imagination of the ‘we’ so often mismatches the messiness of reality. The charge that liberals and progressives are overly invested in the reproduction of race, for example, has some truth to it (and some malicious falsehood as well from those who think we can just be ‘postracial’). We turn to race as a shorthand for mobilizing people based on perceived interest, and as I pointed out in Part 3 of this series, the use of the concept of interest has been one of our long-standing mistakes. The “we” that thinks it is mobilizing or is showing solidarity has become stupifyingly disinterested in the referent that it points to with categories like “Latino”, and is thus constantly surprised at the political heterogeneity of that category, at the manifestation of some people in the category over there in the GOP’s camp. It’s not just race, it is all the kinds of sociological modelling we are doing through and within categories. In our lived experiences, we know quite well why not all people named by a category inhabit it differently, and act in social and political life quite differently from that category. In our habitation of our failing mindset, on the other hand, we become blind to that complexity—perhaps believing that dwelling on it will somehow impede large-scale institutional processes of enumerating people to push for greater diversity and representation. All the words and concepts meant to push our way of thinking towards a better understanding of lived specificity—”intersectional”, for example—have quickly become new kinds of models and simplifications that interfere with our understanding of who “we” actually are. We have to give that up: our structures of feeling need to be full of thick descriptions rather than categorical abstractions.

Finally, I think that as we grow into another way of being and striving, of committing to imagine a better world while also developing a more self-aware understanding of the world as it is, we have got to rethink our belief that the better world we are dreaming towards is a zero-sum redistribution of the world we are in. That locks us always into the idea that to make progress, we will have to take things away from many people, that privileges must be checked, that there is only so much to go around. It’s true that to make a secure, thriving social order where most people are cared for, where needs are met on an equitable basis and everyone is free to dream and aspire, we need some redistributional mechanisms that address the out-of-control inequality of the present moment. They might be nothing more exotic than the kind of progressive taxation that existed in 1960 combined with a better balance between guns and butter in public spending. Run that for a generation and perhaps nothing else is necessary. But as the liberal-progressive mindset has fallen apart in neoliberal times, it has increasingly tilted towards thinking that the answer to a steady growth of impoverishment and inequality in a world full of wealth is to think more of impoverishing everybody equally rather than distributing wealth, even growing wealth in non-destructive, mindful ways.

Taking something away from someone—or even just threatening to do it—is one of the most provocative, antagonizing things you can do in political terms. It doesn’t matter in many cases if contemporary possession is the result of prior theft or seizure. We sometimes think that if only we could establish the truth of that theft, the way forward to redistribution will be clear. Far from it. In the United States, at least one part of the energy behind gun-owning, castle-doctrine-defending patriarchal threats of violence is that people are quite conscious that what they have today was taken from someone else, often quite recently. Much as white nationalism’s constant incitement to racial war comes from an embedded, implicit knowledge of what has been done and is being done to every other racial group to preserve white privilege.

We need to imagine making a society where everyone is materially comfortable and everyone has opportunities that does not rest on a zero-sum reordering, where we imagine how to not just promise but deliver to people the health, security and possibility that every human being deserves as a fundamental right without thinking that has to come from people who own too much and have more possibilities than they need. If it does come from there, it has to come the way that water flows downhill, because it’s the basic topography of our sociopolitical infrastructure, not because of a literal redistributive force is knocking on the door or opening the bank vault. I say this both because I think that’s ethically wise but also because it’s politically lethal to imagine taking things away unless you really hold the whip hand and embrace that conception of power. Our managerial class thinks that’s the situation they’re in, so they don’t hesitate in many workplaces or local bureaucracies to announce that they’re taking away a benefit or cancelling a service, and even there they often discover to their dismay that they are less untouchable than they might have envisioned, that they have created an angry mob where yesterday there was tolerant acceptance.

The flip side of this shift is that we also have got to move away from the idea that our dream centers on fully realized self-actualization and self-making. Some of the seemingly liberal spaces that privilege practices of self-care and self-maintenance have been surprisingly easy to dislodge and re-attach to the new authoritarianism. It was not that much of a surprise that yoga instructors ended up being fervid anti-vaxxers or joined in the January 6th insurrection. Our way of thinking has got to be towards connection, towards obligation and duty, and sometimes towards the diminishment of our own needs. Taking something away from someone—especially if the taker is not being equally inconvenienced—is a bad idea. But sacrificing or forgoing especially if we are all doing that, is part of how we will make the world better. “Greater love hath no person” should be one of our key phrases—not sacrifice of life, not using up ourselves to the point that all that is left of us is barren suffering, but we can all be humble in some critical way, all be meek at some moment.

All of this last shift would be in service to putting the “we” of a new mindset into unceasing relationship to where we are, how we are, what we need, what we lack. In the decayed, dying form of our structure of feeling, many of us are given to imagining change in a way that puts outside of its transformations. That mindset thinks of doing things to other people via the state, via regulation, via law, via command. It talks rot like the Clintonian vogue for “communalism”, which always meant “well, those other people over there have culture—they’ve got churches, values, rituals, localities—so we should leave them to have more of that and then maybe they’ll vote for us.” The “us” in that construction is in the meantime getting blow jobs from interns and flying to Epstein’s island, putting money into off-shore bank accounts, going to Davos. The “communal” is people with the authenticity of alterity, the “us” in this sort of construction is an invisibly universal subject that sees itself as everywhere and nowhere. It builds affordable housing wherever it isn’t, invests in renewable power anywhere that doesn’t spoil the view, puts warning labels on record albums that it doesn’t listen to. It solves the problem of other people, and never itself.

So that is really what we need: a mindset that puts everyone who holds it into view and into relation, where solving your own problems and making yourself well and whole are always already part of solving our problems and making ourselves well and whole. If we begin to inhabit that, I think we will also find that we will achieve a much clearer picture of who exactly is inalterably opposed to the world that we would be trying to inhabit. It is my strong suspicion that the world we would be looking toward would meet the approval of a very large majority of humanity, at all scales of human life. I also think it is a mindset that would have enemies inalterably opposed to that vision—but perhaps not as many as we think, and perhaps some of them would not be today’s aspirant authoritarians but those who have claimed to be part of the liberal-progressive mindset that is now dying.

How better to look ahead to a new century than to redraw the struggle to make it a better one than the last? Or, should we be in for a time that is, against our will and our wishes, worse than the end of the long twentieth century, to begin to imagine how we will be when better days once again become possible?