What comes afterward?

The neoliberal, globalist, corporate-friendly, free-trade consensus that the United States government has operated under since 1980, is these days being attacked with spectactular vigour (I mean that in both the literal and figurative senses of the term). From the left, the charge against the official Washington ideology is being led by Bernie Sanders, who for the most part represents, not Marxism, but a paternalistic, old-school Keynesian New Deal Democracy, of the sort that was standard-issue of post-WWII America. It is very much a function of the individualism, atomism and nominalism of our political shift in the meantime, that even what the Greatest Generation did to ward off socialism, now looks like socialism not only to its detractors, but also to its supporters. From the right, Donald Trump has been leading a cultural revolt of working-class whites which, policy-wise, owes as much to a tradition of executive-heavy Jacksonian nationalism as it does to anything else.

It doesn’t take an expert to reckon that the Beltway’s favoured mix of economic and social liberalism has only a limited life-span left. Even if the champions of the establishment – Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz and John Kasich – manage to win their respective nominations, I will be quite surprised if the dissatisfaction with the direction of the country over the past 35 years simply dissipates with the passing of an election cycle. Previously-intractable issues (the structural indebtedness of students and low-wage workers; the failures of our foreign and immigration policies; ubiquitous discrimination against working-class whites), issues to which establishment liberalism has no satisfactory answer, have been broached and I’m sure will continue being discussed long after 2017.

The pressing question now is: what comes afterward? After countless failed neoliberal colour revolutions throughout the Arab world, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, the cautious and wise observers will be careful to ask whether we know how the replacement for the establishment we overthrow will be any improvement over the status quo ante. And (hopefully!) said observers will take care to evaluate their options. There are, after all, exactly as many variants of anti- and post-liberalism on offer as there are specific and particular projects suited to every interest of class, race, religion, profession and social standing – and (ironic though this may sound coming from a deep critic of liberalism and the Enlightenment more generally, such as yours truly) not all of these variants are created equal, and some may be even worse than what we already have.

I’ll say it up front, though I’ve said it before and I’ll doubtless say it again. No matter how ‘populist’ it might sound, and no matter that it has a raison d’être with which I can’t argue, I cannot in good conscience bring myself to support the kind of political programme Trump brings to the table. Whereas the American élite class have done an incredible job of hollowing out our body of shared moral standards and replacing them with raw emotivism as a substitute, as Lasch himself pointed out, what Trump ultimately represents is the utter abandonment of those same standards. Who can take seriously family values proclaimed by a notorious libertine who is twice-divorced and who treats women like pieces of raw meat? Who can take seriously the basic competencies of hard work, accountability, sincerity and personal responsibility when they are proclaimed by someone who has built his career on a long series of bluffs: pyramid schemes, shell games, reality television and public-relations hype? In short, Trump – for all the excellent points he makes about free trade, the plight of poor whites and even foreign policy – represents an acquiescence to nihilism.

The increased taxation, fairer redistribution, restructuring of the banking system and so forth that Bernie Sanders advocates, is more attractive simply for the reason that it appears to be sincere. In Sanders you have a man who genuinely believes in the common good, and who has spent his entire legislative career fighting for it. (And yes, the idea of having the wealthy pay their share does indeed appeal to yours truly.) But at the same time, the kind of finical tinkering Sanders is basing his campaign on doesn’t reach down to the level of culture, and culture is the seat of our current problems. There are entrenched nexuses of patronage and interest at the core of the American state – nexuses that have an interest in destabilising uncooperative governments abroad; that have an interest in expanding American corporate hegemony at public cost; that have an interest in maintaining a soft ideological conformity in public life – that need to be exposed to scrutiny, and it is worrisome that Bernie Sanders at times seems uninterested in tackling these issues beyond their economic ramifications.

As the editorial staff at the American Conservative have warned us: ‘A void is opening in American politics, and Trump and Sanders are only the first to try to fill it’, and that we should ‘view all of this warily’. Both the description and the admonition are true – and it isn’t difficult to imagine how, if these options are stymied, other, possibly less-healthy, alternatives to the liberalism we’ve come to expect may be allowed to surface. Illiberalisms based on blood-and-soil have a notoriously bloody track record, and those based on scientism and techno-fetishism will undoubtedly land us in That Hideous Strength territory. What we need, rather, is an alternative that has been shaped, if not by Confucianism, then at least by the nobler and more humane strand of the classical thought that was once native to our cultural experience: that of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Seneca. And, hopefully, one which is open to the restoration of a healthy and balanced alliance between labour and agriculture, which is not averse to public ownership and management of communications, transportation, mail and banking infrastructure, but which is also wary of allowing the state to extend its reach down to the affairs of the family, or to the common interests at the community level.