Photo: Gregor Mima, Pixelbay
(Also available at Substack.) As I said in the previous chapter, liberals can be proud of being open to multiple opinions. But sometimes openness can look like emptiness, as if you stand for nothing at all.
It’s hard to stand for something if you’re not even sure what that something is. And many liberals have become unsure what liberalism is.
For a long time, few of us had to think much about it. Liberalism was just default political reality.
It was like water is for the young fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous parable: They can’t see the water, because it’s everywhere. For those who haven’t heard that story, I’ll read it at the end of this chapter.
Let’s remember that the word “liberalism” doesn’t only refer to beliefs on the left. It’s also the name of the philosophy of freedom on which the United States and every other liberal democracy were founded. When Thomas Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” he was referring to the principles of this kind of liberalism.
Everyone who believes in those principles is a liberal in this larger sense. The people we’ve traditionally called conservatives, like, say, a John McCain, or a Mitt Romney, are conservative liberals. And yes, the mainstream media is liberal too, in this sense. The free press is an essential institution of liberalism, which is why it’s protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Most of us learned the principles of liberalism in history class — individual freedom, equality, and the rest — and we’ve seldom had to think about them since. After all, they’re self-evident, right? They’re the water we swim in.
But now we liberals are being forced to think about our default reality, because it’s being disrupted by two radical challenges from outside: one from the MAGA right and another from what’s commonly called the woke left — although the word “woke” needs some clarifying, which I’ll get to a little later.
The trouble is, it can be hard for liberals even to see these challenges for what they are. They don’t fit within our default reality.
In particular, they don’t fit within the conceptual model we use to think about politics.
That model has only one dimension: a single line from left to right.
It’s commonly assumed, including by most political journalists, that the MAGA right and woke left are parts of the right and left we’ve always known.
So we assume MAGA is part of the far, conservative right and the woke left is part of the far, progressive left. If you’re not MAGA or woke, you must be somewhere in the moderate middle.
But those assumptions are wrong.
That single line can only represent the range of opinions based on a shared set of principles, the principles of liberalism in this case. Until recently, that didn’t matter much, because liberalism encompassed all the opinions that were likely to matter.
Sure, we knew there were such things as fascism, communism, or anarchism, but history told us that anarchism peaked before World War I, fascism was defeated in World War II, and communism finally finished collapsing at the end of the 1980s.
But now we have MAGA and the woke left, both of which matter very much. And neither can be found anywhere on the right or the left of liberalism.
That’s because both oppose liberalism. And there is no single line on which you can imagine both a liberal and anti-liberal right and a liberal and anti-liberal left.
This is one reason why so many liberal minds are stymied by both MAGA and wokeness.
For example, conservatives are supposed to favor small, limited government, right? But Donald Trump wins by promising to be an authoritarian strong man.
Meanwhile liberals of the left (and right) are supposed to be strong proponents of free speech. But the woke left believes free speech can be a form of oppression.
Neither makes any sense — if you try to make sense of it with the one-line model of politics. But if you can free your mind from that model — take a leap out of the water — it becomes possible to glimpse what’s happening.
I wrote in detail about the MAGA right in my book Patriots of Two Nations and I’ll expand on that topic in this one. But I want to start with the woke left, to which I gave little attention in that book.
When I was writing it in 2020, I didn’t appreciate just how much ground the woke left had been gaining and would continue to gain. But if I were to write it today, I might call it Patriots of Three Nations.
There’s talk lately that we’ve reached “peak woke.” But that doesn’t mean that the influence of wokeness is receding. It means that for much of the left, a woke worldview has become their default reality.
It’s hard for many on the liberal left to acknowledge that fact for fear of appearing to validate right-wing fear-mongering about woke tyrants taking over America.
But we don’t have to accept a bad-faith framing to see, and think about, what actually is happening.
There is a wide divide between the liberal left and the woke left. Across it, members of the two factions stare in mutual incomprehension. The Democratic Party and its candidates try to straddle that divide, even as it yawns ever wider.
It’s a doomed effort, as Kamala Harris could tell us.
For her presidential campaign, as reporters noted and her opponents emphasized, Harris changed her positions on several key issues. She was described as shifting from the progressive left to the moderate middle. But it was more of an attempt to stand on both sides of a chasm.
Take the issue of defunding the police, for example. There are liberal positions on reforming police, including progressive ones, and Harris has long been a pioneer in pursuing liberal — and effective — reforms of law enforcement.
But the idea of defunding the police, taken literally, is rooted in the body of thought that informs the woke left. That body of thought sees all police forces as instruments of oppression, which can’t be reformed, but must be abolished. It sees liberalism more or less the same way.
You can’t straddle that divide. And for a candidate, the biggest problem with trying isn’t so much choosing a side, although that’s an important choice. It’s that it looks like you can’t choose, a bad way for a leader to look.
I say this as someone who has great respect for Kamala Harris. I just think that what she and many other Democratic candidates have been trying to do is impossible. They’re trying to lead a coalition of people who are both for and against liberalism.
Republicans have already struggled with that contradiction. In their case, it was resolved by the anti-liberals taking over the party.
Now here’s David Foster Wallace’s parable of the fish. It’s from a graduation speech he gave at Kenyon College in 2005, called “This Is Water:”
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
Find Chapter 3 here.