The end of American optimism
Reactionary politics and reduced ambition are pervasive, not extinct
Janan Ganesh at The Financial Times is an opinion writer I generally enjoy reading and don’t disagree with particularly strongly, so I was intrigued to recently read a piece he wrote called ‘Where did all the reactionaries go?’ In it, Ganesh argues that American conservatism nowadays lacks an “elitist, pessimistic, anti-modern vein of thought”. Donald Trump represents not a form of reaction but instead “the distillation of all of modernity’s crassness”. “No movement that centres on Palm Beach,” Ganesh writes, “has a tragic view of life and history”.
Ganesh is an avowed liberal, and I don’t think he means to lament what he sees as the passage of reactionary politics from the American political scene. My disagreement is something else - I just think it’s factually incorrect to say that reaction no longer plays a key role in American political life. In fact, I don’t think you can really understand American politics and culture today without understanding the ways in which American conservatism has been becoming more reactionary, not less. And while I don’t think that the American left is reactionary, I do think that the rise of the MAGA movement has contributed to a pervasive pessimism on much of the mainstream left.
The result is a world in which the boundaries of the possible seem limited, and fear is the order of the day. Welcome to the end of American optimism.
Trump and MAGA
I find the argument that Trump represents a sunny, upbeat and un-reactionary approach to politics to be very strange.
Now, it is true that Donald Trump himself lives his life in a way which can be described - if we’re feeling generous - as boundlessly optimistic and replete with potentiality. Trump is a relatively rich man and throughout his life his money has allowed him to shield himself from the consequences of many of his actions. Need to cover up the existence of a child you fathered out of wedlock or the affair you had with a porn star? No problem for Donald Trump!
But it would be a mistake to mix up Trump’s personal life and his crassly modern celebrity aesthetic with the substance of his politics, which are deeply reactionary. From his call to “Make America Great Again” to dismissing election results when he doesn’t like the way that the people voted, Trump’s entire political persona is a reaction against America as it actually exists today. Taking a deeply pessimistic view of contemporary American life, his project is to restore the country to an imagined past idyll when white men were on top and “the suburban housewives of America” were safely ensconced behind white picket fences. Pro forma appeals and some actual support among the people aside, the essence of Trumpism is the claim that he alone can stop the “carnage” of modernity.
That this is the basis of Trump’s appeal can also be seen by the various chancers and ideologues who warm themselves around his flame. The marriage of Trump and Christian conservatives in general is well known, but he has also served as inspiration to more specific ideological sects. Catholic integralists such as Adrian Vermuele are so reactionary that they reject even the freedoms of the U.S. constitution, arguing that a coercive state must impose the values of the Christian right on the American populace whether they want them or not (they don’t). For people like Vermuele - who Trump appointed to a position advising the civil service - Trump’s identity as a reactionary strongman is clear.
It’s not just religious reactionaries who flock to Trump. He’s also inspired and led secular reactionaries to victory over the libertarians who used to give the conservative movement so much of its ideological content. Libertarians, who worship capitalism above all else, are inherently comfortable with change: capitalism is a system in which, as Karl Marx wrote, “all that is solid melts into air”. Change driven by market innovation is constant under capitalism, which has frequently led libertarians into conflict with parts of the conservative movement who favored the preservation of (their) traditional values. Nowadays, libertarians are decidedly on the wane and the energy of the movement has shifted to national conservatives or “nat-cons” who are suspicious of the market and want to use the state to uphold and advance their own narrow understanding of American culture - a distinctly reactionary one.
A useful exercise is to juxtapose contemporary conservatism with the conservatism of Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s rhetoric of “Morning in America” was a world away from Trump’s elegy to a nation filled with “rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”, which might better be regarded as Mourning in America. The substance of Reagan’s politics also contained reactionary as opposed to libertarian elements, but today’s Trumpy conservativism embraces these much more fully and removes the folksy and optimistic veneer which prevented either pessimism or anti-modernism from becoming Reagan’s defining characteristics. Trumpian conservatism is more likely to attack “woke capital” than it is to argue that deregulation and big business are the answer to America’s problems.
This is before we even get onto contemporary movements like the “intellectual dark web”, the loose collection of individuals like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan whose movement hides a defense of traditional hierarchies behind a critique of “identity politics”. These individuals are Very Online phenomena who mostly propagate their ideas through social media, but it’s a mistake to think that reactionaries must always be old gentlemen in Victorian armchairs, getting their news via a telegraph. In truth, reactionaries have always used cutting-edge technology to advance their agenda. Almost wherever it is found, reactionary politics is not a defense of society as it exists right now, but an attempt to roll it back decades or even centuries: and reactionaries will use whatever modern tools are available in this quixotic quest.
What about the left?
The modern American left is clearly not made up of reactionaries in any sense of the word. But I do think that in recent years the left has experienced a loss of optimism. If you look around the left today for the sort of sunny optimism which was represented by Barack Obama in 2008, it’s hard to find.
Partly, this was a response to the shocking defeat of 2016 - the fact that someone like Donald Trump could win a majority in the electoral college seemed a signal to many people on the left that something was profoundly wrong with America. For many people who might otherwise have nodded along with Clintonian centrism if Hillary had won, the 2016 election became a radicalizing experience. They started to think much more deeply about America’s structural problems - racism, poor education, the way American politics artificially boosts the power of white rural areas - and to understand that Trump was not just a lone maniac but rather represented a culmination of these problems. The enduring power of the MAGA movement and the transformation of conservatism in the Trump years made it clear that these were deep-rooted, long-lasting maladies.
This pessimism did a lot to create the peculiar character of the Biden years, in which much of the left only grudgingly tolerates but is incapable of becoming excited about a man who by any measure has been a very successful president. Biden’s fate is to be accepted but not celebrated because his function is to hold back the tide of MAGA, not lead America into the sunlit uplands of tomorrow. The type of Democrat who gives the most genuine respect to Biden tends to be older, somewhat more conservative, and somewhat more defensive about what the left can be expected to accomplish at this particular moment in history.
Another trend on the left which illustrates this is the way that the politics of American institutions has shifted. You used to be able to rely on Republicans to get misty-eyed about the presidency, or Congress, or the FBI. Nowadays Trump wants to defund the FBI and Marjorie Taylor Greene is a prominent and, at least on the right, respected congresswoman. But precisely as the right has decided to trash these old institutions in service of their reactionary vision, the left has rushed to defend and venerate them. Defending legal and political tradition and “norms” have become a large part of the raison d’être of the modern left. If optimism means something on the left today, it mostly means “America will weather this storm”, not “It’s morning in America”. That’s a dramatically reduced vision.
Silicon Valley
If optimism is retreating and shifting meaning in American politics, there seems to me to still be one influential cultural group who continue to embody that boundless-energy, endless-frontier optimism with which America has historically been associated. And those are people in Silicon Valley, particularly the people clustered around the development of generative AI like ChatGPT.
Their gaze still remains on the future. They foresee a world in which the work they are doing now has led to utopia: a world of longer, healthier lives, less work, and more wealth. They’re also aware that their work might radically diminish the value of human creativity, put hundreds of millions of people out of work, and perhaps lead to the extinction of human life itself. How exactly they’re going to get to utopia and avoid the grave dangers they’ll encounter on the way isn’t clear, to them or anyone else. They’re truly the last of the American optimists, and that makes them exciting but dangerous.
The MAGA movement’s pessimism is terrifying, but the optimism of Silicon Valley terrifies me too, and I hesitate to characterize it as part of the left, whatever the personal politics of the people who work at these companies. Indeed, if you spend a lot of time with or listening to people in this space, then one of the first thing you notice is that they appear relatively untethered from the political and cultural fights which preoccupy the rest of the country. They see politics mostly as a vague threat over the horizon which may interfere with their work and needs managing accordingly.
If the latest wave of innovation in Silicon Valley is going to transform American society - and I really think it will - then it will to some extent create its own reality which will reflect the values coded into it, but it will also become a tool of other political projects. Generative AI like ChatGPT and the hundreds of specialized spin-offs we are about to receive can be put to endless uses - imagine PropagandaGPT, FoxNewsGPT and AntiWokeGPT, and how they could be used to manipulate and shape the public sphere by producing endless content.
If the left has a route back to optimism and hope, it perhaps lays in harnessing this technology for productive and equitable ends - but they could easily be harnessed for the opposite. There’s no reason, then, to agree with the tech bros when they claim to be riding to the rescue. What, then, is the key to renewed optimism, to getting out from under the shadow of MAGA and articulating a realistic but aspirational view of the future? I’ll return to this in future posts, but I’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.