A woman argues with a far-right protester during a rally near the downtown of Stone Mountain, Georgia on August 15, 2020. (Lynsey Weatherspoon/Getty Images)
Is this our first post-liberal election?
Maybe I should unpack that question a bit more. By liberal, I don’t mean left-wing — or right-wing for that matter. I mean a system in which we are committed to living peacefully with others who differ from us, sometimes profoundly. I mean abiding by the same democratic rules to reach compromises, a system where we win some and lose some, and each election season, we lick our wounds or stroke our whiskers, and prepare for the next contest. I mean, in a word, pluralism. This is the essence of liberal democracy; we are Lockean advocates and opponents of various causes and politicians; we are not Schmittian friends and enemies. And no issue is ever settled for good.
This vision of politics held firm for much of my lifetime, even as Western democracies went through convulsions. It’s deeply underrated. It got us through the 1960s tumult, the Cold War, the Islamist terror wave, and the first wave of “political correctness.” But as the economy inexorably and relentlessly split the country in two new classes (the college educated and not), and as ever-more experiments in living emerged to compete with the old, liberal democracy began to fray, as the ancient philosophers predicted. A surplus of elites and a boredom bred of nihilism made things worse.
From the 1990s onward, the Gingrich Republicans increasingly refused to accept the legitimacy of Democratic presidents, and then, under Trump, refused to accept the legitimacy of the elections themselves. The intellectual right flirted first with ridding the world of tyranny alongside with fundamentalist certainty; in the wake of that catastrophe, they went more recently with Thomist “integralism” and caudillo-style populism. Live-and-let-live ethics ceded to Christianism and then Christian Nationalism, and even a half-assed insurrection to overthrow an election.
And among Democrats, a new puritanical zeal emerged to stamp out the original American sin of slavery through an “anti-racist” Kulturkampf — by re-educating children and indoctrinating adults in a new era of “social justice.” In this new woke world, toleration was another word for oppression, and silence equaled violence. The universities became madrassas, the newspapers turned into tracts — abandoning reporting for narratives based in the idea of America as a permanent White supremacy. Dissenters were ostracized or fired. No neutral zone was allowed; and no private space was permitted to exclude the public orthodoxy.
Trump of course catalyzed both illiberalisms, and made them more suffocating. He holds the truth and the rule of law in contempt when applied to him — and that corrosion spread. He abides no principle but obedience to him and to his ego. He has made the right more radical and turned the left into a manic, emotionally incontinent mess. Biden’s promise in 2020 to be a calmer and unifier evaporated almost immediately, as soon as he entered office, as he embraced industrial policy and massive spending, and replaced equality with equity, color-blindness with “anti-racism”, and sex with gender.
The calm, the skepticism, the toleration, the epistemic humility, and the moderation that make a liberal democracy possible seemed to vanish into thin air.
Critically, the oldest and greatest cultural bulwark of liberalism — Christianity — also collapsed. The deep belief that we are all equal in the eyes of God and all equally flawed and forgivable gave way to a fundamentalist hubris on the right that saw liberals not as citizens who were misguided but as enemies who had to be destroyed. And on the left, Trump supporters soon became viewed as alien, anathema, unfathomable, deplorable — bigots for whom forgiveness was unthinkable.
That’s why we’re so on edge right now. For the two tribes, this has come to seem existential. If Harris wins, the right fears ever-more cultural onslaught, persecution, lawfare, and media gaslighting. If Trump wins, the left fears an end to the rule of law and the birth of a fascist regime — complete with camps, tanks, and an unquestionable leader. It feels less like an election than the eve of a final battle.
But is it? As someone who has seen our polity through this lens for some time, I’m now asking myself if I may have overstated the case. We will find out in the next few days and weeks if our worst fears materialize of a liberal democracy come undone. But here are some brief, unusually optimistic, thoughts ahead of the abyss in front of us.
Nothing is ever as bad as you think it is at the time. Yes, our discourse is horrid and made worse by social media. Yes, in the abstract, we have come to hate and fear one another. But in practice, in real life, I haven’t witnessed social collapse. Yes, things get a bit edgy. Yes, it’s hard to be a moderate in an evangelical church, or a liberal in a leftist corporation. But this is not 1968, as we saw this August in Chicago. American easy-going pragmatism still endures in both red and blue America. We feared American fascism in 2016. It didn’t arrive. The system survived one Trump term. It may well another.
Our 50-50 divide also helps in a way: it makes the red-blue gulf nerve-wracking — but it also effectively bars a huge victory for either side any time soon. We are more likely to continue gridlocked than descend into a civil war. Compared with any other developed nation, we’re also booming economically, despite our mutual loathing, innovating away, and still a cultural global hub. We’re not Weimar Germany — a new democracy wracked by hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, and wounded national pride. We are the oldest democracy in the world.
Federalism and the First Amendment are also the safety valves bequeathed us by our Founders. Some questions — like abortion — really are hard to compromise on, but forcing one side’s settlement on everyone (Roe) is the illiberal move. So in some ways, Dobbs has actually made liberalism easier, not harder. It allows for different legal regimes — and experience of them.
The First Amendment has also saved us from the illiberalism of the woke left. Just think of what has happened to free speech in Canada and Britain without it. Yes, the woke captured every institution, but they failed to censor online media (thanks, Elon!), and could not prevent the rise of an alternative media universe to push back against orthodoxy. For every NPR bore, there arrived a Rogan; for every WaPo narrative, a singular Substack voice; for every red guard “fact-checker” in legacy media, there’s a “community notes”.
And we are tolerating each other. Just about. Sure, pro-choice states may offer sanctuary to women seeking abortions in pro-life states — but that’s hardly civil war. And the most extreme woke attempts at a cultural revolution — the bid to end the reality of biological sex, for example — eventually reveal themselves as forms of insanity and cruelty, and fail. Even so, you can now move to Minnesota and have your child’s sex reassigned before puberty; and you can also move to a state where boys are not at risk of being chemically castrated because they act like girls.
There are, of course, many more emotionally satisfying forms of government than liberalism. Ibram X Kendi would love to live in a country where an unaccountable “anti-racist” department could intervene anywhere at any time to right an injustice, however trivial, in the great racial revanchism of the 21st Century. But he won’t get to. Half the country would resist; heck, even NYT liberals have begun to see crude DEI as counter-productive racist poison. And critical race theory hasn’t destroyed the Constitution yet.
Equally, Matt Walsh would love to live in a country where gay couples have no right to marry, women have no right to abortion at all, and divorce is much, much harder. Well, good luck with that, Matt! Adrian Vermeule can thrill to the thought of an integralist Supreme Court bringing natural law back with teeth. But that’s not gonna happen either. Even this outlier Court is unlikely to undo marriage equality, because a big majority — across red and blue America — favor it. We can get a modus vivendi on some things, after all. And we have.
Liberalism wins not because it is better; but because every other option is worse. And as we fret about this election and its aftermath, that’s worth remembering. Liberal democracy is under threat, and we should be vigilant in protecting it. But there’s a reason the liberal settlement has lasted, however ragged. You declare liberalism over … and then realize you’ve got nothing credible or unifying to replace it with.
So we enter a holding pattern in a turbulent atmosphere. There will be some sudden bumps and lurches, but the physics of the Constitution can hold us aloft. We can even harbor a decent hope that our tattered liberal democracy can stay on life support if we keep our nerve, lower the temperature, and begin to accept the permanence and legitimacy of the other side.
And even, eventually, their humanity.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my take on Vance and “normal gay guys”; my convo with Musa al-Gharbi on his empirical findings on wokeness; reader dissents over my Harris coverage and trans coverage; ten notable quotes from the week in news, including two Yglesias Awards; 21 pieces we recommend on Substack on a variety of topics; a triumph of a Mental Health Break; a foreboding window from Vegas; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
A cheery note from a new subscriber: “Thank you for being sane as civilization destroys itself.” From another who is “white-knuckled, grimacing, bracing for a scary-but-safe passage through the shadow of Trump”:
I finally rejoined the fold. I had not been a paid subscriber since you retired the Daily Dish back in 2015, but when the subscriber announcement popped up during your Sam Harris conversation, I had to hear more.
Your full episode articulated so many things that had been rattling around my head. Is this just another round of farce, grift, and self-aggrandizement from Trump? Or would he lead to something truly terrible this time? Can Harris please(!) make some bold last-minute statements saying she was wrong about something during Biden’s term? Something that throws her left flank under the bus? Something that shows actual understanding of Americans’ discontent about inflation and immigration, while making the case that she is the better agent to correct course? Something that shows she “gets it”?
If Harris doesn’t win, I hope our fears of Trump are indeed histrionic.
A “Normal Gay Guy” Checks In
It strikes me as quite remarkable that, this week, JD Vance on Rogan aired a real and fascinating divide in the gay and lesbian world over politics — that hasn’t begun to see the light of day in the activist-controlled legacy media.
(Read the rest of that piece here, for paid subscribers.)
New On The Dishcast: Musa al-Gharbi
Musa is a sociologist and writer. He’s an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His first book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. He also has a great substack, Symbolic Capital(ism).
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on how “elite overproduction” fuels wokeness, and the myth of Trump’s support from white voters. That link also takes you to commentary on our recent episodes with Sam Harris and Tina Brown. We also run more reader dissents on the trans issue and a final batch of Harris-Trump debate before Election Day, with my responses throughout.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Damon Linker on the election results, Anderson Cooper on grief, David Greenberg on his new bio of John Lewis, Christine Rosen on humanness in a digital world, and Mary Matalin on anything but politics. Sadly Peggy Noonan can’t make it on the pod this year after all. We tried! And a listener asks:
Is Van Jones still coming on the show? You said he was going to, and now his upcoming interview hasn’t been spoken about for the last few episodes.
He said he would but his PR team put the kibosh on it. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
I’ve been a Dish reader for over a year now, and I appreciate your common-sense approach to the state of things. But I’m sad to see that you have been ever-more critical of Harris, and not of Trump. While I’m not a Harris fan and share your criticisms of her and her campaign, it’s crystal clear that the barn is undeniably ablaze over on the Trump side. I’m not sure what you’re accomplishing by continuing to increasingly harp on Harris’ issues, while letting the markedly more troubling ones with Trump skate by unobserved. Sure, the MSM is covering that, but it’s also important for non-MSM to cover how unhinged Trump has become, even by his standards.
Read my response here, along with three other dissents. More on the pod page. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the Bezos non-endorsement, why Elon has gone “full conspiracist,” and an obit for virtual reality. Below are two examples, followed by two indie launches:
Ayaan creates her own platform, Courage Media. Congrats!
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? (The cartoon beagle is hiding a key sign.) Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Last week’s contest — of a small city before a hurricane hit — generated more new subscriptions than any other contest. One of the sleuths found an awesome app:
My youngest daughter is doing her final high school exams, and just in time we have started using Google’s NotebookLM. As the world of AI moves at rapid pace, this particular bit of wizardry can (among other things) create a realistic sounding podcast about anything.
So I gave it a challenge: I put in the hotel’s website and asked it to come up with a short podcast about the hotel, its surroundings, and the view from its windows. Here is the result. It sounds like an advertisement for the hotel, but given that I’ve put in minimal effort into this, I’m impressed.
Depending on the reaction of the sleuths, I feel like I could be onto a new thing for the weekly write-up: turning my entries into a podcast format thanks to Google. I know a lot of people get joy from reading the VFYW email each week, but just as the Dish has joined the podcast revolution, maybe the VFYW can too …
Yes please! The super-sleuth in Bethlum follows up with “two things inspired by your write-up two weeks ago”:
First, the national dog of Israel is the Canaan Dog, which a good friend introduced me to more than 30 years ago. It seems to have some similarities to jackals (featured by your biologist sleuth). The Canaan was bred from the wild dogs in the Middle East. It’s a great breed — and very “doggy”, for want of a better description:
Also, damn if I didn’t just watch the episode of West Wing where CJ performs “The Jackal.” Feels synergistic somehow. I’ve been re-watching WW for the fantasy of a functioning government system. Sigh.
Second, I have also hit the regular, not specialty, VFYW Trifecta: book, super-sleuth, and published view. So yay me! Thanks as always for the contest.
See you next Friday. If the republic is still hanging in.
