This newsletter will appear at the start of New Year’s weekend, and the inevitable articles are already appearing expressing the dread of 2024 in the United States. Considering what it will be like a year from now, after the 2024 election, no one can imagine anything good. Either Biden will have won, in which case there will be widespread violence and disruption from the right and disillusioned resignation on the part of liberals and moderates who think Biden has done nothing, or nothing for them, and will accomplish nothing for another four years because he’s old and senile. Or Trump will have won, in which case we will witness the end of American democracy and the beginning of fascistic mob rule. Happy New Year.
But this is the solstice season, the season of the longest nights and the greatest darkness. What we celebrate, however, with lit-up trees and hanging lights, is the light that is never quite extinguished, even in the darkness. In the Expanding Eyes podcast, I have been speaking about Shakespeare’s great festive comedy Twelfth Night. The title refers to the festive period of the twelve days of Christmas, ending on twelfth night, January 6, which in Christian terms is the feast of the Epiphany—the revelation of the Christ child to the Magi or Wise Men, who search for him in the darkness by following a star, a star that metaphorically is the miraculous child. We all know the chorus of “We Three Kings”:
O Star of Wonder, Star of Night, Star with Royal Beauty bright, Westward leading, Still proceeding, Guide us to Thy perfect Light.
Like much “traditional” Christmas mythology, the hymn is a Victorian invention, written in 1857. Does that automatically mean it’s just corny? Search out Patti Smith’s haunting version of it and then tell me it’s just Victorian kitsch. We play it every Christmas season while decorating the tree.
It is an instance of what Jung called synchronicity, or significant coincidence, that the insurrection that tried to overthrow democratic government took place on January 6. The coincidence is the opposite of ironic. It is, rather, exemplary, for on January 6, 2021 the forces of darkness representing a combination of fascism and nihilistic anarchy were defeated. The light continued to shine, and three years later the insurrectionists are mostly in prison, with the law pressing in upon their leader, admittedly with seemingly interminable slowness. The period of darkness before the light is a liminal period in which not only the ordinary social order but, in profounder versions, the very structure of ordinary reality is temporarily overturned. This can be ultimately good, as it is in Twelfth Night, leading not just to a resumption of order but to its transformation and improvement. In such cases, the spirit of disorder can be a Trickster figure representing a creative power at work in the dark and confusion. In more ironic versions of the pattern, however, the spirit of disorder is simply demonic—as it was on January 6, 2020. The title character of Milton’s masque Comus is such a demonic figure of disorder. A girl is lost in labyrinthine woods at night and comes upon Comus and his rout. Milton makes Comus the son of Bacchus, god of excess, and Circe, spirit of devolution down the chain of being: Comus’s followers have drunk from his enchanted cup, given to him by his mother, and have devolved into blindly instinctual forces with animal heads. Remember the guy called “the Shaman” among the insurrectionists? He would have fit right into Comus’s dance troupe. The dance performed by Comus’s followers is not simply some kind of mosh pit chaos, however. It is a dance of anti-order. The dancers have torches, dancing in darkness, because they are the will-o’-the-wisps leading travelers astray in swamps with false, deluding light—the light of, say, conspiracy theories that offer to replace the true order represented by the starry heavens. As Comus says, “We that are of purer fire / Imitate the starry choir.”
The coming election should not be the nailbiter that it already is. Why is Trump ahead in the polls despite 91 felony charges and a constant stream of lies, vituperation, and outright threats to exterminate his “enemies” like “vermin”? For two reasons, one of which I spoke of last week: there is a collective Jungian shadow gripping much of the country, tens of millions of people, some of them ordinarily decent, possessed by an irrational energy of nihilism that takes them over via their personal shadows. The more that people remain unaware, and often willfully ignorant, that they have a dark, unconscious side that is deeply attracted to racist, sexist, homophobic and social class hatred, the more they are in danger of being taken over by the collective mood of hatred that evil people are making every attempt to whip up. This is drug pushing. Hatred is a high better than any cocaine, and more addictive. We worry about young men becoming radicalized off the Internet and turning into mass shooters, and it is certainly worth worrying about, but such people are isolated—indeed, it is their isolation that drives them over the brink. Far more dangerous are the respectable people who are possessed by the mood of fearful resentment to which a steady diet of Fox News conditions them. Most of these are really nice people—up to a point. Up to the point at which the repressed unconscious slips from ordinary civilized controls, and they speak or act in a way that comes from a very different kind of personality than their respectable persona. As a teacher, I see it at small scale when I catch dishonest students who have deliberately plagiarized, these days usually with AI. Because you cannot actually prove that an essay was written by AI, the students are emboldened into trying to gaslight you. Likeable students, who, before you caught them, were indistinguishable from the other genuinely nice students, will play innocent with a veritable George Santos level of shamelessness. Who, me? Oh, I’m sorry if I didn’t actually do the assignment, and I didn’t really understand, and I’ve genuinely enjoyed the class. To the point where whether they actually believe their own bullshit becomes a question, as it does in politics. The lesson is not the cynical one that people are not nice. It is that they are both nice and not nice, and that the right hand does not want to know what the left hand doeth.
Yet the Trump cult, although dismayingly large, is not large enough to win the election or take over the country by itself. The second factor making the election up for grabs is the disillusionment of the sane, expressed as a pessimism and peevishness so pervasive that journalists and political analysts are rather startled by it. Many of the reasons, including the by-now tiresome excuse that “Biden’s too old,” are so flimsy that they are clearly pretexts. Pope Francis is older right now than Biden will be at the end of a second term, and, despite some health problems, is going strong—blessing homosexual couples, outmaneuvering and evicting a reactionary political opponent. I haven’t heard anyone saying he needs to step down—well, except his reactionary opponents. And the idea of voting for Trump or some hole-in-the-wall candidate as a “protest vote” is so foolish it’s hard to know what to say about it. We can only hope that it’s just performative, and that many such people will reluctantly vote for Biden when the time comes.
Looking for a deeper reason, Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times (Progressives, Dec 15, 2023) draws conclusions that seem plausible to me:
But I think there’s a deeper problem, which stems from a crisis of faith in the possibility of progress. Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future. I sometimes hear leftists talk about “our collective liberation,” but outside a few specific contexts — the ongoing subjugation of the Palestinians comes to mind — I mostly have no idea what they’re talking about. | It’s easy to see what various parts of the left want to dismantle — capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy, the nuclear family — and much harder to find a realistic conception of what comes next. Some leftists who lose hope in the possibility of thoroughgoing transformation become liberals like me, mostly resigned to working toward incremental improvements to a dysfunctional society. Others, looking beyond the politics of amelioration, seek new ways to shake up the system.
To me, this puts its finger on something. The comments on the discussion board after the article were interesting. I might point out that I find a genuine debate and free exchange of ideas on these discussion boards more often than I do in the actual journalistic articles, whether in the liberal Times or more progressive sources such as Salon.com and Alternet. You have to skim through hundreds of responses that are either repetitive and forgettable or outright wrongheaded, but there are with some frequency genuinely thoughtful pieces of critical thinking, some of which even debate intelligently with one another. I think the secret is that these boards provide a place where people can actually think aloud and compare views without fear of being cancelled or getting death threats from either extreme of the political spectrum. You know—what Twitter/X was supposed to be and never was.
At any rate, one respondent insisted that progressives do have a “plausible vision of the future,” and named such ideals as environmentalism, non-hierarchical communities, learning how to listen to others, and so on. But another writer complained that those were idealistic and abstract, too far removed from the everyday realities and struggles of people’s actual lives. I might suggest that both writers are right, and that their views can be incorporated into a more synoptic perspective, one that has a rough parallel with something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The second writer correctly sees that any progressive political platform needs to start on the ground level of Maslow’s physiological and safety needs. By all measures, Americans are actually doing pretty well right now economically, whatever they say. My guess is that, when they insist they aren’t, they are really sending a message about safety, about security. In the last 15 years, Americans have been through two huge disruptions to their sense of security on the most fundamental level: the 2008 economic meltdown and the pandemic, followed by the Trumpian chaos. The lines from Yeats are often-quoted, yet express the feeling perfectly, that “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” People are doing mostly okay right now—but wait five minutes, and no guarantees. Impatient as I get with some of the whining, I can understand this kind of insecurity.
The problem is that such insecurity has been fomented by and continuously exacerbated by a combination of the 1%, Wall Street, and the far right. They block attempts at what clearly needs to be done, which Bernie Sanders more or less had correct, except that he perversely insisted on calling it “socialism,” when in fact it has nothing to do with actual socialism. Sanders is in fact not a socialist but what in Europe would be called a social democrat: he believes in what most European countries outside of England actually have, a “mixed economy.” This means a kind of capitalism combined with two things—restraint upon laissez-faire predatory practices and a robust safety net. These two things are what the right is constantly trying to undermine and eliminate. Hence the insane crusade against Obamacare. Occupy Wall Street did not cause anyone to go ballistic because the right, not to mention Wall Street, knew that the finance system is too abstract and remote for common people to care about. All they had to do was wait until the movement became old news and faded. But the Affordable Care Act was an existential threat, because its opponents correctly surmised that once they were in it, Americans would love it and insist on preserving it, which has now in fact happened. It would also show that government is not always what Reagan claimed, the problem and not the solution. So all the right could do was lie about it, ultimately to no avail.
Biden is not fortunate enough to have something like the ACA that concretely and demonstrably improves people’s lives and sense of security in a way that anyone can understand. In addition, his administration has had the bad luck to be hit with a big spike in inflation caused by supply chains and the war in Ukraine. It has tamed that inflation, but has no way to roll back the 10-15% rise in prices that occurred within a year. Once again I think the real problem was not that most people couldn’t afford the increase in prices but that it shocked them and made them feel even more insecure than they already were. Telling people that the rise in wages plus in cost-of-living increases in such things as Social Security have cancelled out most of the inflationary rise is no good because they can’t see it and don’t believe it. Prices are not what they were in 2019, and that’s that, Biden’s a failure.
The heartbreaking reality is that Bidenomics is the “plausible vision of the future” that the left is looking for, or at least well along the road to it. Biden campaigned as a centrist moderate, but he has governed as a progressive, following very much a Bernie Sanders kind of playbook. And it has worked. The economy is booming, unemployment is strikingly low, inflation is tamed. Renewables and various forms of green energy are creating an economic boom without a bitter political battle over something like the Green New Deal, and also helping to deal with climate change in a way that is still insufficient but far more thoroughgoing than anyone dreamed possible 10, even 5 years ago. Biden tried to cancel student loan debt though he was of course blocked by the Republicans. Abroad, he has renewed our alliances with Europe and other allies, played chess effectively with an economically aggressive China, and supported Ukraine both out of justice and as a stopgap against Russian imperialism. Moderate, liberal, and progressive voters should be thrilled with how much Biden has managed to get done, but they are utterly blind to it.
He has very wisely avoided getting sucked into the culture wars, as they are inherently divisive and he wants to unite people. Only glancingly has the Biden administration indicated its real sympathies, though for the most part safely in code. An amusing one was Jill Biden’s recent White House Christmas video, featuring members of the Dorrance troop tap dancing to a jazz version of the “Dance of the Floreadores” (traditionally titled “Waltz of the Flowers”) from the Nutcracker Suite. As reported by Amanda Marcotte, the right predictably was apoplectic over a harmless Christmas video. And why? First there was the outrage that a timeless European classic (well, sorta) would be treated with such disrespect—a jazz tap dancing version? After all, the music is by that decadent modernist Duke Ellington. If you actually watch the video, however, you will see the main source of the outrage: as Marcotte puts it, many of the dancers “read as” people of color or queer. It is lighthearted and charming, but the smiling dancers (that too was an object of ridicule) are, without a bit of preaching, a parable of joyous inclusiveness, good will towards everyone. Marcotte adds that Ellington’s musical collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, was gay. So was Tchaikovsky. If you’re going to fight the culture wars, this is the way to do it. The video is sly, warm and welcoming, without the slightest censoriousness or accusation. It’s slight, and there is no use making too much of it, but its few minutes of Trickster charm might do more good than all the DEI seminars in the world.
I am fascinated by the apprehensive yet positive mood of my parents’ generation during World War II. I do not mean any demonstrative patriotism: in fact, the mood is all the more authentic due to the absence of showy jingoistic display. Marriages and romantic relationships were torn apart as young men enlisted and spent four years apart from their loved ones, including sometimes babies their soldier fathers had never seen. There was wartime rationing of both food and such items as tires due to the war effort. Women went to work in factories and offices. But the attitude was “This has to be done, and I’ll do my part.” I don’t think this is just romanticizing. There was an enemy who was obviously evil and who had attacked us. We were defending our home and our ideals. World War II was unique, the only war that can be spoken of so positively, but it gave us the sense of being united in a just cause. There were those who felt differently. Robert Lowell was a conscientious objector. Joseph Campbell criticized Thomas Mann for supporting the war. But for the country at large there was a genuine sense of a unity, a common identity. Perhaps only the American Revolution itself has produced a comparable mood.
Nowadays the enemy is inside the gates, and it is the same enemy, as Trump echoing Hitler’s rhetoric amply proves. Americans by the millions are becoming neo-Nazis and fascists, and attempting to aid the cause of dictators like Putin abroad. The parallel is more with the Civil War than World War II, and in many ways that war is still being fought. Biden is not a speech maker like Lincoln, but he clearly prefers to unite people by a positive vision. Should he attack the 1% more strongly? I think he feels that the country cannot endure more divisiveness. Biden was no hippie, but he was, like me, a child of the 60’s, and he retains a strong sense of the positive side of the 60’s. Michelle Goldberg ends her column by saying that, to compete with the hate-filled dreams of the right, “the left needs beautiful dreams of its own.” Depending upon what you choose to accentuate, the 60’s can be seen as very dark: the assassinations, the race riots, the Cold War. But But there were people who, in the midst of the darkness and the chaos, refused to lose the vision of a possible hopeful future. They are, in fact, baffling. How can they stay so positive, so hopeful, so cheerful or at least serene, so sane? How is it that they seem inoculated against the contamination of the collective mood of nihilistic despair?
Pete Seeger, for example. He would be remembered if only for being one of the great collectors and preservers of American song, what the African American tradition calls a songster. There were jokes about how, if he tried to sing his vast repertoire through from beginning to end, he would still be singing 5 years later. Yet at the same time he was an activist, using protest songs in the cause of union activism in the 40’s. The McCarthyites went after him, ended his career for a decade by blacklisting him, but he came back and became active in the Civil Rights movement, helping to make the gospel song “We Shall Overcome” into one of its anthems. When I taught a course in folk music, I showed parts of a documentary on Seeger that included footage of a white riot trashing a civil rights gathering. It was absolutely horrifying, people smashing the windows of cars, wreckage everywhere, the look of hate on shouting, jeering white faces. It was a small-scale version of the violence at Selma. How is it possible not to be scarred by all that, not to begin to doubt that anything good is possible when people are so demonically possessed by hatred? But he maintained, and he drew people together: his ability to get people to sing along even if they thought they hated singing along was just a manifestation of his ability to be a uniting force. Nor was he just sentimental sweetness and light: he got censored by the network when he sang his song against the Vietnam War, “Waist deep in Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on,” on the Smothers Brothers show in 1967, though they relented and allowed him to perform it in 1968.
The civil rights movement brings to mind, of course, Martin Luther King, whose “I have a dream” speech is perhaps the most famous example of a hopeful vision of a possible future. I would add to it his “Christmas Sermon on Peace,” a follow-up to the “dream” speech four years later, and a widening of its argument. Later, and outside the United States, there is Nelson Mandela, who refused to collapse into negativity after 27 years in prison. To these heroic real-life examples I would add Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. As many have agreed, the bridge of the original Starship Enterprise in 1966 inspired without preaching, simply by showing a crew whose inclusiveness remains admirable to this day: white, Black, Asian, Russian, Vulcan. It is too bad that public consciousness had not evolved far enough at that point to allow George Takei to be openly gay, and that no Indigenous person was included. The Next Generation crew expanded the diversity to include machine intelligence in the form of Data the android. Beyond that, the only type of diversity missing would be trans and/or non-binary. What is implied is that a possible future could achieve something like King’s dream of inclusiveness.
The fact is that the left has no beautiful dreams because it no longer believes in them. I am well aware that everything I have been saying would be dismissed in some quarters as at best naïve, at worst the usual white hand waving to disguise the usual racism. The central premise of critical race theory and the Diversity Equity Inclusion movement is that racism is “systemic.” It is not an attitude that we can chose to hold or not hold. We are all racist because we live in a system that is racist. No one is innocent, and all we can do is make an effort to be “anti-racist” through various forms of activism. The resemblance to Calvinist forms of predestination is instructive. In Calvinism, the doctrine of “innate depravity,” a Protestant version of Catholic “original sin,” says that the human will was corrupted by the Fall. No one can say, “I am good.” We are all basically evil, deserving of damnation, hoping for some kind of grace to save us even though we do not deserve it. The choice to act in an anti-racist way stands in the place of grace in Calvinist theology. However, there is a complexity here, because the early Christians were another group who bewildered their enemies by their good cheer and hopefulness even in the midst of martyrdom. The aspect of Christianity that stresses the meaning of “gospel” as “good news” sees the central teaching of Christ as the forgiveness of sins. But, according to the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke), Jesus also spoke of sin, condemnation, and damnation. Predestination, with its gloomy pessimism ("Few saved, many damned") originated with Paul in order to spell out the implications of those references, and was developed for Catholicism by Augustine and for Protestantism, in different ways, by Luther and Calvin.
It sounds like neurosis, and it is, but it is a neurotic development of a profound insight. When the French Revolution failed, the Romantic writers’ optimism that it was the harbinger of a better future was crushed. The most profound analysis of why it failed was that of William Blake, who said that it does no good to break people’s physical chains if they are still imprisoned in what he called “mind forg’d manacles.” The real chains are mental chains, and these are not merely individual but collective. In his later work, culminating in his epic Jerusalem, he developed this into a theory of States. “Distinguish States from individuals in those States,” he said. Radical critical theory in the 1970’s through the 1990’s developed the idea of “systems.” In some forms of theory, individuals do not really exist: they are epiphenomena, mere aftereffects of systems. The systems are embodied in social institutions, especially those enforcing social controls, but they are also internalized. This superficially resembles Blake, but it is Blake turned inside out. In Blake the chains are “mind forg’d,” which means the mind makes the chains, and therefore possesses the latent freedom to break them and liberate itself. In some post-structuralist and postmodernist theories, the chains make the mind: indeed, the chains are the mind, constitute the mind. This idea, that there are powers, systems, chains that have made the world and rule it, while the human mind is passive, helpless, a blank slate on which vast powers write as they please, is the very evil that Blake’s hero, Los, the imagination, fights against in Jerusalem. At one point he cries that he is “Striving with Systems to deliver individuals from those Systems.”
Blake identifies his work as poet and artist with the work of Los. The negative aspect of that work is what I call decreation, one aspect of which is the unmasking of intellectual error. It is startling to find Blake attacking some famous figures, such as his unholy trinity of “Bacon, Newton, and Locke.” But Blake is attacking various forms of the same error: the idea that the mind has no power to create and recreate reality but is rather, as Locke said, a passive blank slate that is written on by outside influences. Bacon and Newton expound the other side of the same error: they present as “science” the picture of a mechanistic universe of “Starry Wheels,” an unconscious and indifferent system in which humanity is trapped. If Blake had lived beyond his time, he would have added Darwin, who gave us the heartless universe of evolution, of survival of the fittest, quickly adapted as a model of society in Social Darwinism, and also Freud, who identified this representation of an inhuman condition as the “reality principle,” which it is the ego’s task in “maturity” to come to accept. Blake would have replied that it is not reality but a State, the state that he called Ulro, and that those who live in it are in hell, the only kind of hell Blake would accept. A State seems real to those who are trapped within it, but the task of Los is to deliver people from such a State, negatively by the exposing of error, positively by creating alternative States that are the opposite of the solipsistic nihilism of Ulro. And Los is in all of us, not just in artists. Every thought and action that we perform that originates in the beautiful dream of a better world is the work of Los.
I am no expert on CRT and DEI, but many of the comments on Goldberg’s article reiterate what I see in many places: the progressive cause has alienated, indeed infuriated, many people of potentially good will because of its attitude that any “beautiful dreams” are lies to cover up systemic injustice. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent by some kind of demonstrated “anti-racist” activity. Someone cannot be hired to teach mathematics without showing that they have been involved in activist anti-racist causes. Again the resemblance to reactionary religion appears, as in the pressure to “confess your privilege.” I grew up old-style Catholic, and it was this kind of confessional demand, which is frankly also that of a police state, that I rebelled against.
DEI assumes, correctly, that racism (and by implication any form of injustice—sexism, homophobia, etc.) results from mental conditioning, Blake’s “mind forg’d manacles.” But it responds to that insight with a kind of paranoid distrust that demands endless policing of people’s actions and speech, for language is the key product of the mind. What is called “woke” and “cancel culture” is endless accusation of sin, endless judging of people, finding them “offensive” according to constantly changing rules and standards. (Note that this is not the same definition of “woke” as that of Ron DeSantis, who twists it to mean anything the far right happens not to like). This is as anti-Blakean as it is possible to get. As said before, to Blake the central principle of Christianity was the forgiveness of sins, as exemplified by Jesus. He might well also have had Shakespeare in mind, for such forgiveness becomes a central them in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances in his later career, from Measure for Measure to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Accusation of sin is the essence of the demonic. Not for nothing is Satan called the Accuser. Such accusation is a form of anger: the movement has sadly become contaminated by the hatred that it wants to fight.
Blake’s thought goes beyond the utopian into the apocalyptic, a word that means “revelation.” Insofar as the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, also known as the Apocalypse, is taken up with revenge fantasies of punishment for sins, it is in fact a demonic book. Blake’s way of reading the Bible decreated such a reading based on paranoid literalism. To him, the imagery of the end of the world as we know it is a vision of the destruction of the hell we have made of this world, a harrowing of hell rather than the world’s worst housewarming party. Liberated from the Ulro state of alienation and isolation, we realize that we are not just connected but actually one larger identity—E Pluribus Unum shorn of its imperialistic overtones of domination. Whitman tried to create a positive vision of America in Song of Myself, referring to himself as a “kosmos.” At times his attempt to embrace everyone and everything can get a bit exhausting, perhaps strained, but it is refreshing to read Whitman in the light of the mood of the present time. Whitman maintained his vision that we are all connected through the Civil War itself, through rounds of visiting hospitals of the wounded. If moderates, liberals, and progressives, who knows maybe even moderate conservatives, could truly unite around such a common vision and work out a social and political program to bring it about, maybe we wouldn’t have to worry so much about a violent, hate-filled megalomaniac becoming president for a second time. It is a way of stating the theme of Heather Cox Richardson’s recent book America Awakening. We need to keep in mind that the reason for the eruption of far-right aggression right now is panic: behind the blustering, this is a backlash born of the perception that we are winning, that progress is taking place, however painfully and imperfectly, that all the old injustices, which they disguise as “traditional values,” are slowly losing ground. Nihilism is all they’ve got left. But we have the dream, and we continue to strive towards the moment in which, like the dreaming Adam in Paradise Lost, we awake to find it true. Happy New Year.
I appreciate the generosity of spirit behind your "like." Thanks. Michael
The article you mention by Michelle Goldberg spins out of the same echo chamber as the one by Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce the week before in In These Times. It is the popular Resistance faux outrage of "whatever happened to Uncle Toby." Goldberg adduces examples of people “defecting” from mainstream perspectives—she lists Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Russell Brand—and never once considers it might be linked to people like her disregarding everything they have to say and caricaturing them as racist Trump-adjacent grifters with sexual skeletons in their closet. This attitude will tend to alienate not just the people she’s talking about, but a big percentage of the people watching. The problem is the one she lists: entitled people proud not to listen.