By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
November beckons, our nation’s best chance to correct the course set by Donald Trump. We get new congress members, we get new governors. And in the primaries leading to up that date, Zohran Mamdanis’s Democratic Socialists not only cleared the field in New York City, they found success elsewhere too. Mainstream Democrats worry that the resulting candidates are too extreme to win their general elections. Maybe that’s true. But a better argument against them relies less on strategy and more on principle.
Historically speaking, socialists claim to be realists. They strip modernity of its pretensions. Your government says you are free, yet you’re a slave to your job. Your bosses say you are free, yet your government herds you into the work force, or else it imprisons you, or puts you in the army. Your church says you are free, yet it reserves real freedom for after your death. The only way to be truly free is to open your eyes to society’s fictions and see the real constraints that bind you.
That assertion of clear vision makes socialists into snobs, because they judge non-socialists to be either self-interested cynics or self-deluded fools. While Mamdani’s candidates embody that intellectualism, they improve it so much, they finally subvert it. They don’t want voters to see our world in all its social and physical complexity. They want people to see it drained of history, purified by virtue, and abstracted according to the demands of theory. It’s a top-down version of political philosophy designed by and for spoiled graduate students with a built-in illusion of empowering the masses and a built-in goal of laying your enemies low.
Their program is a grab-bag of progressive shibboleths under the veil of an ideology called intersectionality, which posits connections between widely varied complaints. Gaza has nothing do with trans rights, nor do trans people require the abolition of prisons, but intersectionality not only explains the opposite, it also says you can’t pick and choose between such causes. It’s all or nothing for the Democratic party’s new best friends, and the fact that these beliefs are laced with anti-Semitism barely warrants attention.
Maybe electoral success will blunt this approach. Taken in its broadest sense, after all, the rise of New York’s progressives simply encapsulates the standard divide in American governance between those who believe in growing the pie and those who believe that all you can do is fight for a bigger piece of it.
That conflict used to have a geographic cast, because easterners fought over what already existed (a car dealer in Hackensack could only sell more cars by taking someone else’s customers) while westerners believed that growth could benefit all (a car dealer in Phoenix could sell more cars just by catering to all his town’s newcomers), but modern economics has blurred that line. Our country is all built up now, to the point where an easterner could be forgiven for believing in growth and a westerner could understandably be cynical. Hence the appeal of Mamdani from one coast to another. But his acolytes remain in the conscious business of dividing and taking, rather than growing and sharing.
They are also in the business of bucking deeper themes, because this matter of believing in growth belongs less to the Republican Party (Democrats have also long believed in it, with the added corollary that it needs to be channeled to make life easier for those left behind) than it does to the deepest of Western traditions. Of all the world’s great religions, only those born of Judaism posit a program of divinely inspired progress. In place of cosmic cycles, we recognize special moments that herald better things to come: creations, liberations, births, even deaths. Looking to the future with hope is a Judeo-Christian habit.
Science says our cycle-based friends might hold the more realistic hand. In the vastness of space and time, our universe might well collapse on itself. The Big Bang could be just one of countless similar explosions. Shiva’s dance could reflect the truth of physics. But politically speaking, cultures built on cycles tend to be stagnant. America is many things, but it has never been that.
“All that is solid melts into air,” wrote Marx. “All that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Faced with sober senses, today’s Democratic Socialists are neither Democrats nor Socialists. They are Donald Trump’s true heirs: an idiosyncratic, intellectually incoherent, and hate-powered force for hurting others and helping themselves.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.