Searching For a New Politics of Meaning

As the political tide shifts in a more hopeful direction, a warning about ignoring MAGA's cultural sway.

Solar eclipse, April 8, 2024, me and my daughter Mira (Photo by Micah L. Sifry, all rights reserved)

The other day I was listening to Nathaniel Pearlman, host of The Great Battlefield podcast (which I highly recommend) interviewing Laura Field, the author of the new book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. At one point in their conversation, Field offers a very interesting observation about why MAGA right influencers like Jordan Peterson, Curtis Yarvin, Michael Anton and Christopher Rufo have so much cultural sway. Here’s an edited transcript of what she said:

The deepest question here, which is a theme in the book, is the vulnerability of liberalism. There’s a kind of latent vulnerability to liberal democracy that you can trace back to its origins in the premodern world. Liberal democracy was invented to help people get along in an ugly political world where there are a lot of fanatics on different sides of issues. And so some theorists got together (this is obviously an insanely simplified version) and thought, well, we need a different way forward where we can just have some ways to make some basic parameters for politics and decision making, so that we can all just chill out and not be so obsessive and fanatical and killing each other. And so that’s how liberal democracy was born, effectively.

If you read Federalist 10, they’re quite explicit about how there are different ways to contain the sort of passions that drive human beings. Partly what they’re saying is, we don’t want to fuel the ideological passions. One of their answers was through commerce: trade and moneymaking and industry and science. But partly what they were trying to do is turn attention away from the hard questions of meaning and religious devotion and the Trinity and all these questions that were tearing societies apart. And so that involved turning attention away from questions of meaning and value, including in the academy.

You can kind of see how this plays out over the course of centuries, to the point where, in the 20th century, conservatives like Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom were arguing that universities had lost their way, that they were no longer talking about the things that mattered--the meaning of life, or the questions of like what a just society is, or of doing the important work of philosophizing and reading great books. Instead, it was all science and identity politics and civil rights stuff, which they were pretty dismissive of. [In their view] young people were not being formed in the traditions of Western civilization.

I think that some of that was true and some of that was false. A lot of a lot of people on university campuses are taking those questions seriously, are taking literature and the classics seriously. They’re doing it in a different register than what conservatives are used to. But [while] there’s a plenty of meaning of life questions happening on campuses, they’re partly right too, because I think that it’s neglected and fragmented. When you listen to the university leaders speak today, they’re not talking about bringing young people together to think through life’s hardest questions and to help them through the questions of how best to live. That’s not at the foreground, and I sort of think it should be. I am not a conservative, but I think that there’s room in our universities to restore some of those ideas in a very open new way. So that’s a subplot in the book.

The point here is that the new right loves to talk about the meaning of life. They do it often in a fascist register, or at least a hyper-jingoistic patriotic register that is pretty unthinking and pretty anti-intellectual, but they’re filling a vacuum of yearning that I think exists in our culture, that is being filled by them, because they’re willing to be generalists, they’re willing to spout off, they’re willing to make a million YouTube videos about this. [Take] Jordan Peterson. He’s not in my book, but he’s very important in this way, where he’s clearly touched a nerve for especially young men and everybody’s searching for meaning. We never talk about it, and liberals don’t talk about it very much. We all read the parenting books, but it’s not the same. And I think that they are really leveraging that problem of liberalism that goes back centuries.

…. I am frustrated by this problem of the right wing is very good at culture warring and at speaking in generalities and at going on offense and at fighting this fight. And I don’t think we should fight fire with fire, necessarily, but I do wish that our leaders were better at some of this rhetoric and better at countering some of these messages, especially about culture and the Founding and freedom. I don’t think I’d call myself a socialist or a democratic socialist, but AOC and Bernie are the people who have stood up most vocally and with the most power against this, and I really admire them for that. I’m very disillusioned with the Democratic leadership, but on the other hand, I understand how everyone’s flat-footed, because it’s all pretty shocking what’s going on. But it’s very frustrating.

Now contrast that with the new slogan that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is championing to answer “Make America Great Again.” Worried that the “socialism” label make stick to Democrats, Jeffries wants them instead to talk about being for a “Strong Floor, No Ceiling” instead. As he said on CNBC: “I’ll tell you what we stand for. It’s pretty clear. As Democrats, we believe in a strong floor and no ceiling. In America, you work hard, you play by the rules, you should be able to live the good life.”

As FrameLab’s Jason Sattler jibed, this is a slogan “designed by (and for) donors, not voters.” Yes, it signals a defense of the foundations of the modern welfare state. But, as Sattler notes, “it’s a structure without any protection from the elements.” He adds, “That’s a moral disaster for average Americans struggling to provide for their families in at least two ways. If high prices are a dominating concern for voters, the lack of a price ceiling would be a nightmare. And while most venture capitalists don’t have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads as winter begins, much of America does.” It’s also a slogan, he notes, that picks the wrong enemy—instead of rapacious billionaires, it’s those pesky economic populists who want to raise their taxes.

The problem, though, isn’t just with bad sloganeering by the Minority Leader, who was a corporate lawyer before entering politics. This is just another example of how so much of the Democratic mainstream has forgotten how to talk to voters in the language of meaning and belonging.

When Policy Isn’t Enough

The scholars Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman wrote a recent paper for the American Political Science Association that shows, in excruciating detail, how the people at the very top of the Democratic braintrust from 2016-2024 failed this test. Titled, “The Policy Bet: Democrats in a Post-Neoliberal Era,” their paper shows that while the best and brightest knew that Trump’s 2016 victory showed they were out of touch, their answer – more and better policy rather than meaning and belonging, fell short.

Here’s how Rosenfeld and Schlozman open things up:

Speaking before a class of Yale law students in 2017, Jake Sullivan, senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign the year before, ruminated on the working-class communities that had turned away from his candidate. “How do we solve for this basic and growing division in our society that gets to issues like dignity and alienation and identity?” Sullivan asked. His follow-up rumination—Yale was his alma mater, and the site of his wedding—turned inward: “How do we even ask the question without becoming the disconnected, condescending elite that we are talking about?”

Over the following years, Sullivan would serve as a ring leader in Democratic policy circles developing the economic program that became the Biden administration’s governing agenda. They identified as an urgent political problem what Sullivan had evoked at Yale: the crisis of class dealignment, or defection of lower-income and lower-education voters from the Democratic Party. Their solution was a policy agenda sufficiently ambitious and progressive to restore working people’s connection to the party that championed their material interests. Liberal policymakers would scale their ambitions, in both market-shaping investments and regulations and redistributive social policy, to meet the electoral challenge of working-class disaffection head-on. That meant supplanting the shibboleths of the reigning “neoliberal” paradigm, with its economistic emphasis on trade-offs and limits to public action.

More self-consciously than usual for party actors of their ilk, the ascendant wonks in the Democratic networks sought a policy solution to a political crisis. Saving democracy from MAGA would require the forging of a post-neoliberal political economy. In this grand vision, policymaking seemed to offer up a promise to instantiate, if not itself create, fundamental shifts in the balance of social and electoral forces—something like what an earlier generation of scholars in American politics would have termed a realignment. “In this era of mass disruption, whichever party responds with bold ideas has the opportunity to define the axis of politics for a generation, declared the president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, in 2018.

Without constructive collaboration with a rooted organizational politics, however, policy-as-strategy proved too much to ask. By pursuing a chiefly policy-oriented political approach amid major weaknesses in the traditional pillars of American liberalism, the Biden presidency found its achievements limited and profoundly vulnerable.

This political strategy requires explaining. Policy, after all, is hardly the only means by which parties might solve political problems and forge ties with voters. A party facing an erosion of working-class support might pursue, as one alternative path, new material investments in organizational and civic activity distinct altogether from the development of new public policies, whether in the form of party-building, support for allies in civil society, or even old-style patronage. The Democratic Party failed meaningfully to pursue any of these options either in the lead-up to Biden’s election or during his presidency. Indeed, beyond the continued development of a technically sophisticated message-testing machine for campaign-season advertising, Biden-era Democrats hardly attempted to change, let alone transform, the organizational dynamics of the party apparatus itself or the broader associational life surrounding it.

Rosenfeld and Schlozman go on to argue that this failure is the result of the “hollowness” of the Democratic Party since the 1970s (something they wrote a whole book about) and the resultant rise of professional-class policy wonks, pollsters and message-meisters, who audition for and rent themselves out to ambitious wannabe national politicians who themselves compete to take over the Democratic party franchise by auditioning for backing from mostly wealthy donors. But there’s something deeper Schlozenfeld are pointing to: for much of the last ten years, if not longer, Democrats have been talking to the public primarily in the language of policy. “Deliverism” vs “popularism” after all, is a debate about whether serving up juicy public goods will win hearts and minds, or whether giving people whatever polls well will work better.

The alternative, of course, is organizing at a massive scale. As we all know, that path was abandoned after Barack Obama’s first successful run for president in 2008. It is emerging again now in fits and stops, and with greater emphasis in a few states and greater neglect in others. But organizing doesn’t magically motivate people; the opposite is the case: it only works when it starts with listening to what people care about and then helping them find their way toward building the power to get the solutions they need. And no, the Democratic big donor class is emphatically not interested in helping make that kind of organizing happen—which is why Trump and MAGA have been having such a relatively easy time of blowing up the social welfare state, academia, labor rights, environmental protections, etc. (And now that I think of it—the organizing gap also explains why there was no significant public pushback when the COVID-era expansion of the Child Tax Credit expired; even though it had drastically reduced poverty among children, the cries of policy wonks were nowhere enough to save it against the opposition of Senators Mansion and Cinema.) There is no cavalry coming to save anyone; instead, we’re having to build it in the midst of the fight.

Combating and defeating MAGA is going to take more than winning the midterms—but we’re going to have to work very hard to keep the mechanics of electoral victory from overtaking the crying need to engage the cultural war over meaning and belonging.

Towards a New Politics of Meaning?

I don’t have a well-thought-out answer to this problem. But it’s good to hear people like Dutch historian and activist Rutger Bregman frame our current dilemma in terms of the need for a Moral Revolution, not just a redistributive one. And I find myself struck by how much Rabbi Michael Lerner’s old call for a “Politics of Meaning” still resonates. Consider just the opening paragraphs of this piece he wrote in 2014 about the need for a network of spiritual progressives:

We live in a world filled with loving and caring people. We all crave a world filled with love and care. Yet most of us doubt that we can experience a loving and caring world beyond our own private lives and homes. Why? Because the ethos of the capitalist marketplace, which places greatest value on money and power, has infiltrated our personal lives, shaping our unconscious and conscious beliefs about “human nature.”

In the economic marketplace we are taught to look out for ourselves, maximize our profits, and do what we need to do to get ahead, even at the cost of people we care about. Most people spend most of their waking hours at work. The way we come to experience “reality” is massively shaped by our experiences in the world of work. We learn that the work world is no place for vulnerability, caring, and love. Rather, it is the place governed by the injunction to maximize the “bottom line” of money and power. And this, we come to believe is “the real world.”

So we often hide our yearnings for deep connection, care, and love, and instead build walls around us to protect ourselves from being vulnerable to others because when we have done so in the past we have been disappointed or hurt. We learn to see others through a narrow utilitarian framework, assessing whether they can be “of use” to us in achieving our goals in the economic marketplace. Not surprisingly, those of us who have been taught to think this way about others at work tend to bring this way of thinking into our personal lives. The result: we often feel surrounded by people who see us in terms of what we can do for them. The powerful drive within all of us to be loving and caring seems so “unrealistic” in this situation that many of us have learned to dismiss it, repress it, or simply not believe that others too share that desire to be in a world of love and caring.

We have been so conditioned to believe that the world we want is impossible that we start to repeat a foolish and self-destructive message that apart from our own small group of friends and loved ones (and perhaps our own religious or spiritual community), everyone else is only concerned with power and money. Popular culture promotes this view and it is this cynicism about others that makes it seem realistic. The more we believe people will try to manipulate us to get their needs met, the more we engage in the same behavior to protect ourselves. This cycle of manipulation ends up creating a reality that is contrary to our deepest yearnings and needs. When we are stuck in this cycle, we increasingly come to believe that the only “rational” way to live is to “look out for number one.”

As a result, many of us feel lonely, alienated, and scared, even in the midst of friendships and marriages. We see ourselves surrounded by people who only seem to care about us to the extent that we can “deliver something.” In short, people have absorbed the old bottom line of the capitalist marketplace, and have come to believe that this is just reality. Spiritual progressives, unlike their liberal counterparts, understand that political rights and economic entitlements while important are not what people are actually craving. To successfully transform our society from its current obsession with acquiring material goods, we need to help connect people with their deepest yearnings for a world of meaning and purpose. Simultaneously, we need to provide a framework for concrete political proposals that are grounded in spiritual principles as a counter to the one-dimensionality of many liberal proposals.

Dear readers—if any or all of this resonates for you, who do you think is doing this work now? What organizations are rising to this challenge? Leave a comment.

End Times

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