I came across an interesting response to my It’s The Stupid, Stupid piece. Parts of it struck me as a touch pedantic and triumphant, but I thought the conclusion was stimulating.
I think it is crucial to grasp, first, that Republican discourse is suffused with non-argumentative subcultural signaling and, second, that the content of that signaling is mostly a matter of impotent rage and despair for a real reason.
We are wrong to react to non-arguments as though they are arguments, pointing out the foolish ways in which they fail to pass muster as arguments when they are not arguments at all. We should be making our own arguments and filling the empty argumentative space they have evacuated in their rage and despair.
Further, we should hear the rage and despair in their signals. We should grasp as they clearly have done themselves, that they have been defeated. We should stop treating the ferocity of their passion as if it represented an organized opposition. We should be building up multicultures and convivialities in the midst of the wreckage of the Culture Wars that we won and they lost and filling the empty civilizational space they have in evacuated in defeat.
None of this is to deny the real civilizational threats posed by the historically all-too-familiar bad-faith alliance of parochial short-sighted incumbent-elites and the impassioned mob, but it is to demand that we identify their convulsions for what they actually are and respond to what is actually happening here and now.
That clip makes a little more sense in context, but you get the picture. My reaction is that there is some good advice in there, but that idea that we’ve won the Culture War is premature and inappropriate at the moment. I haven’t seen a poll in six months that would indicate that we’re winning the Culture War or anything else. He doesn’t deny the real civilizational threat we’re facing, but he downplays it. We have a two-party system. When one of those parties becomes captured by neo-fascists, you have to take it as seriously as a heart attack.
