About last night

Across the spectrum, post-Americans must grapple with an uncomfortable truth

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Well, okay.

I don’t know whether this will be a short post or something more long and sprawling. I’ve been head-tripping about how to approach, ahem, the overnight political developments in post-America. The head-trips include

• wondering if I’m sufficiently informed by grace to undertake meaningful observations

• wondering how to avoid vapidity, as in “we shall now see how a second round of Trumpism plays out”

• getting enough of a broad-scope perspective to do justice to all the various groupings of post-Americans to have something substantive to say about their roles in how we got here, as well as how each is likely to react

Let me start with something that is not easy for me to grapple with.

I’ve written a lot about the origins of the progressive impulse, starting with Rousseau, the Romantics, Marx, Dewey and Freud, and the thinkers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth (Richard T. Ely, Thorstein Veblen, Herbert Croly, etc.) who were proponents of the view that the Madisonian view of government was outmoded and that technocrats in areas like education, health care, industrial advancement and urbanization needed to take the policy reins. And about how that impulse made possible the radicalism that has consumed the Left since the 1960s.

I’ve also written extensively about the development of conservatism, starting with Burke, and continuing through Bastiat, Richard M. Weaver, the founding of National Review, Frank Meyer’s fusionist formulation, of course, Reagan’s A Time for Choosing speech, and the coming on board of the New York Intellectuals, (Nathan Glaser, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Joshua Muravchik, etc.) who had come to find Lionel Trilling’s take on the American landscape inadequate.

Speaking of inadequate, that’s what we need to make damn sure our present take is not.

And everybody - us inhabitants of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain, in-the-weeds analyst types, Never Trumpers who cast their lot with the Harris-Walz ticket, and, of course, the progressives, who, never before having shown themselves to be particularly impressed with Harris when she was among a number of choices, got fired up with the white-hot passion of Swifties when she was shoehorned into the slot vacated by Biden - needs to reckon with something we all find discomfiting to one degree or another.

Let me speak plainly. There’s a class element to this.

When the tectonic shift, the inflection point when the countercultural impulse became the mainstream, occurred at the end of the 1960s, the Left, with the exception of a few stray Weather Underground types (most of whom would later get on board) opted for the more phased and less abruptly revolutionary route of the Marcuse-Gramsci long march through the institutions. These folks came in off the streets and went into such fields as education, journalism, the arts and entertainment, institutional religion, and even business, but still harbored a vision of complete upending of the American experiment. They now wore ties, worked in offices, sat on boards and the like, but saw society’s remaining grubby hippies as allies. Hence the support rock musicians were lending to Democratic candidates as far back as McGovern and Carter. The coalition they’d built was well positioned to push forward all the kooky ideas we now take to be normal: transgenderism, defunding police, disparate impact, DEI, net-zero energy policy, universal basic income, to name a few.

Given the Left’s control of the levers of cultural power, this portion of the nation’s ideological spectrum became fashionable. Moral preening - virtue signaling - eventually made it extremely impolite - really, hateful and beyond the pale - to say the progressive direction was the wrong one for the country.

Meanwhile, there has been a swath of America that was so unfashionable it didn’t even have a seat at the table of the national conversation / shoutfest.

We actually started seeing signs of it back there at the tectonic shift. 1968 was when Merle Haggard released two defining records, “Okie From Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side of Me.” Haggard eventually won the respect of the smelly hippies, such as the Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson, but he’d given a musical voice to a looming presence in our society. The following decade saw a big audience for Burt Reynolds’s yee-haw movies. Interesting political currents were underway, as manifested by blue-collar participation in Reagan’s winning coalition.

What Rolling Stone, Norman Lear, Leonard Bernstein, the New York Times, et al neglected to see was that the decidedly un-sexy work of keeping the nation’s infrastructure reliable, of making its cars and appliances, and of keeping alive some notion of cohesive families and local communities was done by people mostly invisible to them. And the resentment of those people festered. They saw the self-appointed arbiters of what was refined, hip or visionary as simultaneously snobbish and useless. This swath had sort of a conservative inner compass, but it was mixed with a keen sense of social stratification. And the decades unfolded, they saw the management of the companies they worked for play an outsized role in disrupting their communities. Management that, per the above-mentioned long march through the institutions, now leaned left. But the real source of their ire was offshoring, a practice perfectly defensible from a free-market standpoint, but not without kitchen-table consequences in the Rust Belt.

These are generally people of few words, people who work with their hands. They have never read Russell Kirk or Hayek. They’d been raised to believe that if one plied a skilled trade, however humble, he’d have economic security. That didn’t happen, and the cultural assumptions on which they’d based their lives were toppling by the day.

These people like their music and their food on the simple side. They’re often inclined to go to church, but they have no interest in theological fine points.

The reason Trump appealed to them is that, although he was born into money, it was new money - made in Queens rather than Manhattan, no less - and he liked the associations with steelworkers and window installers his developer work afforded him. He liked their straight, and often crude, way of talking. It was a world of sharp elbows and transactional interaction.

He segued into politics in 2015 and the great unwashed swath saw the most effective champion they could have imagined.

I can’t stand Donald Trump, and I think we’ll see further conflation of actual conservative positions (staying out of international green-energy agreements, tax cuts, good federal-judge appointments) with Trumpist nonsense (tariffs, throwing Ukraine under the bus, obsession with retribution against political enemies, flirtation with goofballs like Elon Musk and RFK, Jr.) as we commence into the Very Stable Genius 2.0 era.

But everybody across the spectrum fails to reckon with the sociocultural force that gave the VSG a clean decisive victory - in spite of his election denialism four years ago, his role in January 6, his status as a convicted felon, his sybaritic view of women, his vulgar mouth and his admiration for strongmen - at his or her own peril.

So how should we who stand on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain process this revelation? Well, a first inclination might be to say, “We must educate them on how to be consistent in their policy positions, and bolster their positions with some historical precedent.”

But, as correct as we are, let’s be frank; we’re not currently in a position to be listened to by them. Their response to such an outreach would probably be along the lines of, “You pointy-heads have proved utterly useless in improving our lives; we don’t need your clever little theories.”

So the great swath got what it wanted politically. Now we shall see how happy they are as Trumpist policy gets implemented and consequences start showing up.

I suspect their discontent is not over.