The Only Way Out Is Through - The Bias Magazine
In this exhausted political moment, a reactionary antipolitics is ascendent — one that looks to "traditional" aesthetic and religious pursuits as an antidote to the spiritual dead-end of conventional "woke" liberalism and free-market conservatism.
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The Only Way Out Is Through - The Bias Magazine
The
Bias
Magazine
The Voice of the Christian Left
Against Reactionary Anticapitalism
Erik Baker | June 30, 2022
In this exhausted political moment, a reactionary antipolitics is ascendent — one that looks to "traditional" aesthetic and religious pursuits as an antidote to the spiritual dead-end of conventional "woke" liberalism and free-market conservatism.
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For a moment it seemed that there was an alternative after all. Winter was turning to spring and an avowed democratic socialist was winning presidential primaries. In hushed tones we called him the front-runner. Soon he would be organizer-in-chief. Everything was getting apocalyptic – a time of revelation, of crisis. Nothing would be the same. Normal strove to reassert itself: Phone calls were made; announcements issued; the old script again, all of a sudden. But the disintegration of that familiar universe wouldn’t be stopped so easily. Lockdowns, the vaporization of shared life and then its explosive reappearance. Precincts up in flames, bodies in the streets. In the summer sun you could smell a new world wafting up from the molten blacktop.
And then – what? I’m still not sure, exactly. The hard edges hemming in our reality, once blurred, regained their solidity. Slowly, all but imperceptibly, kairos gave way once more to chronos; it was Ordinary Time again. Just enough suburban white people voted for normality for it to reclaim its place in the Oval Office. The lesser evil triumphed. The boot continued to stamp on human faces, allowing them — not always, by any means, but often enough — just enough space to breathe.
This closure of possibility is the fundamental trauma of our political moment. It often feels like the left today, in a strict sense, does not have a future, only various versions of an indefinitely extended present: the repetition compulsion of the Bernie 2024 camp; the borderline misanthropic despair of the climate doomers; the podcasters, the posters, the publishers, commodifying their diagnoses of our collective terminal condition. If social media is to be believed, young people are increasingly “blackpilled.” Their eyes have been opened and at last they can see the endless nothingness stretching out before them.
For the most part, the manifestations of this attitude of political resignation have been innocuous. If someone wants to get really into gardening or grilling or ketamine right now, or to partake of what Alcoholics Anonymous calls the “geographical cure,” I can’t begrudge them. But our ambient hopelessness has also fueled a seductive but noxious ideological tendency: a reactionary antipolitics that looks to allegedly traditional aesthetic and religious pursuits as an antidote to the spiritual dead-end of both conventional (“woke”) left-liberalism and free-market conservatism. An array of features, profiles, and thinkpieces over the last few months have given it labels — the “post-left,” the “New Right,” the “postliberal right,” the “vibe shift” — and traced its key sites, acolytes, outposts, and hangers-on. Among them are Peter Thiel, the podcast Red Scare, the magazine Compact, the fake New York microneighborhood “Dimes Square,” and something called Urbit, which as best as I can tell is a version of Substack for blockchain enthusiasts, a cinematic universe of Twitter and Tumblr accounts that talk a lot about “extinction” as a sort of spiritual disposition.
Yes, it’s a freakshow — New Yorkers, tech bros, and media sinecurists with too much time on their hands and an adolescent compulsion to provoke. But there’s a certain hallucinatory clarity to this scene’s thinking, too. However absurd the result, they have ultimately done little more than to follow to their logical conclusion a set of intuitions that are shared more broadly on today’s left — especially those seeking to synthesize Christian and socialist commitments.
For a long time, mainstream, secular socialists casually wrote off the possibility of such a synthesis. And indeed it is not a straightforward task to reconcile an emancipatory political vision with a religious tradition that has for millennia, in its institutional form, overwhelmingly backed the side of power and exploitation. But in recent years, with the renascent socialist movement desperate for allies wherever they can be found, it’s become almost gauche to suggest that there’s a unique set of difficulties that Christian socialism must navigate.
Not all religious anticapitalisms are created equal. Faith can nurture revolutionary hope in our collective ability to overcome a seemingly indestructible mode of production. But it can also be wielded to suggest that such hope is unnecessary; that a well-tended spirituality, expressed through a return to “traditional” forms of life, is by itself an effective avenue of resistance to capitalism. It is a tempting bargain in dark times — very much like other deals that purport to be from God but in fact have a different author.
The anticapitalist left often likes to imagine itself engaged in a form of a siege warfare. Capitalism is likened to a fortress, hulking and impenetrable. Our task is to occupy the territory on its outside — to encircle it, to cut it off from external reinforcements, until its defenses shrivel up and we can move in. This search for capitalism’s outside goes hand in hand with — and is partially borne from — a paranoid fear of “cooption.” Those who have come of age politically in the twenty-first century have witnessed an endless parade of “outsiders” who soon became firmly ensconced on the inside. Rare is the subversive gesture that is not replicated before long by some corporate social media account. But this spectacle has only intensified the search for some exterior pivot point, one that will be forever beyond the reach of the powers that be.
This is how many Christian leftists understand religion, or more broadly, “tradition” — a feature they share with all the various postliberals who reject the leftist label entirely. On this view, the crucial feature of capitalism is its internally revolutionary character, its tendency, as Marx and Engels put it, to turn all that is solid into air. Capitalism can easily metabolize any call for “change” (exhibit A: Barack Obama), so the only gristle that could actually muck up its guts must come from the past. After all, the history of the last several centuries is a record of the obstacles that capitalism has overcome in its march to world domination; to figure out which obstacles we ought to erect in our own time, we should therefore look backwards.
For instance, the theologian and occasional political critic David Bentley Hart has “every confidence that we will find a way to turn ‘socialism’ into just another name for late-modern liberal individualism.” The only way to inoculate against cooption is to reframe socialism as “a Romantic rebellion against modernity,” even affirming “an essentially nostalgic belief in the hierarchy of those subsidiary estates and institutions that naturally evolve out of religious, communal, and social life.” Here Hart, who claims the socialist label, is hard to distinguish from the full-throated Compact reactionary Patrick Deneen, who summarizes the inexorable consequences of any revolutionary politics: “Traditional forms of life, which offer some resistance to concentrations of power, would be relentlessly targeted by the supposed agents of liberation.” Considering that Hart has sought to distance himself from right-wing postliberalism, it is striking how much he shares its animating concerns: the encroachment of modernity on tradition, the value of social and institutional stability, and the wisdom of looking to the past to find alternatives to our present distress.
“Tradition” is of course a slippery beast, and its presumed contents vary widely. For the aesthetes of the downtown Manhattan art world, it seems mostly to denote a culture of art for art’s sake and respect for the prerogatives of individual genius (widely but falsely imagined as a premodern inheritance). Allegedly, there’s a cohort of recent “converts” for whom tradition is a synonym for the Roman Catholic Church, though how many of them have ever set foot in an RCIA classroom is anyone’s guess. In the pages of Compact, it means most saliently the right-wing orthodoxy on sex and gender — or “biology,” the transphobic dogwhistle their writers are fond of repeating without a trace of irony.
Well, as Freud taught us, we all want to climb back inside the womb when the going gets tough. But none of these would-be havens in a heartless world are as well insulated from liberalism as today’s fugitives would like them to be. Christ himself anticipated that in the upheaval wrought by his coming, fathers and mothers would be divided against sons and daughters; it is no surprise, then, that struggles for justice today have, as always, caused battle lines to be drawn in the supposedly pre-political realms of family, gender relations, art and religion. For the postliberals, the encroachment of the profane on the sacred is today’s major political emergency. “Nothing beautiful survives the culture war,” Atlantic staff writer Elizabeth Bruenig laments, in an essay on the politicization of parenthood following the leak of Samuel Alito’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. It’s an increasingly common cri de coeur among those searching for sanctuary outside the reach of liberal modernity. It is one thing to announce your intention to tend your own garden, disillusioned by conventional politics; it is another thing to find a plot to till where “politics” — which is to say, power, conflict, the challenges of collective decision-making — have not already taken root.
But all of this was supposed to be an anticapitalism. To ward off suspicion that there’s nothing more to its political vision than boring conservative grievance, the postliberal right often tells its story about culture war in the language of class struggle. This move sees “the working class” as the repository of “tradition,” remaining faithful to the values of family, faith, community, hard work, and the significance of place. The “ruling class,” the “professional-managerial class,” or simply “the elites,” on the other hand, are depicted as the rootless soldiers of feminism, antiracism, the LGBTQ movement, and everything else lumped under the umbrellas of “cultural liberalism” or “identity politics.” Class is culture.
Strained as it is, this framework has been articulated in different ways. Patrick Deneen trots out a conspiratorial version that rhymes with older stories about “Cultural Marxism”: “The hedonistic and liberatory object of ‘total revolution,’” he claims, was in the late twentieth century melded with “the ‘conservative’ structures of technocratic and economic power that maintained and deepened the rule of a small oligarchic class.” Fêted Dimes Square playwright Matthew Gasda has a grander narrative, of the sort that a precocious high schooler might produce after reading about Max Weber on Wikipedia. For him, the tyranny of the “PMC” is “part of the secularization of the modern age,” through which “bureaucracy... replaced faith; bonds of honor and tradition gave way to scraps of paper, and folkways hardened into regulations.” The German politician Sahra Wagenknecht, a favorite among American postliberals, is not so fatalistic; she still holds out hope for a left that addresses itself to workers who “subscribe to conservative values, because they want stable communities, just like the workers of the past.”
Whatever form it takes, the conflation of class and culture has become ubiquitous. Even people who would never affirm the thesis in its strong form can find themselves lapsing into the assumption that there’s something a bit bourgeois about being gay. Witness Danielle Allen, Harvard political theorist and aspiring Democratic politician, explaining in the Washington Post what she sees as the germ of truth in her opponents’ worldview: “Elite organizations … are, in fact, generally left-leaning and have sufficient combined power to squelch socially conservative ways of life, particularly those linked to traditional family structures.” It’s gotten to the point that even Compact co-founder and conservative Catholic Sohrab Ahmari thinks it’s gone too far, according to his dispatch on this June’s Labor Notes conference. “At its worst, this tendency bizarrely classes adjunct professors and the like among the ruling class,” Ahmari observes, “while oligarchs like Elon Musk are made out to be working-class heroes, of a kind, simply because they defy some progressive orthodoxies.” He’s not wrong.
Adrian Bott @Cavalorn