The success of the Democratic Socialists of America in the June primaries has prompted much speculation about what it means, not only for the Democratic establishment (the so-called “moderates” who are nowadays hardly that) but for US politics as a whole.
The fact is that American politics as a process and a structure – the campaigns, the media coverage, the candidates’ basic strategies, the lies, the subterfuges – has barely changed. What has changed is the mentality of the winning candidates, which cannot be properly described as “political” at all in the word’s recognizable sense; it is simply a white-hot brain core of elemental rage.
Rage at what, exactly, it is difficult to say, given its wildly unfocused and incoherent nature. Billionaires? MAGA? Property owners? Jews? Israel? Columbia University? Divisive politics? Christianity? Big Pharma?
Who knows? Who cares? One wonders whether the Democratic Socialists themselves do, so long as whatever issues they raise are transgressive ones, presented violently and irrationally to attract plenty of media attention.
Melat Kiros, who defeated Diana Degette in her attempt to win re-election in Coloraro’s 1st congressional district, told voters: “I looked into healthcare, I looked into childcare, I looked into housing, I looked into social justice, I looked into climate. Every single issue that I looked at, where we thought there was a problem that was persisting, we already figured out the solution a long time ago.” Straight from the brainpan of the most brilliant political thinker on the Front Range. If Ms. Kiros simply stood up and released a primal scream every time she addressed an audience, she could easily beat out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her party’s presidential nomination two years from now.
“You solve homelessness by giving people housing, you solve hunger by giving people food, you solve healthcare by going to a single-payer system,” she added. “We know these things already, and yet nothing changes, ever – and it’s because, despite the fact the vast majority of Americans agree on the solutions for all of these issues, there’s too much money in our politics.” Tocqueville would have been in awe of the young lady.
An excellent book by Carl R. Trueman offers a penetrating insight into the formless political thought of the western world in the 21st century and the essentially formless and contentless minds that have shaped it. “Our world,” he writes in The Desecration of Man, “is not characterized by a disillusioned indifference to values originally grounded in religious faith. Rather, it often seems to revel in an ecstatic destruction of all that was once considered sacred… Transgression of that once considered sacred has become [the] primary task [of the cultural elites]. And transgression of the sacred is exhilarating precisely because it makes us feel like gods, the creators of our own meanings and our own selves.”
Transgression all the more exhilarating, too, owing to the extent to which it agrees with the nihilism that has been a strong temptation of the post-Christian mind for the past two centuries.
A further aspect of the “Democratic” Socialist movement is the degree to which it is significantly the work of second-generation immigrants from non-western nations; a fact that, upon reflection, exonerates the writings of conservative critics from the 1970s down to the present day of mass immigration from the Third World. These critics are a much-maligned group who warned against the incorrect assumption that immigrants from these regions would be predominantly well-meaning and open-minded newcomers with regard to US politics, culture and history.
‘Transgression of the sacred is exhilarating precisely because it makes us feel like gods’
Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez in New York, Kiros in Colorado: none of these people gives the impression of being “assimilated” to the broader US culture beyond their districts and cities, just as Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and AOC refuse “assimilation” to the country and culture they delight in criticizing.
Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and author, one observed Americans’ tendency to live in the future, to the point where a majority of them speak and behave as if the future were the realest thing there is, while the past is inadequate, shameful or simply nonexistent. This explains why US politicians are always talking about what Barack Obama memorably called “hope and change,” as if to imply that the America of today is a woefully backward, unhappy and benighted place, requiring immediate transformation, material and moral.
There was a sulphurous whiff of this dangerously demagogic trope in the primaries, one that Democratic Socialism – an obvious contradiction in terms – can only encourage in this hopey-dopey “future” of theirs.
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