By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, November 06, 2020
The inconclusive, unsatisfying outcome of Tuesday’s election might be read as evidence of a country bitterly divided. Which it is, of course, but the election also provides evidence of a country strangely united — united in spite of itself.
Here is a seldom spoken fact of American political life: There is no real mandate for radical social change. It isn’t there. Talk of it is a parlor game, and sightings of it are a mirage, whether in left-wing form or in rightist form. Almost nobody actually wants radical social change, few Americans would be happy with it, and fewer still would be willing to endure the disruption associated with it.
Americans talk a good revolutionary game. That’s in our blood. We were founded in revolution and still like to talk about it. Bernie Sanders promises a “revolution,” and woke goofs such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declare themselves devotees of socialism. The Right has its own version of Jacobin fervor — tea parties, the Buchanan Brigades (remember them?), “drain the swamp!” — and the Republican Party has more than earned its designation as the red party, revolutionists in rhetoric if not in fact.
But the evidence suggests that Americans do not actually want revolution: They like the entitlement system the way it is and strongly resist changes to it; they famously hate Congress but like their own representatives well enough; in this election, 98 percent of House incumbents will be returned to Washington; proposals for radical social change ranging from government-monopoly health care to categorical prohibition of abortion reliably fail to command the support of even a bare majority, much less a transformative popular groundswell; the big tax-cut bill of 2017 reduced the top income-tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, a whoop-dee-doo moment if ever there was one; if you ask Americans about Trump’s trade policies, you get partisan polarization, but if you ask them about trade in general, you get a strikingly broad bipartisan consensus; a majority of Republicans, a majority of Democrats, and a majority of independents support marijuana legalization, which is proceeding through the states in a slow but steady democratic fashion. Etc.
Of course, there are subjects about which American opinion remains sharply divided, but there is also wide and deep consensus.
What Americans actually seem to want is for government to improve their well-being in two traditional ways: by increasing their ability to consume and by raising the social standing of the groups to which they belong. One of these produces a fight over scarce resources, and the other produces a fight over status. Our politics is not about philosophy or the grand sweep of history: It’s about free false teeth and the social pecking order.
The standing demand of the American Left is not a fundamental reordering of political and economic life along Marxist lines. Democrats may talk about socialism and “democratizing” the economy, but what real-life progressives walking the street actually demand is that somebody else pay their medical bills and their college loans, and that the state maybe provide them with an allowance, in loco parentis, in the form of wage subsidies and employer mandates.
It is not difficult to sympathize with where that comes from: Surely I am not the only middle-aged man who thinks of all the fun stuff he could have done with that $5,000 every time he has the house painted. Paying your student loans and insurance premiums is a drag, a joyless thing. But our college-educated progressives do not demand that somebody else pay off their student loans because they are ensorcelled by the ghost of Lenin — like me and you and everybody else, they just have other things they would like to do with that money, spending it on whatever people like them spend it on — ecotourism in Cambodia or fair-trade purslane enemas or whatever. They may dress it up in anti-capitalist rhetoric or social-justice rhetoric, but consumption is consumption is consumption.
Because we live in a rich country, the money stuff is relatively easy. We can’t do all the stuff Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders want to do, but there’s a lot of American prosperity to go around. The status stuff is harder, in part because the money stuff is easier. Hungry people wish the people they love had a little more; well-fed people wish the people they hate had a little less.
If you want to understand how status competition shapes our domestic politics in non-obvious ways, consider the case of gun control. Almost every progressive proposal for gun control consists of new restrictions on federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them, i.e. the least-criminal demographic in these United States. That’s not an anti-crime program — that’s a program to annoy gun enthusiasts. There are much more sensible proposals that probably would reduce violent crime: actually prosecuting straw-buyer cases instead of using that law as a paper tiger; pursuing more prosecutions and longer sentences for first-time and non-violent firearms offenses; having the ATF actually do its job and retrieve guns transferred in erroneously approved purchases; pursuing more aggressive gun-trafficking investigations and prosecutions rather than reserving such actions to major organized-crime cases; etc. Those are all potentially fruitful ideas, but none of them would accomplish what gun control is meant to accomplish: inconveniencing and humiliating gun enthusiasts, who are seen as an atavistic cultural enemy by the kind of nice progressives who don’t leave Brooklyn on the weekends.
Similarly, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg could personally take care of pretty much every American woman who wants an abortion but cannot afford to pay for one, but the point of publicly funded abortions isn’t the money — it’s exercising power over abortion opponents. Joe Biden’s ongoing jihad against the Little Sisters of the Poor has nothing to do with the need for birth control and abortifacients among . . . elderly celibate nuns. The Left, including the Catholic Left, simply wants to rub their noses in it for sport, to demonstrate that they can, to aggrandize and entrench their own status. The same is true for any number of hot-button social issues: forcing people to sit through indoctrination sessions and make ritual confessions as a condition of employment at major corporations, writing transgender ideology into second-graders’ textbooks in Utah, Invasion of the Body Snatchers–style shrieking about “privilege.” If you see status as relative, lowering the status of hated rival groups is as good as increasing your own status. Somebody holds the hoop, and somebody is obliged to jump through it.
Aside from certain religious traditionalists and a few artists, most Americans do not have any real interior sense of self and are instead almost purely exterior in their orientation, getting their sense of status and personal meaning from the evaluation and approval of others. That’s the evil genius behind Facebook and Twitter, the genesis of the selfie, and the reason you now have to honk your horn after every red light to rouse the driver in front of you from his Instagram immersion. For such people, status is an absolutely zero-sum calculation: If one person moves up a few notches, then everybody now below him has been diminished. It’s a thoroughly puerile way of thinking about the world, but it is what drives American life — especially American political life. This kind of status-gaming is why our politics is driven by tribe rather than policy and why the president has become a ceremonial tribal totem instead of a chief executive. That’s what we’re fighting over.
On the policy front, most Americans, including American progressives, are fundamentally conservative — even reactionary: It is not Mitt Romney or Ted Cruz but Bernie Sanders who speaks wistfully about returning to the policies of the 1950s, as do many other Democrats, Joe Biden prominent among them. Barack Obama came into office talking like Fidel Castro and left with a fat Netflix deal and a new gold Rolex — that community-organizer stuff is what he did on his way from Harvard to Martha’s Vineyard, his off-the-rack-suit years. Why on earth would he want to overthrow the social order when he was on his way to climbing to the top of it? Perhaps Senator Sanders ponders these things in his lakefront dacha, or maybe Nancy Pelosi thinks of them at the FBO.
We aren’t fighting over philosophy. We’re fighting over consumption and status, just like chickens or meerkats or chimpanzees. And maybe the message of Tuesday’s election was nothing more than: “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”
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