Lost Ground

Change is difficult for someone who perceives themselves as losing something. Paul Rosenberg cites Corey Robin for pointing out that these are the people modern conservatism appeals to--those who want to be "great again". Rosenberg's interview with Angie Maxwell goes into how women and a sense of loss were integral to the Republican Southern Strategy.

Modern sexism describes feelings of resentment and distrust towards feminists and working women. Rather than believing that a woman cannot do a particular job, folks who express Modern sexism resents a woman for wanting to do that job.

Everything that progressives would champion as a success or progress — I mean, if you already had the ideal society you wanted, then "progress" is just chipping away at that.

Update (July 25):  In the wake of the Robert Mueller testimony, Andrew O'Hehir is not encouraged about the prospects for representative democracy.

What sticks out for me above everything else in Wednesday’s spectacle is another thing we already knew but is clearer than ever. Democrats and Republicans don’t just have different points of view or different understandings of America (one of them kind of boring, the other completely terrifying). They inhabit different universes, and communications between the two realms are spotty at best.

I don’t mean this as a glowing endorsement of the Democratic Party in general, which is plagued by all sorts of internal conniptions about ideology and policy and cannot work out how forcefully to resist the rise of (let’s just say it) fascism. But even when they tell lies or spin history to their advantage or deliver sanctimonious stem-winders on the greatness of the American middle class, Democrats remain at least theoretically connected to an epistemology of reality, meaning the idea that facts matter, actions have consequences, and evidence drawn from the past can be a useful guide to the future.

As for Republicans — I mean, what can you say? No doubt their party has been trending toward a Venn diagram of cynicism, self-delusion and conspiracy theory for many years, but this is different. What we saw on those committees was a bunch of Republican members who have undergone something akin to a collective religious conversion or cult awakening. It’s not just that they believe things that aren’t true; we all fall prey to that sometimes. They have gone past the most radical postmodern thinkers and no longer believe in truth at all, or at least do not believe it is something objective that exists in the outside world and can be determined.

As Hannah Arendt and others have proposed, this kind of totalitarian ideology can be immensely seductive to those who feel alienated or left behind by the rapidly changing facts of modern social reality.