Back in 1931, when the West really was on the brink of being overrun by card-carrying fascists, the German-Jewish essayist Walter Benjamin found himself exasperated with exactly this kind of knee-jerk negative posture. The left of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin felt, was winning the moral high ground but losing the rhetorical (and therefore political) war. In a widely read review titled “Left-Wing Melancholy,” he took aim at the New Objectivity, an artistic movement that satirized the vacuousness of modern life. These artists and writers, he wrote, had abandoned the “gift” of disgust with present material conditions in favor of rote, routine and self-flattering criticism. Preferring to pose as a “spiritual elite” rather than actively engage with the labor movement, they were guilty of a “grotesque underestimation of the opponent” (in this case, capitalism). Where their ideals used to be, Benjamin lamented, there lay only “the empty spaces where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the feelings—nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity—once rested. Now the hollow forms are absentmindedly caressed” with a “know-all irony” that “turns the yawning emptiness into a celebration.”
For many progressives, Benjamin’s gift of disgust with material conditions has likewise been displaced, shifting instead to a disgust with the people who vote for Trump. Since 2016, it has become common across the left-liberal spectrum to argue that these voters are low-information, cast ballots against their own interests, are primarily motivated by misogyny and racism, and on top of this are just plain stupid. While a pedigreed “spiritual elite” has tried to educate these voters out of their incorrect economic assessments and backwards cultural beliefs, it has in the meantime allowed a “yawning emptiness”—a silence—to engulf issues that its ostensible base, working-class voters, say really matter to them.
I think it’s worth pointing out that part of that yawning emptiness includes the “God gap,” finely highlighted by David French. “A party that’s culturally disconnected from (or perhaps even scornful of) traditional religious faith,” says French, “is going to alienate itself from tens of millions of voters it could otherwise reach.” That elephant in the blue room seems to almost-but-not-quite have a place in this essay.
Helpfully getting more specific, Stevens goes on to describe the way that, in the last four years, the narrative on the left repeatedly dismissed economic complaints as essentially fictional:
The reasoning went something like this: Consumer sentiment (bad) had become spuriously uncoupled from the underlying macroeconomic data (good) and could therefore be dismissed as “bad vibes.” All Biden—and Harris after him, forced to clean up the campaign disaster he left in his wake—had to do was show us enough data to make us believe inflation was under control. Never mind that other year-over-year data for 2022-23 showed trends like worsening inequality, a deepening affordability crisis (especially pronounced in blue states, which have failed to build housing), an uptick in credit-card defaults and a 12 percent increase in the national homelessness rate. The standard political vocabulary—GDP is rocking!—failed to capture the underlying reality, which is that it rocked unequally. The Democrats used this language anyway. The idea of a “vibecession,” meanwhile, smuggled in the contemptuous suggestion that the problem lay with the voters themselves, who simply refused to admit how wonderfully they were doing.
…Dismissing the economic experiences and self-perception of low- and middle-income voters is also a bad idea for a party that is still seen as having presided over the biggest bailout for banks in global history. The appeal to “vibecession,” itself a gross misdescription of how “real people” experience the “real economy,” in fact recalls the underlying causes of the 2008 financial crisis: back then, financiers chose to dress up the economic outlook in fancy math and intentionally obfuscating language that directly contradicted the underlying—and structurally rotten—material conditions.
Stevens’s essay, titled “Left-Wing Irony,” is a good example of (and step toward?) the conversation that I wish would take place publicly on the left today. “Irony Abounds” could just as easily have been the essay title, and to counter that sea of irony, on both the left and the right, Stevens says the left needs a better “type” of irony:
A more productive left-wing irony might be rooted not in the ideological certainty of the smug critic—the “know-all” irony of Benjamin’s “spiritual elite”—but in ideological humility. The irony, that is, of holding two thoughts in mind at once: my experience, and yours.
She goes on to prescribe Richard Rorty’s “liberal irony” as just such a productive humility:
This is irony as reconnaissance mission: it requires paying attention to a wide range of experiences in order to accurately describe how people are living today and what they desire—especially people whose experiences are different from yours. It provides a blueprint for the contemporary left-wing irony American politics so desperately needs.
Though I admire the honest criticism and love some of the descriptions of vision that Stevens lays out, I don’t think she has much of substance to offer even a sympathetic reader like myself. And I’m not even a little convinced that Rorty is a source improvement. (Mark Edmundson has argued convincingly that Rorty’s philosophy is a substantial part of what led us exactly to where we are, so it’s difficult to see how he could simultaneously appear as a source of needed wisdom.) Stevens saves a fair amount of space at the end of the essay to lay out a little Rortian groundwork as she sees and recommends it, but I felt like I was waiting for a package that never showed up.
This a great time for me to be starting O. Carter Snead’s What It Means to Be Human. Although he does say his book is explicitly about law, it seems pretty clear to me that the anthropology that Snead advocates is both firmer and more dynamic ground than Rorty’s liberal irony.
From the introduction:
Building upon this richer anthropological account, the book argues … that for both their basic survival and their flourishing, embodied (vulnerable) human beings depend on networks of “uncalculated giving and graceful receiving” constituted by other people who are willing to make the good of others’ their own, regardless of what this might offer by way of recompense. By first depending on these networks, and then participating in them, individuals become the sort of people who can care for others in this same way. This transformation of persons from needy consumers of unconditional care and support to mature uncalculating caregivers for others, of course, guarantees the sustainability of these essential networks. But, more importantly, it also helps people to develop into what an embodied being should become, namely, the kind of people who make the good of others their own. Put most simply and directly, by virtue of their embodiment, human beings are made for love and friendship.
In older, dried out parlance, this is about moving the conversation away from the dominant language of negative rights and back to where it was always meant to be: responsibility and care.
I’m looking for more of the criticism that Stevens offers, and more anthropological cow bell from folks like Snead. This is good stuff.
