Authoritarians Do Not Fall from the Sky (They Rise from the Deep)
A first look at James Davison Hunter’s new book, Democracy and Solidarity
Of all the things Donald Trump has done since taking office, requisitioning the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts seems to be the most benign. Yet, it suggests that the Right has embraced as a political program the teachings of history’s most famous “Cultural Marxist,” Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). To be clear, the phrase “Cultural Marxism” is a bugaboo largely created by the Right to attack the Left. Gramsci never used the term; few Marxists have. What Gramsci did do was criticize fellow Marxists for not taking seriously enough the complex role of culture in capitalist domination. Today among the Right, Gramsci’s theory, once it has been hollowed out by the likes of Ted Cruz, has become very simple: in order to keep political and economic power, you have to dominate culture.
It’s very odd indeed that a nation with a Bill of Rights aimed at holding, protecting, and preserving differences, debate, disagreement, heterodoxy, and minority voices now has a political Right (aka, “conservatives,” a label that we should doubt) that’s utterly preoccupied with purifying speech, symbolic fidelity, and loyalty to a Leader. The supposed “anti-woke” cleansing of the federal government and national institutions is so very much more than a correction of the course liberals took over the last four years. It has the stench of Mao, not Madison.
Not even six months ago, the Right was loudly defending the right to free speech and accusing the Left of being authoritarians. Their argument, when it managed to take the form of an argument, was that universities, the media, corporations, and government bureaucracies were ramming the woke cultural agenda down peoples’ throats. I too had my criticisms of where DEI was going and what it could do, wrongly, to too many people it targeted. While I would strongly defend the norms of diversity and inclusion, and I think the problems of equity are real ones, the fact is that DEI was most powerful when it was used to shame or punish people, or when it was used to make a buck for consultants, rather than when it was used to educate, inform, or rectify. This was both sad and wrong.
But it is one thing to require people to watch DEI videos at work, or to check diversity boxes, or to honor others’ preferred pronouns, or to have to tolerate yet another Hollywood celebrity trying to educate us on anti-racism, or even to be accused of racism, it is another thing entirely for the federal government to draw up a list of prohibited words in government and government-facing documents; or to cut funding for any research, even medical research, that focuses on minorities; or to bar from the White House news organizations that refuse to heed the president’s preferred new name for a large body of water; or to order a prominent cultural institutions like the Smithsonian, even though not part of the federal government, “to remove improper ideology" that is “unpatriotic”; or to arrest and imprison foreign students that are here legitimately and legally for signing editorials inconsistent with the Trump administration’s professed ideology; or to claim wartime legal powers in a non-wartime period to indiscriminately sweep up immigrant Latinos and send them, without a hearing, to a notorious prison in dictatorial El Salvador; and to do all this—and this is critical to understand—for essentially photo-ops and their PR equivalents so as to push the polls and keep the base enthused as other policies are put in place that will further degrade the wellbeing of many MAGA voters.
As a Chinese student of mine said to me recently, this all seems to be coming straight out of Chairman Mao’s playbook. More humorously, a colleague of mine who frequently deals with the federal government said to me, “Working with the government under the Trump administration has become a giant game of Taboo.”
James Davison Hunter’s new book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, does more than any other book I know of to suggest how the Right came to imbibe the spirits of their own great bugaboo, “Cultural Marxism.” In its great breadth, the book is an attempt to trace the devolution of American political culture from Madison to Chairman Trump.
Hunter is a sociologist at the University of Virginia. He made his name in the 1990s with Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. In the 1990s, too, he founded and continues to oversee the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. The Institute, though its halls are occupied by more than a few card-carrying Obama-type liberals, and though Hunter himself relies on a lot of work belonging to the intellectual Left, has nevertheless been an important hub of intellectual life in the American center-right and among academically engaged American evangelicals. (Full disclosure: I spent an academic year at the Institute in the 2010s as a visiting faculty fellow. It was a very stimulating intellectual season in my life, for which I am deeply grateful. Still, what I write here is an attempt to grapple with Hunter’s argument on its own terms.)
There have been numerous books in the last decade that have tried to warn Americans of the authoritarianism in their midst. Most of these books work from the examples of Europe, Russia, or China in the last hundred years, arguing that the patterns of party capture, doublespeak, paramilitary violence, and reverence for a “Great Man” that brought the world totalitarianism and fascism are in danger of being replicated here in the United States. My comparison (not in jest) of Trump to Mao is in this vein. I have more than a little sympathy for this approach.
Nevertheless, there is another approach, the great pioneer of which is Hannah Arendt, another patron saint of Civic Fields. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism attempted to trace the long historical backdrop to the totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union. While she was concerned with totalitarian structures and practices, she was more concerned with their roots.
Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity is written in this spirit. He argues that the creeping authoritarianism in our political culture is the product of, well, American culture. More precisely, he argues that it is the consequence of the exhaustion of the “deep structures” of American culture.
Reflecting on the ways in which even a major global pandemic like COVID was turned into more grist for the mill of the culture war, Hunter writes,
For all of America’s extraordinary wealth, talent, innovation, and goodwill, none of the key actors in this drama could provide an authoritative account of current events, much less the arc of American history. None would even try to articulate a vision for the future capable of acknowledging the legitimate concerns or claims of their opponents. Neither could any of these actors inspire a plurality of citizens to constructive action in the face of dire national and global challenges. . . . Rather, for the partisans in this conflict, their opponents had become the “repugnant cultural other.” Persuasion and compromise, they concluded, were futile. The only option left was to do an end-run around the opposition—for the technocrats, an end-run around popular sovereignty itself. Most profoundly of all, the cultural sources that had long underwritten liberal democracy . . . seemed spent. (292-93, emphasis added)
It is this last sentence that is the main thesis of Hunter’s book. American political culture is exhausted, spent. There are no deep cultural resources for the nation to draw on, only a self-destructive nihilism. Authoritarianism is on the rise because more solid sources of moral and political authority have been depleted.
I find this argument quite compelling, at least on one level. I will explain my serious reservations next week. Here, I think it’s important to take seriously this idea of “cultural exhaustion.” It connects to my concerns, expressed here, about a certain kind of rootlessness in American culture. We are not doing a good enough job connecting with our collective past in all of its glorious and awful complexities. I think the main culprit here is the particular form capitalism has taken in our country since the 1980s. Hunter also used to think something like this. In Culture Wars, he went full-on neo-Marxist, citing no less than Gramsci:
Gramsci is closer to the truth in showing that the conflict is primarily among different kinds of intellectuals and knowledge workers. . . . In this light, perhaps the most Marxist observation one could make is that this is a conflict over “the means of cultural production.” The end, however, is to have the power to define the meaning of America. (64)
In Hunter’s view in the 1990s, public culture was the arena in which elites battled for power and domination, with “America” serving as the chief totem over which they fought.
Now, however, Hunter thinks it all goes much deeper than that. His diagnosis of our current cultural exhaustion comes at the end of a much longer and broader story he tells about American history.
Like a Shakespearean tragedy, the big story he tells has five main acts.
Act One begins with the Founding, when the country set out on the back of what Hunter terms the “hybrid Enlightenment.” The stress here is on “hybrid.” Though the Enlightenment is often taken to be a secular intellectual movement, Hunter reminds readers that it was composed of a variety of philosophical, theological, and political threads, some secular and some religious. Rather than either/or, America was founded in a both/and moment, and this both/and moment provided American culture with the basis for what he calls “solidarity.” Solidarity, he stresses, is not agreement; it is not even a form of harmony. Rather, it represents a common cultural foundation, often barely recognized or acknowledged, upon which differences, disputes, and disagreements can be worked out and worked through.
The hybrid Enlightenment, he argues, was strong enough for the country to weather even a gruesome Civil War. This is what Act Two is all about. Even amid bloody differences, Americans continued to hold to and try to work through hybrid Enlightenment premises and positions having to do with the promise of the nation, the nature of the human being, and the need for progress. Even in war, Hunter argues, a form of solidarity held.
Act Three begins in the early 20th century. Here, we witness the beginnings of what will grow to become serious cultural fractures, as Hunter sees in the 1920s and 30s a normative distance opening up between strong secularists like John Dewey and religious fundamentalists. Think Scopes Trial.
Act Four brings us to the culture wars of the second half of the 20th century. For a period, the cultural and political middle, Hunter argues, tried to hold, but their efforts were in vain. Even moderates began to adopt premises and positions that excluded whole sectors of the American community as enemy “others.” Battles over morality, policy, and power became fights to metaphorical and sometimes literal death, as in abortion-clinic shootings.
Act Five concerns the unravelling of the culture wars into our current nihilistic free-for-all. We are, Hunter argues, in a state of cultural exhaustion, incapable of working through our differences because we lack the cultural resources to do so. Shallow authoritarian personalities have taken hold of the Right, while liberals over-aggressively grab for bureaucratic, state, and cultural power to enforce their own dogmatic ideologies.
In sum, the big story of Hunter’s book looks something like this: Early on, even if people were not working from the same cultural books—some were reading the sacred Bible and others Jefferson’s secular Bible—at least their books were all part of the same cultural library (namely, a library where Bibles mattered). But eventually Americans started going to radically different cultural libraries—think of the difference between a Christian bookstore in Colorado Springs and a queer bookstore in Greenwich Village—to the point where the “hybrid” part of the original Enlightenment project unraveled into an unresolvable battle royale among nihilistic cultural forces.
I’ve presented Hunter’s story as a tragedy, and for a reason. Hunter is a tragic thinker. He invites us to consider our current civic state, for all its ridiculous farce, as a tragedy.
Several weeks ago, I listed for my undergraduate students all the major national events of their lifetimes. The list included 9/11, two failed foreign wars, the Great Recession, too many shootings and mass shootings to count, observable changes in climate, the COVID pandemic, and January 6. All in 25 years.
“There’s a time to mourn and a time to dance,” a Hebrew book of wisdom tells us. Surely ours is a time to mourn, no?
Of course, that’s the last thing the current president is thinking about. For him, everything’s great, never been better, perfect! And watching the likes of Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, I sometimes get the sick feeling that they too are pretty satisfied with the status quo. When not in power, they get to play the part of the Resistance. Shoot, not even three months after Trump’s innauguration the Democrats are already on an electoral winning streak.
James Davison Hunter thinks our civic problems are deep. The grotesque incongruities of our current political culture suggest why.
Nevertheless, I think the problems with his argument are also deep. Next week I will try to explain. Until then, some mourning truly seems in order.