Rightwing or anti-left politics are on the rise in Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Germany and, beyond Europe, even in Canada and much of Central and South America. In the Muslim world, which encompasses ¼ of the Earth’s population, we see a neo-fascist rejection of what we used to call “Western values.” In Russia and China, with their crypto-autocratic regimes, it’s hard to tell if these countries are left or right, but what they are not, in either case, is liberal. Centrist or center-left liberal politics such as are embodied in the U.S. Democratic Party are not being embraced by the world’s electorates. Here in America, where Donald Trump is currently president, he’s terribly unpopular, of course, but this should not be confused with a repudiation of his policies, but rather, to his own repellent, reptilian personality. The rightwing policies he amplified remain popular.
Still, Trumpism or MAGAism has resulted in some heady victories for conservatives. Americans are not clamoring for affirmative action, or reparations, or the wholesale replacement of their pronouns. Nor are they anxious to revisit the racialized politics of the past; they’re sick and tired of racial issues. Trump has swept all these prior concerns away. People rightfully are suspicious of “coastal elites,” especially from academia, who seem dismissive of their daily lives and yet insist on telling them how to live. They remain conservative, even as their movement morphs into, or becomes indistinguishable from, what has been called “end time fascism”—an extreme cult of superstitious Christian nationalism that embraces Biblical literalism, authoritarianism, intolerance of other religious beliefs, fantasy, and the rejection of science, not to mention homicidal hatred of the LGBTQ spectrum. With this unholy wedlock of militant religion and fascism, America is experiencing something new, and ugly, in its history.
The reasons for the rise of conservatism in America are not difficult to understand. In times of great uncertainty—and these are such times—people tend to hold on to what they already have and know. The threat of radical change frightens them. They’ve already lost a great deal of what they used to have—wealth, social stability, the family, the expectation that tomorrow will be better than today, security in their homes and towns—and they don’t want to lose any more. So they turn toward the security blanket of conservatism, which says, “Change is not your friend.” Change is, of course, associated with liberalism. When Bernie Sanders wants to tax billionaires, it’s only natural for a worried middle class to echo Niemoller and wonder if the taxers will come for them next (the answer is a resounding “Yes”). And when AOC wants to establish a single-payer healthcare system, it’s also natural for them to worry that they’ll lose whatever healthcare they already have, or that it will become completely unaffordable. Liberalism, in the phrase of the political scientist Patrick Deneen, “has exhausted itself,” leading to atomization, nihilism, the erosion of freedoms, “and the growth of powerful, centralized bureaucracies” such as we have here in Oakland. Even Obama—no right winger he--in a 2018 review of Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed,” wrote that the book “offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril."
In my own case, as a Gay man, an educated Jew and a New Yorker, I never had any use for conservatives. I saw them as ignorant yokels, homophobic, religiously insane, culturally barren and crude, and worse: boring. Yes, the deplorable inhabitants of flyover country. But I’ve changed. Living in Oakland for forty years has shown that the forced imposition of so-called liberal values is destructive of many things I cherish. Race, or the color of someone’s skin, never meant a thing to me: I simply didn’t care. But then I came to this town where the color of one’s skin is all-important. This obsession distorts our politics and results in the high crime, racial resentment, social dysfunction and economic collapse we see all around us. Over many years, I’ve come to perceive what we now call wokeism as a spiritual disease. It infects the mind and the soul and causes the erosion of the basic moral values that have informed me, and I like to think my country, since our mutual births. I don’t like it and can think of few battles worthier to fight than that against wokeism.
I take some comfort in knowing I’m part of a worldwide movement of resistance to wokeism. I admit to worrying about the homophobia of “end time fascism” and its other sinister aspects. We simply have to work hard to expunge these false, and faux-Christian, beliefs from a conservative movement that, in other respects, contains praiseworthy things. In the same way, we have to work hard to expunge wokeness from the Democratic Party. Only in the non-ideological center can we come together to solve our many problems and, in so doing, save Oakland.
But back to the death of liberalism. Historians of the future will labor mightily to explain it. I think, when all is said and done, it’s going to come down to the racial problem, at least here in America. The two races, Black and White, like oil and water have been difficult to blend, both stirred up, as it were, by muckraking mongerers on either side. We, as a nation, already have dealt decisively with the mongerers on the right, the slaveowners and slavery defenders, segregationists and White nationalists who now are odium to decent Americans. We have yet to deal with the mongerers on the left, who are the exact mirror image of their MAGA counterparts, and just as deplorable.
Steve Heimoff