Liberal America’s Contribution to this Catastrophic Victory of Fascism

This piece appeared as an op/ed in newspapers in mid-December, 2024.

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Democrats have trying to identify mistakes they made that contributed to the catastrophic election outcome, giving the powers of the Presidency to a man whose abuse of those powers is virtually certain.

But the important failure of the liberal side of America, however, lies far less in the recent campaign than in the generation-long path that led up to it.

Showing That Major Failure

1) Conservative America’s election of a man like Donald Trump to the Presidency – in 2024 – is something that no previous generation of Americans would have done. They’d have found it simply unthinkable in view of the many actions and attributes of Donald Trump each of which conservatives would have regarded as automatic disqualifiers.

(From lying, to criminality, to betrayal of American national security, to siding with our fascistic adversaries, to assaulting the Constitution.)

All those “disqualifiers” have been bountifully exposed.

2) Obviously – given that the previously unthinkable happened (that a major American party would nominate, and that tens of millions of Americans would vote for a man so unthinkable to the Conservative America of old) – we must conclude that major transformations occurred over the past generation.

These transformations were well under way before Trump entered the political arena.

Starting in the 1990s, the Republican Party began acting in ways unprecedented in American politics, and each unprecedented action undermined the structures and norms of our constitutional order. (Like how they related to Presidents of the other Party—not treating any Democratic President as legitimate since Jimmy Carter.)

Most tellingly, from the GOP of Eisenhower’s time or Reagan’s, the Party morphed into a political force that consistently acted in ways that made things worse – on virtually every issue.

Meanwhile, a program of masterful propaganda – Limbaugh, Gringrich, FOX, Rove — was changing the political consciousness of Conservative America. (Trump would never been nominated – in 2015 — had not the consciousness of the Republican base already have been greatly transformed by then.)

3) Despite these profound transformations happening out in the open, Liberal America scarcely noticed.

This I know from many years of trying to raise the alarm in Liberal America. Neither Democrats nor their supporters perceived the fundamental change transforming the politics of Conservative America.

They failed to notice that – beginning in the 90s — the Republicans made our politics not, as before, about conservative-vs.-liberal approaches to issues, but about all-out political warfare in the quest for power. (Like the across-the-board obstructionism against Obama, which was abnormal – and indefensible — conduct for an opposition party.)

The level of the conflict had become more fundamental, but the Democrats spoke as if it were “politics as usual.” Even as Republicans treated them as enemies, Democratic politicians spoke of their “friends across the aisle.”

Most tellingly, the liberal side failed to perceive that telling consistency of destructiveness, revealing the “Spirit of Brokenness” taking over the GOP.

4) And failing to perceive the destructive thing the Republican Party had become, the Democrats did not fight it.

(E.g. they did not fight for the hearts and minds of Conservative America that were being transformed before their eyes by the likes of Limbaugh, Gingrich, Fox News, Karl Rove.)

And failing to fight that Destructive Force, Liberal America allowed it to grow in strength. Till here we are: a fascistic party now rules the nation.

(It was in Conservative America that the pathological pattern of brokenness entered the system, but it could only gain this dangerous level of power because Liberal America responded like a compromised immune system.)

All of which leads to the question:

Why was Liberal America Unable to Perceive These Ongoing Profound Transformations?

My answer: Because the worldview of Liberal America had no way of conceiving of something like what was taking over Conservative America.

Which can be described as “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world worse.”

In the Judeo-Christian religious worldview, such a “coherent, destructive force” has been central.

It was given the name of “Evil,” and it was personified in a supernatural being – the Devil – who commanded his minions to lead people astray and degrade the world.

But the predominant worldview of Liberal America is a secular worldview. When, in modern generations, a great many people left the religious framework, they ceased to have a concept of “Evil.”

They’d abandoned the understanding of “Evil” as a supernatural force, but then had no other concept of such a force – coherent in operation and consistent in its destructiveness — to replace it.

People cannot readily perceive something whose reality they have no way of conceptualizing. So, when Liberal America was confronted with such a force – coherent in operation, and consistent in its destructiveness – they failed to see it.

And, as they say in baseball, “You can’t hit what you can’t see.”

It’s understandable that the “secular worldview” would emerge incomplete. The religious worldview developed over thousands of years. The secular worldview – getting its understanding from the processing of empirical evidence through reason – has arisen relatively recently. Understandably “a work-in-progress.”

Understandable, but America—and the wider world – have paid a huge price for that incompleteness.

My life’s work is an effort to fill in such holes in the secular understanding of the world. One part of which has been to show the reality, origins, and M.O. of just such a force operating in the systems of the human world. Which, had Liberal America grasped, could have helped prevent this disastrous triumph of a Force of Fascism.