The campaign of 2016 was an education in the deep problems facing the
country. Angry voters made a few things abundantly clear: that modern
democratic capitalism is not working for them; that basic institutions
like the family and communities are falling apart; that we have a
college educated elite that has found ingenious ways to make everybody
else feel invisible, that has managed to transfer wealth upward to
itself, that crashes the hammer of political correctness down on anybody
who does not have faculty lounge views.
Alienation breeds a hysterical public conversation. Its public intellectuals are addicted to overstatement, sloppiness, pessimism, and despair. They are self-indulgent and self-lionizing prophets of doom who use formulations like “the Flight 93 election” — who speak of every problem as if it were the apocalypse. Alienation also breeds a zero-sum mind-set — it’s us or them — and with
it a tribal clannishness and desire for exclusion. As Levin notes, on
the right alienation can foster a desire for purity — to exclude the
foreign — and on the left it can foster a desire for conformity — to
squelch differing speakers and faiths.
But going forward we need a better establishment, one attuned to Trump voters, those whose alienation grows out of genuine suffering. The first task for this better establishment is to not make the political chasm worse . As the impeachment investigation proceeds, it’ll be important for us Trump critics to not set our hair on fire every day, to evaluate the evidence as if it were against a president we ourselves voted for. Would we really throw our own candidate out of office for this?
Over the longer term, it will be necessary to fight alienation with participation, to reform and devolve the welfare state so that recipients are not treated like passive wards of the state, but take an active role in their own self-government.
It’ll be necessary to revive a living elite patriotism. That means conducting oneself in office as if nation is more important than party; not using executive orders, filibusters and the nuclear option to grab what you can while you happen to be in the majority.
It means setting up weekly encounters to help you respect and understand the fellow Americans who reside across the social chasms.
Finally, it’ll be necessary to fight alienation with moral realism, with a mature mind-set that says that, yes, people are always flawed, the country always faces problems, but that is no reason for lazy cynicism or self-righteous despair. If you start with an awareness of human foibles, then you can proceed with what Levin calls pessimistic hopefulness — grateful for the institutions our ancestors left us, and filled with cheerful confidence that they can be reformed to solve present needs.
From: https://www.nytimes.com/
