The Radical Center Cannot Hold

Substacking in a Post-Ideological Age

Who I Am

I’m a nobody who occasionally writes science fiction. My stories have been published in some anthologies and collections. I’m less enthusiastic about traditional publishing these days, but I still enjoy reading and writing fiction.

I also journal a lot. Sometimes I feel moved to post my journal entries online. This is probably a bad idea, but it seems to be the kind of bad idea that’s fully in keeping with the spirit of the age.

Here's an image depicting a harried blogger toiling in obscurity at the end of history, courtesy of ChatGPT. The AI would like you to know that “the scene captures the essence of struggle and isolation, set against a backdrop that blends elements of the past and future.”

Why I’m Restarting My Substack

This is my second go at keeping a Substack. I had one a couple of years ago. I deactivated it. Why? For the embarrassing reason that my entire worldview got turned upside down.

Well, maybe not my entire worldview. Maybe more like 30%. Still, it was a discombobulating experience.

I've been thinking over the problem for a while. What do you do when a major chunk of your mental system, the model of the world you keep in your head, is suddenly and catastrophically outmoded? I don't know. But I know this. I wish more people would grapple with the question.

Why I Shut Down My Old Substack

I might repost some of the old entries I published on my old 'stack. I'm not a big of fan of the newsletter format that pushes daily updates to subscriber inboxes. I'm leaving this material up as a record of where my thoughts were trending at the time. Briefly, I was worried about the effects of online activism on liberal institutions. We all remember the debates that raged in those days.

Should Democrats commit to defunding—even abolishing—the police? Should Democrats instate mask mandates, vaccine passports, lengthy quarantines, and track-and-trace systems into perpetuity, to control the spread of covid and other infectious diseases? Should Democrats use their leverage with professional bodies to smuggle leftwing theories into schools and workplaces? Should Democrats embrace economic models, such as MMT and its ideological kin, that license unlimited government spending while pooh-poohing fears of runaway inflation? Should Democrats pass national affirmative consent laws requiring explicit verbal permission for all forms of sexual contact? Should Democrats pursue a policy of de facto open borders? Should Democrats nationalize American industries and embrace degrowth as a means of fighting climate change? Should Democrats seek to purge society of such secular liberal values as multiculturalism, individualism, and respect for intellectual freedom? Should Democrats adopt a moral framework in which the traditional knowledge of oppressed peoples is valued over law, recorded history, and science? Should Democrats go so far as to celebrate looting and property destruction, sever the bonds between parent and child, seek the dissolution of faiths and nations, and even, perhaps, strive to bring about the extinction of the human species?

I thought this stuff was nuts. No, that's not right. I thought it was absolutely freaking bonkers. Even if you cut the wackier proposals and leave only big-ticket items—Defund, open borders, the Green New Deal—you have one of one of the most radical policy platforms proposed in modern times.

Even weirder was the way people talked about these ideas. The activists touting the above positions didn't kick off discussion by saying, "Look, I know this is going to sound extreme, but hear me out …" They packaged these bold proposals with a hostility to open debate. I still can't get my head around this. We've all had crazy dorm-room discussions. We've all held unorthodox opinions. But it takes a special kind of cognitive distortion to insist that people agree with them.

That's to say nothing of the daily debates that otherwise normal people in my life were having about these issues—the surreal discussions in which positions and definitions shifted dozens of times within a conversation, in which collective manias and crowdsourced obsessions succeeded one another like middle-school fads, in which people broke down in hysterics over online rumors, simple misunderstandings, or minor breaches of social etiquette  …

Enough. Those who didn't experience these phenomena firsthand will surely have heard other people complaining about them.

But then … then it all came to an end. Or mostly came to an end. The Democrats abandoned the extreme policy positions that activists had been pushing them to embrace. The hysterias cooled off. The unfair cancellations (among liberals, at least) dwindled to a trickle. In my personal life, the conversations people had been having about the need to destroy liberal society became conversations about how those earlier conversations had gone overboard. Liberals calmed down. Most liberals, anyway.

What happened?

What I Got Wrong

I started my old Substack because I thought something in modern networked society was driving people crazy. But a funny thing happened: a lot of those people turned sane again. Republicans, of course, grow more deranged every day, and the American leftwing movement has almost totally collapsed due to internecine fussbudgetery. But the Biden Democrats have pursued what looks to me like a genuinely moderate, middle-of-the-road governing strategy that's philosophically continuous with the past fifty-odd years of technocratic neoliberalism. The policies I was worried about—excessive pandemic mitigation efforts, curtailments and shutdowns of public services, excessive regulation of interpersonal affairs, degrowth—have been dispensed with. Others, mostly to do with foreign policy, are still being hashed out, but in a fairly conventional way; there's only so much the U.S. can do to manage foreign conflicts and shape international systems. The much-maligned DEI bureaucracy is massive, probably wasteful, and often ridiculous, but it seems to have jettisoned the more florid theories of the 2010s in favor of boilerplate HR-speak. The so-called "Resistance" to Donald Trump has abandoned its arcane tales of international espionage in favor of prosecuting the former president for his many well-documented crimes. Blogging has made a triumphant return, clickbait journalism is a failed business model, and arthouse horror is big at the multiplex. All this suits me just fine.

In short: I got what I wanted. In the war for the soul of Blue-state liberalism, my side now has the upper hand. Not that "wokeness," whatever it is, went away. Liberals are still obsessed with identity. You can see that many aspects of society are still moving in a woke-ish sort of direction. But hysterical wokeness, malignant wokeness, the kind of wokeness that destroys institutions, mostly seems to have abated. And I can live with functional wokeness. Functional wokeness—basically, large-scale affirmative action—is workable.

In fact, in many ways, as with border policies and the Gaza war, current U.S. policy is too far right for my tastes. The fact that the past decade of viral hysterias crippled the Left's ability to organize effectively around issues like migrant rights and Palestinian statehood is yet another reason to deplore the dynamics of that era.

So where does that leave things? Well, it leaves me with a question. By my lights, the overarching narrative of our era is straightforward. A few years ago, everyone went loony. Then a divergence occurred. Some people (pssst: Republicans) kept getting loonier, while other people (liberals) pulled back from the brink. What accounts for the bifurcation? If you think about it, the second half of the story is more interesting than the first. We've heard quite a bit about the baleful influences that cause groups of people to lose their marbles. But how do groups of people regain their marbles? Forget about driving people crazy. What does it take to drive people sane?

Provisional Thoughts on Staying Sane in Crazy Times

A few years back, while the furor I'm talking about was at its height, scientists developed a suite of innovative vaccines to help fight a novel pathogen. As it turned out, the shots didn't provide the shield against infection many people had hoped for. But they gave the body's natural defenses enough of a kick to help get the disease under control.

I'm wondering, now, if there are cultural influences, as subtle and miraculous as vaccines, that strengthen society against other kinds of contagions. I was brought up to see liberal values as a bulwark against fascism, totalitarianism, and other collective manias. Then most of the liberals in my life went nuts, leaving me scrambling to compile a new theory of the world. Maybe conservatives were right all along, and liberalism had only created an illusion of success by cannibalizing traditional values. Or maybe leftists had been right all along, and liberalism was merely the propaganda of classism. Or maybe no one had ever been right about anything, and all moral systems were just post-hoc validations of Girardian conflict and moblike behaviors.

I find myself in a state of radical uncertainty. The rapidity with which contemporary society swings between equilibria seems to overturn worldviews as soon as they form. When I was growing up, for instance, everyone said racial discrimination was terrible, one of the worst moral offenses imaginable. Many people of my generation are shocked that this norm was subsequently overturned. But it obtained for—what? Fifty years? Before 1960 or thereabouts, mainstream opinion held that certain kinds of racial discrimination were just peachy keen. Now, people in the cultural vanguard think different kinds of racial discrimination are advisable. Those groups have opposing justifications, of course; they're at odds with each other in almost every way. But the point is that liberals of my generation believed a universal prohibition against racial discrimination would become an enduring ethical principle, when in fact it proved to be a transitional phase. And that's to say nothing of the social norms governing sexual relations, which have changed so rapidly over my lifetime that I'm not sure there are norms anymore. How can you have a so-called "norm" that only persists for a handful of years?

All of which goes to say that I'm in an awkward position: I think mainstream society is on the right track, but I'm not sure why it's on the right track. If you think bad ideas are wrecking society, you at least know where you stand. You've got to stop those ideas! But we seem to be living in a time when ideas, ideologies, -isms, and creeds—all those bugaboos of the liberal mindset—are less relevant than ever. Even liberalism itself, the ideology that eats other ideologies, is a withered remnant of its former self. Instead of coherent belief, people now have shared attitudes. They like this, they're opposed to that. Antipathies spread through memetic contagion, whole swaths of people deciding at once that hating facemasks, or vaccines, or Taylor Swift, or Marvel movies, or polyamory, or police officers, or Harry Potter, or surrogacy, or Substack, or Chick-fil-A, or what-have-you, makes you either a good or bad person. Theories and evidence are crowdsourced by the network and cobbled together to justify the attitudes of the moment, usually without much regard for plausibility. This isn't consumerism, exactly—everyone uses the same tools and streaming services, and attempts at conspicuous consumption barely register. But it's not political, either, because these attitudinal citizens can barely muster the discipline to organize any structured movements. Occasionally, some collective spasm will draw mobs of angry people into the streets, where they hang together long enough to chant a few slogans, vandalize a few pieces of property, take a few videos, or beat someone up. But the furor subsides, the protests dissipate, and no one shows any lasting interest in anything but the crudest kind of political participation.

In this world, liberal institutions survive not because anyone actually believes in liberalism per se, but because people have become too feckless and self-involved—too besotted with their own prejudices and affinities—to buckle down and build something different. Likewise, the elites who run the show aren't what I would call leaders of a liberal society. They're more like system administrators who maintain the legacy infrastructure because without it, society would collapse. The critical divide isn't between left and right. It's between loudmouths and pragmatists—people who play at being revolutionaries and people who are focused on getting things done. The Biden Democrats didn't turn sane, in this view, because they rediscovered some optimal set of political principles. They turned sane because, like responsible parents in a dysfunctional family, they had no choice but to do their jobs. They, too, would probably prefer to be out in the streets, shouting at the establishment and kicking over trash cans. But hey, someone has to keep the lights on.

Fukuyama was wrong, in other words. Liberalism isn't the final stage toward which all political systems inevitably evolve. It's the system that happened to be installed in certain countries when this new world, whatever it is, came online. Just as you couldn’t found a major world religion after 1000 AD or thereabouts—you could found new cults or sects or denominations, but the window for major new faiths had closed—the global era of political innovation seems to have drawn to an end. The nations of the world have organized themselves around established rulesets and institutions, and new forms of viral culture are getting layered atop those underlying architectures, like applications running atop a patchwork of networked operating systems. The old theocracies and autocracies and democracies persist through sheer inertia, even as people cease to believe in the ideas that inspired their creation—to believe, I would argue, in much of anything at all. The establishment endures because it has to endure. Everything else is just a fad.