America’s Hegelian democracy

and its Freudian party system

Eve of another American election. Four years ago I was staying with my grad student friends in Baltimore when the election arrived. We wandered through cold deserted boarded-up Washington, D.C. and then drove back and wandered around cold deserted Mount Vernon, stood in front of the Washington Monument there—like much about Baltimore’s old neighborhoods, much more attractive than its D.C. counterpart—and contemplated the American past and future in an attitude of mock graveness. We cooked a giant ham and the three of us ate it off of the three plates in the apartment, with the three forks and three knives in the apartment, and drank wine out of the three mugs in the apartment, from which we had to rinse out the dregs of our three espressos. Pleasant grad-student-esque sense of living precisely within one’s humble means.

My impression at the time of the speech Trump gave late into the night after things started to go wrong for him in the results was of a man stumbling toward denial in real time. How could it have gone wrong, he seemed to be saying, it was going so well at first … it was almost as though we couldn’t lose … and yet somehow it seems like we did, how could that be … but … then again, what if we didn’t?

When they finally called it for Biden days later we were in Philadelphia wandering around and we saw groups of people running through the half wooded area around the art museum with glow sticks and things like that. Strange scattered kind of celebration. The world remained in quarantine.

Now here we are again, Trump the “ogre” having managed a kind of Hundred Days-esque return to the brink of power, and it sounds like D.C. is half boarded up again, but otherwise things are different, of course. I don’t have predictions to offer or even exhortations, just a few detached thoughts about our odd little political/electoral system, which limps on, vast consequences hanging upon it, kept in motion as is tradition by a fifty-state patchwork of (in many cases) complete amateurs.

First of all, the electoral college, which I think at least in its current condition can be understood as a form of Hegelian democracy. Not Hegelian in the sense of the politics discernible in the Philosophy of Right but in a rather cruder sense: Votes matter more in states where the world spirit lives. If you look at the list of swing states—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona—all are either in the declining Rust Belt or the ascendant Sun Belt.

These are the states where, for now, the American flame lives. In the language of this essay of mine from earlier this year, they are the hubs of American filibusterism, where private forces are seizing various sorts of opportunity to advance projects that are transforming American society, and the state (in the broader sense) is following along in their wake, trying to mop up the mess they make and take stock of the consequences.

Nevada and Arizona are burgeoning sprawl states, soaking up middle- and lower-middle-class fugitives from California who want to remake the vanished world of San Fernando Valley “yahoos with Goldwater bumper stickers” in the great Western desert. North Carolina and Georgia are great beneficiaries from the trillion-dollar trick that capital played on American labor, redeploying people and industry from the union-strong Midwest and Northeast to the open-shop South and West.

As for Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, decline brings its own kind of reinvention, at least in America. One dimension of this is that towns like Reading, PA have gone from being John Updike-type cities full of whites and white ethnics to majority-Latino redoubts, blue but trending redward. Here race and political economy collide—and fulmination from liberals over the supposed siren song of the alt-right for allegedly machista Latino men seems to overlook brute economic fact. As a greater proportion of a rising immigrant group reaches petty bourgeois status—excuse me, “small business owners”—the basic outlines of standard GOP economic policy will become more compelling.

From Jack Herrera’s report from Reading in Politico magazine today:

Down below, the city and surrounding county are all Rockwell Americana: On the periphery, shingled witch-hat turrets poke up from rows of Victorian houses, and, downtown, deco highrises mix with handsome brick buildings. The city’s architecture preserves the thrill of civilization their builders felt in the early 1900s, when this was one of America’s great centers of heavy industry. In the first half of the 20th century, the Reading Railroad put this city on the map (and on the Monopoly board) — but, like so many other cities across the Rust Belt, it collapsed along the domestic steel industry. Between 1960 and 2000, the city shrank and shrank, its stately buildings becoming empty husks. Then something happened. Sometime in the early ‘90s, word began to spread in Dominican and Puerto Rican communities that Reading was where it’s at. The housing stock, built during the city’s heyday, was gorgeous, and, because Reading was shrinking, it was affordable. There was also a solid job market: After years of white flight, the remaining factories in the city—Hershey and Pepsi among them—were hungry for workers. Waves of Latino immigrants rejuvenated the economy, and the city began to grow again for the first time in 50 years. 

The swing states are, in a word, the states that are changing the fastest. The only states not on the list that might deserve that classification only recently stopped being considered swing states: Ohio, Florida, Texas. And all three have become comfortable Republican territory. Another state that has changed much but has long since passed its “tipping point,” in the other direction, is Virginia.

Of course this wasn’t part of the intentional design of the electoral college, nor necessarily how it has always operated historically, but in a country so obsessed with the new, and so constantly remade by waves—of people, from within and without; of money; of industry—it seems somehow hardly accidental, and almost appropriate. Our Delphic oracles are the people on the bleeding edge.

I’ve been reading a lot of Tom Wolfe lately and—in a cultural rather than political manner—there’s a lot of this to his outlook, too. He had a great nose for what was new in American society. He was always looking for the societal equivalent of that mid-Atlantic rift, on top of which lies Iceland, where new land wells up from the bowels of the earth. Look at the subjects of his novels: ethnic conflict and urban decay in New York City, the rise of the New South, sexual politics on college campuses, the rise of Miami. But he was sort of obsessed with the new, perhaps to a fault, and it got more grating as he got older. Wolfe was always a critic of the European influence on American culture, but there’s something to be learned from the Éric Rohmers of the world, the minds who pay attention to the lives of people whose social situation and cultural coordinate points are not changing at all but are rather quite stable.

I have always voted in deep-blue states from which the flame has long since moved on—California and New York. And the experience is a bit different in each. In California as an “informed voter” you’re obliged to study in depth a long list of ballot measures in order to discern which has been placed there by some “special interest” and phrased in deceptive language, appealing to some sort of vague Californian instinct like preserving the environment or funding schools, but which in fact is intended to do the opposite, or to provide some sort of carve-out for some obscure group, like a construction company or (in one memorable long-running case) Big Kidney Dialysis. As for the business of electing officials, it was simple. You can vote for the Democratic candidate for the state legislature, who will win, or you can vote for the Republican candidate, who will lose. And you can vote for judges, or whatever.

Voting in Brooklyn in the midterms I received an education in what a real political machine looks like. State senator, running unopposed. State assemblyman, running unopposed. Judges? Pick any six of these six names. There was something pleasant about dispensing with the whole illusion of choice. Fill in the rest of the stereotype here about New York City being a more frank and honest culture than California, etc. etc.

The subject of the two parties brings me to my second point, which is that you could describe our party system, again rather crudely, as Freudian. I mean that in the narrow sense that the Democratic Party has become something like the national superego and the Republicans the national id. This was very much on view in the two parties’ conventions and subsequent rhetorical interventions. On the one hand, you have prominent Democrats reminding voters of the stakes of the election for the future of democracy, about the importance for women’s rights, about the danger of fascism—Barack Obama scolding black men for insufficient energy in supporting Harris, and so on. On the other, you have Hulk Hogan tearing off his shirt and bellowing, Trump’s mischievous vaudeville act with the worst impulses of his crowds, the by now ingrained compulsion of the right to loudly do whatever they are under the impression liberalism is telling them not to do.

Democratic Party says: do what you ought to do. Be a respectable and upstanding person. Voting for us is your duty. The Republican Party says: do what you secretly want! Let them call you whatever names they want.

It wasn’t always this way. The Republicans used to be the respectable party—the party of old-stock Americans, of small government, the stout, morally upright, Protestant, New England-certified party that put an end to slavery—the party of Calvin Coolidge, for God’s sake! And the force opposed to a Democratic Party full of unassimilated immigrants and unreconstructed (or rather de-reconstructed) Southerners. But with the changes of the twentieth century and now with the brisk movement of college graduates and respectable types generally toward the Democrats, we’ve ended up in this situation, which in a country with a marked rebellious streak … a country that elected Jackson over John Quincy Adams … and which has a secret ballot, may be a dangerous situation for the Democrats. But who knows! The pollsters won’t tell much, however much they’re worth, so we will just have to wait and see. It’s political Christmas come early. The results will tell us, the American nation, whether we’ve been naughty or nice.