by Christopher Hall
About this time ten years ago, I was making a wreck of myself by paying an absurd amount of attention to the politics of a country I’m not even a citizen of. Every morning would begin with an inspection of Nate Silver’s 538 to see where the polls were; was it still a sure thing Clinton was going to win in two and a half month’s time? I was no fan of Clinton, and I’m still not, but the alternative was unthinkable. 538 remained cautiously optimistic on this front, but other sources were nowhere near as circumspect. DailyKos, I recall, pegged Clinton’s chances at 90%. At the cusp of the Trump Era – and despite the brief, ineffective Biden moment, the past ten years can’t really be described as anything but – I was relying on the chiromancy of the pollsters to have a better sense of what America’s palm read. Of course, for most of them, they didn’t.
Well, now the unthinkable is our daily bread, and I am no longer obsessed with the polls. My already shaky belief in the Democrats as a functioning political entity entirely collapsed after the failure of the Harris campaign, a moment when farce and tragedy became indistinguishable. I, of course, would prefer that they take over Congress in the midterms, but if they happen not to, my shoulders already have a shrug pre-loaded. This is deeply irresponsible, given the damage that the Trump administration is currently inflicting with utterly malign purpose on the Canadian economy. But I can’t help myself; the words “lost cause,” with all their historical weight, inevitably come to my mind when it turns its focus southward.
If there’s one area where I have been paying some attention, it’s been toward the brewing civil war within the Democratic party itself. The primary nominations of a few progressives have been enough, it seems, to send moderate Democrats into apoplexy, and they can be heard shouting their rallying cry of “Not Electable” across the land.
Again and again, the Gaza War has emerged as a litmus test for candidates. Israel and Gaza are deeply embedded in the American political consciousness at this point, and that leads to the level of cognitive dissonance in at least some moderate Democrats where they might assert that “criticism of Israel has no place in the Democratic party” and then, seconds later, engage in precisely such criticism. (Even if we accept that Carville misspoke and meant to say “antisemitism,” it’s at least telling that in at least some part of his consciousness antisemitism and criticism of Israel are necessarily aligned.) Of course, the attitudes of any given country towards any foreign conflict may be proxies for issues closer to home. In suggesting that that is the case here, I hope I won’t be taken to suggest that Americans don’t really care about the slaughter of thousands of civilians. What I mean to say is that, if the Gaza War is indeed acting as a litmus test at the moment, it is part of a story concerning a dueling set political visions that have dominated American politics in the 21st century.
Recall that, in the heady early days of the Iraq War, a clear divide was staked between those who were in what was called the reality-based community and those who weren’t:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The “aide” here – suspected of being Karl Rove – is articulating a vision of American power that has, in true colonial boomerang fashion, rebounded into domestic affairs. The Gaza War thus becomes a proxy for a much older and broader issue: the ability or inability, simply put, to put accurate names to what reality delivers to us. If you can’t call what was clearly and obviously a genocide a genocide, you will not be able to effectively combat those who think Tylenol causes autism, who don’t think climate change is real, and who don’t believe the US constitution grants birthright citizenship.
“Reality-based community” here was spoken in contrast to the “faith-based communities” that were a key component of Bush’s domestic policy. It may be that current crisis is only the most recent modulation of a divide that’s exited since America’s birth, between the secularism inherent in its construction and the fundamentalist drives of significant portions of its population. But it is a least clear that we are in a new key. The core political divide in 21st century America is between fabulists and anti-fabulists, and moderate Democrats are failing to be able to make clear that they are among the people who can name things for what they are.
Fabulism, as a literary genre (this is where the current matter links with my overall interest in speculative fiction), attempts to integrate elements of fantasy into what is an overall realist frame. The core of the matter is that reality never quite goes away or becomes irrelevant, but is rather shaped and altered by elements more commonly found in fable and fairy tale. The writer picks and chooses, and the genre as a whole is, one could say, a metaphor for the ways in which we incorporate fantasies and illusions into our everyday lives. This isn’t to truck in the very old idea that fantasy is inevitably harmful to readers – not just children, but of all ages. But it is certain that fantasy needs to know its place, purpose and time – just like reality needs to.
The political fabulist is better than a simple liar, as they are lying to an audience fully primed to be receptive, even if its members live on a spectrum between full acceptance and simple, perhaps ironic pleasure in the tale being told. This is the essence of the fabulism of this moment: it allows those invested in it to add or subtract just as much reality as they wish to, and that ratio may vary from moment to moment. But with that said, the nudge-wink rhetoric of the Bush years, with all its subliminal hints that it never really took seriously the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq, has evolved into superliminal demands that the world is precisely what MAGA says is it, and damn the degeneracy of those who gainsay it.
If shared consensus about reality has been broken in America, it’s because a sizable enough chunk of the population has become deeply practiced at unseeing reality. Democrats may not need to adopt every item on the Democratic Socialist of America’s wish list, but they must at least show they aren’t on the slide of the neo-imperial imaginary.
Of course, political fabulation is just another form of giving the people what they want – or what you can convince them they want. This goes some way to explaining its success, and it would be naïve to suggest that Democrats of any flavour are free from either its influence or the temptation to employ it. What Freud called the pleasure principle, our basic drive towards satisfaction and away from anything unpleasant, only gives way to the reality principle reluctantly; as he says in Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning, “The replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, with all the psychical consequences involved…is not in fact accomplished at all once; nor does it take place simultaneously all along the line.” We can engage in this form of fantasization and all the repression that it entails even as we are aware that it does not stand up to reality testing.
Democrats cannot continue to state that Israeli would not, could not, and did not commit crimes, when it would, it could, and it did. It cannot rely on a broken moral calculus that finds that counter-atrocity is a fair response to atrocity. These are abandonments of the reality principle when it is most crucially needed, when matters of deep ethical concern are at hand. It is a fundamental problem, of course, because the political reality principle demands renunciation of what’s most wanted. If we think Americans are no longer capable of this, we’ve essentially conceded the future to Trump and his emergent avatars.
The basic libidinal economy of American politics – maybe all politics – depends on a constant exchange between fantasy and reality, and a disturbance of the equilibrium can have the deepest consequences, even if the disturbance is never symmetrical. A majority of Americans, including a lot of Republicans, oppose data centers, but start talking about “surveillance capitalism” and you’ll get a lot of glazed eyes and potentially hostile looks. What I’ve been most impressed with in the progressive and socialist candidates is that, contrary to expectations indoctrinated into us that say that left-wingers are fatally compromised by utopianism and other such miasmas, they mostly seem pretty down-to-earth. Zohran Mamdani is the archetype here, and his brand of “fix-the-potholes” socialism seems, for the moment, to be working.
That litmus test that so many moderate Democrats are failing goes well beyond foreign policy in general or towards the Middle East in particular, and it goes beyond any contemplation of the influence of entities like AIPAC. Again, I am not particularly worried about the future of the Democratic party; so far as I’m concerned, given its stunning inability to learn anything from its mistakes, it can go the way of Whigs. We talk a great deal about the breaking of consensus in the age of social media, but I’d hazard that democracy depends on something deeper than mere consensus. There must be an indexical ability functional among a large enough portion of the population that people subject to all forms of ideological fantasies can still point at a thing and say “There it is.” If we shouldn’t delude ourselves about the possibility of illusion-free politics, or be jaundiced about the uses of fantasy, the fact remains clear: reality must be on the ballot.
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