I was recently invited by the influential German magazine Cicero — imagine a right-center version of The Atlantic or The New Yorker — for some thoughts on the outcome of the American election. While there are few things I say here that won’t be known to American readers, the questions and concerns expressed in the questions are perhaps a window into what the intellectual right in Germany are thinking about.
What follows below is the English version of my Cicero interview:
Mr. Deneen, even after Donald Trump's first election victory in 2016, intellectuals such as Francis Fukuyama and Mark Lilla attributed the Republicans' success to the cultural detachment of the urban milieu. Now Trump has once again won the race for the presidency. Has the progressive milieu not learned from this?
The progressive left has generally been aware of this divide, but opposed to the view that there is any lesson to be “learned” from this detachment. The Democratic party has decidedly shifted over the past several decades from being a working class party – both urban and rural – to a party that has sought to wed support of highly-educated and wealthy voters with a large number of voters from disadvantaged groups, especially African-Americans and other recent immigrant groups. It was widely believed that their future political success – even permanent dominance – was promised by demographic shifts which would make them a permanent majority. This belief has proven to be false, as a sizeable number of people, especially men, in those disadvantaged groups – African-American, Hispanic, and even Muslim – shifted their support to Donald Trump in this election.
With that said, Fukuyama and Lilla are hardly to be trusted as suitable political guides, particularly given their fierce opposition to Trump from the liberal-right and the liberal-left. They have similarly been proven to be as politically irrelevant as the progressives they criticize. Both are members of a generally “Never Trump” worldview which was organized around the belief that American politics should ideally return to its Cold War configuration, consisting of a divide between right- and left-liberalism. The 2024 election decisively put to rest the idea that a politics configured around “center liberalism” could be resurrected. We are now in a post-liberal era.
For weeks, the reporting of liberal media such as CNN and the Washington Post conveyed the feeling that Kamala Harris could hardly be denied a victory in the presidential election. This had very little to do with the political mood in the USA. How do you explain this misperception? How do you explain the fact that Harris was hardly able to reach people in the USA beyond the urban, progressive core electorate in the blue states?
The answers to these two questions are connected, but not identical. The progressive left has created a highly insulated ideological bubble, one that has made itself largely impervious to views or information that contradicts its preferred narrative of historical inevitability. This bubble is made up of institutions that dominate the mainstream of American life: media, universities, entertainment, the managerial class, bureaucrats, etc. They had grown to believe that their narrative shaped reality, when in fact, this view was increasingly detached from a reality that they largely ignored. By dismissing any challenges or contradictory evidence to their preferred views, they had convinced themselves that their narrative could admit of no alternative.
Kamala Harris over her entire career has been both a participant in, and a beneficiary of, this insular environment. Her political career was born and shaped in the most insulated bubble of all – not just California, but San Francisco, where there are no alternative viewpoints whatsoever. Even as a candidate for the presidency in 2022, she had little interaction with people outside of that bubble, as she ran a campaign based on appeals to her identity as a woman and and African-American, and policies that, in some cases, were further to the left than Bernie Sanders. She was wholly ill-equipped, and likely even unaware, of how to connect to voters outside that bubble – voters that Democrats continue to need in the “swing states,” even as the progressive viewpoint regarded them with scorn and disdain.
Let's look at Trump's success: the amazing thing about Trump as a political figure is that he can resolve many supposed contradictions. The biggest paradox is certainly that so-called small people from the lower classes can identify with a billionaire from New York City who comes from a world of big business. What do you attribute this to?
This is actually no contradiction at all. One need only go back to major figures in the American past such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and before him, Thomas Jefferson, to see examples of a long tradition of wealthy and privileged figures who became leaders of the “popular” party. “Populists” are often drawn to figures who are in a position to thumb their noses at their supposed betters. In the case of Trump, his wealth and stature insulated him from the need to kowtow to the usual donors and managers of the Republican party, permitting him to break with its longstanding orthodoxies (such as free-market trade and neo-conservative militarism). Moreover, it should be recognized that, in the particular case of Trump, he was and always has been something of an “outsider,” having grown up in Queens in New York City, at that time a working-class and ethnically-diverse borough that was economically, socially, and culturally in the shadow of Manhattan. Trump has always been regarded as a gauche interloper by those from the more cultivated “Manhattanites.” Even though he had attained wealth, he lacked the cultural markers of the highly cultured, and their disdain for him was only heightened as he ran for president as a representative of those parts of the citizenry who were similarly disdained by that same educated and cultural elite. He did not have to pretend to be an “outsider” to be embraced as their champion.
As in 2016, Donald Trump was particularly successful with workers in deindustrialized regions of the US and former Democratic heartlands. Trump's success is also an uprising of the workers. To what do you attribute the crisis of the left in the USA?
Beginning in the late 1960s, the Democratic party began a shift from its roots as the “Jeffersonian” working class party to a party of a highly-educated professional class which sought to represent and promote oppressed minority groups. Initially, this was primarily African-Americans (beginning with the Kennedy-Johnson presidencies), but eventually grew to include feminists, homosexuals, a growing number of ethnic and religious minorities (e.g., Hispanics and Muslims), and, more recently, those with transgender and “non-binary” sexual identities. One need only look at the most recent multifariously colored “rainbow flag” to begin to get an idea of all the identities that were included as constituencies of that coalition.
Over that same course of time, what was once seen itself as a diverse, multi-ethnic working class party began to be redefined simply as “white.” Ethnic groups from that older Democratic party, such as Irish, Italians, Polish, German, etc. – once thought of as quite distinct and not automatically as “white” (which was a label reserved mainly for WASPs -- White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) were now all grouped together as a supposed “dominant” and even “oppressor” class. Their economic interests were still partially represented by the Democratic party, but their cultural values were simultaneously derided. Meanwhile, the cultural values of these elements of the old Democratic party were increasingly represented by the Republican party, but Republicans continued to pursue economic policies beneficial to the business class. For decades, the “white working class” had no natural political home, and its support oscillated between the two parties. Notably, their support would invariably end up being the deciding margin in elections, as they voted for Reagan (twice), Bush I (once), Clinton (twice), Bush II (twice), Obama (twice), Trump (in 2016), Biden (once), and Trump again (in 2020).
Trump was the first candidate to realize that combining core cultural values of the Republicans with the older economic commitments of the Democrats was a winning combination. I would argue that he was able to recognize this simple and obvious fact because he came wholly from the outside of the establishment political parties. I would further argue that it was this effort to realign American politics that earned him near-universal condemnation from mainstream figures and organizations on both the left and the right, and not, as such, his character flaws.
It’s important to remember that Trump first had to defeat the “old” Republican party during the 2016 primary – in which yet another Bush (Jeb) was believed by the mainstream media to be the favorite – and then defeat the progressive Democratic party twice. Indeed, one of the storylines of the 2024 election was the effort of Kamala Harris to combine these two elements, represented by her embrace of Dick and Liz Cheney. Trump’s victory was a humiliation to both of these remnants.
Barack Obama recommended your bestseller “Why Liberalism Failed” in 2018. In it, you analyze the crisis of liberalism and explain that people are social beings and need values and community in addition to freedom. Is this longing one of the reasons why Donald Trump struck a chord with Americans with his “Make America Great Again” campaign?
One of the main arguments of my 2018 book was that liberalism seeks to eradicate “arbitrariness” from the human (and natural) dimension. It seeks to eliminate the “unchosen” from the world, making all of our arrangements the subject of our supposedly liberated will and completely unfettered choice. In nearly every dimension of life we have seen this deeply radical ambition advanced into areas that given rise to consequences that are both catastrophic and ultimately unpopular. Liberals have sought the elimination of arbitrary national borders -- while ordinary citizens value the nation, their communities, their towns. Liberals have sought to displace the family as the basic unit of society, with catastrophic social consequences on the lives of ordinary people. Liberals have sought to eliminate marriage and birth as basic norms, leaving people increasingly lonely and insecure. Liberals have sought to reject the idea that male and female are sown into the fabric of our natural reality, increasingly leading to deeply illiberal outcomes (such as allowing biological men to compete in sports against biological women, or forcing people to use “preferred pronouns” at the risk of jobs and reputations).
In nearly every domain where these liberal commitments became the enforced norm, they proved increasingly unpopular to broad swaths of the population. Moreover, the effort to impose fealty to these beliefs was increasingly based in enforced orthodoxy to falsehood. While liberals believed for a time that their project was on the verge of triumph, in fact, in its most advanced form, its totalitarian dimension led to its own widespread illegitimacy. While many people were afraid to say so out loud, they nevertheless flocked to a champion who promised to defend basic norms that comport with reality.
You are regarded as having a powerful intellectual influence upon the future Vice President JD Vance, whose best-seller "Hillbilly Elegy” told the story of his childhood of poverty in a working-class family in the Rust Belt. Like you, JD Vance is a Catholic. What might we expect?
Vice President-elect Vance is a deeply intellectually curious individual, and has extensively arrived at his own conclusions about the current state of our nation and world from wide-ranging reading and his own thoughtful deliberations. If I have had any influence, it is because he is a voracious reader, and among the works that he has read are my several better-known works, which doubtless supported and perhaps gave some additional clarity to his own existing intuitions and ideas.
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