It Doesn’t Take Audacity to Hope
Barack Obama doesn’t speak because he knows he has nothing to say that can even remotely rise to the occasion, to address the scope and magnitude of our need. While the radical right makes its play to topple democracy across the West, political liberals overwhelmingly remain apathetic like Obama. We should not be surprised that voters turn against the system, therefore, when it is so obvious that liberals are too clueless or feckless to defend the common good even in its most essential form, the basic institutions of liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy is hollow; there is no deeply-felt unity, trust, or commitment to the common good. We have careerism and “incentives” of political and economic varieties, but no collective vision or ability to strictly enforce a social contract. This is how we ended up with outrages like invisible trillions in tax havens and yet working people are expected to pay more to fight climate change. Obama turned out to be just another hollow man, a liberal careerist. Alas.
The real audacity is not to hope, as Obama wrote in an empty gesture, but to build something new, as Andrew Yang admonished us to do in his 2019–20 presidential campaign. The answer to the crisis of democracy is to start doing democracy better, to build a civic system for democracy that is so novel, audacious, and efficacious that people can’t stop paying attention to it. That is how a non-partisan movement for democracy catches on.
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We need to quit mocking MAGA and quit complaining about Trump, in other words, and outdo them instead. For instance, the real “America first” agenda is to be the leader of the free world. We need to be the beacon of freedom and justice, and to lead by example. Rather than “resisting” Trump with the same old social-democratic vision, therefore, liberal democrats should take the America First brand for themselves and out-Trump Trump. The first step in putting America first is to do democracy better, since we can only be stronger abroad when we are stronger and more unified at home.
America really needs to be first on the world stage, and proud of it. That is how we ensure our national security. Furthermore, in populist economic terms, a true America first agenda would be directly opposed to Trump’s kleptocracy, since it empowers the people with a more accountable system of democracy. Not even Bernie and AOC have the vision to build a civic system for democracy that empowers a citizen majority to govern themselves with full transparency, as well as with the authority of genuine majority consensus. It should happen at the state level first.
I don’t want to hear any more careerist politicians speaking for themselves. I want to hear the voice of the people, the voice of the majority, the voice of the general will speak to me with exact specificity on every single policy issue. Building the civic system that gives voice to the general will is the most important challenge of our time. Without an authoritative general will, we will not have national security, we will not have shared prosperity, we will not fight climate change, and we will certainly not bequeath any hope to our children as they face the future.
Obama might have known better. In my previous Medium piece, I wrote about the well-funded, rightwing Gramscians that have worked for decades to take down liberal democracy from within. Obama read one of the Gramscian Right’s intellectuals, Patrick Deneen, famously contributing a recommendation to the book jacket of Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. Well, Obama read it, but he didn’t have the wit to understand the implications of what had to be done in response.
Liberal democracy is institutionally, epistemically, and civically incomplete. It is time to build a civic system for democracy that is more powerful and inspiring than anything the world has yet seen. In fact, we need a Second American Revolution that puts America truly first, once again.
Do Americans have the audacity to be real Americans? Do we have the audacity to lead the world as we once did in building a better democracy? For those things we may hope. And then we better damn well get to work.
