The Ghost of Yesterday's Consensus
Yesterday’s assumptions can’t make sense of today’s storm.
Political parties are never monoliths. They’re like families with feuding, fragility, and bound by shared illusions. America’s two big ones are no exception. Ours don’t splinter as easily as in other countries, but they shift over time, swallowing new coalitions and shedding old ones.
In the last half century, we came close to something this country had only dreamed about: a truly multiracial democracy. Not perfect, of course, but real enough to frighten the ghosts of the old order. Civil rights cracked open the imagination of America, and with it came a double-edged energy, a politics of progress, and a politics of backlash.
One party learned to ride that backlash like a wave while speaking in simpler slogans, addressing older fears, and promising a mythic past. The other tried to keep its balance, talking like accountants while the world demanded prophets. Each carried its own contradictions, its own debts to the century that made them.
The result is what we see now: one side turned into a paranoid juggernaut, haunted by its own creation. The other became an exhausted caretaker, managing decline and calling it stability. Refugees from that juggernaut now wander toward the caretaker, hoping to shape it in their image, but without facing how their own blind spots helped build the fire they’re fleeing.
Meanwhile, some people always saw through the mirage. They are the ones who lived the cost of “trickle-down,” who watched hospitals close, rents rise, and rights chipped away, and are still here. They’re the ones with the urgency and imagination that both establishments lack. They never mistook the reflection for the sun.
Maybe that’s where the future lives, not in the tired houses of left and right, but in the neighborhoods that kept the lights on when institutions lost the plot.
We were raised on Happy Meals, loud movies, and endless streaming. It was a culture of distraction built to keep us from noticing the center could not hold. But the illusion’s wearing thin. The false star that dazzled us for decades is burning out, and in that dimming light is the real work.
The complex, human work of democracy begins again.
Stew. I get 50 emails daily, most of the substacks, yours is the only one I thoroughly read and absorb. I can't say that I learn from you, but I can say that you re order my thinking. Always another way to look at something, to see what has always been there, but not seeable because of blinders.
I might find use to plagarize you, with credit, for this as it is my bitch, the big wheels in the Democratic Party should read this: Freakin' boring accountants, how right you are.
Political parties are never monoliths. They’re like families with feuding, fragility, and bound by shared illusions. America’s two big ones are no exception. Ours don’t splinter as easily as in other countries, but they shift over time, swallowing new coalitions and shedding old ones.
In the last half century, we came close to something this country had only dreamed about: a truly multiracial democracy. Not perfect, of course, but real enough to frighten the ghosts of the old order. Civil rights cracked open the imagination of America, and with it came a double-edged energy, a politics of progress, and a politics of backlash.
One party learned to ride that backlash like a wave while speaking in simpler slogans, addressing older fears, and promising a mythic past. The other tried to keep its balance, talking like accountants while the world demanded prophets. Each carried its own contradictions, its own debts to the century that made them.