[Orig to FB; I’m too lazy to go back and find the specific context I was referring to, but the longuer-durée aspect is certainly more, uh…useful.]
Imma up this from my reply to [RG] under another post:
I’d go much further and say it’s not just the Dems but much of the political spectrum they purport and — a subtle but key difference — are said to represent. I do believe that liberalism, both uppercase and not, has reached a breaking point and needs to be rethought, but that rethinking needs to be done in good faith and in plain language. That larger problem is tangled, but not hopelessly, with the exhaustion of the Dems and their larger field, in large part because the institutions that exemplify that legacy are themselves collapsing under their own weight: obsessive credentialism, procedural formalism, nano-hair-splitting scholasticism, and so on. People love their narratives of decline these days, but “decline” is the inbred bastard of historical periodization, and — again, largely because of zombie institutions — we’re miscalculating when we are. By the standards of the old world, for which liberals hanker, the US is in decline. But by the standards of a new world that doesn’t quite exist yet (and thanks to social media everyone knows that line from Gramsci now), the US is, as always, very advanced. The old world was one of political economy, but the new one is of subjective economy: we’re generating new forms, models, and modes of subjectivity. But we just don’t know how to explain that yet, and probably never will. That’s the problem the Dems face — because political representation itself is being left behind, weirdly (which is surprising) in the conceptual sectors the Dems represent. The GOP has managed this better, not just by believing in nothing but, mainly, by adopting organizational strategies that nurture and reward baroque craziness.
And, I mean, why even write Das Kapital when you can just type this kind of stuff on FB?