What the Left Needs Now

I wrote the article below in the year 2000, after the contested election that gave the the presidency to George W. Bush . In that election, you’ll remember, votes contested in the state governed by Bush’s brother threw the election to the Supreme Court which decided Bush had won. I looked at the article again after the election of 2016 when Donald Trump won the presidency without winning the popular vote, and by Golly, it didn’t feel on bit outdated. So I adjusted a few of the verb tenses and posted it on Huffington Post. Then, recently, I looked at that article, and by golly it still feels relevant. Here’s what I wrote and what still seems true to me today:

When Ronald Reagan was running for re-election in 1984, most of the people I hung out with thought he would lose. He’d railed at the deficit, but the deficit had only skyrocketed. He’d sworn to stop the Soviets, but the Soviets seemed on the rise. The country had plunged into a recession and Reagan in a staggering faux pas had said to a reporter, “Should I care that some guy with a lunch bucket is standing in an unemployment line in Ohio?” How could he possibly win an election after a gaffe like that?

Then one night I was watching a re-run of an old Twilight Zone episode and a Reagan campaign ad came on. At that moment, I realized his gaffe didn’t matter, the deficit didn’t matter, Reagan was going to win. The Twilight Zone episode was about an office worker who’s struggling to make ends meet, whose brute of a boss abuses him, whose shrew of a wife shrills at him, whose neighbors and co-workers laugh at him, whose children defy and disrespect him. One day he falls asleep on the train on his way home from work, and when he wakes up—because the train has jolted to an unplanned stop—the conductor is calling out, “Willoughby.” He peers out: a small town. Pleasant yards with green grass and picket fences. Schools letting out. Church bells ringing in the distance. Dads in shirt sleeves mowing lawns. Dogs catching balls. Kids playing in the streets. Moms calling them home for dinner. Then the train set off again, the man goes home to more shrilling and shouting and unpaid bills and disrespect and anxiety. The next time the train stops at Willoughby, he gets off, and is never seen again.

Then came the commercial break, and it was one of Ronald Reagan’s Morning-in-America ads. It offered Willoughby-like images with an avuncular voice-over saying nostalgic words. I understood then that Reagan wasn’t saying, “Let me drive the bus.” He was saying, “I’m taking this bus to Willoughby.”

Never mind that a cynic like me would say, “There is no such place, you’re romanticizing a past that never existed! In your Willoughby there are no black people, no poor people, no poison-spewing factories, no cancer clusters in polluted waste dumps, no women chafing at the narrow compass of their lives or subjected to lewd gropings at menial jobs—”

Never mind all that. What mattered was this: the contest in this presidential election wasn’t between Willoughby and that other place. There was no other place. We–the Democrats–weren’t offering one. What Democratic candidate Walter Mondale was offering were programs. What we had were critiques. What we trumpeted were do’s and don’ts. What we said was, our guy was better at driving and we could prove it, we could show you his resume, we could prove he had experience and know. With him at the controls, the bus would not crash. We didn’t say where we’d be taking that bus if we got into the driver’s seat. We the Democrats—the liberals—the progressives—call-us-whatever-term-hasn’t-been-turned-into-a-pejorative-yet—weren’t painting a lyrical, irresistible picture of the world we’d all be living in, if the world we envisioned came to be. And today we’re still not doing that. Our standard is inclusion, but inclusion in what?

Years later, when George Bush took office , I sat in on quite a number of meetings at which activists on my side of the aisle discussed what was to be done. Virtually all of these conversations centered around electoral strategies that might secure this or that fractional demographic for the Democrats. It wouldn’t take much, was the argument. Even in the electoral college, Bush’s margin had been razor thin. If we could just turn a precinct here, and a precinct there, we’d have 51 %, they’d have 49 %, and then ha ha we’d be driving the train again, and we could overturn their programs and carry out ours.

Even then, Ihave to say I thought: “Fifty-one percent? There’s something wrong with 51 percentism. We should be talking about seventy-five percent, eighty percent, more even. We should be working to build a consensus around a vision so inspiring, so big, the overwhelming majority of Americans would be jostling to get aboard because where we were going, just about anyone would want to go.

I don’t know where that place is. I don’t claim to have crafted that vision. I’ll go a step further. No single person or group of persons can or should craft that vision.  This is a vast communal project that will emerge out of the conversations of many, illuminated by the work of artists and poets, teachers and spiritual visionaries as well as political leaders. I have no idea what the substance of it could be, I only know: this is the work that must now be done. I only know—as I knew in 2001—that fifty-one percentism is the road to hell, no matter who’s got the 51%.

When Obama ran for president, I jumped aboard his train enthusiastically because to me he zeroed in the most serious problem afflicting the United States: polarization. Take it from a close student of recent Afghan history, polarization is but a prelude to fragmentation. Obama said there were no blue states, no red states, only the United States. Nice talk. And I thought the hunger for a unifying meta-narrative was so intense, Americans would rally ‘round him as starving people ‘round a banquet.

But it didn’t happen. And in retrospect, I see why. Obama’s diagnosis was exactly right, but his prescription amounted to nothing more than compromise. He’d meet the other side halfway if they’d meet him halfway. Halfway across a chasm is an abyss. Compromise works only if you’re on the same continuum and disagreeing only about where to take a stand. In our current circumstances the absence of any middle ground is the essence of the problem: what we have are two different, internally coherent narratives. You can’t simply re-brand a problem and call it the solution.  In retrospect, it’s easy to see what Obama needed to do and couldn’t. He’s a smart guy, and I’m sure he’s a good guy, but crafting an inspiring meta-narrative that rose above the clamor was beyond him. It’s telling that his slogan “Yes, we can!” was an incomplete sentence. Yes we can do what? When Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream,” he didn’t stop there. He went on to describe his dream.

When Trump got to the White House, he was a man with a plan. His plan got the country sliding toward fascism. So once again, the question came up: what to do?

Resist? Sure. I was for it. Resistance had to come first. Don’t let president #45 replace the secret service with Blackwater thugs. Don’t let him hand the National Security Council over to avowed white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. Don’t let his cabal use the powers of government to slap felony charges on reporters covering demonstrations. Don’t let him replace the rule of law with religious litmus tests. Stand up for unabridged, universal voting rights, for habeas corpus,  for a free press, for authentic freedom of religion including the freedom to have no religion. I applauded the brave people dedicating their time and energy to building this resistance.

But what else?

“No you can’t!” to almost everything #45 tried to do was a vital first step, sure. But there had to be a “yes” as well. Yes to what? That’s the queston for “progressives.” It’s not enough to float airy abstractions linked to litanies of do’s and don’ts. Launching a visionary journey requires a concrete destination.  One thing we need, I say, is a physical project to put on the table, a challenge to the nation: something monumentally ambitious and transformative,  something with the power of metaphor.

Late nineteenth-century America undertook to build a railroad across the continent. Yes, getting it done spawned a lot of cruelty and corruption, but we’ve forgotten the flip side of such critiques: what an epic enterprise it must have seemed: millions of tons of steel transported to landscapes without roads, over mountains and across deserts, in boiling heat and freezing temperatures…Impossible?  So what? The very grandeur of the proposition stoked a sense of purpose. The Civil War had just ripped the country in half, and here was a project to connect the Atlantic coast to the Pacific with a physical belt of timber and steel. Talk about a metaphor.  

In 1962, John F. Kennedy laid down a challenge: “Let’s put a man on the moon.”  What in God’s name was he thinking? The moon? For thousands of years, humanity’s highest hope had merely been to fly. Now we were going to the moon? A cynic might have said, what’s so great about the moon? I’ll confess I was one such cynic, But I was wrong. The unthinkable ambition of that challenge was a metaphor for something already stirring in the nation. Only a people who dared to dream big would roll up their sleeves and attempt a feat like that. Less than one year later, Martin Luther King said “I have a dream..” and suddenly tens of millions of people could see the promised land he was talking about, a land of liberty and justice and inclusion for all.  By the time the Apollo mission landed, dreaming big was second nature to this country.

Trump put just such a project on the table: he vowed to build A Wall. I can’t abide that project, but let’s concede: it’s physical, it’s ambitious, and it is a powerfully functional metaphor for an idea. The wall said: You’re right to be afraid, they’re coming to get us, we’d better hole up and hide. That wasn’t perhaps exactly how Trump put it (although it’s not that far off) but that’s the sentiment he saw out there, the emotion he appealed to and evoked, and that therefore was the attitude he stoked.

As with “Willoughby”, it’s not the Wall versus the other project. There is no other project. We have not put one on the table—but we could. I’m sure a thousand good ideas could come pouring out.  Drop by drop is how a river forms, goes an Afghans saying; so here’s my drop. How about offering, as an alternative to the Wall—the Grid. Let’s propose to build within ten years time, a power grid across the country that entirely replaces fossil fuel with energy from the sun, the wind, our rivers and waterfalls, the waves of the ocean. Are you going to say, “Well, ten years, that might be a little unrealistic, we could start by, you know, allocating two million here and four million there and supporting a little effort in Arizona that looks promising, and if that goes well we could—”

No. Stop that! That’s that old 51-percentist spirit pushing in again. Ten years tops and we’re off oil for good and yet flourishing as never before. Can’t be done? Sure it can. If the will is there, the remaining problems are just technical. Technical is something we Americans have ben good at and could be good at again. We need a unifying vision though. We could be inventing cars that run on sunlight, but instead we’re squandering our technical prowess inventing cars that don’t need drivers.

Let’s take the Green Grid out of the argument about climate change. The environmental discussions can and must go on, but in other forums. The Green Grid is above all a jobs program. In this world of ours, with the digital revolution bidding to give us every convenience in exchange for taking away most of our work, ten of millions of people are looking at a future in which their skills will count for nothing. But the Grid! That’s a project that will require, along with scientists, engineers, software wizards, and the like, carpenters, plumbers, pipe fitters, drivers, machine operators, electricians, clerks, laborers—the list goes on and on. And where will these jobs be? Everywhere that power is needed, which is everywhere. Everywhere the sun falls and the wind blows, which is all over the country. Jobs generated by the grid project will be dispersed across the land and isn’t that exactly what we need and want?

And not just jobs, for what we want are not just jobs. We want work. Jobs give you money; work gives you dignity. A job is what you do to get a paycheck; work is what you do because your skills are needed, your efforts matter, and therefore you matter. The difference between the two does not lie in what you’re doing. There’s nothing more exalted about writing a sonnet than taping sheet-rock. I’ve done both, and believe me, I got more satisfaction out of taping sheet-rock, because when I was doing that work, I was fixing my own house with the help of friends.

The Grid is a metaphor. Do we want to be frightened creatures huddling behind a wall clawing at each other? Or do we want to be part of a network of invisible energy blanketing our country, connecting cities and small towns, farmlands and wilderness, mountains and prairies, everyone and everyone? When you’re part of a grid like that, you’re not only free to be what you want: you’re adding value to the whole just by being yourself. That’s the kind of country I wish I were living in. What’s your ideal? Let’s hear it.

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The View from August 17, 2021

             America’s 20 years in Afghanistan interrupted an internal story already in progress, the latest of many such interruptions. Before the Americans, there were the Soviets’, before the Soviets, the British.  And the ongoing story they keep interrupting was always the same: the cultural struggle between two ideas of Afghanistan: between inward-looking rural Afghanistan, the culture of the villages, and outward-facing urban Afghanistan embodied most importantly by Kabul.  

            When the Soviets attacked Afghanistan, they used Kabul as their base. What they did to rural Afghanistan throughout the 1980s was a crime of horrific and historic scale: it eviscerated virtually the entire countryside, it led to a ghastly civil war, and it drove over seven million refugees, almost all of them women and children, into refugee camps. The Taliban of today’s Afghanistan are the children of those camps, all grown up now. When they took over Afghanistan in 1996, they cast a pall of darkness over the land. Those were damaged men filled with rage. And when the U.S. and its allies drove those Taliban out, Kabul and its environs were euphoric. I know. I was there in 2002.  I felt, as did everyone I met, that America had come to save Afghanistan, that the war was finally over. 

            Recently, I heard someone plaintively say, “America’s not the only bad guy here.” I submit that looking for “the bad guy here” is pointless now.  Most of the Americans who got involved in the project to save Afghanistan were good guys; they tried to do good things there and did do good things—they built schools, they helped liberate and empower women, they restored Kabul, they put in vital infrastructure. But all along, something was going wrong, and as the years went on, it went more and more wrong.  Today, people are saying, the withdrawal was botched, it should have been done differently. But differently how? The problem isn’t the withdrawal, it’s the twenty years that led to this withdrawal being the only option.

            In 2002, America and its allies in the West came to Afghanistan with three assets: military power, flabbergasting amounts of money and “a better culture.” I put that last in quotes because one is always on slippery ground when one says “my culture is better than your culture”. The Bush-Cheney crowd exploited the women’s issue cynically to rally the public to a war fought for other and meaner reasons. By going to war with that banner they locked themselves into “Changing Afghan Culture” as their cause.  And many Afghans, including me, wanted to see the changes America wanted to bring. 

            In order for a culture to change, however, the culture must want to change. The instruments the Western powers brought to bear for “fixing” Afghan culture were mainly guns and dollars. Unfortunately, guns and dollars aren’t very good instruments for changing a culture. The mechanisms dropped onto Afghanistan by the West after 2002, the democratic apparatus, the civil institutions, the new rules and regulations, inspired people who already wanted those changes—the people of my Afghanistan, progressive urban Afghanistan; but they alienated and estranged people who weren’t already wanting those changes.  Over the last twenty years, Kabul, Herat, and the largest northern cities moved forward socially;  the rest of the country moved the other way, I fear, especially given the influx of Islamist radicals from outside the country who met the Western narrative—”democracy! elections! women’s rights! secular schooling!”—with a counter-narrative of their own, which was more instantly recognizable and resonant to most Afghans outside the cities: “Home! Family! Tribe! Islam! Quran! Our land! Afghan pride!”

            When the Trump administration started negotiating with the Taliban in Qatar but pointedly left the Kabul government out of the talks, most Afghans understood that the fix was in: America was throwing Kabul to the wolves. With that gesture, the Trump administration was blatantly saying, forget that government in Kabul, that’s not the real government, let’s stop pretending. At that moment, the Trump administration’s line exactly echoed what the Taliban had been saying all along: there is no Afghan government in Kabul, those are just a bunch of puppets shilling for the Americans. 

            How could the Kabul government exercise any credible authority after that betrayal?

            The official reports claimed that the U.S. and NATO had helped the Afghan government in Kabul build a mighty army, but they were merely counting the number of men in uniform, the number of guns those men had, and the amount of expert training they had received in using that military machinery. Were those really fighters, or were they just guys collecting paychecks for a day job?  A real army is the fighting force of a culture. A culture is an interconnectivity among people that enables a sense of identity among them, a sense of  peoplehood. The American intervention had produced a government in Kabul that many Afghans, even in Kabul, didn’t emotionally recognize as their own; elections had not stoked an emotional connection of that sort.  The army that the U.S. and NATO intervention brought into being didn’t have anyone to fight for–especially after the Trump Administration announced that those officials in Kabul weren’t really the Afghan government.

            Red flags were already in evidence when I visited Afghanistan in 2012.   That year saw a worrisome rise in the phenomenon termed “green-on-blue killings”. In that period, from time to time and with increasing frequency, soldiers in the Afghan army would suddenly turn their guns on their officers or trainers.  Apparently, some 14% of the casualties suffered by the International Security Assistance Forces in 2012 resulted from green-on-blue attacks. To me, 14% sounds like a pretty substantial number.

            That year, on the way into Kabul, I met some young men—urban fellows all—who told me there was no such thing as the Taliban. “All the sabotage you hear about?  It’s really the Americans setting off those bombs. They blow something up and say ‘the Taliban did it,’  and use that as an excuse to send their troops in. Slowly, slowly, they’re moving their troops in everywhere.”  I did not for a moment believe this, but if this was what city people were saying,  I could only imagine what people were saying out in the countryside, where the Islamist insurgency was gathering strength.

            In Kabul that year, I also met a police officer who showed me the American-made gun he’d been issued. It was made of some lightweight synthetic material he found suspicious. He told me he was pretty sure it was built to stop working when the Americans invaded Afghanistan directly. This was a catastrophe he actually believed was coming. The Afghan national government supposedly numbered over two hundred thousand troops at this point, but I had to wonder, if they were all like that policeman, whose army was it, really? Did the national government have any army at all?

            When I visited Afghanistan right after the fall of the Taliban in 2002, the physical devastation I saw was flabbergasting: at least a third of Kabul had been reduced to rubble by the civil wars that followed the Soviet withdrawal.  That year, when I visited the neighborhood of my childhood, I couldn’t tell which pile of rubble had been my house. Yet somehow the culture was still alive—some feeling I got of an Afghan soul. I’m a secular guy, so I don’t want to gush about this, and culture is too subtle to be communicated in a few sentences, so I will only report the experience I had of arriving in Kabul, that visceral feeling of a social atmosphere that permeated every conversation I entered into. Something I recognized from decades ago was still here, something that still felt like home.

            When I went back ten years later, the city had been rebuilt, the physical reconstruction was flabbergasting, but that visceral sense of an Afghan culture? That was eerily absent.   Today, we grieve the disaster unfolding in the wake of the U.S. and NATO military withdrawal, but we shouldn’t dismiss and forget the twenty years that led to this. Somehow, during that time, even as schools were built, women empowered, elections held, infrastructure restored, something ugly was growing and gaining power in that other Afghanistan, the one I wasn’t born into.  Why did the countryside remain so recalcitrant? Why were they not happy with the brave new Afghanistan that we of the West were building? I think it’s because they did not recognize themselves in it.   It was somebody else’s Afghanistan, not theirs.

            And that’s the tragedy, because I have to believe that, deep down, rural and urban Afghanistan are not two different entities, this is one family at war with itself.  This war cannot really end, I fear, until we find each other and become one family again, find a way to come together as Afghans, whole and indivisible. 

            Right now, however, for us in the West, the single most important issue is the new wave of refugees that are coming out and will keep coming out for a while, because this time they’re not from rural Afghanistan, these are the urban Afghans who partnered with the West, fleeing the horrors that rural Afghanistan might well be intent on visiting upon them now.  The West has a moral duty to help its Afghan partners get out and get resettled, because the West did so energetically draw them into the partnership that marks them for slaughter now. Most of these Afghan partners faithfully did everything they could to make America’s project in Afghanistan a success. It isn’t their fault that it failed.

            When the Soviets attacked Afghanistan, the refugees fled across the nearest border into Pakistan mostly. There they received a welcome from a fundamentalist Islamic government that had just seized power in a coup because they were Muslims running from Communists. The Islamists are still in power in Pakistan and they cannot be counted upon to shelter the refugees now in flight, because they will be fleeing from a radical Islamist government in Afghanistan. Indeed, Pakistan might be complicit in bringing that government to power. The West owes it to the new Afghan refugees to help them find safe haven somewhere beyond Pakistan, not just for their sake but for the world’s—because every time a huge new population of homeless refugees emerges on this planet, a new global trouble spot forms and then persists.  Today’s troubles in Afghanistan trace back to the war that started forty years ago,; it was that war which produced those millions of refugees who became the Taliban. Refugees are a problem for the world and the world better come together on this one. Helping the Afghans leaving Afghanistan get to safety and shelter is something we owe not just to them but to ourselves and our descendants. 

2021

Throughout history…

… empires have come and gone. Movements have swelled and subsided. Titanic figures have swash-buckled their way across the stage, and then vanished into oblivion. Life is change. History is upheaval. 

Does anything endure?

The easy answer would be: No. But let’s look deeper. Are there not certain underlying themes?

Take, for example, the border that exists between the two fundamental sides. Yes there are only two sides: the inside and the outside. Look anywhere in history, pick out any event, and you can discern this border in the mix. And it’s not just true of history. All of life, at every level, from amoebas to empires can be described as the story of the interaction between the inside and the outside. The fundamental unit of life, which is the cell, exists only by virtue of a membrane that separates inside from outside.

We humans are always on that border as groups. We’re always grappling with Whatever’s Out There, and we don’t really know what is Out There.  We do our best to know. We look, listen, feel our way, sniff the air. We ask each other what we’ve seen. We tell each other what someone’s told us. We pass on rumors. We share conclusions with our fellow humans. We pool our evidence and make collective decisions. We construct a model of the world that we all agree on.  We operate within that shared model as individuals, because only thus can we sync up with our fellow humans. None of us would make it alone.We’re social animals. We’re all in this together.

But this model we’ve built with our fellow humans is not the world itself.  It’s an imaginary world that we’ve built collectively, and inhabit communally. As long as it works, we have no reason to think of it as anything but the world. The trouble is, the model never completely works.  Undetected asteroids are always hurling toward us from the unknowable Out There. Even between crises, our model of reality is always in the process of becoming obsolete.

Five hundred centuries ago, we humans lived entirely as hunters and foragers.  What our greatest experts knew was where the animals could be found and what plants could be consumed. Some eighty centuries ago, we figured out that we could fence off little parts of Out There and alter it to suit our needs.  As farmers, we turned bits of Out There into parts of In Here. We gathered with others and built sturdy shelters and enlarged the extent of the World in Here. As bigger groups, we found that we could even tame rivers and alter the shapes of mountains and turn them into parts of What’s In Here.

But Out There was still out there. It was still the immense unknown, always presenting new faces that forced us to keep adapting our model. We couldn’t know, for example, that such a thing as contagious diseases existed until we had cities. We couldn’t recognize pollution as a danger until we learned to power machines by burning stuff. Hello, climate change. New threats. New opportunities. That’s what is constantly emerging on the border between In Here and Out There. And that’s where the whole drama of human history takes place. History is the story of our adventures on that ever-changing frontier.

Ultimately, we human beings are a single human creature, looking for the way to keep on keeping on. It’s a drama because we’re looking for it as sub-groups.  That’s just the way we humans roll. Sometimes, various subgroups of all humanity agree, sometimes they clash, sometimes they merge. From ground level, one sees many separate stories. From the birds-eye view, one might see the story of one whole distributed animal trying to interface with a real world of unknown size and complexity. One might see the Whole Human Animal, thinking, probing, working out a plan–but doing so in the way that our species does: as subgroups working on many different plans. That’s our evolutionary strategy. That’s the key to our success.

The enduring problem of human history is this: None of us really is the Whole Human Animal.  No combination of human groups is the Whole Human Animal. Our success depends on being, at any given time, many different groups trying out many different plans. We need our differences.

But the coin does have that all-important other side. All of us depend on the health of the Whole Human Animal. If it’s sick, we’re all sick. Which suggests, we’d better ponder who we are as a whole. Because like it or not, we’re all characters in one big story: we all have some effect on where that story goes, and we all have a crucial stake in its outcome.

My upcoming book The Invention of Yesterday, A 50,000 Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection explores the interaction between Self and Other as one of the engines of history. Look for it wherever books are sold on October 1, 2019.