Everybody Would Win
Luke Savage, The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History
OR Books, 272pp, £15.00, ISBN 9781682193334
reviewed by Luke Warde
Luke Savage begins the first essay of The Dead Center, ‘Liberalism in Theory and Practice’, by describing his first ‘formative’ political memory: the evening of November 4th, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Given who he was and what he represented, this was in itself an event of colossal historical importance. Yet much of Obama’s true significance lay not in what he had just achieved, unprecedented as this was, but in what he promised: a better, less divided, more equal and less belligerent America, one which would actually live up to the ideals that champions of its ‘exceptionalism’ like to make a fetish of. In other words, the Obama phenomenon was as much about securing a future as it was about atoning for a past. He and his administration were meant to deliver.
By any measure, he failed to deliver, and the election of his monstrous successor, Donald Trump, seemed to confirm this. For many North American millennials like Savage (he is Canadian), disillusionment with Obama was radicalising; it was their rite of passage from liberalism to socialism, from The New York Times to Jacobin (for which many of the book’s essays were first written), from Obama to Bernie. Indeed, the latter’s unlikely rise is probably as symptomatic of the former’s failures as Trump’s election was.
The Dead Center has perhaps surprisingly little to say about Sanders, whose star has also since fallen. Instead, Savage’s attention is relentlessly trained on a liberalism that refuses to account for its own failings, preferring to insist on its perennial necessity, if only as a bulwark against outright fascism. Somewhat perversely, what makes this ‘lesser-evilism’ — the term is Savage’s — look convincing are precisely the morbid symptoms that liberalism plays a role in producing. After all, the emergence of a figure like Trump is inextricable from the destruction wrought on the American working class by 40 years of neoliberal economics, the US establishment’s pensée unique.
For Savage, the Democratic Party’s reluctance to break decisively with this legacy has made American liberalism tantamount to a species of conservatism: an ideology resistant to change, seemingly by default, and dismissive of ‘even the most modest social-democratic alternatives’ coming from the left. What is more, there is something plainly absurd about liberals’ attempts to relive the end of history. He writes:
First as tragedy, then as farce etc.
However quixotic, the desire to return to those days is in itself not incomprehensible. Indeed, at least in Europe and the United States, the 1990s seemed to embody everything that contemporary politics lacks: there was a general optimism regarding societies’ direction of travel and a broad consensus on effective policy. What is more, people got along. There was even this thing called ‘bipartisanship’.
But what permitted all this apparent agreement and civility? Savage tells a familiar, but broadly true, story. What permitted it was the radical attenuation of political possibility. This was the era when the Thatcherite incantation, ‘There Is No Alternative’, reigned supreme. Gone were conflict and antagonism — especially if defined in terms of class. After all, everybody shared the same fundamental interests and goals, ones which would be assured by active participation in competitive markets. Everybody, moreover, would win. Social mobility (always assumed upwards), turbo-charged by entrepreneurial gusto, was the order of the day.
As Savage sees it, the obsession with civility is indicative of, at best, contemporary liberalism’s poverty of ambition and, at worst, sheer exhaustion. As he puts it, ‘in an age of surging inequality, far-right reaction, and impending climate apocalypse, liberalism offers an elegant and appealing psychological compromise: a frictionless vision of social, racial, and economic justice achieved through conventional institutions without the redistribution of wealth and power, the disruption of actual change, or the bother of mass popular democracy.’
An incisive assault on this nostalgia, and perhaps the strongest essay in the book, is ‘How Liberals Fell in Love with the West Wing.’ The essay is less a critical review of Aaron Sorkin’s hit television series and more a reading of contemporary US politics that seeks to account for its wide popularity. This is a show, Savage writes, that portrays ‘Democrats governing as Democrats imagine they govern, with the Bartlet administration standing in for liberalism as liberalism imagines itself.’ As Savage points out, the show everywhere betrays its allegiance ‘to a particular aesthetics of political institutions’ rather than to any policy platform of recognizable consequence. Moreover, its political antagonisms hinge not on a clash of interests, but on a ‘perpetual pitting of the clever against the ignorant and obtuse. The clever wield facts and reason, while the foolish cling to effortlessly exposed fictions and the braying prejudices of provincial rubes.’ More interesting still is the way the West Wing phenomenon has at times obtruded into actual US politics. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Bradley Whitford, who played strategist Josh Lyman in the series, stated publicly: ‘there is no doubt in my mind that Hilary would be President Bartlet’s choice. She’s — nobody is more prepared to take that position on day one.’ Was this cross-contamination between television and politics not itself a central aspect of what many Democrats so abhorred about Trump?
While drifting at times into what one might call a kind of left boilerplate — much of what Savage has to say about liberalism is now a species of common sense on the more radical wings of American politics — The Dead Center is a nonetheless lively, and often scathing, overview of a period whose historical significance remains ambiguous, not least for the kind of political movements with which its author would identify. Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid ultimately failed, but Joe Biden has displayed a willingness, however tentative, to break with a centrism with which he was once virtually synonymous. Try as it might to resuscitate itself, that particular centre is dead, and its would-be zombies know it.
By any measure, he failed to deliver, and the election of his monstrous successor, Donald Trump, seemed to confirm this. For many North American millennials like Savage (he is Canadian), disillusionment with Obama was radicalising; it was their rite of passage from liberalism to socialism, from The New York Times to Jacobin (for which many of the book’s essays were first written), from Obama to Bernie. Indeed, the latter’s unlikely rise is probably as symptomatic of the former’s failures as Trump’s election was.
The Dead Center has perhaps surprisingly little to say about Sanders, whose star has also since fallen. Instead, Savage’s attention is relentlessly trained on a liberalism that refuses to account for its own failings, preferring to insist on its perennial necessity, if only as a bulwark against outright fascism. Somewhat perversely, what makes this ‘lesser-evilism’ — the term is Savage’s — look convincing are precisely the morbid symptoms that liberalism plays a role in producing. After all, the emergence of a figure like Trump is inextricable from the destruction wrought on the American working class by 40 years of neoliberal economics, the US establishment’s pensée unique.
For Savage, the Democratic Party’s reluctance to break decisively with this legacy has made American liberalism tantamount to a species of conservatism: an ideology resistant to change, seemingly by default, and dismissive of ‘even the most modest social-democratic alternatives’ coming from the left. What is more, there is something plainly absurd about liberals’ attempts to relive the end of history. He writes:
‘In the 1990s, figures like Blair and Clinton took up the task of dismantling the old order with gusto and conviction. Theirs was a self-consciously ideological effort animated by a genuine zeal for the so-called Third Way and a real, if misplaced, enthusiasm for an unbroken future of rule by the dictates of exchange value. Even in victory, the bewildered progeny of Clinton and Blair possess none of this spirit – their energies occupied instead with symbolic gestures, triangulating sound bites, and cynical attempts to garnish what is now a thoroughly technocratic project with a patina of popular allure.’
First as tragedy, then as farce etc.
However quixotic, the desire to return to those days is in itself not incomprehensible. Indeed, at least in Europe and the United States, the 1990s seemed to embody everything that contemporary politics lacks: there was a general optimism regarding societies’ direction of travel and a broad consensus on effective policy. What is more, people got along. There was even this thing called ‘bipartisanship’.
But what permitted all this apparent agreement and civility? Savage tells a familiar, but broadly true, story. What permitted it was the radical attenuation of political possibility. This was the era when the Thatcherite incantation, ‘There Is No Alternative’, reigned supreme. Gone were conflict and antagonism — especially if defined in terms of class. After all, everybody shared the same fundamental interests and goals, ones which would be assured by active participation in competitive markets. Everybody, moreover, would win. Social mobility (always assumed upwards), turbo-charged by entrepreneurial gusto, was the order of the day.
As Savage sees it, the obsession with civility is indicative of, at best, contemporary liberalism’s poverty of ambition and, at worst, sheer exhaustion. As he puts it, ‘in an age of surging inequality, far-right reaction, and impending climate apocalypse, liberalism offers an elegant and appealing psychological compromise: a frictionless vision of social, racial, and economic justice achieved through conventional institutions without the redistribution of wealth and power, the disruption of actual change, or the bother of mass popular democracy.’
An incisive assault on this nostalgia, and perhaps the strongest essay in the book, is ‘How Liberals Fell in Love with the West Wing.’ The essay is less a critical review of Aaron Sorkin’s hit television series and more a reading of contemporary US politics that seeks to account for its wide popularity. This is a show, Savage writes, that portrays ‘Democrats governing as Democrats imagine they govern, with the Bartlet administration standing in for liberalism as liberalism imagines itself.’ As Savage points out, the show everywhere betrays its allegiance ‘to a particular aesthetics of political institutions’ rather than to any policy platform of recognizable consequence. Moreover, its political antagonisms hinge not on a clash of interests, but on a ‘perpetual pitting of the clever against the ignorant and obtuse. The clever wield facts and reason, while the foolish cling to effortlessly exposed fictions and the braying prejudices of provincial rubes.’ More interesting still is the way the West Wing phenomenon has at times obtruded into actual US politics. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Bradley Whitford, who played strategist Josh Lyman in the series, stated publicly: ‘there is no doubt in my mind that Hilary would be President Bartlet’s choice. She’s — nobody is more prepared to take that position on day one.’ Was this cross-contamination between television and politics not itself a central aspect of what many Democrats so abhorred about Trump?
While drifting at times into what one might call a kind of left boilerplate — much of what Savage has to say about liberalism is now a species of common sense on the more radical wings of American politics — The Dead Center is a nonetheless lively, and often scathing, overview of a period whose historical significance remains ambiguous, not least for the kind of political movements with which its author would identify. Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid ultimately failed, but Joe Biden has displayed a willingness, however tentative, to break with a centrism with which he was once virtually synonymous. Try as it might to resuscitate itself, that particular centre is dead, and its would-be zombies know it.