Getting ready for the Midterm Elections
I wrote the following Response to my Bellah Legacy Group (BLG) colleagues, William Sullivan’s and Richard Madsen’s essay posted on the new BLG Substack, bellahlegacygroup.substack.com. Go to the new site and read their essay in full. If you do not have time, my Response below will give you a good sense of what they have written.
We are just a few days until the midterm elections. I believe my colleagues’ essay gives a compelling reason why the fascism of “Muskism,” “Trumpism,” and their MAGA supporters’ vision of the United States must be defeated. This “off year” election can mark the beginning of that defeat. However, after the defeat we will need to continue to pay attention to the rebuilding process. My colleagues’ essay will help us think through what is needed, of course with the added insights of all of us. So, if you have yet to vote, this essay will help inform your vote. If you have already voted, this essay will give you a sense that many of us are ready for a rebuilding process. If the midterms are a disappointment, it will be even more urgent to be in solidarity with others to create a mass movement to meet the time of trial we now face in our country.
What is clearer and clearer to me is that we have to understand that Trumpism and Muskism are essentially two sides of the same amoral coin. One is a conman focused on personal gain and the other represents the tech oligarchs’ vision of control to enhance their anti-human vision that has no respect for constitutional rights and the common good. Both isms must be defeated. Even if we regain State power from Trump the fascism of private power could prevail. Candidates and initiatives that seek to curtail both isms need to win. Even if the alternatives to Trumpism and Muskism are not perfect, we need to support them. Yes, this means in California the billionaires’ tax must win so we can continue to improve on the law.
Do vote and help ensure we are building a path to a positive future. Also check out the new Bellah Legacy Groups new website: https://advancedcatholicstudies.org/bellah-legacy-group/
Note: my next post on “transhumanism” will arrive after the election.
Response to “Rebuilding Democracy in America: Is a Good Society Possible?”
There is so much to appreciate in Sullivan’s and Madsen’s timely essay that arrives just days before the midterm elections, defining the nature of the “trial” we face today. My comments will focus mainly on what they call “Muskism.” This is a worldview of “techno-sovereignty,” with its “vision of progress as identical to the optimization of efficiency in all areas.” This vision is “dependent on the control of natural processes” via “systems of technique,” by utilitarian and instrumentalist methods. A world view, according to the authors, that has little or no space for moral considerations such as inquiring “about the meaning of a good life.” This moral inquiry raises questions of human identity and purpose,” such as:
what is worth doing and why it is so?
what kind of person is it worthwhile to become?
what kind of society is worth striving for?
These are questions of “value and meaning” that have no algorithmic answers, according to Madsen and Sullivan, which will “burst the bounds of the optimization paradigm.”
The authors make the case that Muskism is a new kind of fascism, “less human” and “more powerful” than the classic fascism of Trumpism, “which builds its loyalty through exchanges of favors with oligarchic elites…and cows an atomized mass society through inflammatory rhetoric of national emergency and salvation delivered by mass media.”
In reading this essay I am reminded of the closing lines from Robert Bellah’s book, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial.
We should not be so overawed by the late American worship of technical reason that we enter once again the illusion of omnipotence. One of the tenets of the early Puritans that we could well remember is that the millennium is brought by God, not man. Above all, Americans need to learn how to wait as well as to act. We have plunged into the thickets of this world so vigorously that we have lost the vision of the good. We need to take time again to see visions and dream dreams. But as Plato wrote so long ago, the vision of the good does not exempt us from life in the cave. Faith is not utilitarian, but neither is it an escape from the search for the useful. [Italics Added]
We do not know what the future holds and we must give up the illusion that we control it, for we know that it depends not only on our action but on grace. While recognizing the reality of death, we may return finally to Winthrop’s biblical injunction: [Italics Added]
Let us choose life.[71]
In the last section of the essay, “Toward a Regeneration of American Democracy,” Madsen and Sullivan give us some suggestions how to “choose life,” based, I believe on a version of Bellah’s plea “ to learn how to wait as well as to act.” They build on a book they co-authored with Bellah, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton, The Good Society, their sequel to their bestseller, Habits of the Heart, where they emphasized the importance of the “practice of paying attention.”
First, they tie the importance of how individuals use and direct their psychic energy to determine “the kinds of persons they become and how well they integrate their energies toward personal well-being and sharing life with others.” Second, they connect this insight to the way institutions are “collectively organized ways of directing attention to social ends,” that could foster, hinder or misdirect our attention. Third, they suggest that democracy is maintained if our institutions as the realm our realm of shared practices help shape our identities and “keep our energies focused on justice and serving the common good.”
After an analysis of how our attention can be misdirected in the “attention economy” of social media where our attention is “monetized and exploited by algorithms,” they offer ways in which we can reform and restructure our institutions of the political economy “to reduce incentives for the extraction of attention.” The authors do not shy away from the thicket of artificial intelligence (AI). It is one of most helpful insights of the essay. Quit rightly, from my perspective, they characterize AI as creating a new threat to civic attention with the advent of generative AI chatbots. Thus, they feel that AI is the “most important, even defining, technological development of the age.” Beyond technology itself is the concern of the growing power and wealth of tech companies who are locked in an “arms race” for controlling the new technology within the US and with China. Therefore, they suggest it is crucial to redirect public attention to be an “essential catalyst for the collective action of politics” to deal with the AI world.
Sullivan and Madsen, acknowledge that even in the post Trump era there are no quick answers for these collective actions. “The path to institutional reform could take generations.” They do have suggestions, basic principles and policies that could guide our considered actions, building on many of the insights in The Good Society:
“The most important goal remains fostering civic attention.” This will demand new coalitions of citizen groups working together on “goods shared in common.” These efforts could foster needed civic virtues: “the skill and will to listen and respect perspectives of different, interdependent people.” “Practice,” according to the authors, “forms and builds upon virtue.” They cite the spirit that was alive in Minneapolis in the face of threats from ICE as an example. Perhaps we now see this manifested in challenges to AI data centers.
They call for the “democratic transformation of the economy.” New institutional structures and policies are needed to help encourage “widespread representation and deliberation by citizens who stand equal to one another.” They tie their recommendations to their original recommendation in The Good Society but then update them in the context the challenges in our “techno sovereignty” world. Today they believe we will need to reform labor unions so the core of their activities will be “face-to-face interaction.” This will help mitigate the “social atomization” that has undermined democratic morale” in our digital world. This is crucial for workers to defend against the disruptions of AI. As in The Good Society, they call for a different kind of regulation, “one that limits irresponsible destructive activities…while enhancing and encouraging others.”
Reform of institutions of governance, based on a reinvigorated democratic citizenship is essential. They flagged the need for election funding reforms in The Good Society which today demands the overturning of the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision where corporations are considered individuals. Democratic liberalism requires moving beyond the individualism of American society which casts government’s role only to provide minimum order so individuals can pursue their self- interest, which they characterize as “Lockean liberalism.”
Crucial to any reforms is the need to enlist the “civic mission in the education.
They believe a successful education would be one that not only allows students to excel as individuals but also give them the insights and skills to engage in the cooperative work of citizenship. Again, in the age of AI these goals take on more “urgency.” Liberal education, which they argue is an uniquely American tradition, is needed to “enable graduates to be able to make sense of the world and determine their place in it.”
“Religious institutions have an important role to play in reconstructing civic life.” A positive example they offer is Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. It is valuable for it offers a voice that is “healing” with a “universal vision.” It is also timely for it “sets out a moral ecology to keep AI from violating the dignity of the human person” and to make AI’s “instrumental benefits work for the common good.” Again, a major part of the context of any attempts to reform our institutions will have to “pay attention” to what is happening to us, often with our unwitting acceptance, in the AI world. From their Good Society book the authors state: “Believers have a qualified loyalty to the state but an unqualified loyalty to God, and this can on occasion move them to respond in love to human need beyond the relativistic play of individuals, groups, or nations. In certain ways this gives them a larger opportunity to raise issues – about peace, about global ecology, about poverty in the Third World – than if their loyalties were purely national.”
In closing they reaffirmed the rationale for reform that informed their work in The Good Society:
“Perhaps most important, the focus of public debate must move away from a concern for maximizing private interests, as encouraged by the Lockean understanding of individual and society, toward the central problems of a sustainable future in our own society and in the world.”
They spend a good portion of their current essay explaining the way Lockean liberalism fosters a kind of individualism in the US that is still dominant today, which works against collective solidarity. I suggest that readers devote much time and thought to this section of the essay.
In their summary paragraph of the essay, they give a vision that understands how the world is now so interdependent with no turning back. But they also identify the downside of the way globalization, as the main illustration of interdependence, has created global inequality. According to the authors, the “perils that interdependence brings challenges the American Project, especially if driven by a similar Lockean liberalism. In the context of the global order, we also need to realize “we are no longer strong enough to dominate the globe on our own terms,” even as we now seem to think we can. So, a new focus on “solidarity” is needed.
In the 1970s, Bellah in The Broken Covenant cited that our new “trial,” after Independence and the Civil War, was to play a responsible role in the emerging interdependent, pluralistic and diverse world to create a more inclusive society and world order. That trial and challenge remains today with urgency and a need for new approaches.
In the final paragraphs the authors make clear that the challenge remains:
To meet geopolitical challenges from such strategic competitors, we need to form broad coalitions with countries that share democratic values and shared interests and then work steadily at the compromises and accommodations necessary to maintain those coalitions even in the face of not fully aligned interests. Finally, to promote our most cherished values to the rest of the world we need to put our own house in order – to double down on democratic openness, the rule of law, grassroots innovation, and civil equality, working toward a broader solidarity while combating the festering evils of racism and xenophobia.
I cannot do justice to the clarity of the insights presented in the essay by Sullivan and Madsen in my brief appreciative summary. A careful reading of their essay is a must.
This compelling and suggestive essay has stimulated many questions that can engage us for a long time. I offer a few of my own:
Can the challenges to the hegemony of private AI companies be successful, not only for generative AI but also for artificial general intelligence AGI? Who will win out on the “alignment” problem when AI companies try to align their creations to human values? Will the values you represent in your essay stand a chance? What vehicles/institutions need to be put in place to safeguard those values. Who will decide?
Which of the insights from Jürgen Habermas’ work on the “public square” and the role of religious institutions in public life can be helpful additions to your calls for greater civic participation and paying attention?
In what ways do the goals of Democratic Socialists (DS) align with your ideas? Do you envision coalitions with socialists? Do you believe the current DS will continue to evolve and offer a new kind of socialism? How do these efforts relate to the sentiments of Bellah in his chapter on socialism in The Broken Covenant where he calls for a “distinctly American socialism.” If a segment of politically active young people is inspired by DS, do you think the language of democratic liberalism still speaks to these activists? Is it wise to ensure we have a socialist presence so that future generations can have viable socialist history to learn from and reform? How do the ideas of “participatory socialism” of Thomas Piketty relate to the reforms you suggest for a “democratic transformation of the economy?”
As members of the Bellah Legacy Group, (sponsors of this Substack) what do you see as the priority events for the future? Can events with a focus on civil religion generate new galvanizing myths for the American Project? Myths that might be in a new idiom and speak to the current trial we now face? What might be events that focus on “AI and our future,” look like? Who are potential speakers for the Bellah Lectureship on Religion and Public Life who can address artificial intelligence?
My thanks to Sullivan and Madsen for challenging us to “pay attention” to extending the promise of a responsible nation. I look forward to continuing this conversation and engaging others in this effort.
With appreciation,
Harlan Stelmach
Berkeley, California
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