Tim Burke's reflections on the fragility of left-liberalism and of the nation-state

Tim Burke, There's Got to Be a Morning After, Easily Distracted, Nov. 4, 2020.

His opening shot: "The liberal-left coalition is not just weak in the United States, it is weak globally (in various different local meanings and configurations of left-liberal)." It is up against a largely working class movement that "visible everywhere around the planet in various forms" and

is socially coherent because it is territorially contiguous (whereas the left-liberal alliance is dispersed, even in its centers of power, and has no sense of material proximity except in sites of consumption and in evanescent public gatherings) and because its resentments are well-founded. I do not say just or fair or morally right. But I can agree that people in deindustrialized cities, materially decomposing suburbs, in lower-managerial positions bossed or owned by pedigreed professionals, running small businesses that depend on the culturally protean consuming largesse of educated elites, in rural communities that produce food and boredom in equal measure, have some coherently connected reasons to resent their situation. And hence, even if they are not a clear majority of the inhabitants of a given national territory, are often able to mobilize a political response that either lets them capture the nation-state or lets them block the political will of the much more socially and ideologically fractured opposing alliance. And this reaction has no devotion to democracy, equality or liberalism. It will, if it seizes any system or structure that allows the use of violence and domination, gladly deploy them with little concern even for collateral damage to its own social redoubts.

Scholars have known for a long time that nations and nationalism are much less distinct from empires than it might seem. To some extent, they are empires that performed a level of political and cultural integration in the 19th and 20th Centuries that concealed their remaining, continuously reproduced forms of territorial difference and divergence. Western intellectuals in the late 20th Century liked to talk high-handedly of postcolonial states as divided by ethnic or religious rivalries that were a result of badly constructed boundaries drawn by colonial rulers and uncorrected by postcolonial inheritors. But I think now we are seeing those nation-states were not a defective variant of the main form: we are seeing that everywhere the nation is not what it seems and nowhere does loyalty to the nation create a fellowship that transcends other forms of territorial, economic and cultural affinity and alliance. And contrary to some of the sentimental weepiness in American public life this morning, it never really did. This is not a world we have lost, it is an illusion that has been popped like the soap bubble it has always been.

What a left-liberal alliance needs to go forward into some form of reproducible command over territorial sovereignty is a coherent foundational politics that does not depend upon viewing “explainers” on social media or does not require paternalizing sermons by the woke. It needs a politics that is felt in the bone and arises out of persistent affinities, that is made manifest and visible in every moment of our daily lives–a politics that can be spoken out of experience by anyone who subscribes to it and that has some hope even of circulating into some of the spaces of resentment that make our enemies, that fracture some of their coherence, perhaps by addressing at least some of what they resent or fear about the futures that the rest of us stand (often uneasily) with.