America’s revived left wing, mobilized by Bernie Sanders and drawn to organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), does not doubt the disastrous consequences of the Trump presidency. Yet for the left he represents not a historic rupture but a continuity. As Jed Purdy put it in Dissent last summer, Trump is “not an anomalous departure but rather a return to the baseline—to the historical norm.” Trump exposes starkly what the civility of Obama and his administration obscured—the subordination of American democracy to capitalism, patriarchy, and the iniquitous racial order descended from slavery.
For its steadfast radical critique, the American left once earned the dismissive scorn of centrists. Now that the center is panicking, the left senses an opening. An insurgency in the Democratic Party backed by the DSA appears to have a genuinely broad base. Among a swath of young Americans, talk of socialism has lost its stigma. This is not a moment of democratic crisis but an opportunity the likes of which the American left has not seen in many decades.
As different as their positions are, one thing these three sides have in common is that their goals are resolutely national. Trump promises to make America great again. Centrist Democrats are scandalized that Trump ever called America’s greatness into question and promise to repair the damage he has done. The preoccupation with Russian meddling is a call to rally around the flag. Meanwhile, the left draws its inspiration from a narrative that is no less patriotic and nationalistic than that of its centrist and right-wing opponents. Purdy in Dissent calls on activists to take up the national tradition that goes back to Radical Reconstruction, the left wing of the New Deal, and civil rights. In Tablet, Paul Berman has revived Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country and its insistence on the continuing tradition of radical republicanism from Walt Whitman to John Dewey and beyond.
The scope for a truly internationalist or cosmopolitan politics in the United States is limited. It would be unrealistic for any politically minded person not to reckon with this constraint. Nor should one waste time imagining how America might shed its creaking eighteenth-century constitution, the oldest that is still in use. But if patriotic appeals are simply the sine qua non of politics in this country, the historicist tone of America’s crisis talk is nevertheless puzzling. How can references to World War II, the Gilded Age, the Civil War, or the Revolution not seem anachronistic at a moment when accelerating climate change, the last great burst of population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, and the rise of Asia, driven by China’s authoritarian capitalism, are transforming the world?