This is something I started writing in 2004, just after the election that gave George Bush a second term. I was moved to begin this piece after a symposium I attended, in which liberals got together to discuss what went wrong and how things could be put right again.   It struck me that everybody was focusing on how close the election was:  everyone was fussing about what Democrats could do to get 51% instead of 49% in the next general election.  It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that people were failing to focus on the deeper deficit costing the Democratic Party (and liberals in general) elections: our lack of an archetypal narrative, a grand quest, a mythic sense of destination. I began to ponder what it would take to recreate such a narrative.  The piece that follows is incomplete; a mere fragment.  That’s why I’ve never published it. But I’m going to post it here in hopes of at least starting a conversation.

The Willoughby Factor

For the last twenty-five years, the Republicans have been remarkably successful at winning elections because they have articulated not just a direction for American society, but a destination. Over this same period, the Democrats have disintegrated into a fractious collection of factions, each one clinging to one or two narrow issues and constitutencies, trying desperately to win elections by cobbling together coalitions, and why? Because they cannot coalesce around some deep sense of where they want to take the country.
I emphasize the word “where.” I propose that broad political success for a national party must begin with a mythopoeic sense of a coherant future world to which the party will deliver us if we board their train. The Republicans have such a place, and I call it Willoughby.

Willoughby is a small town portrayed in an early episode of Twilight Zone about an unhappy middle-aged businessman plagued with a terrible boss and a shrill wife, suffering from battered self-esteem and deadly work pressures. One day, riding home from work, he dozes off and dreams that the year is 1888 and that the train has stopped in some quiet small town.

“Willougby!” the conductor chirps. Through the window, beyond the platform, the businessman sees a pleasant neighborhood of single-family homes with nice yards, kids playing baseball in the streets, and neighbors talking over picket fences. The town looks clean, and the pace looks slow. It’s obvious that no one in Willoughby feels any stress. It’s obvious, too, that Willoughby looks like this no matter when you happen to pass through. It’s beyond change.

The next day, the man has a nervous breakdown and quits his job. On the way home, the train stops in Willoughby again, but this time he decides to get off. As he strolls into a slower world of measured serenity, the townsfolk all greet him by name.

Even if you never saw that episode of Twilight Zone, you probably recognize the place: the Republicans have been talking about it for nearly 40 years. Maybe they don’t use the name, but Willoughby is the place that began to appear in Republican speeches in the seventies, the place that was crystallized in ads for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in the eighties, the place that he and other Republicans have evoked constantly in ever since in folksy anecdotes and banter.

It’s the hidden promise of a mythic Willoughby that has enabled Republicans to wrestle Democrats to the mat for decades. Democrats famously know they lack “some sort of vision thing,” but when they dig around for something visionary in their bag of ideas, they come up with tediously specific programs, annoyingly vague “directions,” or meaningless “themes.” That’s because a movement consisting of many cantankerous and contradictory factions must first of all give none of its rattle-trap parts a reason to defect. Thus, any Democratic attempt to craft a mythopoeic offering is crippled from the get-go by the requirement that it avoid evoking any specific image.

In 2000, for example, Al Gore ran on the promise of a “prescription drug program added to Medicare”—that was his grand “vision.” Four years later, John Kerry’s campaign centered on “strength.” Can you imagine living there…? Can you picture it—taste it? Can you fantasize how you’ll spend your days in a land called Strength or a town called Prescription-Drugs-Added-to-Medicare?

The Republicans counter all such campaigns by whispering, “Willoughby. Stick with us and we’ll take you to Willoughby.”

If the Democrats want to persuade the country to board their train, they must start by coming up with a destination of their own, a place so tangible they could create travel brochures for it. Because who’s going to board your train if you can’t say where it’s going?

Without a mythic destination of their own, the Democrats are reduced to saying, “Willoughby’s no good, who wants to go there, the trip’s too dangerous, you’ll never get to Willougby with the Republicans, their train is infested with cockroaches, the track they want to go on is broken, their engineer is blind and drunk, hey—let us drive the Republican train, we studied driving in college.”

“Willoughby” has been working for Republicans because it addresses two deep-seated anxieties in American life. Liberals may dismiss Willoughby, but they can’t dismiss these two anxieties and indeed do not dismiss them. People on the left are just as passionately concerned about these problems as people on the right; and yet the left has relinquished ownership of these issues entirely to its rivals.

Endless Random Change

The first issue is the anxiety of endless, random change. At bottom, this stems from our relentless progress in technology, which keeps overhauling our economy, which in turn incessantly transforms the social milieu within which each of our personal destinies must unfold.

Because of this incessant change, no one can make dependable plans for the future. On one level, this generates a simple brute material anxiety. You train for a job, but by the time you finish your training that sort of job has probably vanished. At a deeper level, the prospect of constant, endless, random change generates social, psychological, and (dare I say it) metaphysical tensions.

For example: as a young person growing up, you absorb the expectations of your culture and look ahead to dating, finding a mate, and fulfilling the normal human passions that are expected to result ultimately in offspring and family life; that’s a set of urges genetically coded into your biolgoical self. But by the time you get to young adulthood, the rules have changed, nothing you learned (usually at the cost of so much humiliation and such assaults on your sense of self-worth during your adolescence—just check out AmericanPie or any of a hundred other teen movies) applies anymore: everything you do is wrong, offensive, and “incorrect.”

Let’s pursue this theme a few steps further down the river of life-stages. Your parents and several generations before them painstakingly built up a structure within which it was possible to get medical treatment if you got sick and to retire when you got old. Those structures are vanishing. If you don’t have health insurance, you don’t know what you’re going to do if you get sick.

If you do have health insurance, you’re probably getting it through your job, which means you had better not lose your job–but this comes at a time when all jobs are subject to the anxiety of endless random change generated by (see above), since even the most solid-seeming companies can disappear in a twinkle, as can whole industries.

Or you might be one of those who have already flown or fallen out of the old economic structures: you’re operating as an independent now, a consultant of some sort, or a service worker with a skill, in which case you’re buying your own health insurance, and every year your rates shoot up catastrophically, and there’s nothing you can do but pay them, because you’ve got some pre-existing medical condition staining your record, everyone does eventually, perhaps as trivial as headaches you once complained about, or sedatives you once requested which marked “possible sleep disorder” on your record, allowing any insurance company to reject your application.

And you certainly don’t know how you’re ever going to retire, because pensions are vanishing and everyone tells you social security is going to go broke long before you get a penny out of it, even though you’ve been paying into it all your working life and are paying into it still.

Meanwhile, every physically familiar aspect of your landscape is undergoing a transformation. That field you played in as a kid, that stream where you once caught polliwogs, that house on the corner where the cranky neighbor lived, the bridge or park or parking lot where you tasted your first kiss, and son on through an endless list of sentimental moments fused into physical landmarks, all have been mulched by the industrial process into something else. The passion that lies behind a word like “homeland”—the attachment to land, to a plethora of sensations, to inviolate memories, to the sweat and blood of ones forebears—none of that applies anymore, for all of it stands in the path of the universal grinder of endless random change.

A young Republican told me one day that if you wanted a real, old-fashioned home-made pie, you had to go to a small town in America’s heartland to get it. Well, that sentimental idea doesn’t correlate to what’s actually out there anymore. I have occasion to spend a fair amount of time in at least one small town in Eastern Kentucky, and—there at least—every commercial establishment within hours of driving distance, purveying anything from hardware to restaurant food, is the local franchise of some mega-chain. The only place to shop for “dry goods” is Wal-Mart, the only “old-fashioned pie” you can get is at the local Wendy’s where “old-fashioned” is just the name of a product-line.

Big corporations have purchased the rights to whatever indigenous American culture used to exist in the small towns in America’s heartland, they’ve had designers in distant cities standardize it, and they have low-paid workers in some other country manufacture it for re-sale to the people in small towns at prices lower than those folks could possibly afford to manufacture the products themselves, and then the corporations hire them to vend those goods to one another for wages they can spend only in the local outlet of the big chain, because there is no other place to spend it, money which more or less instantly shoots off to general accounting in the head office, to be disbursed according to the budgetary logic of a sprawling multi-national concern.

There is no Willoughby. But Americans long for it, so they listen to the blandishments of the Republicans, because no other vision of a livable future is being crooned to them.

The Meaning Deficit

The other of the two critical anxieties plaguing American society, and indeed the post-industrial western world in general, is the emptiness of a life consumed by work and rewarded by goods. It’s the meaning deficit.

Ironically, the meaning deficit comes out of our very success in certain areas. Mainly: our society is very good at production. It can pour out goods and services better than any society in history and better than any other system in the world today. I’ve been to places outside the post-industrial West, and I must say, nothing rivals the profusion of goods available here. Go into any store, look in the yellow pages, look at the ads in any newspaper, in the magazines, on TV, on the Internet–anything you want exists out there; and once you have everything you want, you don’t stop wanting. You need only open your eyes, and you’ll soon find new things to want, and all of that will be be available too, if you have the money.

There is nothing wrong with prosperity per se. Prosperity is a good thing. It’s certainly better than poverty, shortages, boarded-up stores, empty shelves, and famine. Prosperity must certainly be one feature of any mythopoeic destination that liberals propose to American voters.

There are, however, two problems with prosperity as we now enjoy it. The first is: we can’t relax about our goods. Strictly speaking, it isn’t just greed that makes people feel they don’t have quite enough, no matter how much they have. The truth is, hardly anyone does have quite enough to feel justifiably secure. Very few American families are more than the loss of health insurance and one catastrophic illness away from living on the streets. At one time, at least in our mythic memory, people who crashed for one reason or another ended up relying on their families, friends, neighbors, and community. But the trend in our society for years has been toward independence and autonomy for every individual. Men always sought it; then women entered the workforce, and now many women have independent incomes too, even if they’re married; and in the last few decades, children’s advocates have sought autonomy and independence for children too, even ones still living with their parents.

We might debate the merits of this trend. I for one find much to treasure in autonomy, independence, and sovereignty for each individual. I would not want to give it up—but I do see the flip side of sovereign control over all ones own choices: if you get into trouble, you’re on your own. That haunting anxiety drives each person to dream of achieving so much economic clout that they will never have to count on the indebtedness or compassion of any other human being.

And that’s what brings us to the meaning deficit. Although most of us may chafe at interference in our lives and resent other people trying to define us, what we want in the end, as human beings, is not simply to be left alone. We’re social creatures. We derive our sense of humanity, our sense of worth, and our deepest sense of purpose from our connections with other people, from our place in a social network. We want to be needed and called upon. Our deepest hunger is to signify. And none of us can achieve the sort of significance all of us long for by mattering only to ourselves. We must matter to someone else, to many someone elses, to a community, to a world out there.

Advantage: Conservatives

Conservatives were well situated to exploit the anxiety generated by endless change, because the reflexive rhetoric of the Right has always glorified stasis and demanded the preservation of the status quo. The left was poorly situated to offer any resonant response because progressive rhetoric has always inherently called for overturning the old, forging into the unknown, embracing the new, and risking that which is different.

The trouble is that in the last half century, “the new” has been thrust upon all of us whether we want it or not. We don’t need politicians to bring us “the new”: the new keeps coming willy nilly.

Of course, when progressives speak of overturning the old order and trying something new, they mean overturning old power relationships, the ones that entrench injustice and keep the majoity of people dissatisfied.

But in a social milieu quiveringly sensitized to the disquietudes of endless change, a politician whose speeches are larded with words like “new”, “different”, and “change” can expect much of his or her audience to hear only those words. Lacking some sense of an ultimate destination, the progressive stump speech seems to consist merely of “more change”, “anything new”, “shake it up”, “forget the past”, “question authority”, “denounce tradition”, “lets try something different, don’t care what, don’t know the consequences, don’t care.”

In the first few decades after World War II, words like “change” and “new” had automatic allure because they lined up with the broad historical tide. All over the world, colonial powers had recently let go of their possessions. All over the world, people who had formerly lived under the boot of some foreign culture were emerging, so they thought, into self-definition and independence.

Besides, all over the world, in the wake of the most devastating war in history, the demographics of the world suddenly tilted toward youth. In the richest portions of the globe, those youth came of age in a milieu of not just comfort but luxury and leisure. The energy of youth and their enthusaism for risk combined with global elation about independence and a sudden efflorescencence of material abundance in the West to produce worldwide receptivity to exploration and adventure. Change was fun, new was glamorous, old folks were stodgy and dumb, tradition lacked respectability, and in every realm, from entertainment to sex to politics, social consensus began to value the theme of last-shall-be-first.

Authority had to prove it’s moral legitimacy and could rarely succeed. Rebels reflexively got the benefit of any doubt and could lose legitimacy only by committing the most outrageous crimes. As late as 1976, I still heard people saying that Idi Amin was a good guy whose reputation had been blackened by imperialists and that the genocide in Cambodia was actually a worthy thinning out of pre-revolutionary predators, the extent of which had been vastly exaggerated by the media.

But in that decade, various crimes finally burst the bubble of legitimacy that had protected revolution per se. One of these was Cambodia itself. Finally, there could be no refuting the mountains of skulls, the forced marches of ordinary innocent people to extinction. Then came the exodus of the “Boat People” from Vietnam. Then came Afghanistan. And so on.

What Reagan Did

Reagan rode the reaction to Cambodia, to Vietnam, and to smaller dramas such as the mass suicide of the supposedly utopian Jonestown community in Guyana. Of course he came to office with a political agenda—of course he did. He wanted to make the rich richer. He wanted to militarize American society. He set out to promote Christianity as a quasi state-religion of the United States, it’s true. And yes, he wanted to protect the freedom of big business to make as much money as it could in any way it saw fit. Check, check, and guilty as charged; but these goals had little to do with his immense popularity or his electoral success. Another president could have come in with all those same goals, submitted all the same bills to Congress, launched the same programs, and left office in midterm on a rail if he ever got in at all.

Reagan was popular because of another more subliminal message he broadcast to the American people. He said that change was bad, not good. He said, the traditional family model was good, not bad. He said a fixed social order in which everyone knew his or her place and kept to it was a blessed thing. Masses of anxious people let out great sighs of relief. Yes, they panted, thank God someone finally said it: change is bad. Make the change stop. Please make it stop.

As for the meaning deficit, conservatives of course had a ready-made answer to plug into that one too. They had that old-time religion—which, as an added bonus, dovetailed nicely with an infrastructure for political organizing already in place: America’s churches.
                                                    (to be continued)