In one of the great scenes from the movie “Dr. Zhivago,” based on the novel by Soviet author Boris Pasternak, a young Bolshevik commander explains to the idealistic physician that “the private life is done in Russia. History has killed it.”
In America today, it also seems increasingly impossible to separate personal life from the political. In awards shows, sports broadcasts and fashion runways — which once provided escapes from politics — we find endless passionate anti-Trump protests and denunciations. Even corporations, like Under Armour, have faced opprobrium — and even boycotts — for daring to support Trump. Nordstrom faced a possible boycott for carrying a now-canceled fashion line of his daughter, Ivanka.
In contrast, the GOP, once a smooth-running machine, has become something akin to the motorcycle gang from the TV series “Sons of Anarchy.” Led by a screwball president, its partisans often at odds with each other, they have so far demonstrated some stupefying incompetence, not to mention a lack of policy coherence. If enforced and overwrought unanimity is the disease of today’s Democrats, chaos threatens to be the new GOP curse.
The new cadre party
Joseph Stalin, the dominant figure of the Soviet era, understood keenly the role of culture in politics. He once called writers “the engineers of the soul.” He would find some kindred spirits in today’s progressive cultural warriors who dominate the arts. Most of the media, outside of the Murdoch empire, have been, in the words of the Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik, “flipping out,” losing any tie to the tradition of impartiality. Attempts to silence pro-Trump, or simply too obstreperously right-wing, supporters are also gaining currency on the progressive-controlled social media.
Conservatives are regularly harassed and prevented from speaking on college campuses. Celebrities and law professors have even praised the idea of a coup, although it’s pretty clear who would have the guns on their side. But what they lack in firepower they have made up for with impressive organization. There has been little “spontaneous” about some of the various demonstrations that, as the Daily Beast recently reported, are produced by well-organized, and well-funded, cadres.
The dominant groupthink of our cultural and intellectual classes increasingly runs through the bloodstream of the Democratic Party. Once a broad coalition of regional, economic and ethnic interests, the Democrats, as Will Rogers once quipped, were not an “organized party,” but rather a motley assemblage of interests.
Enforced by the notion of “intersectionality,” activists are compelled to embrace every permutation of the politically correct ideology. Increasingly, no self-respecting Democrat can dissent on issues ranging from climate change policy to “Black Lives Matter,” an “open borders” immigration policy, transgender rights or income redistribution. The threat to the last remaining moderate Democrats, such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, seems to be of little concern; orthodoxy, if you will, trumps efficacy.
Republicans: In control but out of control
Theoretically, Democratic overreach and intolerance should prove to be a boon for Republicans. But Trump’s own natural authoritarian tendencies — and lack of grace — provide an ideal foil for the self-proclaimed “resistance.” Ronald Reagan faced almost as fevered opposition but his communication skills, coherent ideology and personality left the Democrats looking petty and unhinged. Ultimately, to regain power, the Democrats were forced first to cooperate with the GOP and later adopt some elements of its program.
In those days, the GOP was fairly well organized, and, once the inevitable conflicts were played out, followed the so-called “Eleventh Commandment,” which discouraged attacks on fellow Republicans. But thin-skinned Trump, unlike the jocular, self-confident Reagan, cannot accept criticism gracefully, much less with a sense of humor. He also has problems working comfortably even with his own party’s leadership in Congress. If the Democrats increasingly resemble Bolsheviks, the Republicans increasingly seem out of control and over their heads.
Yet, in some ways, the GOP’s anarchic divisions are somehow reassuring, compared with the neo-Stalinism of the Democrats. Like the old Democratic Party, the Republicans — both in Congress and the conservative press — carry out open internal warfare on a host of issues, from relations with Russia to immigration, trade and tax policies. It is cacophonic, and often chaotic, but at least there’s the benefit of vigorous debate that once so enlivened the Democratic side.
Greater tolerance of political differences needed
Clearly, a confrontation between rampaging Trumpians and overwrought Democratic cadres is not in the best interest of comity. Each tendency bores, like so many termites, into the always delicate frame of our republic, threatening to topple the whole thing and usher in something more intrinsically authoritarian and far less stable.
Needed now — from both the political class and the media — is a willingness to listen to, and assess, arguments carefully without jumping to conclusions or resorting to conspiracy theories and invective. There is no monopoly on wisdom and no shortage of good ideas. The republic cannot be repaired by madcap bikers or fanatic cadres who can hear nothing but their own dogma.
Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).
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