The Catastrophizing Left
It Used To Be The Right's Message Was That the World Was Coming To an End. Not Anymore.
Extreme catastrophizing- the belief that we are bring about the end of the world, in some literal or figurative sense- has a long history. It is a longstanding idea associated with the political Right. One of the most famous versions of the argument involves religious beliefs about the End Times. Millenarianism, Dispensationalism, and various related Christian Eschatological beliefs posited that we were close to the events depicted in the Book of Revelation, and humanity had little time to repent.
The Christian End Times belief is as old as Christianity- indeed, there is some evidence that early Christians believed that the End Times would be coming quite soon, perhaps even in their own lifetimes. But it flourished, for some reason, in the United States. American history is littered with this or that Christian sect that preached we were arriving at the end of the world. These beliefs spread through what we now know as the Religious Right- the network of rural, evangelical churches, whether it be the Tent Revival circuit of the 19th and early 20th Century, or the mass television ministries of today.
Want to know the power of those ideas, even in modern times? Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of novelizations of the Rapture were massive bestsellers, published between 1995 and 2007. (LaHaye himself was a major religious right figure, and his wife, Beverly, founded Concerned Women for America, one of the most well known anti-feminist groups.) Left Behind was made into a feature film just eight years ago. Lots of people on the Christian Right believe that the end is near.
But I would argue even secular conservativism has traditionally had a long tradition of End Times thinking. Essentially, conservatives believed that human traditions (and especially Western and American traditions) were a sort of dam holding back humanity’s most self-destructive forces. Expanding the scope of government would lead to world Communism, anarchy, and destruction; the sexual revolution would lead to the breakdown of the family, etc. You’ve heard the arguments. The premise was that what we think of as American democracy is uniquely fragile, and dramatic change could lead to unintended consequences which sow the seeds of its destruction.
If I were to choose one example that shows the catastrophizing tendency of the Right, it would be the debate over gay marriage in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The Right did not merely argue that they thought homosexuality was immoral or against their religion, even though that was likely what was motivating many of them to oppose gay marriage. Rather, they said that marriage was one of the central institutions of society since time immemorial, and any attempt to “change” marriage might cause societal collapse. This argument, of course, was obviously crazy; marriage has changed in all sorts of ways over the course of time, and there’s no actual evidence that in the absence of a civil partnership with certain legal obligations, humans would not engage in pair bonding or attempt monogamous relationships. There was also no evidence that whatever gays did or didn’t do would affect straight marriage at all. And yet, conservatives adopted that argument until it became clear to the public that it was ridiculous, as jurisdiction after jurisdiction adopted gay marriage and nothing bad came to pass. It fit in with their ideological priors, that our social institutions are fragile and any change might tip us over the edge into chaos.
In contrast, traditionally, the Left has told us not to fear progress; indeed, the Left over the last few decades has self consciously adopted the moniker “progressive”, making this more explicit. The Left’s message is that we can improve society, and we can’t be held back by our fears. That the future is better than the past. That there is no “end times” over any realistic timeframes; organized religion, of course, is simply incorrect, and Burkean conservatives who fear change are too skittish and too willing to consign those who current suffer deprivations to the status of permanent oppression and subordination.
That’s how I’ve always thought of the Left. But lately, the Left has been stealing a page from the Right’s playbook and incessantly catastrophizing. It started in a part of the Left that always had a catastrophizing element- the environmental movement. Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, making a Malthusian environmentalist argument that overpopulation would destroy humanity. That did not, obviously, come to pass. But because many environmentalists see the planet and ecosystems as inherently fragile, catastrophizing “end of the world” arguments have a certain attraction to them.
Extreme environmentalism has quasi-religious, earth worship elements to it. So if they were the only folks on the Left catastrophizing, that wouldn’t merit an essay. But it is now spreading in our modern polarized world. Democracy, we are told, is about to die. The most extreme types say things like “Trump will steal the 2024 election and then democracy will be abolished”. Slightly less extreme are takes like “purple states will be gerrymandered to the point where no Democrat can ever win them”. And of course, there’s a ton of discourse about how conservative control over the Supreme Court will mean that Republicans will get whatever they want in the political realm, because if the Democrats try to do anything or win anything, the Court will block it.
To understand why this is a problem, and why it relates to partisan polarization, consider a time not so long ago, when Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush won landslide presidential elections in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988. Three of these elections retained Republican control (Nixon won his first term in 1968 in a close election, and 1980 elected Reagan to his first term), and the 1980-84-88 sequence was particularly painful for Democrats, who did a lot of soul searching that resulted in the Bill Clinton candidacy of 1992.
But what Democrats did not say during that period was that it was the end of the world and that they could never win the Presidency again. You might imagine people actually saying that after an election like 1972 or 1984, in each of which the Democrats won exactly one state! Let that sink in— not only did Nixon and Reagan win states we think of as Blue stalwarts like California and New York, but they even won socialist Vermont! Reagan carried Massachusetts in 1984! That looks like a Republican electoral lock, doesn’t it?
And yet liberals did not believe this meant that the end was near. Now, obviously one big reason is thanks to liberals’ alliance with conservative Southern white Democrats, and also thanks to gerrymandering(!), the Democratic Party retained control of the House for that entire period and the Senate for much of it. But to be clear, even this wasn’t some boon for liberalism— actually passing liberal stuff in Congress required alliances either with Republicans, Southern conservative Democrats, or both. Liberals weren’t doing very well in the governance department in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Nonetheless, the end was not near.
I think the real difference was this: because there was less partisan polarization, liberals did not sit around thinking about how the Right was conspiring against liberals, how the Right was “capable of anything”. Liberals understood that even large majorities were ephemeral, as they had seen their own large majorities during the Roosevelt and Johnson years disappear. The Supreme Court was conservative in the 1970’s and 1980’s too, but that mostly manifested itself in things like cutting back on the rights of criminal defendants and ruling for big business, not using the “shadow docket” to jump into hot button political controversies and skew the current political climate to the right.
And as you can probably see from this description, part of this story is that the Right really has gotten a lot more aggressive at overthrowing procedural norms in an attempt to entrench itself. The Supreme Court really is deciding too much on the shadow docket, and Republican state legislatures are passing way too many bills to manipulate elections and are even flirting with stealing the presidential election.
Nonetheless, that is only part of the story. Because much of the catastrophizing is about stuff that the right either doesn’t do or can’t do. A case in point- before the 2020 election, it was standard on the Left to hear even very respectable people swearing that the Supreme Court would intervene to reelect Trump if he lost. As is often the case, the people who say these sorts of things were very sure of themselves, and quick to insult and attack anyone who pointed out that no, the Supreme Court doesn’t work like that. Of course, the Court had many opportunities to intervene in cases Trump brought to overturn the election, but it did not do so. Indeed, even the Left’s favorite talking point- that Justice Thomas’ wife, Virginia, was heavily involved in January 6 and “Stop the Steal” activities- cuts the other way on this. Even though one of the nine Justices had a close family member who clearly sympathized with President Trump’s post-election claims, the Court still didn’t intervene.
Similarly, many on the left are making hay about a recent statement by a prominent Wisconsin politician that the Republican Party will never lose another election in Wisconsin. But he, and his party, do not have the power to do that. It is true that they have extremely gerrymandered the state, which makes it difficult, in the short term, for Democrats to win an election there. But note the boldfaced “in the short term”. In the long term, first of all, the way gerrymandering works is by trading off risks. In other words, if you gerrymander, you increase the probability that your party will carry all normal elections, because instead of having a few districts with big majorities, you have many districts with small but comfortable majorities. Gerrymandering is about creating as many 55-45 districts as you can. But the flip side is that in a landslide, the gerrymandering party loses big, because it eliminated a bunch of its safe seats to create those districts. The 1932 and 1994 congressional elections were full of gerrymandered seats that got wiped out in a landslide- the Democrats lost 54 House seats in 1994, and the Republicans lost an astounding 101 seats in 1932!
But beyond the mathematical limit on gerrymandering, it’s also the case that you can’t predict the future course of politics. Take a look at the following two maps, which are just 24 years apart:
The top image is Bill Clinton’s 1992 election, by county. The bottom image is Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Trump, by county. See that big vertical line of blue just right of the center of the country in 1992, starting in Minnesota and running all the way down to Louisana? We don’t talk about that line much. There’s no “story” attached to it like there is with the “Solid South” and other electoral pheonomena. But what that line represents is a whole region of, literally, middle America, that Democrats could carry in 1992 and can’t carry anymore. (Biden didn’t carry it either, despite winning the election by seven million votes.)
My point is, over time, the electorate changes. Whatever the coalition that existed in Vermont in 1984 to vote for Ronald Reagan, it doesn’t exist anymore and obviously no Republican presidential candidate can carry the state right now. But even saying that doesn’t mean it will be true forever; none of us can predict what Vermont politics will be like in 2044.
So there’s no reason to assume that just because some overconfident Wisconsin Republican says the GOP has locked up the state, that they have. The political graveyards are full of people who made foolish predictions of electoral “locks”. It wasn’t too long ago that some prominent Democrats were predicting that the rise of racial and ethnic diversity in America would give the party a lock on elections (the central text expounding this was a book called The Emerging Democratic Majority, which sold well to Democratic partisans). It didn’t happen, as we all know, and the Republicans are actually making gains now among Black and Hispanic voters.
The fact of the matter is that both the Left and the Right catastrophists are wrong. Human institutions are resilient. America is a powerful country. Public opinion is taken seriously by politicians, and the opinion of the business community and rich people, who want stability, is taken extremely seriously. This isn’t to say that nothing can happen to knock us off our perch; we obviously took a big hit from the coronavirus, for instance, and global warming remains a serious long-term threat. But there are several intervening steps between us and the actual destruction of our institutions, and the catastrophizers never explain how these steps are going to be surmounted.
To see this, consider one of the currently popular scenarios. It turned out that John Eastman, a very hackish lawyer, told the Trump legal team that if they filed their election contest cases in Georgia, they could get the cases up to the presumably sympathetic Clarence Thomas, who could “rule for them” as “Circuit Justice”. (The Circuit Justice is a Supreme Court Justice who hears routine motions from a particular federal circuit. Emphasis on “routine”. Stuff like permission to file an oversize brief. They refer everything controversial or consequential to the full Supreme Court.)
This is, as I intimated, extremely bad legal advice. Justice Thomas neither had the power as Circuit Justice to issue rulings on the merits of election contest cases, nor the desire to upset his colleagues and do something that would surely be reversed by the rest of the Court. But let’s say he somehow did. First, the rest of the Court would have to not reverse it, which is highly unlikely given we know how they ruled on the 2020 election contest cases. Then, whatever it is that he ordered would have to be implemented. Mike Pence would still have to recognize whatever the Georgia legislature or state officials did to supposedly reverse the election. And then, the House of Representatives would vote to overturn Pence’s ruling, right? And then where are we? Even the catastrophic outcome gets you several steps short of actually installing Trump as President.
Indeed, I’m sure that is exactly what some of Pence’s advisors told him before he decided to certify the result that Biden won. President Trump’s strategists were not a bunch of diabolical people who could manipulate American political and legal institutions to reverse an election result. They aren’t that smart and they aren’t powerful enough to do that. They were throwing out “3 a.m. in the dorm room” theories hoping something would stick or at least please their boss. Successful coups require extensive plotting, because you have to know exactly what you are going to do once you break into the President’s quarters. And it has to work, because if it doesn’t, oftentimes the coup plotters end up strung up in the public square. These guys had no idea how to make anything stick.
And the reason they had no idea is because it is actually very tough to overthrow a democracy in a country that has a whole bunch of powerful institutions. I haven’t even gotten into what the media would do if it looked like such an attempt might succeed, or how the business world could exact pressure, or how the rest of the world, fueled by outrage, could make it impossible for the illegitimate leader to govern. You have to map out a lot of things to overthrow American democracy- things that the John Eastmans of the world lack the intellect, power, or foresight to figure out.
Because I don’t think catastrophizing results (for the most part) from reality, or us living in a particularly bleak period for liberalism (the 1980’s were much worse, believe me), that leaves me searching for other explanations. I think the major one is partisan polarization. Polarization makes the other side seem more evil, which does two things: (1) it increases the perceived stakes, so that the GOP is seen by liberals as a bigger threat than Reagan was in the 1980’s, and (2) it feeds the notion that your political enemies are “capable of anything”, and thus have the combination of omnipotence and malevolence required to destroy our institutions.
This is all quite bad. I think the old Left narrative about societal progress was essentially correct. Not that progress is inevitable- you have to work for it, as the Left always said- but that it is not something to be feared. The future is almost always better than the past, and this is the case because humans with foresight imagined a better future instead of imagining the end of the world. I know of no great human visionary in the last few centuries who preached a dispensationalist ideology, who said the end of the world was near. We need to keep doing the work and resist the siren song of catastrophizing everything.
So one thing the midterm seems to have shown is that there really are guardrails, whose existence/effectiveness I had come to doubt.
That provides strong support for your argument here.
If the GOP was ready to accept that they can play by the rules and win, this debate would be over. But my gut feeling is still that the GOP will respond to the 2022 midterms by continued attacks on the guardrails rather than by trying to stay within them and still reach voters, which this election have shown they can do, even in NY and CA.
This was a good read, but as one of those "catastrophizing" lefties, it did not fully address my main concern. I think the problem isn't political polarization per se. It is polarization in an environment where 1) one party can attain and hold power without majority support, 2) that minority ruling party increasingly uses its power to perperuate its advantage. (In that sense, Wisconsin is a good example).
The Republican dominance in 1980, 84, 88 was, as you note, limited to some degree by Democratic control of the House throughout and the Senate too most of those years. But it also did lead to Clinton in 1992. But overreach from Clinton meant he spent his last 6 years with a Republican congress.
Then GWB wins a close election, loses the popular vote, and at least to some degree the Bush Admin is humbled by the narrow win. At least to some degree they saw it as a problem for their own governance that they didn't get a popular majority, and when they did get one in 2004 it was a huge deal to them. Not sure what his presidency would have looked like without 9/11.
But the unpopularity of the contiuing wars and the great recession swing the Democrats back into power in 2006 (Congress) and 2008 (WH). Democrats pass the ACA in 2009, and lose the House i 2010. Obama is reelected in 2012, prompting the GOP "autopsy" that suggests the need to expand its base and appeal.
Looking back, all of that, from 1980 to 2012, looks like a political system that is functioning "well enough." Muddling through despite its many problems. But I don;t thinkmwe are in that place anymore.
In 2013, House hardliners kill a bipartisan immigration reform bill that had passed the Senate. In 2014, the GOP takes the Senate. In 2016, Trump wins a close election despite coming nowhere near a popular majority. In 2020, he comes ~45,000 votes away from pulling off the same feat again. During his term he and Mitch McConnell steal a SCOTUS appointment that should have gone to a Democrat, which locks in a extreme conservative court for at leaast a generation. That court is hard at work reinforcing the GOP ability to win without a popular majority.
In my view, what kept things in equillibrium from 1980 until the recent turn after 2012 is that both sides felt some obligation to appeal to a majority. Since the GOP no longer does, things are different now.