Imagination Capture

Steve Scalise, the congressman from Louisiana and former Republican Majority Whip, recently said that “the Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November, against freedom. Make no mistake about that. The lines have never been more clear in an election.”

His aim, I suppose, was to invoke the bogeyman of the Red Scare of the 1950s or the threat of communism that motivated the Reagan years. Whatever his intention, his words had the feel of shag carpet or sitcoms like “Leave it to Beaver” watched on black and white televisions with antennas and remote clickers. It’s the rhetoric of a bygone era.

But Scalise, like most Republicans these days, was following the lead of Donald Trump. With the recent electoral victories and challenges by Democratic Socialists (DSA), Trump has warned that the nation is imperiled by those hell-bent on destroying “the traditional American way of life.” “Communism,” Trump declared at the Mount Rushmore sesquicentennial event on July 3^rd, “is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

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Well, what should we expect from an eighty-year-old President, who believes he is the smartest man who has ever walked the earth? He traffics in a politics of fear and, I guess, the threat of “commies” lingers in his addled head as the most effective way, outside of explicit racist appeals, to motivate voters who are struggling economically.

But Trump and his ilk aren’t the only ones playing at this game. DSA has rattled the Democratic Party, and some within the party’s ranks seem to be in full panic mode as they fight on the terrain set by Republicans and their accusations of a communist/socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.

These Democrats, like Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, insist on a kind of pragmatism inherent in centrist politics, echo the language of the political consultant class about “electability” (a shorthand for troublesome concessions), and declare their commitments to the power of markets even as crony capitalism erode the basic pillars of American democracy.

Ironically, theirs is an echo of a bygone era, too.

In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger published, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. To put it crudely, he understood the destabilizing effects of unbridled capitalism and technological advances on traditional forms of life. People felt unmoored. They experienced a breakdown in the social bonds of society. Communism offered an alternative, new forms of solidarity. But that alternative ended up being a more secure prison.

Schlesinger commended something between the free hand of markets and the dictatorship of the proletariat: he argued for a form of liberalism that would be both practical and affirming of the “balance between the individual and community.” But this approach, practically, would go hand and hand with American Cold War nationalism.

The “vital center” had to hold between the equal threats from the left and the right.

In short, the extremism of fascists and leftists, broadly understood, presented an existential threat to the Republic. What results is a political orientation that sets out to contain any politics that might fall under the category of socialism or the left or radical left.

And what do we hear today from some Democrats about the “far left extremism” of those who embrace democratic socialism? Van Jones, former advisor to President Obama and CNN commentator, recently warned that the extremists in DSA were “hijacking” the party. “I am tired of a set of people on the very far left, telling us that in order for us to be progressive that we have to believe and support ideas that are completely nuts”, Jones declared on his Substack.

He laid out his progressive bona fides and the positions that he fully endorses (e.g., criminal justice reform, the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, free education). But the extremists, he claims, push an agenda far outside of those commitments. They want “no police, no prisons, and no borders.” They “support Hamas” and celebrate “the murder of Israeli civilians.”

But this carries the stench of the bogeyman.

One wonders who these people are who demand that all progressives should hold such views. The slogan, “no police, no prisons, and no borders,” feels like it came straight out of a Republican war room. And criticisms of genocide in Gaza ought not be conflated with support of Hamas or celebrating the murder of Israeli civilians. One can hold the former without embracing the evil of the latter. Think of the positions of AOC or Mamdani here. Just to name two popular politicians. Jones knows these positions among progressives are much more nuanced and the debate more vigorous than his caricature.

But caricature is the point.

Today’s version of vital center politics must work to hold off Trumpists AND the so-called left. Both represent an existential danger, on its view, to the Republic. The old rhetoric of the threat of socialism and communism to freedom seeks to occupy the imagination and cut short any attempt to think outside of the box of its version of liberalism.

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A while back, one of my former teachers, Jeffrey Stout, wrote a short piece entitled “Ism-mongering.” It involved a rather technical philosophical debate about his book, Ethics After Babel. Stout took issue with the reviewers’ description of the book as “an attempt to refute foundationalism, realism, or any other ism.” In fact, he resisted the shorthand of slogans that stand as substitutes for his own thinking. The reviewers’ attention to “isms,” he claimed, got in the way of what he was trying to argue in the book.

I think we need to resist the allure of “ism-mongering” in our politics, too. Invocations of socialism and communism can gum up the imagination. The slogans stand in for serious thinking. And, in some ways, that is the point.

Our politics presuppose imagination capture. Both parties don’t want us to think outside of set boxes or frames. Our fears and ambitions must be familiar, rote, and contained. And every single time we stick our heads outside of a box, speak words about the possibility of a different way of living (claim that markets are not the answer to all social and moral ills), and demand a responsive politics to our troubles, familiar language interrupts and we are forced, once again, to draw within the lines.

I am not interested in fighting over “isms.” I could care less whether I am thought of as progressive or not. The values animating the fight for a better world draw my attention and heart not ideological fealty. The bogeyman isn’t as effective when we are more concerned about what and who we care about than about what we fear and labels that signal our virtue.

Both parties and established interests want us fighting on old terrain. Debating about socialism, communism, and freedom. The Cold War, vital center politics, Reaganism, the triangulation of the Democratic Leadership Council and its various offsprings, and MAGA are all in a fight for how we imagine the past, present, and the future. Easy slogans will secure our chains.

Let’s break free, allow our imaginations to do the work this moment demands, and draw outside these damn lines.

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