The left never sounds more conservative than when it’s shedding crocodile tears for the American “institutions” the Trumpian right is shredding. David Corn laments “Donald Trump and the Deconstruction of America” in a long rant on Mother Jones’ site that was linked by Drudge (who himself never sounds more left-wing than when he’s posting negative headlines about Trump and seemingly operating on the bitchy premise that any argument is interesting if it’s directed at a target you hate—and I say that as someone who’s not a Trumper).
Corn has been active for decades but now joins the recent wave of leftists, not so unlike Paul Krugman, who sound positively nostalgic for 1950s fiscal habits or the intelligence community or proper Senate procedure or whatever is vaguely recollected to have preceded the Trump era, even though these same leftists were usually denouncing all those things right up until Trump proclaimed that he was against them. The biggest irony of that sort in the case of Corn’s new essay, right there in the title, may be his pretense that he sees “deconstruction” as a bad thing.
I mean, I have no doubt he hates Trump’s particular deconstructive methods, and the term’s safely vague, but Corn hails from Brown University—graduating in the early-1980s, a decade before I did—and the early-80s was really the (brief) peak of deconstructionism as the most esteemed mode of literary and philosophical analysis, praised by the left and hated by the right, with Brown proud of being one of the most decon-friendly campuses on Earth.
The idea behind deconstruction was to pick apart even the tiniest and most trivial of cultural products, especially American ones, and show that they were tools of stealthily-encoded oppression—at least by the standards of Marxism, feminism, and (less popular nowadays) Freudianism, the three favored “lenses” of the time, though it was always implied the left could use and discard others if it really wanted to, which it didn’t. Through deconstruction as it was then conceived, the left drew attention to media bias and described all art as alluring but potentially dangerous propaganda, making the artsy left wary at times even of such basics as narrative and conventional grammar.
By 1989, real-world communism was collapsing but “transgressive” art influenced by deconstruction was all the rage. The left often described this shift away from constructing institutions such as labor unions and regulatory bodies toward tearing down older bourgeois institutions through relentless criticism as a shift to “Cultural Marxism” (rather than economic socialism as it had traditionally, and somewhat pragmatically, been understood).
Recently, and rather strangely, recalling that phase of intellectual history has been declared taboo, with even some of my libertarian colleagues claiming there isn’t and never was such a thing as Cultural Marxism, apparently springing to its defense-through-concealment for no better reason than that it has sometimes been targeted for criticism by anti-Semitic, right-wing conspiracy theorists. But one need not be (and shouldn’t be) an anti-Semite to criticize the very real political project that was Cultural Marxism. Far from being an imaginary phenomenon dreamed up by the far right, it had vocal, explicit advocates on campus around the same time deconstructionism did, often the same advocates wearing different hats (or black turtlenecks, at least).
By the time I graduated, deconstructionism had come to be seen, at least by some of us, as both an annoyance and a punchline, very much filling the cultural space that would be occupied by “wokeness” a generation later. Corn’s lamentations, to his credit, sound more Generation Jones than Gen X, thus a bit more serious and mid-century—a bit more dry and embittered by events such as Watergate—and at the same time a bit too recent in tone to sound like full-on hippie Boomer revolutionary delusion.
I can readily believe Corn is horrified to see Trump, the Richard Nixon of the 21st century, acting like a transgressive, anarchic deconstructionist, and Corn might be even more horrified by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon explicitly calling himself an advocate of “the deconstruction of the managerial state.” But where was the left during the pre-Trump century and a half of intellectuals wanting to tear America apart and put it back together again in accordance with their philosophical, deconstructive whims?
Maybe the time for the left to start showing some deference (some, I say) to mainstream conservative-and-liberal political institutions wasn’t during Trump’s presidency, nor during the 1980s, but back around the 1880s, when Progressivism was born in sci-fi book club bull sessions across the nation, largely as support for Edward Bellamy’s leftist utopian novel Looking Backward. The left’s mind-rocket has been on a course that veers ever farther from reality since then (and yet they call libertarians unrealistic geeks and LARPers for endorsing the occasional Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, or Ayn Rand novel).
In his essay, Corn doesn’t advocate nationalizing all industry or making 45 the legal retirement age the way Bellamy did, but he surely allows himself some creative license in describing Trumpers. His rant tosses out the sort of paranoid flights of fancy that have become perfectly acceptable rhetorical strategy on the left, unmoored as the left has been from statistics and other facts—at home instead in the realm of symbolic oppression—in the decades since the deconstructionists and other fantasists conquered the left-leaning mind.
For instance, Corn sees merely allowing federal employees to discuss religion at work as “Christian dominionism,” a form of theocracy of which I’d wager most Republicans have never even heard but one prominent in the word-palettes of scaremongering, non-Christian non-conservatives. By any conventional measure, such as what laws make up most of the federal register and how government budgets are allocated, the Christians per se aren’t dominating, mostly just existing. I say that as an atheist/agnostic, mind you.
As the only other datum offered for his case that Trump is replacing secular America with theocratic America, Corn must do a non-sequitur swerve to slamming Trump’s potential renaming of the Kennedy Center—despite Trump not even being alleged to be planning to rename or reshape it in a Christian fashion. (Indeed, John F. Kennedy may have been more Christian than whatever member of the Trump family Corn fears will become the namesake of the altered arts venue.)
Did Corn just forget which phantom he was attacking in that part of his “argument,” sort of like when left-wing stand-up comedians doing Trump impressions toss in a whole bunch of imagined anti-gay invective, either because they sincerely think that’s stuff the sybaritic non-monogamous New York City-minted president is secretly longing to say or, just maybe, because it’s hateful stuff they’ve been repressing in their own minds but now can vent while blaming someone else, sort of like the scatological ravings of mildly mentally-ill people claiming to be possessed by demons? A paragraph or so later, Corn seems to remember where he is and tosses in the phrase “MAGA theology” to refer to right-wing agenda items in general, as if that’ll square the circle of his unconvincing imminent-theocracy claims.
Amidst it all, Corn has the audacity to assert that the real problem is that Democrats, unlike Trump, have no way to attract public attention or influence the media and are locked out of the conversation. He also has the gall to assert that left-leaning Americans are paying no attention to politics, thereby allowing Trump’s autocratic and fascistic tendencies to play out unopposed. Would that Americans pay attention to something besides politics!
One of Corn’s own most deconstructionist-sounding moves in the essay is to lament, like a latter-day Gramsci or Foucault, the very idea of objectivity. Writes Corn: “The gravitational pull within much mainstream media is toward neutral language and presentation. That aids bad-faith actors.” Can’t have leftists getting counterbalanced by non-leftists!
I agree that truth is more important, and more trans-partisan, than simply going through a he-said/she-said, bipartisan ritual about every outlandish claim under the sun. As a former employee of TV news divisions, I’m also aware of how left-slanted nearly every news division besides Fox would likely become if they weren’t tethered somewhat to reality by the ideal of “neutral language and presentation.” I’m sure Corn is aware as well, which is exactly why he wants to ditch objectivity and neutrality and leap unfettered into the subjective, politicized abyss. He’s the true child of the deconstructionist era.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
