“A people who have been real to themselves because they were for something,” wrote Archibald MacLeish in 1949, “cannot continue to be real to themselves when they find they are merely against something.”¹ When a nation’s political life reaches a point at which large majorities no longer know what they are for but only what they are against, that nation has arrived at a state of negative self-definition.

When that occurs, MacLeish wrote, two things follow. First, defining oneself solely in opposition to the views of others is not merely a negative act; it is “a declaration of political bankruptcy.” Giving up one’s “independent mind” and reducing one’s political will to “the dry negation of the will of others” leaves one reactive and rudderless, with nothing positive to offer. Second, and even more dangerous, the point at which millions of people surrender to negative self-definition is the point at which politics, economics, indeed the entire substance of national life, becomes imbued with a profound sense of unreality. That is the point at which the national discourse becomes dominated by negative, fearful fantasies, and power falls into the hands of whoever is most skilled at manipulating those fantasies.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election was a national exercise in negative self-definition. Exit polls suggest that most Trump voters did not vote for Trump so much as they voted against Clinton and everything for which she stood. Donald Trump not only made Hillary Clinton the centerpiece of his campaign, but every one of his key policy proposals, from building the Mexican wall to a Muslim registry to overturning Roe v. Wade to dismantling the Affordable Care Act, reflected a militant and highly emotional negativity. His very path to his party’s nomination was primarily an appeal to negative feelings about his rivals, whom he attacked as tools of a corrupt establishment. In short, he ran a campaign virtually devoid of positive programs, in MacLeish’s terms “politically bankrupt,” yet at the same time highly successful at manipulating negative fantasies.

Reciprocally, indications are that most Clinton voters did not vote for her so much as they voted against Trump and everything for which he stood. Several of her key supporters essentially told audiences to vote for Clinton because she wasn’t Trump. Even Bernie Sanders, while lauding the Democratic platform as the “most progressive in American history,” repeatedly emphasized that the primary strategic objective of the campaign was to prevent Trump from capturing the presidency. Thus the negativity was not the exclusive property of either side; it was a state of mind shared by both.

That shared state of mind is the most visible symptom of a national malaise that runs even deeper and has become even more dangerous than when MacLeish wrote. In 1949 negative self-definition meant defining U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics in terms of anti-communism. The Cold War, MacLeish argued, produced an U.S. foreign policy that was in all key respects “a mirror image of Russian foreign policy.” Similarly, “American domestic politics were [being] conducted under a kind of upside down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted…unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn’t like it.” Both parties identified as anti-communist and competed over which was more credibly so, thus setting the stage not only for the McCarthy era but for almost half a century in which fear of communism played a key and often determining role in U.S. politics.

This is not to say that the political atmosphere during those years was entirely negative. The Marshall Plan, the civil rights movement and its resultant federal legislation, the War on Poverty, and Medicare all stood as evidence of positive impulses. As late as the 1964 campaign, Lyndon Johnson could tell a cheering crowd, “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.” Eventually, however, he too fell prey to the anti-communist preoccupation, and what had begun as a limited intervention during the Eisenhower years escalated into a full-blown war in Vietnam. The overthrow of several democratically elected Third World governments before, during, and after the Vietnam War reflected the same mindset, as did a ballooning military budget that for the first time took the national debt beyond the $1 trillion mark.

Destructive as it was, however, the negative self-definition of Cold War anti-communism was still one in which the prime enemy was an identifiable foreign country, even when McCarthyite attacks targeted that country’s supposed domestic agents. Lives were lost, careers were ruined, and vast sums of money misspent, yet the negativity was still primarily directed outward.

The collapse of the Soviet Union could have signalled an end to American negative self-definition in that the threat of global communism was no longer credible. Almost immediately, however, a new threat arose to take its place. Early reactions within the Clinton Administration to the first World Trade Center bombing were restrained, and as late as 1998 White House aide Richard Clarke was accused of “scaremongering” about the still-obscure Osama bin Laden in order to win funds from Congress. Even so, the negative mindset of anti-communism had never completely dissipated, and with the far more destructive second attack in September 2001, it quickly and seamlessly metamorphosed into that of anti-terrorism. Again the parties competed as to which was more anti-terrorist, with resultant bipartisan support for expansion of domestic surveillance as well as entry into what has now become the longest U.S. war.

Despite the continuity between anti-communism and anti-terrorism, however, there is a significant difference between the two. Whereas the former was directed primarily at an identifiable foreign country with known borders and an identifiable government, the latter was and remains directed at a series of shadowy organizations with no definable borders and no identifiable headquarters. As a result, the fear and hatred behind anti-terrorism have become even deeper than that of anti-communism because the enemy could literally be anywhere, as evidenced by 9/11. Thus, far from subsiding after the collapse of the old Soviet enemy, negative self-definition in the United States has become even more pervasive than during the era of Soviet-U.S. rivalry. For the first time there is a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security whose main mandate is to protect against attacks from an omnipresent, unseen enemy. Such an organization was never considered necessary even at the height of the Cold War.

What the 2016 election suggests, however, is that alongside the second-stage negative self-definition of anti-terrorism, the United States has now entered a third stage. Because it incorporates and at the same time goes beyond anti-terrorism, it is the most all-encompassing and therefore the most dangerous stage of all. For that reason, it is important to understand its genesis.

In the wake of the Vietnam War, both major parties, the Republicans in the 1980s and the Democrats in the 1990s, were taken over by politicians who promised an era of peace and prosperity built on what came to be called “globalism.” That is, global U.S. economic expansion was to take the place of and obviate the need for destructive wars abroad. Since adherents in both parties coupled economic expansion abroad to a relaxation of restrictive regulations at home, “globalism” became linked to the term “neo-liberalism.” The new approach, initially centering upon the negotiation of trade agreements such as NAFTA, reached its apotheosis with the bipartisan repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, the signature New Deal financial legislation that had prevented a banking industry meltdown for two-thirds of a century.

Appealing at first, the twin doctrines of “globalism” and “neo-liberalism” turned out to be a not-particularly-subtle exercise in the export of American jobs to countries with lower labor costs, accompanied by massive upward redistribution of wealth at the expense of the American middle class. Within a decade, repeal of Glass-Steagall produced the worst banking meltdown since the Great Depression. With both parties clearly culpable, alongside the negative self-definition of anti-terrorism arose a third and even more far-reaching negativity, that of anti-establishment politics. Negative self-definition, first directed against an identifiable foreign power and then at a mysteriously diffuse enemy, now turned against the U.S. political system itself. The negativity became internalized, thereby becoming the basis for the most bitter, divisive election campaign of modern times.

To assess the full implications of this third stage of negative self-definition, one need only remember what MacLeish wrote. People cannot “continue to be real to themselves when they find they are merely against something.” Not only do negative fantasies replace concrete realities; instead of facts determining feelings, feelings now determine what people choose to accept as facts. If Trump supporters feel that millions voted illegally, the fact that there is no evidence to support the belief is irrelevant. What feels true becomes true.

One could argue that the ultimate irony of this third stage is that power is about to pass into the hands of a man who first achieved national recognition through “reality” television. In truth, Donald Trump is not an irony in the face of negative self-definition; he is the logic of negative self-definition. So ingrained are the fear and hatred that to his supporters, reality is whatever he claims it to be at any given moment. That Clinton received 2.8 million more votes than he did does not prevent him from claiming a “landslide” victory; nor does it prevent his supporters from believing him. They neither demand nor expect verifiable evidence. They demand only that he accept and validate their own negative feelings. In MacLeish’s words, Trump’s victory is the victory of “political bankruptcy.”

How, then, is the United States to rescue itself from negative self-definition? The first lesson of 2016 is that it cannot be done by more negative self-definition. None of the attacks, whether from Hillary Clinton herself, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or any other prominent Democrat, was sufficient to offset the negativity of the Trump campaign. The only remedy for a nation fallen prey to negative self-definition is a credible positive self-definition. Americans need more than ever to know what they are for.

That does not, however, mean a mere change of slogans. Trump was shrewd enough to realize that he too needed a slogan that sounded positive, hence, “Make America Great Again.” His supporters, however, recognized and responded to the negativity behind the slogan. Thus a change of slogans is not a solution if the subtext of the new slogan is still negative. Positive self-definition begins with recognition that anti-establishment politics is aimed at both parties. At the same time, there is a fundamental asymmetry between the parties with respect to their current situations.

Campaigning against the Republican establishment, Trump nonetheless carried the party to its highest level of political success in generations. Even before taking office he made clear that he will, after all, be working closely with those establishment politicians against whom he campaigned. Thus Americans are not likely to see Republicans taking the lead in abandoning negative self-definition. It has worked too well for them. And as most of Trump’s Cabinet nominations suggest, his administration will take negativity to new lengths by attacking the agencies of the Federal government themselves.

That leaves the Democrats and, to the extent they can remain a visible presence on the American scene, the Green Party. Not surprisingly, pro-Clinton Democrats are already attempting to scapegoat the Greens for Clinton’s defeat, declaring Jill Stein to be the “Ralph Nader of 2016.” Scapegoating being another form of negative self-definition, it is unlikely such an effort will succeed. However, given the financial and media realities of U.S. politics, the impact of the Greens beyond this election cycle remains problematic. That being so, the key question is: What will happen within the Democratic Party itself?

What made Clinton’s candidacy so vulnerable to anti-establishment attacks was not merely her personal connections with Wall Street bankers; it was the party’s long-term identification with such job-killing legislation as NAFTA, a product of the “globalist” outlook to which the party became committed during her husband’s presidency. That identification cost her the electoral votes of several Rust Belt states—Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania among them—which in turn proved decisive in overcoming her margin of 2.8 million in the popular vote. Immediately after the election, long-term Democratic strategist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who had supported Sanders during the primaries, called for the resignations of the entire DNC leadership on the grounds that their continued presence at the helm could only play into Trump’s hands. Reciprocally, Clinton supporters argued that it was the Sanders candidacy rather than Clinton’s own institutional and policy affiliations that undercut her support among party faithful, reduced voter turnout in November, and thus insured her defeat.

As Democrats debate their party’s future, how they view the Sanders-Clinton split is both reflected in and influenced by the vocabulary they use. To Clinton supporters, it remains a contest between center and Left. By contrast, Sanders supporters describe it as progressives versus the establishment. The difference is not merely semantic. In calling for a return to the center, Clinton Democrats take the view that Sanders pulled the party outside the mainstream and that only a return to the strategies of Bill Clinton’s presidency will win back the crucial allegiance of independent or swing voters. By contrast, Sanders supporters argue that the Clinton establishment’s policies not only cost the party the presidency in 2016, but are responsible over the past two decades for the loss of the Congress as well as 31 state legislatures and 32 governorships.

In that sense, what the debate really comes down to is a difference in how Democrats interpret their own history, and specifically how they view the party’s relationship to the American mainstream. To Clinton supporters, Bill Clinton’s approach is the mainstream, and any other approach would risk alienating the business community, wrecking the economy, and making the Democratic Party the minority party for the foreseeable future. Sanders supporters define the real American mainstream as the New Deal tradition of the Roosevelt years, when the Democratic Party achieved not only its greatest electoral triumphs but its greatest accomplishments on behalf of working Americans. From their perspective, it is Sanders who represents this older, more authentic mainstream while it is the Clinton establishment that deserted it in the 1990s by turning their backs on the New Deal tradition and recasting the party as the “other” Wall Street party.

Put another way, while Clinton supporters worry about the politically counterproductive effects of trying to force a downward redistribution of wealth, Sanders supporters focus on the upward redistribution that has gained momentum under both Democratic and Republican administrations over the past 35 years. As a related issue, to Clinton supporters the business community remains the key donor base that they cannot afford to alienate. By contrast, Sanders supporters argue that their candidate’s campaign proved there is another viable base and that the party need not abandon principle for the sake of large rather than small donations. In their view, the greater political danger lies in alienating middle- and working-class voters by failing to reverse upward redistribution and growing inequality, thereby surrendering those voters to Trump’s faux populism.

Despite the unpredictability of the situation, one thing remains clear. Almost seventy years after MacLeish raised the issue, the United States has fallen more deeply than ever into a state of negative self-definition, in which the negativity has now turned inward against much of the political system itself. That the presidency will be in the hands of a man who thrives on manipulating negativity and at the same time abhors criticism makes the situation even more dangerous. Principled opposition will be necessary but not sufficient. The strategic task facing the opposition party is to develop an alternative self-definition that will speak to the alienated in positive terms, offering them a program that they can be for.

The future of the nation, and possibly the world, depends on it.