Monday, October 18, 2004
Jacobin Radicalism of the Right. I'm moving to a street in Seattle called Burke Ave. I don't think it was named after the famous Edmund. But I like the fact that his name will be associated with where I live. He was then and is now a much needed voice of sanity.
He is promoted today as a conservative, but in his own day he was considered a liberal. He made his name as a proponent of evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. He argued passionately that the French Revolution was a huge mistake because its Jacobin spirit. The spirit of Jacobinism is extremism in the cause of sweeping aside the whole irrational, premodern bulwark on which a society's traditions and customs are based. The Jacobin hope is to create a new society based on a kind of deracinated idealism with as little as possible of the baggage that has been inherited from the past. And as Burke argued, when you do that, you essentially destroy the social psychological framework that keeps men civilized. The result is inevitably the Terror in France or the purges directed by the Jacobinist spirit in Russia, China, and in other "revolutionary" societies. You can create a new reality only if you destroy the old one, according to the Jacobinist logic.
Now read this quote from Ron Suskind's NY Times Magazine article that 's been getting some play in bloggerland:
The [Bush] aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Now I realize that this is just some Bush aide talking and not anybody really accountable, but I think it points to a mentality that illuminates much of what has happened over the last four years. And this is what I mean when I say that these guys really aren't conservatives. They are deracinated, neo-Jacobin radicals, and that's why they are so dangerous. Jacobinism in the final analysis is not a phenomenon of the right or the left; it's about an inflated sense of politics' capacity for control over reality. It's born of powerlust and the delusional idea that you can remake a society according one's imagined blueprint. Facts? Facts are for pedants. Facts are so five minutes ago. We Jacobins are world creators. We create new worlds and facts are what we define them to be. History will be rewritten to conform to our new reality.
Sound familiar?
I don't think that Bush is a Jacobin, but I think he is manipulated by the neo-cons and others who are. Several of the original neocons were Trotskyites who defected to the right in the 70s, and they have brought the Jacobin revolutionary mentality of secular left revolutionaries with them but now in support of an agenda pursuing American empire. For these guys power is the only thing that's real. Power therefore defines what is real. There is no reality except as Power defines it, so everything depends on who has power. They have it, and they have no intention of giving it up.