After the Future

Economics and Politics

I've always been somewhat awestruck by the stupefying inhumanity of economists who see the global economy as this perfect  system in which the abstract homo economicus, as if such a being existed in flesh and blood, rationally pursues what is in his economic best interest.  And how different nations do the same thing in a global division of labor in which if you were good at manufacturing but just so-so in agriculture, you develop your industrial capacity and let your agricultural production die.  Since you're good at manufacturing stuff, you can export  your finished goods to make the money you can now use to import cheaper food than can be produced domestically from countries who are better in agriculture.

For economists of this stripe the Good equals the Cheap.  And the great mortal sin is to erect trade barriers, tarriffs, that would protect industries, well, because that would be inefficient and causes consumers not to get the best price.  I know that tariffs can in some cases be a form of corporate welfare, and I know the kinds of problems that arise with trade wars, but to exclude the possibility of protecting some industries in principle defies common sense.  Sometimes there are other values besides getting the lowest prices that are more important.

We just accept it as inevitable that the market forces trump, for instance, the need to preserve cultural traditions and values.  What does it matter to theorists that  agriculture and the traditions and way of life of most of a nation's population get destroyed? The benefits of lower cost are so much more important. Hey, all those displaced, independent farmers having to find work in sweatshops, or if more ambitious, to emigrate to susbsistence wage jobs in more developed countries, are better off because the the prices they pay for the stuff they have to buy are  Wal-Mart cheap  That they have hardly any money to buy even cheap stuff with, well, that's just the way it goes.

So the idea that to be coservative means to be for a classic, laisser-faire economy is one of  the great oxymorons of our time.  For no greater force has the world ever seen which is destructive of traditional values and the traditional communities that nurture them than classical capitalism. The two ideas--capitalism and conservatism just don't go together in reality. 

The only thing that capitallism conserves is the privileges of the small percentage of the globe's superwealthy who have the resources to weather any of the destructive effects their system that rewards them so generously wreaks on everyone else.  Everyone else is vulnerable.  Everyone else is under threat now of having his job be outsourced in the flat world celebrated by overclass apologists like Thomas Friedman.  That's reality.  Get used to it, we are told.  Adapt or die. We are all replaceable in the Great System that cares only about lowering costs and increasing profits for those in the investor class. It's all perfectly rational if you look at it dispassionately from the economists lofty perch or from within the gated communities of the superwealthy.

Well, is it inevitable?  Must we all accept that the system is reality, and our job is only to find some way for ourself and our families to survive in it.  Or are there political solutions, ways in which people can organize themselves to make the system serve the needs of the many rather than the needs of the few?   

In John Gray's NYRB review of Suzanne Berger's How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing to Make It in Today's Global Economy, he writes:

Devoting a significant part of her analysis to the dilemmas surrounding outsourcing, Berger concludes that the threat of continuing job losses in the US is at least partly real. Many economists insist that as old jobs are lost, new technologies and industries will appear to replace them. Berger does not entirely reject this view, but suggests that the experience of those who have been laid off and cannot find jobs without accepting large reductions in pay may point to a trend that mainstream economics has missed: "After crying wolf so often, perhaps this time the pessimists about technological advance and employment have really spotted one." Outsourcing poses a real risk to employees; but Berger believes a "race to the bottom" can be avoided if companies accept that employing cheap labor is not the most effective way of responding to global competition. The activities that succeed over time are those that involve conditions —such as long-term working relations with customers and suppliers and specialized skills—which companies whose main asset is cheap labor cannot match. A company policy of forcing wages down is not a recipe for long-term corporate success.

Berger is clear that acting on their own, companies cannot make all the needed adjustments. Governments have a major part in creating an environment in which businesses can plan for the future, but how governments do this will depend on the type of capitalism they must deal with. As she acknowledges in a lucid discussion, capitalism comes in several varieties reflecting different cultural traditions and political systems. Within this wide variety two different kinds of market economy can be distinguished:

liberal market economies, like Britain's and the United States', in which allocation and coordination of resources takes place mainly through markets; and coordinated market economies, like Germany's and Japan's, in which negotiation, long-term relationships, and other nonmarket mechanisms are used to resolve the major issues.

The point is that the economics is not necessarily the war of all against all, as the  laisser faire Social Darwinists, now in their Libertarian incarnation, want us to believe. The goal of economics is not to achieve some theoretical lowest price possible, but to serve human needs.  Markets are half of what makes any economy work, but the market is not some sacrosanct theological principle that must at all costs be protected from political interference or regulation. Markets are not the whole story.  Politics is the other equally essential part of how any economy works, and we have to see Libertarian ideology for what it is--a justification for a system that serves the needs of the superwealthy. It's a political ideology that bends the economy to serve a particular narrow set of interests. That we accept it as a model for how the economy works is a political choice when other choices are possible. But don't expect lively debate about it in the Mainstream Media. Such a debate is simply not in its interests.

So the central question that should be debated is this: Which is the tail, which the dog--the economy or the politics?  If you think that letting the chips fall where they may as the invisible hand of the market does its thing, then you feel the economy is the dog, and politics the tail.  If you feel that the economy should be managed to serve human needs, then for you politics is the dog, and economics the tail.  I, for one, am in the latter group.  It's the distinction right now that I believe is at the heart of the difference between those who think of themselves as Libertarians or Progressives. 

And it's the split that defines the difference between traditional New Deal Democrats and  Democrats like Clinton, Bayh, Lieberman, and the rest of the Republican Lite gang at the Democratic Leadership Council. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the Democrats since the 80s is how much of its leadership has been coopted by Libertarian thinking.  This is a big part of what makes our politics right now so confusing and ennervating.  The politics of lasiser-faire is no politics at all; it's a politics of letting the economic tail wag the poltical dog; it's a politics of having given up. 

Economies can be and should be managed, and they should be managed to meet the needs of the majority, not the elite minority. Because there is the danger that they might be managed poorly does not preclude the possibility that they could be managed well.  Germany and Japan are just one point in case.  The problem does not lie on the level of what is technically possible, but rather on the level of political will.

The tragedy is that in order for that will to develop, things will have to get very bad.  Maybe George Bush is on a mission from God.  To push this country to reductio ad absurdum of classical economic theory, so that it can finally be seen for what it is, with the result that we can finally move beyond it for good. 

Understanding the Backlash

In my reading of so many secular Liberal pundits and blogs I continue to find remarkable how patronizing and tone deaf they are to the concerns and sensibilities of religious believers. If nothing else, it's just politically stupid. I don't have a problem with anybody condemning hatred, intolerance, and the plain nuttiness of the Robertson, Fallwell, Coulter, Limbaugh variety, but most people with traditional religious values are not hatefilled nutcases, and it's with those that secular liberals of the DailyKos stamp need to develop a rapprochement. I believe that in this country an appeal to the religious idealism of the American people has to be central for any hope for a substantive progressive politics.

But let's face it, secular Liberals really have at best a patronizing attitude toward believers. They are so insulated by their smug sense of having moved beyond the need for religion that they seem often to be genuinely surprised when they meet a believer who is not allied with the forces of reaction. They have come to see themselves as the only hope for a progressive future, and quite frankly, from my point of view, their pretensions are ludicrously delusional. These people think their world is the only world worth living in, and really have very little understanding about how we're at the beginnings of a struggle for the soul of the country that will have to draw upon deeper resources than they have to offer.  And in my view they are one of the biggest obstacles for the development of a robust progressivism that would be true to America's highest ideals.

Progressive politics has a branding problem in this regard, because it has become too closely associated with the kind of secular European style socialism to which most Americans are allergic. A secular progressive politics may or may not continue to work work in Europe, but it hasn't a prayer here. Europe has its own problematic history with its religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, a history which is quite different in the U.S. European progressives saw the Church as the enemy, and for good reason.

But in the U.S., the situation has always been quite different. Until the seventies and eighties, religious minded people were more at the vanguard of social change more than playing the reactionary role more typical in Europe. Progressive politics,whether we're talking about the abolitionist in the ante-bellum era, the social gospel movement in the Progressive era, or the black church-based early civil rights movement, has mainly been driven by religious idealists.

This changed in the 1970s when the Democrats were mainly taken over by a hodgepodge of secular feminists, multiculturalist, and the soft Marxism of the Frankfurt School New Left. And was aggravated in the 1980s when in reaction to seventies, a rather bizarre form of right-wing, cargo-cult Christian religiosity emerged as a political force to take back America from the seventies-style, anything-goes Democrats who were destroying it.

But here's the thing that the folks over at DailyKos have to understand: for better or worse, no change has been widely accepted by Americans unless it was framed in terms that were consonant with the religiosity that is hardwired into the American psyche.  And this is in my view the root of the Democrats  problem in having lost touch with its base.

A little history as to why:  (Skip this indented section if you're sick of my repetitious history lessons regarding the so-called cultural shift we're in the middle of.  I think it's important, though, to understand if you'r serious about engaging in the long-term argument I've been advancing on this blog.)

Secularism is the spirit of the Modern period, and the modern period ended about a hundred years ago in Europe, and in 1963 in the U.S. You can quibble about dates, but for me Gutenberg's first printing of his bible in 1455 marked the transition from the medieval period to the modern.  And Nietzsche's death in Europe in 1900, and JFK's  in the U.S. in '63 marked the transition from the modern to the postmodern. The Modern era itself reached its high-water mark between 1650 and 1789, the period of the great epistemologists--Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant--and the enlightenment philosophes--Voltaire and Rousseau. The beginning of the end was the massive irrationality of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and the end of the end was the French Revolution and the Terror. Enlightenment gave way to Romanticism and its heady notions of Spirit in history, and Romanticism gave way to Marx's dialectical materialism and Darwin's idea that history was just a meaningless groping in the void. 

WWI swept away what was left of enlightenment or romantic optimism in Europe, and WWII, framed by its Nazi perpetrators in a Nietzschean vocabulary, was the first postmodern war. It ended with the detonation of one of the most horrific products of the technological mind. And for the first time humans began to understand that they had it within their capability to destroy the earth. It became clear that human rationality was a fragile coracle being tossied about on a roiling sea of irrationality. Americans were a little slow on the uptake. It took the turmoil of the sixties to drive the point home that we were no longer moderns. And I would argue that the secular rationalist mentality is as relevant to understanding our world now as medieval Catholicism was for understanding the scientific technological impulses that drove the culture for the last five hundred years.

And while secular rationalism will persist just as Catholic medievalism persisted, it's simply no longer the cutting edge. But why did secular rationalism develop in the first place? It was mainly a response to the bloody post-Reformation relgious wars in Europe. It began to take hold in the wake of the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics that ended in 1648 and the English Civil War between Puritans and Anglicans in 1649. Intelligent people understandably started thinking that this religion thing was a problem. And they began to question whether it was really needed at all. Could it be possible to live without it, and would everyone be better off if they did? And at the same time the prodigious Newton was establishing for all the world to see what the power of reason could achieve, and it became interesting for people to think of the world as a great machine and of God as an engineer who made it. And like a wind-up clock he coiled the spring and then left it to run on its own.

Such a god has essentially abandoned his creation, and does not interfere with its workings once it had been set it into motion. In a world with such a god there is no grace, no miracles, no enchantment. Such a world might delight the engineer in us, but not the poet. If the world is nothing but a great machine, it has power, but it lacks soul. Such a god for such a world is useless when it comes to solving problems, and his new status as a cosmic irrelevancy made it easier to ditch him altogether in the nineteenth century. That's when the Industrial Revolution kicked in and the machine became more than a metaphor; it became in a very real sense the new god.

The main thing to keep in mind was that during the modern period, there were two basic camps that formed with all kinds of variations on two basic themes. The new one comprised those who were open to new ideas and put their faith in reason and technology, and the other was the old traditionalist camp that comprised those who resisted the "new thinking" and continued to put their faith in traditional practice and religious authority. Instead of religious authority, the progressive new thinkers had science. It gradually became a substitute religion for many progressives who wanted to assert values of freedom and independence over against the constrictions of the traditional past. It was completely understandable that these progressives would want to divorce themselves from traditional religion and work to undermine the kind of society that was dominated by oppressive religious ideologies.

The "new thinking" types were optimistic about progressive social change and thought that rationality and new technological advancements were the tools to achieve it. The traditionalists steeped in religious ideas about original sin were skeptical that any kind of truly significant progress was possible. But the new thinkers pointed to the material improvements and the prosperity generated by the new technologies. The most thoughtful of the conservatives Blake, Coleridge, Dostoyevski wondered if humans weren't being seduced by the promise of material progress into a rationalist/technological nightmare world. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, the first significant science fiction novel in 1817, gave expression to the foreboding.

It's not a foreboding that we have left behind. Now we worry about the coming Singularity. The problem does not lie with science, but with what we do with the new knowledge that science has made available. Science has given us the aiblity to reverse engineer the natural world, and with that knowledge comes enormous power. Pure science is a discipline very restricted in its scope--it seeks only to understand in naturalistic terms the natural world. The technological applications of this new knowledge go far beyond just trying to understand the natural world.

The motive driving technological development is very similar to the motive that drove alchemists and magicians in the late medieval and early modern period. Both sought to understand the laws that governed how the world worked in order to obtain greater levels of power. In the 1600s science and alchemy existed side by side-- Newton was as much interested in the latter as he was the former.

But in the end science and its materialistic logic proved to be the more potent tool for controlling and transforming the material world. And the principle of Ockham's Razor excluded any reference to a reality beyond the material world of the senses, even if scientists believed there was such a world. So a habit of mind developed that was committed to the radical separation of the material world from a spiritual world, and it is understandable that insofar as the supersensibile world becomes irrelevant to what one does on a daily basis, it would only be a matter of time before a kind of culture of rationalist skepticism developed whose members found it hard to believe that there was any other world except the material one they sought so diligently to understand.

Secularism is for the most part the product of the modern habit of mind that developed a culture of skepticism among its intellectuals. As science and philosophy became activities divorced from any consideration of the ways in which the spiritual and material world interacted, so was politics similarly divorced. I think the divorce was for the most part a good thing, and I wouldn't have it any other way, but I understand why the Christian right, the Pope, and Muslim ayatollahs have a problem with it. They think the divorce is a false division that gives people who live in a society split that way a distorted picture of reality with profoundly alienating social effects. They have good reason to think so, but in a globalizing world they have no choice but to adapt.

Nevertheless their alienation is real and their confusion painful. Their God is not a watchmaker god. He is intimately involved with his creation, and they believe this to be true with every fiber of their being. To acquire the ability to live in a world where one's private beliefs are not reflected in the social structures that support them is not easy for a people with a traditionalist mindset. They view the secularists arguments about separation of church and state that require the removal of prayer from schools and the ten commandments from the courthouse lobby to be like the clever lawyer who makes a case in court that gets the obviously guilty criminal off. Their sense of the rightness of the world is profoundly offended, and it's understandable why they would have a hard time with a political system that operates from assumptions that makes such travesties possible. Liberals, for whom nothing is sacred because everything is profane, have no clue how viscerally wrong this feels to traditionalists.

It's not something most traditionalists think about; it's something that they deeply feel, and I have to say that I think there is an element of healthfulness in it. It has made them feel strangers in their own country, and that's hard to bear. And one of the biggest drivers in the conservative backlash since the eighties has been the longing these traditionalists have to get their country back. It's a futile, nostalgic longing, but I understand it and I sympathize with their distress and confusion. And I understand why they feel so offended by the force that they believe is the cause of it all--secular liberalism and its cosmopolitian tolerance of just about any kind of weirdness. Is nothing sacred? Is there no shame? These are legitimate questions.

Nevertheless, in a globalizing world we're all Cosmopolitans, whether we like it or not. We have to learn to deal respectfully with those whose who come from different worlds while at the same time holding fast to what is for us sacred. And secularese is the neutral language we must speak in the political sphere. Otherwise we will revert to the kind of insanity that engulfed Europe in the first half of the 1600s and that we see now in Iraq as it devolves into a three-way civil war.

What bothers me about the smug cosmopolitanism of the left is that they have little sense of the price that has been paid and of the superficiality of their glib worldview. Cosmopolitanism is a survival strategy in a globalizing pluralistic world. It does not, however, comprise beliefs that most people would die for, and for people who have any real hope of fighting for a just society in the now intensifying confrontation that is coming between ordinary people and the ruthless  predators in the corporate overclass, they will have to draw on resources than those found in the glib cosmopolitanism  you find at DailyKos or the mainstream of the Democratic Party.  In the end this is truly a spiriitual struggle for the soul of the country. 

Christian Liberty

Since Libertarianism has been the topic of the last couple of days, I thought a discussion about "liberty" from the Christian angle might balance things out a little.  As I wrote in my earlier essay, Politics and Religion,  I think Libertarian principles  should rule in the  cultural  sphere--government has no business legislating morality, but it's a different matter when it comes to the economic sphere.  Read the essay for a more elaborate treatment that attempts, how successfully I'm not sure, to find some clarity and principle to an otherwise muddled debate.

Given those assumptions, it is not for Christians or anyone else to dictate how others are to use their freedom, but they can make the effort to persuade and to model an alternative to the prevailing materialistic, quantitative notion of freedom that prevails now in our culture.  In contemporary Libertarian America, freedom is a question mainly of multiplying choices, the more the better.  Freedom is a question of being unshackled from any restriction.  Liberation is understood as the unrestricted pursuit of any compulsion, so long as it does not harm others. From the Christian point of view, nothing could be cruder or more destructive to the life of the soul. 

I think that freedom is best understood as a paradox.  We human beings are actors improvising on a stage where the possibilities truly are infinite, but as one makes concrete choices, other possibilities are grayed out; they become unavailable. So the very exercise of freedom involves a quantitative reduction of possibilities, and yet it's only by the movement out of possibility into actuality that we become truly free.  Our free acts require that we become the prisoner of our choices. But restriction on the horizontal dimension of our lives creates the possibility for expansion on the vertical dimension, the dimension of grace and spiritual freedom.

Let me come at it from a different direction. Recently I saw a local production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It's a play that was written in 1899 about a group of interesting, decent people who had very few future possibilities, and of their desperation in being compelled to live in a small, provincial town, which was for them like a prison cell. When someone has a sense of future possibility she makes plans and she acts to realize those plans. The sisters hated their provincial existence, but could not act to change it, so they had no plan. Instead they had a fantasy about moving someday to Moscow. And so they lived in the fantasy rather than in the real world that they inhabited, which was dominated by willful people, the Tom Delays in their neighborhood, who did have plans, plans that led to the loss of the little that the sisters had.  Do I need to belabor the metaphor?

Whatever the relevance of the play to our current political situation, it is on a more universal level about how fantasies substitute for actionable possibilities, and the waste of life that ensues. Our lives take on substance to the degree than we enact possibilities, and they remain insignificant and insubstantial to the degree that they wallow in dreams, no matter how noble, not acted upon. The more we act the more real we become, and the more real we become the fewer the possibilities to be something other than what we have become. The point is to act; in the end it does not matter whether it turns out well or poorly, for we are measured not by the nobility of our sentiments, but by the enactment of a certain chain of choices, and it's those choices that give the soul a spiritual density which is what makes us most deeply human. 

We cannot dither in the land of possibility for fear of losing possibilities.  We must chose, let the chips fall where they may, live with the consequences.  That's what it means to be a free human being. Commitment phobia is the way this dithering plays out in our personal relationships. If, for instance, one is sexually attractive enough to have many partners, why limit yourself to one? This is the dilemma that the John Cusack character faces in High Fidelity. He’s a self-absorbed twenty-something who is made emotionally claustrophobic by the idea of having to commit to one partner, but then cannot understand why the women in his life always dump him.

The reason is clear. He’s a child who lacks substance. He is a weightless abstraction, a dry leaf tossed about by the wind, and the women in his life want someone who is real. They want him to come down to earth, to have some substance, to enact a concrete future that involves them, and that requires giving up on fantasies of other possibilities; it means making concrete choice that exclude other ones. It means moving out of a dream world into a real one. That’s how human beings become more deeply humanly real—by their choices and their commitments, not by living in a fantasy of perpetual possibility. The Cusack character finally figures that out by the end of the movie, although it's an open question whether he actually has the capacity to deeply care about another human being.

So does the graying out of possibilities mean we become less free because the fewer the choices, the more limited our freedom? That's where another dimension to the paradox lies, because freedom is not only measured quantitatively. It is measured also and more significantly qualitatively, in the dimension depth, a depth that is usually uncovered in the intensity of our commitments. Do we accept the limitations and the consequences of our choices, or do we long for the good old days when we could live in the dream of infinite possibility. Will we plunge into the murky mess or will we seek featherweight flight? Limitation on the horizontal dimension, the dimension of quantitative possibility, lived in the right way leads to liberation on the vertical dimension, the dimension of spirit. It's not easy to do, and there are few models of it that are celebrated in our culture.

Dorothy Day, one such model of spiritual density if there ever was one, was fond of quoting Dostoyevski's staretz Zossima--"Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."  Her life was a living testament to that kind of pracitical love. That's not an idea about love that is celebrated in the culture, and yet it's a love that so many Americans live, whether they've read Dostoyevski or not.  It's just in them to do it, and they do. 

Dorothy Day did, and the kind of life she lived makes no sense in the classic form of Libertarianism found, for instance, in Ayn Rand's Objectivism.  The two women represented completely different models concerning the development of the human Self.  Day makes as much sense to Rand as Frodo Baggins makes to Sauron. Ayn Rand's was a view of the Self in which it was the tail being wagged by the will to power. It is a dime-a-dozen Self that is the common tool of a compulsion. Dorothy Day's modeled the developement of a different kind of Self, one that grows grows only when power is renounced and love fills in the space in the soul where powerlust and self-absorption once clogged it. 

Another remarkable model of the spiritual liberty that I'm aware of is found in the Etty Hillesum diaries, An Interrupted Life. In it one reads about the gradual growth in interior freedom of a young Dutch Jew during WWII whose inner spirit grows brighter as the world around her grows darker and more restrictive. It’s as if she took the darkness, this void that was all around her, and made of it a kind of fuel which she was able to ignite within herself, and her burning so brightly in turn ignited those around her. She could have been swept away by the darkness in despair or rage—many were. Instead she chose to take the darkness and she transformed it into something strange and beautiful. And her example speaks more deeply, more truly, more movingly than all the theodicies I’ve ever come across.

Christians are those who have been admonished to be as guileless as doves, but also as shrewd as serpents.  I've always interpreted that to mean that we need to find a way to live and operate on the horizontal level, which is ruled by the symbolic creature which slithers hoizontally across the suface of the earth.  But we need to do so without being ruled exclusively by the clever, but superficial logic of the serpent.  This can only be done if one finds a way to be open to the vertical, the dimension of height and depth, the dimension that reaches to the heavens and penetrates to the depths, which, again, is the dimension of grace and spiritual freedom.

Some people, the people who feel most at home in the world in which the superficial horizontal pursuits defined by sex, power, and money are the primary motivators, are more serpentine; others, usually the kindly, warmhearted, decent folk whom, in my more sanguine moments (I do have them) I believe are the real soul of America, (as many living in red states as in blue) are more dovelike.  But their guilelessness is an impediment if so onesided it leads them to trust those who are not worthy of their trust.  They must cling to the guilelessness that is at the heart of their decency, but they must also wake up and use their faculty for shrewdness in order to protect themselves from the predations of the serpentine who have no compunction about exploiting them by using their guilelessness against them. 

If Christians were told only to be guileless, then I suppose they should just meekly suffer whatever the guile-ful impose on them, but Christians are admonished to be bi-lingual, to be fluent in both serpent-think and dove-think. And to me that means that Christians, if they are doing their job, always, always have a subversive influence in any part of the world that is dominated by serpent-think--including all too often the churches.  And insofar as Christians (and all those who are genuinely responsive to the influence of grace in their lives) succeed in bringing the vertical into their actions in the domain of serpent-think, they have a subversive effect.

Christianity is fundamentally a subversive spiritual impulse. And Redemption is the ongoing story of liberation, which is the gradual subversion from within of the world ruled according to the logic of the serpent. Anybody who doesn't get that, in my view, doesn't get what Christianity really is.

 

Class Warfare

I wanted to expand on a response to a comment made by Eustochius to my post yesterday on Libertarianism.  He feels that what I'm describing here is too conspiracy theory-esque with the use of such words as "overclass" which suggests the phrase "class warfare"--a big no-no in polite conversation, especially with conservatives.  They don't like anyone putting a name on what many of them are themselves blatantly doing.  It's been frequently pointed out that the GOP is playing the class card everytime its operatives try to provoke red-state resentment of relatively powerless Northeastern or Hollywood liberal elites.  And it has also been pointed out how tricky this tactic is, because it distracts all the resentful red-state non-elites from what the real power elites are doing, which is shifting the tax burden on them, outsourcing their jobs, and sending their kids off to die or be maimed in an unnecessary, poorly planned war.

So class war is something the GOP has been very skillfully executing on behalf of a mix of groups that compose what I've been calling the American overclass.  The phrase "class warfare", therefore, while it may be distasteful to many readers, nevertheless accurately describes what is happening because it's been happening since humans began organizing themselves into societies. Unless the relatively weak organize to defend themselves, the relatively strong naturally seek to dominate them. Oligarchy and feudalism are just the way of the world in a fallen world if ordinary people don't remain continually vigilant and ready to fight to prevent it.

Political hierarchies form quite naturally when wealth and the power that comes with it become concentrated in the hands of a few. There is a natural tendency for those who have a lot to want even more, and, as I wrote the other day, the correct word to describe this compulsion is "avarice", but in contemporary Libertarian America, it's called "freedom".  Sleepy Americans say to themselves, "Avarice = bad; freedom = good.  Libertarianism = freedom, Libertarianism = good.  Libertarianism is for getting government off our backs.  QED: Government  = bad." 

But government is the only tool ordinary Americans have to effectively organize the power they have in numbers to protect themselves from the predations of the powerful.  The superwealthy understand that, and so it is natural that they would want to take that tool away from those who would use it to prevent them from doing as they please. Americans who buy into the Libertarian ideology of the corporate overclass, even superficially or moderately, are colluding in their own disempowerment. 

In democracies 'the people' own the government; in oligarchies the few, usually the richest, do.  Which word describes our situation today more accurately?  Is policy really being developed in the intersts of ordinary Americans?  Why don't we have a sane healthcare system, then?  Why are we fighting a war that no one wanted before the propaganda barrage began?  Why have we allowed taxes to be cut although most Americans did not see a need for it?  Do you think  that might explain why most Americans feel so dispirited when they go to the polls in national elections?  Do you think it might have something to do with voting coming more and more to feel like a meaningless ritual?

In any event, there is quite a large literature (start with old-school Republican Kevin Phillips' Democracy and Wealth) developing that documents how the top 5% or so in this country have significantly increased their wealth while the rest of the population has stagnated since Reagan became president.  It's the natural result of people who have acquired wealth and power using that power to consolidate their position by pressuring the poltical system to work for its benefit. The Clinton years  were very much a part of this progression with his ramming through NAFTA, his failure to get healthcare reform, and the loss of the House to the Republicans who essentially destroyed his capability to do anything for the rest of his presidency.   

There's no conspiracy here; it's just what you would expect to happen because it always happens, and we shouldn't be surprised or shocked that it's happening because Americans are not exempt from the human condition.  I don't think there is a secret committee representing the American overclass which meets secretly to plot its next move.  There are all kinds of very-well financed think tanks and foundations for that.  People who are very wealthy (and wealthy wannabes) naturally tend to support policies that help them to secure their interests, and they use their wealth as the source of their power to make the system responsive to those interests. What's disappointing is that the rest of us have in our complacency let them do it.

The U.S. was founded as a political organization, a republic, after a fight against the power of existing oligarchies in Britain to dictate policies that the Americans, mostly bourgeois and middling gentry, thought not to be in their interests. The founders were very concerned that this new republic not evolve into yet another oligarchy, and the most prescient of them understood that it would be continuously threatened by the tyranny of the powerful few who would seek to dominate it.

And they were right; that's what happened. To simplify a little, it was threatened first by the southern oligarchs, then by the Robber Barons, and now by the corporate overclass. And the threat was beaten back the first two times because alert, patriotic Americans  recognized the threats for what they were, and fought them. The question now is whether things have already progressed too far for a third fight to be mounted and to have a chance--I don't know.  I have my doubts because only a minority of Americans seem to have a clue about what is really happening.

This  most recent battle in the ongoing class war has been waged behind a cloud of propaganda and confusion that has made if very difficult for  many decent Americans who want to think well of their political leaders to recognize what has been happening.  God knows the corporate media isn't going to talk about it. The first set of Robber Barons were bare-knuckled captialists who felt no need to hide what they were up to and felt no compunction about doing whatever it took to run over whoever got in their way.  The current crop is much shrewder, and they have been very adept at disguising their agenda, which is nevertheless very easy to recognize by anyone who cares to look. 

My post yesterday argued that Libertarianism was the propaganda tool used by the current overclass that was an essential element in their strategy to muddle our thinking about what is in most Americans' best interests.  Hint:  It's not lower taxes. It's not the war in Iraq.  It's not the anarcho-capitalist idol, free trade. It's not indiscriminate deregulation and privatization; it's not the Medicare Prescription Plan. It's not indifference about global warming. It's not a whole host of things that Americans don't want but which has been shoved down their throat because they've allowed themselves to be conned by overclass marketing through the media it controls and naturally uses to promote what is in its best interest.

Along these lines, the right in this country has deliberately tried to make the phrase 'class warfare' radioactive so that people have precisely the reaction I'm sure many of you readers are having to it now as you read this post--it's one of those unspeakable words;  we can't talk about it, and so it seems invisible. But it's the big story that the overclass right doesn't want anybody to be telling, because it's a war that they can wage all the more effectively so long as the rest of us are sleeping while they do it.

Libertarianism--The Unwitting Ally of Tyranny

I can understand why the very rich would  profess to be Libertarians in the same way that I can understand why the Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century professed to be Social Darwinists. When you burn away all the high-sounding rhetoric and distorting propaganda for which Libertarianism is the cover, it's essentially the same doctrine, and its barbarous effects on our political and economic life are also the same. (I am more open to the idea of Libertarian principles governing the cultural sphere, for reasons I describe in this essay.  But they lead to disastrous results in the political and economic spheres.)

The Social Darwinists basically professed an eat-or-be-eaten, might-makes-right ethic and justified it in survival-of-the-fittest quasi-scientific terms.  The rich and powerful in any society are just evolution's winners.  They are rich because that's how evolution works. They are beyond good and evil as evolution is.  Rules and laws are for the losers, for the little people, those who haven't the talent, initiative, boldness, and shrewdness that the winners have.  The rich and powerful are the kings of the hill and it is to be expected that they will use all their power, wealth, violence and political ruthlessness to fight off anyone who would try to drag them down. The mediocre have no role except to serve the needs of evolution's winners.  So went the thinking of the Robber Barons, and that's pretty much what we saw until the Prosgressive movement at the turn of the century started to push back.

The only ones who could restrain the power of the superwealthy in the Robber Baron era were organized labor and the government, and the first eighty years of the twentieth century were about how the power of both inspired by Progressive ideals to create prosperity for a hugely expanded segment of the American population.  It happened because Henry Ford was smart enough to figure out that rather than fighting labor and doing whatever it could to keep wages low, that everyone benefitted if the workers actually made enough money to buy the cars they were building. It happened in large part because J.M. Keynes persuaded some key people among the American overclass that Bolshevism was their future unless they changed their m.o., and so the progressive FDR replaced conservative libertarian icon Herbert Hoover. 

And the American story, until Ronald Reagan came to office--at least on the domestic side--was a story of a decent, progressive America emerging, one that tried to bring more and more Americans into the prosperous middle.  For complex historical and cultural reasons, black Americans were left out, and it took until the 1960s before serious efforts were made to remedy the injustices associated with that.  The tactics to effect these remedies were in some cases successful and in others not. I am not a great fan of patronizing affirmative action policies as a remedy.  I think that the high-rise monstrosities that passed for public housing in the sixties and seventies created as many problems as they solved.  We can argue about what works and what doesn't, but whatever the practical results, the unreached goal of expanding to everyone access to prosperity was a worthy one, and one still worth pursuing. 

Progressives are those who believe that government is one of the principal vehicles to promote the general welfare of a society.    And progressives are (or should be) adamantly opposed to  Libertarianism in the economic and political spheres.  Libertarians think that government is the enemy, and associate its power with tyranny.

I think it's a good thing that "progressive" replace "liberal" because I think more accurately describes the aspirations of people like me in the radical center who want to secure and protect the rights and prosperity for the greatest number of people--the aspirations of most decent Americans who have some sense of there being a common good. Classical Liberalism is  Libertarianism, and the conceptual confusion that comes from the verbal enmeshment of liberal and libertarian is easily fixed by using the word progressive. 

I also dislike the word "liberal" because it has become too associated with libertinism and moral caprice as in "Hollywood liberal." A progressive is someone who thinks that government is an essential tool for ordinary people to use to insure that their rights and welfare are protected from a predatory superwealthy overclass.  The progressivism of which I speak is deeply rooted in a tradition of American decency,  moral seriousness, and communitarianism.

But my  main objective in this post is to write about the regressivism that is at the heart of the Libertarian movement. Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Frederich von Hayek, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Grover Norquist, Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus are some of the best known names associated with Libertarianism. Some Libertarians like Sullivan and Kaus are militarists, and others like the editors at AntiWar.com are not. 

It's an interesting split.  The anti-war types, consistent with the Libertarian aversion for strong governments, are against the growth of government power, and they see war as the best excuse for government to appropriate more power to itself, which is exactly what we're seeing in the current government dominated by the so-called conservative libertarian principles of the GOP.  The pro-war libertarians see war as the right of the strong to do what they need to do to pursue and protect their interests.  I think the anti-war libertarians are more intellectually consistent, but naive about how power works.  The pro-war libertarians are either conscious or unconscious promoters of the overclass agenda to destroy governmental restrictions in order that the superwealthy consolidate power and eventually to destroy the liberty of everyone else.

Because here's where the intellectual incoherence of Libertarians breaks down in the economic sphere.  Libertarianism in this sphere is anarcho-capitalism.  It wants no limits on the freedom of individuals or corporations to pursue their interests.  If government is seen to be the enemy because of its power to restrain liberty, Libertarians are naive about the threat to Liberty that comes from those who have become powerful because of their unrestricted freedom to pursue wealth. The practical effect of Libertarianism leads inevitably to the loss of Liberty for the majority so that the few can do as they please, and this must inevitably evolve into the crony capitalism that is degrading our political life as I write. 

Some principled Libertarians might be theoretically against crony capitalism, but it's their very principles that lead to its inevitability.  If there are no restraints put on the wealthy, what countervailing power is there to stop them from becoming the government?  And when they become the government, then all of a sudden, the superwealthy shed their Libertarian principles and become the great advocates of big government because government no longer restrains them; the government is them. It has become the principal tool they use now to achieve their objectives.

What the Libertarians oppose in principle, they promote in fact. The Libertarians, so fearful of the tyranny of governments, have created a widely, if superficially, adopted  political philosophy that creates the conditions in which the government is inevitably be bought by the wealthy thus creating the tyranny they so adamantly oppose. Isn't this precisely what we're seeing with the Bush administration, the administration that so many Libertarians voted for because they thought Bush was a principled conservative?

They can protest all they want that this isn't what they wanted, but it follows as night from day if Libertarian principles govern our political culture.  And so Thatcherites like Andrew Sullivan, who supported and defended Bush for four years on small-government, conservative-libertarian principle are shocked, just shocked, to discover that he is not a real conservative.  Well, duh.  It's never been about principle; it's always been about power. And and people like Sullivan, witting or unwitting, enabled the ascendancy of this crowd who could care less about principles except as it gives them a rhetoric for their propaganda. Sullivan seems to be a decent enough chap, buy why he is taken seriously by anybody except as a lackey apologist for the overclass is beyond me.

Our foreign policy has been for decades in the service of corporate overclass elites.  To think otherwise is in my mind simply to have been duped by the propaganda that drones ever on in the media that they own.  Now even our domestic policy is being directed by them.  Policies regarding the environment, health care, tax codes, energy--you name it.  The laws are being written by the corporate lobbyists.   The government of the United States is now owned by the superwealthy, and especially those who work within the military/industrial/ congressional complex use it to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us. Our elected representatives on both sides of the aisle are simply their servants, for the most part bought and paid for because of our corrupting campaign finance system.

Libertarianism, in the end, promotes only the freedom of the strong to dominate the weak.  The only counterbalance that those of us in the middle have to the power is in a democratic government that works in the interests of the many rather than in the interests of the few.  This in the end is the only tool that ordinary people have to protect themselves against tyranny, and it's a tool that that in the last twenty five years they have slowly given away.  That's why everything depends on our taking our government back to insure that we have the power to fight the inevitable tyranny that is to come if the Libertarians continue to muddle our collective thinking. The superwealthy elites are not interested in Liberty or democracy in Iraq or in the United States.  Everything about the current administration is disdainful of democracy and democratic procedures.  They are about power and about abusing it in any way they want.

The American Dream

America's imagination of itself is rather inflated with an ungrounded sense of its superiority.  One of the great myths of our time is that ours is a land of unique opportunity, that the American Dream is what makes living in the U.S. an amazing experience to be found nowhwere  else.  That was  more true  a hundred years ago, especially for so many of the immigrants who fled Europe for a better life in an economy that hadn't yet hit full stride, but it just isn't any more.  And since 1980 it has become ever less so with each passing decade thanks to the co-optation of American politics by the money elites and their political lackeys who seek to dismantle the New Deal:

Conventional wisdom among the globalist elite is that inequality is the price a society must pay for increasing social mobility, reflecting greater opportunity.  Thus, for example, the governing class never seems to tire of telling Americans how lucky they are compared with the citizens of Western Europe who are so protected from competition that they have no incentive to succeed.  Yet, although the United States has the highest level of income inequality among all advanced societies, a child born to poverty actually has a greater chance of moving up the class ladder in Western Europe and Canada than in the United States.  Economist Miles Corak, who analyzed dozens of studies on this point, told the Wall Street Journal in May 2005, "The U.S. and Britain appear to stand out as the least mobile societies among the rich countries studied." France and Germany, regularly ridiculed by the American elite for economic policies that supposedly discourage ambition, actually provide more room for mobility than does the United States.  Canada and the Scandinavian countries, home of high taxes and generous welfare, are, according to the numbers, even greater lands of individual opportunity. . . .

You can become a billionaire quicker in America, but your chances of living a longer, more secure life, with time for your family and friends, free from the anxiety of economic ruin if you get sick, and a higher-quality education for your children are much greater in Western Europe.  European workers have taken more of their productivity gains in leisure--primarily in longer holidays and shorter workweeks.  Over their lifetimes, Americans work an estimated 40 percent more hours than do workers in France, Germany, and Italy.  --Jeff Faux, Global Class War

No system is ideal, and I know that it's easy enough to find flaws in the Canadian and European systems, but ultimately it comes down to quality of life, and in most respects ours has evolved to become comparatively inferior, and getting worse.   And so we persist in this ridiculously distorted picture of our national greatness as if having the biggest military was the proof of it.  It's nutty. We mostly have no idea about the price we're paying.  There are layers upon layers of costs, and we are the poorer for it.  And after this fiasco  in the Middle East, we'll be paying for decades to come.

But maybe it's just time to redefine the American Dream.  It has become too much associated with becoming fabulously wealthy, and it's this idea that co-opts a lot of Americans into rejecting any concept of limits on one's avarice.  No restrictions should be put on people acquiring as much wealth as they feel they need, because theoretically ordinary Americans dreaming the American Dream delude themselves to think that in theory they or their children could some day be one of the superwealthy.  Any healthy society has to have ways to productively channel the ambitions of its citizens, but why is wealth the ultimate criterion?  It's pathological. Prosperity, yes.  As-much-as-you-can-get wealth, no.

We see the pathology at work in the ridiculous compensation given to CEOs and athletes.  How much is too much?  Well, actually, in this model, there should be no limit, and that's why athletes will jump from a winning team to a bad team for $25 million a year instead of $18 million a year, to take the example of Alex Rodriguez after the 2000 season.  I realize that seven million dollars is a lot of money, but the conventional wisdom is that anybody who was in A-Rod's position would have done the same thing, and it's hypocrisy to say otherwise. 

But why?  Because that's the culture we live in.  Greed is the motivator that trumps all others, and we just accept it as normal.  Staying to make a team on the brink of greatness even greater meant nothing.  His connection to the coaches, teammates, and the city that adored him  meant nothing.  It was not even a consideration to make a statement that loyalty and winning and being ridiculously well paid was more important than disloyalty, losing, but being even more ridiculously well-paid.  Is it just that he was a jerk?  No, because if he hadn't taken the deal, he would have been considered a fool by his peers and by his agent. "It's a business decision."  "I'm doing what's best for my family."  "I only have a few productive years."  What? to make more money in a year than 99% of the world will see in their lifetimes?

How is it that it has become acceptable to be bought so easily, to be so crudely, publically avaricious?  What has become of us that this is so? That we just accept it as normal?

So the popular American belief in this avaricious version of the American Dream is something that plays right into the hand of the overclass.  It preserves the structure of the hierarchy with all the advantages going to the people at the top.  But as Faux, and Kevin Phillips and so many others are at great pains to point out, it is a myth--very few people rise to positions in the overclass--the best most will achieve is simply to function as overclass lackeys.  But even if the myth were true, it's not a myth that leads to true national greatness.  It leads to what we have today--the rich and powerful doing as they please at the expense of everyone else.

My version of the American Dream is one that focuses not on greed but American decency, modesty, humor, magnanimity, and sobriety, that focuses not on market dynamics, but on public service that strives to build public wealth, that seeks to mitigate the cruelties of the market with a clear-headed compassion that  empowers the powerless, that helps the dependent to find their dignity as productive citizens, and  provides adequately for the health and education of all citizens, especially its children and elderly. 

This is not the America we live in, and if you think it's ok to live in such an America, you are living not any American Dream that is worth caring about, but in a self-absorbed Libertarian/Reaganite American Dreamworld, and you need very badly to be woken up.

American Decency

This from Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine:

On some of the fundamental core issues, people don't want this kind of messianic, militaristic policy. They just want to be secure and have some kind of principled foreign policy. They want universal health care. They want an end to the war. With virtually no political leadership, I think people seek a saner, more decent country than our elected representatives offer and the mainstream media paint. And this blue/red divide they're always harping on, I don't like it. . . . There's more complexity and more decency and more generosity of spirit here than is generally allowed in the kind of 36/7 media culture we live in.

I agree. But the problem lies in that these same American people have no political means to exert their will on the national poltical scene, and they seem to have given up hope of ever having any.  And maybe it is too late.  For me it's an open question. 

Americans have pretty much abandoned their responsibility for governing themselves to the moneyed class.  This class has an agenda that has little or nothing to do with the interests of ordinary Americans.  The Democrats have become almost as bad as the Republicans in representing the interests of money.

The idea of the Democrats taking back the house this Fall would be a relief.  But regardless how exhilarated the folks over at DailyKos might be about the prospect, I won't be feeling any. The Democrats are profoundly implicated in what is horrific in our political culture right now, and I am not at all sure they have an illness for which there is a cure. And please God, spare us having to deal with Hillary Clinton in 2008.

So the question for me is what has to happen for democracy to reassert itself in this country?  Is anything possible anymore?  Has it all become too complicated? Is it a pipedream to believe that an alert, well-informed American electorate, an electorate much as vanden Heuval describes them, could take back one or the other party from the money interests who run them.  Or will it require the creation of a new party, which perhaps could be called "The American Decency Party," and whose program starts with the three issues vanden Heuvel identifies: "There's the Constitution -- defend it; there's Iraq -- get out of it; there's universal health care -- pass it."

Resignation

McClellan's gone.  Here's Sidney Blumenthal's mean, but rather apt take:

McClellan is a flea on the windshield of history. On the podium, he performed his duty as a slow-flying object swatted by a frustrated and flustered press corps. Inexpressive, occasionally inarticulate and displaying a limited vocabulary, his virtue was his unwavering discipline in sticking to his uninformative talking points, fending off pesky reporters, and defending the president and all the president's men to the last full measure of his devotion. Inside the Bush White House, he was a non-player, a factotum, the instrument of Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist and deputy chief of staff. McClellan played no part in the inner councils of state. He was the blank wall erected in front of the press to obstruct them from seeing what was on the other side. McClellan's stoic façade was unmatched by a stoic interior. He was a vessel for his masters, did whatever he was told, put out disinformation without objection, and was willing to defend any travesty. He is the ultimate dispensable man.

Regarding Rove's "role reduction", I think, with others, that the most important thing in Bush's future now is the Congressional elections this Fall.  If Bush loses his majorities in either house, his goose is cooked.  So Rove's reassignment is hardly a demotion, but rather giving him the most important political job this administration has--making sure the GOP maintains its Congressional majorities.  This is his forte.  This is where he excels--doing whatever it takes to get his people elected.  Nothing is more important to the Bush presidency this year.

Iran with a Bomb

Why is Iran with a bomb inherently more scary than Pakistan with a bomb or N. Korea, China, and India, or even--with Bush in office--the U.S. with a bomb?  After all the U.S. is the only country that has ever dropped one on people, and Bush seems ok with the idea of doing it again.  We'll nuke the Iranians to prevent them from  getting a nuke. Makes a certain kind of Strangelovian sense. 

But hey, it's an option the ever-loving, America-loving Joe Klein says we have to keep on the table. That, in his mind, is the the differenece between being a Liberal and a Leftist.  Leftists are wishy-washy pansies who hate America and who don't have the cojones to think nuclear.   

Don't you see how it works?  Don't you see how the so-called center is pulled off center by so-called centrists talking such nonsense?

To me the much scarier threat is the bomb arriving in a container ship in New York, Philadelphia, or wherever.   The retaliatory consequences of a nation state delivering such an attack make it far less likely than a terrorist nuclear attack.  We have demonized Iran to such an extent that we just assume that if they get the bomb they'll be inherently more dangerous than the other nation states who own one. I'm not saying that a nuclear Iran is a good thing, but why is it so much worse than other dangerous situations that we're facing.  Why is it so so urgent to attack now?  Are you losing sleep over Pakistan's nuclear threat?  Is the situation there really any less crazy?

But people who love America will use nukes if it's in America's interests. But whose interests are we really talking about here?  Is it the interests of the ordinary American on the street? Or is it the big money interests of the so-called military/industrial/ congressional/media complex?  There's no money in defending our ports.  The big money is in the nation-state game.

I know how nutty the Iranian leadership is right now, but still. We can't really be so stupid as to allow ourselves to be conned into a war with a huge Middle Eastern country?  Can we?

Update: "Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots' rationale for war made no sense ... But I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat -- al-Qaeda." Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on April 9.

***

Saddam's regime really was one of the most brutal in the world (probably number two after North Korea). Iran's regime is unpleasant, but not notably more repressive than those prevailing in the region. Indeed, compared to close Arab allies of the United States like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, etc., Iran is closer to being a democracy. Politically, it's about on the level of Morocco's pseudo-democracy, probably the most progressive of the bunch. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is given to saying crazy stuff, but unlike Saddam, the Iranians have never waged war on their neighbors and the government hasn't even "gassed its own people" or whatever other talking points you want to break out. Nor has Iran, to anyone's knowledge, ever been involved in any terrorist attacks on American civilians.

Instead, the big fear is supposed to be that Iran will launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Israel. The evidence for this is so weak that people feel the need to make stuff up. In The New Republic, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen tried to make this case and had to clearly misinterpret something a former (yes, former) president of Iran said after he left office to do it. In a later issue of the same magazine, Matthias Kuntzel just truncated the same quotation to make his interpretation seem more plausible. Jeffrey Bell once alleged in The Weekly Standard that Ahmadinejad "muses about the possibility of correcting that Nazi failure by dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel," which never happened. I called him up and asked him about that, and he explained he was using "poetic license" (my understanding had always been that journalists, not actually being poets or fiction writers of any sort, didn't have this license).  Matt Yglesias,

Our Carnival Hall of Mirrors World

What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. Paul Krugman, July 2005

***

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. Ron Suskind, NYT Magazine, 10/17/04.

If it were not Karl Rove, it would have been someone else. It's not that he's the cause of it all; he's more a symptom of a larger historical cultural trend. Rove is just more precocious among Americans in understanding it and leveraging what he understands into political power.

Nevertheless give credit where it is due. He is the first truly postmodern American politician (maybe you could make a case for Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich). He's created a political culture in which the aide could talk to Suskind the way he did and expect to be taken seriously.  Rove understands that objective reality is irrelevant and that the Liberals' greatest weakness is their continued quaint belief in facts and argumentation. Rove understands that truth is a social construction and that the people who have the most power are the ones in the strongest position to construct their version of reality. Those who have the power are fools not to use it to construct a version of reality that promotes and consolidates their power.

It's been really something to watch. I often find myself in slackjawed amazement as I observe the audacity with which he exploits his advantages. He is a chess master who finds a way to take his opponent's queen off the board early in the game. He shrewdly identifies the key strengths of his opponents and develops very effective strategies to neutralize them. He is a psychological warrior, and his favorite tactic is simply to spread lies that plant the seeds of doubt.

Q: What was John McCain's greatest strength?
A: His heroism as a POW.
Q: How do you flip that into a weakness?
A: His experience in the camps made him mentally unstable.

Just enough of a doubt, just enough plausibility, that if you were leaning toward McCain, now you're going to start looking somewhere else to stay on the safe side. Everything the electorate knows about  candidates for national elections is indirect and fuzzy. Each has a crafted media image, and Rove understands better than anyone how to craft the counterimage. And the public doesn't know for sure which one is the more truthful. So whichever one gets the most media repetition is the one that gets established in the public's mind as the more true. That's the logic of the big lie. Just say it often enough, and it's accepted as reality--by enough people to get you elected, anyway. There is no truth; there is only image crafting and counter-crafting for political advantage, and the main crafting tool is repetition through talking points.

No one understands better than Rove that political reality is a sham reality, and nobody exploits better the public's suspicions that all politicians are not the images they project. There is no strength that cannot be flipped into a weakness. No insignificant peccadillo that can't be made into a major scandal. In Rove's hands either will be crafted into a negative that in the end it becomes his opponent's defining characteristic. He is an artiste of political thuggery.

But what I find truly awesome about Rove is his ability to inoculate his own candidates. Bush has some strengths, but his weaknesses are so obvious, so glaring. That this oafish, ignorant, weak man could be plausibly enough presented as a strong, steady leader to win (sort of) two presidential elections will be one day recognized as of the greatest accomplishments of modern political propaganda. We're too close to it now to fully appreciate it for the remarkable achievement that it is. It's stunning, really.

He does it primarily by playing very aggressive offense. He keeps his opponents off balance and prevents them from establishing a strong enough foothold to mount a counter attack. The main technique is just to say any absurd thing. It doesn't matter if it's untrue. The opponent has to spend time to refute it because we live in a carnival hall-of-mirrors world where innuendo has as much a hold on the public perception as a lifelong record of public service. But the more time he spends refuting, the less time he has to counterattack. And whatever mostly weak and ineffectual attacks he is able to mount, Rove is able to parry fairly easily.

He does it by accusing his opponents of being politically motivated. What else? In his world that's all there is, because for him there is no reality except that which is constructed for political advantages. He will use every trick in the book and all of the power of the presidency, now that he's obtained it, to promote his version of political reality and to delegitimate the version of his opponents.

But reality has a way of bringing people down to earth. Our delusions never last. Sooner or later reality gives us a jolt and wakes us from our dream. The reality of Iraq is finally shaking the country awake from its neocon power fantasy. And this business with Valerie Plame seems finally to be awakening the country to who Rove, Cheney, and Bush really are.

But maybe not. I could be wrong. I was wrong about the election. I'm still amazed that 51% of Americans could believe the GOP version of reality plausible enough to allow it another four years. 30% or maybe 40%, ok. But a majority of voting Americans? Still hard for me to understand. Maybe we just don't want to see what's right before our eyes. Maybe we'll just yawn, roll over, and go back to sleep. Let Big Daddy do his thing. He knows best. But sooner or later we're going to be shaken awake. If it doesn't happen now, the jolt to do it will have to be all the stronger in the future. Better that we do it now.