After the Future

My Problem with Hillary (Updated)

Greenwald expresses well the underlying reasons for my negative feelings about Hillary's candidacy :

...in my view, Howard Dean's 2004 candidacy prompted such passion and excitement not because of any specific policy plans or even views on issues which he advocated (even including Iraq). Far more important was the fact that he looked, sounded and smelled like (and I think actually was) an insurgent candidate -- someone who emerged outside of our corroded Beltway system and seemed legitimately opposed to it, even hostile towards and disgusted by it.

He sounded like an American citizen who was running in opposition to the prevailing Beltway political culture and its rancid operating procedures, not as someone who was a by-product of it eager to prevail within it by adhering to its rules. That was the real "substance" of Dean's campaign, what distinguished it and made it interesting.

It's for that reason that the only presidential candidate, at least among the (credible) Democrats, who seems truly odious is Hillary Clinton, and that is true not so much because of her, but because of the people with whom she has chosen to surround herself and who will run our government should she be elected. To understand why that is so, just read Matt Stoller's superb and important story about how the Clintonistas operate.

The people who are attached to the Clinton campaign and who will be swept back into power with her -- the Terry McAulliffes and Mike McCurrys and Howard Wolfsons and Chris Lehanes and James Carvilles -- are pure embodiments of the whole corrupt and principle-less and worthless edifice. They're the people who, both when they were in power and throughout the Bush presidency, sleazily fed at the trough and they believe in nothing. Cheap and deceitful cynicism is the nourishment which sustains them and, most of all, they love the Beltway power system and can't wait to resume their place in it -- fully preserved and unchanged.

If Hillary's the nominee, I'll vote for her. As cynical as the mindset is that lies behind her campaign, I would argue that it is not as dangerous as the rightist mentality that has taken over the GOP in the last twenty five years.

But I think those of us who are trying to redefine a vital, integrated, radical center have to ask ourselves what is really going on in the mindset of most sane Americans when they judge a particular candidate as presidential or unpresidential.  And we have to own up how we are manipulated by precisely this cynical, power infatuated Beltway agenda which rejects anybody who will not sell out and play the game by its rules. We all seem to accept the Beltway definition of reality as if it's the only possibility.  We do it because people who have power and resources to shape public opinion use it effectively to construct a narrative that defines "normal" reality, and other more reality-based narratives are not supported by enough power and money to present a plausible alternative.

The Beltway folks rejected Gore and embraced Bush, and I will admit to being influenced by the incessant negative portrayals of Gore and only later came to wonder why the Beltway courtiers were giving a man by far his inferior a free pass. I couldn't vote for Bush because of his party's history. He struck me as a decent guy who was out of his depth, but at the beginning I was  open to Bush's proving himself a "compassionate conservative" and a "uniter."

In other words I was sucked in by power's construction of reality to the degree that I was even willing to give Bush a chance.  I'll never do that again, because I'm much clearer now than I was then that individuals don't matter as much as the power base that supports them. This power base should never be given a fair hearing by any sane American, because its agenda is clear, and whatever justifications it might give for its agenda, they have nothing to do with their real motivations, which is to accrue more wealth and power at everyone else's expense. Their only goal in appearing reasonable is to neutralize opposition.

But back in 2000, while I wasn't happy about Bush's election, I wasn't as upset about it as I was when he won in '04.  In 2000 I expected at worst  politics as usual, but in the runup to the war it became clear that we were getting something far worse. And that's when my outrage began. It astonished me how easy it was for the Beltway types to manipulate public opinion. It astonished me how dissent about the war was made to look insane, and how no credible opposition was able to form against it.

Wasn't that Howard Dean's biggest public perception problem? His criticism of the war was deemed radical and leftist. In retrospect it looks like common sense.  What is it about our political culture that a centrist, common-sense perspective like Dean's is made out to be outer-fringe insane.  If outrage is what defines you as insane, and being sane was accepting the Republican agenda and its m.o. for implementing it, then up is down and black is white. Insanity, in fact,  is conscious or unconscious complicity in the GOP program. And insanity means taking what you hear from the Beltway courtiers as defining normal reality.

In 2004, the Beltway courtiers rejected Howard Dean, and public opinion followed.  He wasn't presidential enough.  A soulless stiff like Kerry and callow ignoramus like Bush, however, were deemed presidential.  It's almost as if the Beltway automatically rejects anybody who shows he has a soul, and that automatically meant disqualification for Gore and Dean, and it probably means trouble for Obama.  We'll see--his charm may exempt him.  But it also explains its ready acceptance of Hillary's machine. The people who run it play a game the Beltway courtiers understand. I've been reading Somerby's defense of Hillary, but I don't buy it. She's too complicit in this corrupting power system, and I feel almost as negatively about the faction she represents within the Democratic Party as I do the Republicans as a whole.

I have argued here that the Republican Party has delegitimated itself, and every candidate that it puts forward for national office should be rejected no matter how good the individual candidate might be. Again, it's not about the individual;  it's about the power system behind the individual. And we've learned enough about that power system to know that it must be thoroughly repudiated. But the same holds true for the Democrats.  It's not about liking or disliking Hillary.  It's not a popularity contest.  It's a question of the power network and political mentality that stands behind and supports her.  We need something far better than what she brings with her. And I'll support anybody who seems to have a chance to bring it.

***

Sunday Update: I don't want to appear to be an amanuensis for Glen Greenwald, but his post today connects to this idea about what the GOP thinks as "normal"-- that it's ok for presidents to arbitrarily arrest and lock up American citizens without review or trial.  It's astonishing how non-chalant Giuliani and Romney are about it:

And the power that Guiliani is dreaming of exercising (but don't worry - only "infrequently"), and the power which Romney thinks must be subject to a grand debate among lawyers before he decides whether he has it, was found by the Supreme Court just three years ago in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld -- after George Bush exercised that power against American citizens, with hardly a peep of protest -- to be in violation of the most basic Constitutional guarantees. Explained the Hamdi majority, stating the bleeding obvious:

It would turn our system of checks and balances on its head to suggest that a citizen could not make his way to court with a challenge to the factual basis for his detention by his government, simply because the Executive opposes making available such a challenge. Absent suspension of the writ by Congress, a citizen detained as an enemy combatant is entitled to this process.

And the Court's left-wing terrorist-lover, Antonin Scalia, was joined by John Paul Stevens in dissenting on the ground that the opinion did not go far enough in proclaiming just how repugnant such a power is to our basic Constitutional framework, and Scalia explained: "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive."

Yet Rudy Guiliani expressly does not believe in this "very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system." And Mitt Romney has to convene a team of lawyers before he can decide whether he does. And Romesh Ponnuru can pass along these views as though they are the most unremarkable things in the world, nothing that warrants comment, just the latest position of the Republican candidates, like whether they believe in adjustments to the capital gains tax or employer mandates (though Ponnuru did note, without specifying the reasons, that Cato's "Crane says he was disappointed with Romney's answer to his question the other night"). If you don't mind going throught the day pass hassle at Salon, read the whole post.

I am still in a state of shock that habeas corpus was so blithely done away with in the passage of the Military Commissions Act.  You have to wonder if these guys in Washington have any concept of the consequences of what they are enacting into law.

Religion and Politics II

I've been arguing for some time now that it's clarifying to think of the cultural sphere as separate from the political sphere.  There is obviously  overlap, but I think a lot of our current confusion and poor judgment in the political sphere lies in incorrectly understanding what politics is really about and what culture is really about. So I'll briefly rehearse here what I've said about it in previous posts.

Culture is the realm of freedom and values, and politics is the realm of power where competing interests resolve conflicts and promote projects that benefit the commonweal.  In the cultural sphere of pluralistic societies, as all modern and postmodern societies have become and will remain into the indefinite future, freedom is the central value.  People should be allowed to freely associate and live according to any values system they choose, and to engage in the pursuit of happiness in whatever way suits their idea of it. And they should expect no interference from the government so long as they don't encroach on the rights of others.  That's what it means to  live in a free society and it's at the heart of what it means to live as an American.

This sense of being an American, however, doesn't sit well with those on the cultural right, which wants to define themselves as  the only true Americans, and everyone who doesn't fit into their traditionalist template as un-American. And the Dominion Christianist wing of the cultural right wants to run the country as a theocracy.  This isn't even a traditional American idea--it's pre-American; it's medieval. And yet we find people like Monica Goodling was trained at Pat Robertson's Regents University law school, and according to the school's webpage, 150 other Regents graduates are currently serving in the Bush Administration. I'm sure most of them are very nice people in the same way most ordinary people who become involved in cults like the Unification Church are nice people.  It's not they as individuals that concern me, but their role in promoting an ideology that is designed to set up the American political system on a fundamentalist biblical basis rather than constitutional basis.

We live in a free society, and these people are free to believe whatever they want, but when they enter the political sphere, their ideas should be repudiated because they want government to be established on a basis that is undermining of the constitution. The rest of us have to call them out and see clearly that their agenda has no legitimate place in our political discourse.  It's utterly un-American and indefensible as such.

I'm a Christian, and I take my beliefs seriously, but I think every political candidate and appointee in the future needs to be asked whether in the performance of his or her duties in the political sphere, which principles take precedence: biblical or constitutional?  And anything in the background of such a persons which would indicate that biblical principles (or any other religion's principles) would come first, should render them disqualified without a second thought unless they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they have renounced those ideas.  I'd say the same of someone who had earlier publicly advocated violent revolution or was a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party.   Such people have a right to their views in the cultural sphere, but they should  be afforded no respect or credibility in the political sphere.  Their views are inherently inimical to the constitutional rule of law which is the essential basis for the American polity.

So now that I've been clear about how certain attitudes that are permissible in the cultural sphere ought to be disqualified from serious consideration in the political sphere, just how does the cultural sphere interface with the political?  Obviously, the people who operate within the political sphere have values and beliefs that are shaped by their lives in the cultural sphere. For me Martin Luther King's leadership of the civil rights movement is a perfect model.  It was profoundly religious in its inspiration, but it translated itself into rights language when interfacing with the political sphere.  MLK used religious language when talking to members of the desegregation movement, but secularese or rights language when talking to officeholders in the political sphere.

Politicians with religious beliefs who are elected to office are, we would hope, inspired by and shaped by those beliefs, and their performance in office would of course be affected by those beliefs and ideals.  But as officeholders their first responsibility is to the constitution, and if there was a conflict between their constitutional duty and their religious beliefs, it might be necessary for them to resign or to recuse themselves.  But never should their religious beliefs undermine the constitutional rule of law. 

Politicians have a responsibility to be who they are, i.e., the kind of persons shaped by their values and beliefs in the cultural sphere,  and yet they have a responsibility to represent the pluralism of worldviews and value systems of their constituency. For this reason politicians, whatever their cultural background, should be evaluated solely on their political program and their political track record. Good politicians are genuinely interested and respectful of cultural values that differ from their own. And their job as their representatives in the political sphere should be to translate the legitimate political concerns of their constituents into language and programs appropriate within the political sphere.

But politicians have no responsibility to engage in arguments with opponents in language other than that appropriate to the political sphere. An argument about one's beliefs in evolution or God as criteria for election should be dismissed as irrelevant without hesitation. But his beliefs or values concerning the death penalty or abortion, for instance, should be a matter for political discussion because one's cultural values shape one's political positions in areas that might be legislated in ways that affect the rights of the parties affected.

It should be clear that I think that religious people have every right to bring their concerns into the political sphere, but they have to translate their concerns into secularese. And if they don't translate, then I can't think of an instance in which it would be appropriate for political discussion. If there are readers who can think of and exception, let me know. There might be something I'm not considering.  But from where I stand, nothing could be clearer or more necessary than this separation of the cultural from the political.  If there are problems with such a separation, they are minor compared to the problems that arise when they are not separated.

But I'm open to criticism.  I know lots of people have a hard time with this conceptually.  So take your shots.

See also "Religion and Politics I" , "The Radically Centrist Narrative," and "Controlling the Narrative."

Obama in Beltway MSM Echo Chamber

Greenwald (see 1st update) today about Joe Klein's post about honeymoon being over for Obama .  We'll see if Obama will be more resistant to becoming what the punditocracy says he is no matter what he really is.

Obama's vocal opposition to the rotted cynicism that plagues our political discourse and drives our dysfunctional Beltway system is substantive. It is arguably the most important issue we face. Yet the jaded Beltway media, precisely because it is drowning in the very cynicism that Obama is criticizing, will never see that issue as anything other than empty cosmetics.

This Klein post also underscores the point yesterday regarding how these pundits run around spewing assertions based on absolutely nothing (as James Wolcott notes, NBC News' Brian Williams and Don Imus repeated the same theme as the Chris Matthews panel: namely, that somehow it is Democrats who bear the political risk from investigations into the U.S. attorneys scandal). What happens is that they all begin repeating the same thought, and they then mistake that group dynamic as "proof."
If Richard Stengel, Gloria Borger and Chris Matthews are all saying that "Americans don't want investigations," then it must be true. That's enough "evidence" to warrant repeating it. If Ron Brownstein and Mike Allen are all reporting on petty matters regarding Obama, that proves his campaign lacks substance. Beltway journalists only talk to each other and listen to each other. They constantly echo what they hear and then mistake that echoing process as evidence.

Klein is right about one thing: Obama is being increasingly attacked by the Beltway media. It may be that Karen Tumulty and Mike Allen think that Barack Obama is "lightweight," but 10,000 people would never show up to hear from Allen or any Time pundit as they do for Barack Obama's speeches. While Beltway mavens depict Obama as lacking in substance, Americans are finding themselves attracted to Obama with unparalleled intensity in large part because he points out so clearly that the real parties lacking in substance are those shaping and driving our political discussions.

The Pew Report and Democrats' Wishful Thinking

There's an emerging conventional wisdom narrative that the Republican party is broken and ain't nobody gonna fix it soon. (See also here and here.)  The White House is there for the taking by the Dems, and they'll be able to hold it for years to come. The reasoning behind this lies in the polling data  from a recent Pew Center Report, which shows that Americans have a negative attitude toward Republicans. Come on. We all know how rock solid and resistant to manipulation American public opinion is.  If the Dems are going to let themselves get complacent about American public opinion being in their favor, they haven't learned a thing in the last twenty-five years.

Anybody who believes that this kind of polling is an indicator about how power has shifted from the GOP to the Dems doesn't understand how power works. Power is not grounded in fuzzy, poorly formed majorities who are not particularly interested or very knowledgeable about history and politics.  Power lies in the hands of well-funded, well-organized factions who are clear about their agenda, and will do whatever it takes to accomplish it. 

Majorities have power only when they are aroused and organized.  But mostly politics is driven by smaller groups whose members are aroused and organized.  That's how things get done in the political sphere and in life in general--the people who want it the most usually get their way--especially when opposition is amorphous and non-committal.  Impassioned minorities, whether they are corporate lobbyists, the NRA, civil rights groups, or whoever, push or game the system until they accomplish their goals, and it doesn't matter what most Americans think in opinion polls. 

As mentioned above, public opinion does matter when the broad American public is aroused, but such arousals are temporary phenomena, and the public does not get aroused about most issues in the political sphere. An while positive or neutral public opinion can help these minorities achieve their goals more quickly, it's not determinative. And stealth strategies work even better.  Who knew that the Patriot Act would give the Justice Department the right to appoint new US Attorneys without senate approval? Americans want some kind of national policy to remedy out-of-control healthcare costs.  Will they ever get it?  Only if they become aroused enough to demand it.  Until then powerful, well-funded special interest minorities will prevent anything from happening.

Sure, public opinion is against the Republicans for the time being, but it's not because of some fundamental repudiation of the Republicans or its right-wing ideology; it's because the Republicans have been so incompetent, corrupt, and clumsy.  The connection between incompetence and political ideology is there to be made, but it's not one that most Americans are likely to make.  They just think of all politicians as corrupt and incompetent.

If anybody thinks that the right wing is now experiencing anything more than a temporary setback, he simply doesn't understand our situation.The right is still impassioned, it's still organized, and it's still well funded. Unorganized, amorphous negative public opinion about Republicans is not a potent counterbalance, and it doesn't affect the right's sense of mission about its goals in the least. What is there on the center and the left to counterbalance that?  The right will regroup, and it will attack again, and it will succeed if a strong centrist counternarrative doesn't emerge with effective, articulate political leaders with backbone who embrace and promote it.  The New Deal was the centrist narrative that emerged to neutralize the influence of the hard left in the thirties.  We need a similar narrative to emerge that will have a similar neutralizing impact on the hard right in this decade.

Something like that  might emerge in the next couple of years.  I hope it does. But until it does, we  should not allow ourselves to indulge in wishful thinking about the demise of the right wing in this country.  If it does it's more likely to come from someone like Obama than from Clinton.  I think Obama, at least from the little I've seen of him, seems to get that in a way that the other candidates don't.  We'll see if he has what it takes to deliver the goods. 

The Radically Centrist Narrative

I have been over many months now arguing that the terms conservative and liberal don't really mean much and create more confusion than they clarify.  At the root of the meaning of conservative is to conserve, but the people who call themselves conservative in this country are not conserving but destroying a system set up in the middle of the last century that found a working compromise between the agenda of the corporate hard right and the socialist hard left. We called it the New Deal.

Liberalism historically has meant the bourgeois rejection of the older medieval crown-and-altar narrative and of the feudal and mercantilist economic arrangements associated with it.  Liberalism today means everything from the laissez-faire Libertarian no-taxes, no-regulation agenda of the economic right to the movement to give gays and lesbians marriage rights.  The word Progressive is sometimes substituted for Liberal, but it doesn't help much. Its amorphous conceptually and describes a mood more than it does a political program.

Although I have called myself a progressive on occasion, I don't find the phrase apt anymore to describe what I'm about.  I feel more comfortable describing myself as a Burkean conservative which in this political climate is a centrist position.  I, like Burke, am opposed to top-downism of the Jacobin right or left; I am for gradual social and political evolution, I am pro-republic and anti-empire, and I am for conserving the social and political gains already made.  If this is a radical agenda, it is a radically centrist one.

I have also argued in posts like Religion and Politics, that one of the most important things we can do to bring some coherence to our politics is to separate out our social discourse into three spheres: the political, the cultural, and the economic.  Much of our confusion is rooted in the conflating the cultural and the political.  The cultural sphere is the sphere of freedom, where citizens have the right to pursue the kind of life, values, thinking they choose (or were acculturated to) without the interference of anyone else so long as they don't infringe on the rights of others.  If people want to join the Heaven's Gate cult or to be atheists or Catholics or whatever, they are free to do that, and their right to do so is guaranteed by a pact developed in the political sphere that we call the Constitution. 

The point is that the cultural sphere should be free as possible from interference from political sphere so long as basic rules are followed which boil down to respecting the freedom of others to pursue the life that they choose.  Freedom in the Cultural sphere is an essential central value in a pluralistic globalizing world. Dialog and debate and between groups with different values should be an important part of our social discourse in the cultural sphere, and there is nothing wrong with trying to persuade members of other groups to change their views. But no group can forcefully impose its values and worldview on the others, and the Dominionist agenda of the religious right is to be rejected as un-American without any need to debate it because its essential program crosses that line.  This group ought not be pandered to; its program should be roundly and universally repudiated by all Americans serious about maintaining a political sphere organized by Constitutional principles.

No one cultural narrative can be imposed on the political sphere; that's why the lingua franca of the political sphere must remain secularese--it's the only practical language to be used in a society where groups with different cultural narratives can speak to one another. And as I've said before, secularese is essentially "rights" language, not traditional-values language.  So people with traditionalist values, and anyone else, have every right to promote their interests in the political sphere, but they have to do it speaking secularese and by following the constitutional rules. The idea of having any depiction of Moses or the ten commandments in the courtroom or the legislature defies this principle.  This secular principle governing the political sphere does not require the diminution of religion in the cultural sphere; it simply respects the idea that in a pluralistic society the political sphere must be as culturally neutral as possible.

The political sphere is the sphere of power and of setting up the rules by which different factions in  a complex society can resolve the conflicts that arise between them as they pursue their different interests. We have a basic set of rules and democratic institutions and procedures set up in this country for resolving those conflicts, and they are very vulnerable to be manipulated by factional concentrations of power and wealth which leads to the tyranny that the republic was founded in the first place to combat. So a basic principle in the political sphere for our form of republican democracy is that any trend that undermines the power of people to shape their own political destiny should be unequivocally repudiated. 

That is not a leftist idea; it's central to the whole idea of America. And yet many Americans are complacent about the threat to the Republic that is being posed by hard-right factions which have been aggregating power and wealth and have been manipulating the system in a way that undermines the commonweal.  Bill Moyers, one of the most eloquent defenders of the American Republic puts it this way in a speech he gave recently at Occidental College:

Things have reached such a state of affairs," the journalist George Orwell once wrote, "that the first duty of every intelligent person is to pay attention to the obvious." The editors of The Economist have done just that. The pro-business magazine considered by many to be the most influential defender of capitalism on the newsstand, produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American child can get to the top. A growing body of evidence - some of it I have already cited - led the editors to conclude that with "income inequality growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility falling behind, the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." The editors point to an "education system increasingly stratified by social class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great universities that are "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities." They conclude that America's great companies have made it harder than ever "for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchies by dint of hard work and self-improvement."

It is eerie to read assessments like that and then read the anthropologist Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail He describes an America society in which elites cocoon themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private security guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools." Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security, and public schools." Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, warns Jared Diamond, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.

So it is that in a study of its own, The American Political Science Association found that "increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed."

This is a marked turn of events for a country whose mythology embraces "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as part of our creed. America was not supposed to be a country of "winner take all." Through our system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a healthy equilibrium in how power works - and for whom. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, we made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors, especially the relatively poor, were protected by state laws against their rich creditors. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights. In my time, the hope of equal opportunity became reality for millions of us. Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by the Great Depression, and were poor all their lives, my brother and I went to good public schools. The GI Bill made it possible for him to go to college. When I bought my first car with a loan of $450 I drove to a public school on a public highway and stopped to rest in a public park. America as a shared project was becoming the engine of our national experience.

Why is this basic centrist idea of "New Deal" America being undermined?  Moyers goes on:

We are talking about nothing less that a class war declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who had been Richard Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury. In it he declared that "funds generated by business... must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. The trumpet was sounded for the financial and business class to take back the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal. They got the message and were soon waging a well-orchestrated, lavishly-financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less... .It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more." The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call "the animal spirits of business."

Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious literalism opposed to any civil and human right that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.

To put muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post, reported that "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right - Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who gleefully contrived a cultural holy war that became a smokescreen behind which the economic assault on the middle and working classes would occur.

Nothing matters more than opposing this agenda, and to say so is not a leftist or progressive position.  It's a profoundly conservative position, because it seeks to conserve the republic and the commonweal, and it should be the position of every American with common sense.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Robert Parry:

When historians sort out what happened to the United States at the start of the 21st Century, one of the mysteries may be why the national press corps ganged up like school-yard bullies against a well-qualified Democratic presidential candidate while giving his dimwitted Republican opponent virtually a free pass.

How could major news organizations, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, have behaved so irresponsibly as to spread falsehoods and exaggerations to tear down then-Vice President Al Gore – ironically while the newspapers were berating him for supposedly lying and exaggerating?

In a modern information age, these historians might ask, how could an apocryphal quote like Gore claiming to have “invented the Internet” been allowed to define a leading political figure much as the made-up quote “let them eat cake” was exploited by French propagandists to undermine Marie Antoinette two centuries earlier?

Why did the U.S. news media continue ridiculing Gore in 2002 when he was one of the most prominent Americans to warn that George W. Bush’s radical policy of preemptive war was leading the nation into a disaster in Iraq?  Read more.

This is beat that has been well covered by Somerby, and I think it cuts to the heart of my post yesterday about how our political discourse is skewed significantly to the right. Gore is about as centrist and common sense as you can get, and yet the right-wing narrative of his being a left-wing flake took hold in the so-called liberal media. I wrote yesterday about how we all have narratives that organize reality for us, and as it turns out the common-sense, centrist narrative that Al Gore operates with led him to be right about the war and about global warming when the hard right and the media mocked him for it.  What does that say about our media and the way they have been coopted by the skewed right-wing narrative?

An important strategy for the right wing in this country was to attack the media for its left or liberal bias, and in doing so it pulled the MSM to the right.  If you accept the basic right/left/center analysis I posted about yesterday, it follows that the so-called liberal bias of the media, was in fact a bias shaped by a centrist imagination that reflected the cultural and political values of the New Deal compromise.  The MSM's capitulation in allowing themselves to be defined by the right as left has been an essential element in the right's program to neutralize criticism of that program by a common-sense center. Any critique of the program of the right is now easily dismissed as biased and out-of-touch leftism. It was a remarkable feat of political legerdemain for the right to have accomplished this. And so people who really are on the left like Chomsky and Nader speak, but nobody in the center as it is currently defined listens.  Their perspective have been marginalized to irrelevancy.

And the result was evident everywhere, especially in the runup to the Iraq War when widespread dissent was dismissed as flakey leftism. Here's how the media responded to September 2002 speech Gore gave to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco which critiqued Bush's doctrine of preemptive war as a radical departure from decades of American support for international law:

“Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered,” wrote Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. “It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts – bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible.” [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002]

“A pudding with no theme but much poison,” declared another Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer. “It was a disgrace – a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence.” [Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2002]

At Salon.com, Andrew Sullivan entitled his piece about Gore’s speech “The Opportunist” and characterized Gore as “bitter.”

While some depicted Gore’s motivation as political “opportunism,” columnist William Bennett mocked Gore for sealing his political doom and banishing himself “from the mainstream of public opinion.”

In an Op-Ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, entitled “Al Gore’s Political Suicide,” Bennett said Gore had “made himself irrelevant by his inconsistency” and had engaged in “an act of self-immolation” by daring to criticize Bush’s policy. “Now we have reason to be grateful once again that Al Gore is not the man in the White House, and never will be,” Bennett wrote. [Wall Street Journal, Sept. 26, 2002]

When the conservative pundits addressed Gore’s actual speech, his words were bizarrely parsed or selectively edited to allow reprising of the news media’s favorite “Lyin’ Al” canard from the presidential campaign.

Kelly, for instance, resumed his editorial harangue with the argument that Gore was lying when the former Vice President said “the vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized.”

To Kelly, this comment was “reprehensible” and “a lie.” Kelly continued, “The men who ‘implemented’ the ‘cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans’ are dead; they died in the act of murder on Sept. 11. Gore can look this up.” Kelly added that most of the rest were in prison or on the run.

Yet, Kelly’s remarks were obtuse even by his standards. Gore clearly was talking about the likes of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, who indeed had not been located. [Kelly later died in a vehicle accident in Iraq.]

Still, the underlying theme running through the attacks against Gore and other critics of Bush’s “preemptive war” policy was that a thorough debate would not be tolerated. Rather than confront arguments on their merits, Bush’s supporters simply drummed Gore and fellow skeptics out of Washington’s respectable political society.

More than four years later, with more than 3,200 U.S. soldiers dead and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead too, the consequence of the news media’s hostility toward Gore is more apparent.

Maybe the question we need really to understand is why Gore's critics were taken more seriously than Gore. In hindsight they all look ridiculous, but to the average American this "Gore is a crazy liar narrative" was the collective conventional wisdom.  It's a very strong statement about who controls the narrative in this country, and it's not the so-called liberal media. The whole sorry story about how Gore lost the 2000 election and the tragic consequences that followed is a  massive indictment of how our media is vulnerable to be exploited by the distortions and propaganda of the right wing. If criticism of the war by a centrist ex-Vice President of the United States can be marginalized so easily and so stupidly, no wonder the political left in this country has no voice. 

For another post on the skewed media treatment of Gore see this May 2006 piece entitled "Whom the Gods Would Destroy."

Controlling the Narrative

One of the basic presuppositions that lies behind everything I write in this blog is that people operate largely unconsciously with presuppositions.  We all have biases, and those biases are rooted in narratives that organize reality for us, and we don't give up on them until the evidence becomes so overwhelming that the narrative can no longer be sustained. There is no objective reality that we can know directly; there is only mediated reality, and narratives are the medium. They are social constructions, and they are provisional.

We cannot do without these narratives and the biases that come with them, but we can do some work to make sure that the biases we have are well grounded. The difference between the wise and the foolish is that the wise work with narratives that are well grounded, and the foolish within narratives that are specious. Philosophy since at least the time of Socrates has been at root the exercise of bringing those narratives into awareness in order to evaluate how specious or well grounded they are.

In politics, the party that controls the narrative controls the levers of power.  In a democracy, the people are supposed to control the evolving narrative, and political power, in theory, ultimately lies with them.  In a tyrannical regime a power elite controls the narrative, and it uses its power to suppress competing narratives, mainly through propaganda and threat of reprisal.

The Republicans understand the importance of controlling the narrative in a way that the Democrats don't. Or if there are some Democrats who do understand its importance, they are powerless to do anything about it. There are layers of reasons for this, but among them is that many of the people who are attracted to the Republican Party are authoritarian personality types who are more easily organized into a lockstep mentality to support the leader no matter what. The Democrats have a more difficult time submitting to authority or doing anything in a disciplined, focused way.

I'm not saying that all Republicans are good little soldiers unquestioningly following orders or that all Democrats are independent free thinkers, but it's fairly obvious that at the core of the Republican party--the so-called base that comprises about one third of Americans, loyalty and group cohesion are more important than being independent minded. That's an enormous political asset for factions who want to play the power game. To me it's pretty frightening that at this late date such a large proportion of American citizens still thinks positively of this president and his administration. They either approve of the authoritarian tilt of the administration or they are working within a loyalty narrative that is impervious to evidence that would otherwise demand their disapproval.

And surely this authoritarian mentality is on display in the current controversy regarding the unprecedented firings of the eight U.S. Attorneys   The USAs who were fired were republicans who exhibited a little too much independence. These attorneys were not "loyal" enough, and they resisted marching orders from central command: Prosecute Democrats, and leave Republicans alone.  They learned that being independent minded and following the law is no longer a Republican virtue.

But the narrative that organizes reality for the authoritarian segment of the American citizenry, while clearly ungrounded and specious and an everpresent threat to the wellbeing of the commonweal, is not my primary concern.  I'm more concerned about propping up the narrative for the middle. As I've argued here repeatedly, our political discourse has skewed so far to the right in the last twenty-five years that what used to be the middle is now considered left.

So let me reiterate what I said about defining Right, Left, and Center in response to some questions about my post earlier this month about The Phantom Extremist Left.  The question is whether it's possible to objectively define right, left, or center.  Isn't it a matter of subjective perception depending on where one stands? Well, I would argue that it isn't; it only seems that way in the U.S. because the Right and the mainstream media have essentially delegitimated the "real" left in this country. We don't have a politically legitimate left as they have it in Europe, Latin America, and even in Israel. So let me define left, right, and center by an objective standard that I think most people who know some political philosophy would agree with:

The political right is defined by (1) its celebration, if not idolization, of the market and its correlative agenda to destroy the New Deal compromise and (2) by its hypermilitarism in the face of the terrorist threat and of its correlative authoritarian-leaning moves to strengthen the executive branch, to stack the courts, stonewall the legislative branch, and to diminish civil liberties in general. In the United States the right is corporate power aligned with and subordinating political power to its agenda while relying on a specious jingoism and traditional-values narrative to seduce the cultural and religious right to provide the votes needed to support its agenda.

The principle that defines the "real" left is its agenda to control the market through the nationalization of key industries and by its program to redistribute wealth through various governmental mechanisms. There is no such left in this country at this time with any political clout.  There was a Left at the turn of the 19th century through the 1930s  and '40s  And the New Left played a role in shaping political discourse in the late '60s and early '70s but for reasons it might be interesting to go into another time, it dissipated rather quickly after the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam. In the early eighties there was some anti-military and anti-nuclear activism, but as the decade progressed, the left agenda pretty much shrank to concerns about rights for women, and racial and sexual minorities, which is pretty much how it stands today. There is no widely accepted legitimate critique of power distribution in our mainstream political discourse.  Most Americans either accept or are unaware of the the trend toward aggregations of power and wealth in the hands of fewer people since the 1980s.

The center is defined as the people who seek a compromise between the left and right as defined above. The New Deal was its model in this country insofar as it works with both markets and with government controls to solve problems and seek to achieve goals that promote the nation's general welfare.

Was there some overstretch by some of the left-leaning people in government who sought to solve problems with clumsy top-down programs like busing during the '60s and '70s  Yes, and some adjustments were warranted. Top-downism whether it originates from the right or the left is for me always a problem except in extraordinary circumstances.  In my post here about Latent Authoritarians, I discuss how the real spirit of the New Deal is subsidiarist, and how subsidiarity is a guiding principle that affirms both self-reliance and interdependence. The balance between these two social principles is for me what guides a centrist agenda.

So I grant that some of the top-downism of the '60s progressive political agenda required some adjustment, but with the ascendancy of Reaganism the New Deal compromise was confronted with a program of dismantlement.  The point is that most Americans were pretty happy with the New Deal system in defining a socially democratic center. Even Nixon accepted its basic premises, and what later became Reaganism was in previous decades considered right-wing lunacy.

The New Deal consensus was so thoroughly "normal reality" that most people were complacent in their acceptance of it as such. This resulted in this center's not taking seriously at first the extremism of Reaganism. And this in turn led to its being unprepared for the withering assault the right mounted in the '80s that continues to this day. So the amazing story of the last thirty years is how what was considered right-wing lunacy in the '70s became the dominant narrative in the '80s and beyond.  And the only way to understand it is by analyzing how the right organized to achieve its remarkable political objectives. And they did it by doing what the "right" does everywhere--by a concerted program of power and wealth consolidation behind a screen of jingoistic nationalism and traditionalist values.

I have made repeated arguments that true American conservatism in our current political context is defined by those who seek to vigorously resist the program of the hard right as defined above. That attitude of resistance to the hard right is characterized now in media-think as as a Liberal or Left position, and I think such a characterization absurd. The center is now defined by some middle point between the hard right and the New Deal Center, which means that the center is very much skewed to the right. So people who think of themselves as centrists according to this scheme are really rightists.

This is an important point because I think there are many people who are uncomfortable with the program of the hard right currently in power, but are reluctant to join in actively resisting it because they fear that to do so requires their collusion with the program of the hard left, which they loathe, even though it's currently non-existent as a power faction in American politics. The hard right, however, is very much existent. And so the point is that "Liberalism", insofar as it simply preserves the New Deal compromise, is really the center. To resist the agenda of the hard right is a centrist project focussed on preserving the social democracy that brought so many Americans prosperity and civil rights in the period following  World War II. 

This unprecedented prosperity is pretty much the only thing most working Americans in the boomer generation and after have known, but it wasn't always that way, and there are very powerful structural forces at play right now that could very well return us to the quasi-barbarism of the late nineteenth century. That's why the real fight right now is to control the narrative that defines the center. And it starts with "conserving" the center as the consensus defined it in the New Deal compromise between the hard right and the hard left.

And so the entire thrust of what I've been writing for some months now is to show why such a media characterization of "left" is distorting and enabling of the program of the hard right. There might be a cultural left in the universities and in the arts world, but there is no political left--no left that offers an alternative program for power and wealth distribution in this country.  I am not promoting such a program; I  simply want to point out that insofar as most Americans are unaware of such a hard left program, they see a philosophically centrist, i.e., New Deal, position as leftist, and it just isn't.  As a result, we're in a situation right now where anyone slightly to the left of Ann Coulter is considered a moderate. Coulter serves the right effectively because she pushes the limits of what defines the right, so that rightists can position themselves somewhat to her left and be considered "reasonable."  It's not reasonable; it's a flim-flam.

Repudiation of the American Right

It ain't gonna happen so long as MSM outlets like Time prop up the fantasy that Ronald Reagan was an admirable president.  Americans who buy into this fantasy fail to understand that the mess we're in now is the direct result of movement conservatives in the  Reagan mold having taken over the levers of power in 2000.  It's not that things have gone wrong because of the screwup of a couple of Bush administration incompetents; they have gone predictably wrong based on the very premises of the  philosophy and worldview of the American right today.

Krugman makes the point:

Why is there such a strong family resemblance between the Reagan years and recent events? Mr. Reagan’s administration, like Mr. Bush’s, was run by movement conservatives — people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package.

In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.

If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be “loyal Bushies.”

The movement’s apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn’t likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy.

The idea that movement conservatism is a for small government is a hoot. Whatever the beliefs of its more naive proponents, the practical effect of movement conservatism is to bloat the government while subordinating it to corporate demands.  Bush administration is the reductio ad absurdum of the movement for which Reagan was the herald.  Bush is what Reagan would have become if he had both houses of Congress, the judiciary, and no Soviet Union to hold him in check.  What we see now in this disastrous administration is exactly what we should have expected, and it's what we should expect after 2008 if Americans allow themselves to be conned into electing another Republican president and Congress. 

We Americans are naive if we think that what we are witnessing now is just about the individual failure of one man--George Bush.  It's not about the indivdual; it's about the underlying power constellation for which Bush and Reagan are simply front men.  And regardless of the mess the elements that compose this constellation have made and the price we Americans will pay for it in the decades to come, these groups retain enormous power and influence, and they are not going away. 

There is no splitting the difference with this movement. It must be repudiated root and branch. The cultural values debate is a smokescreen to hide the power alignments that are coalescing behind it.  The cultural sphere is where we should be having debates about cultural values; the political sphere is where we should be concerned about power alignments. The single greatest threat we face as a nation is the alliance between corporate power and the power of big government. And the degree to which the Democrats are also implicated in this power system is profoundly troubling. 

So it's getting to the point that it won't matter if most people disapprove of what this coalition of power interests wants to do. The issue is not about whether the American people approve or disapprove of its agenda, but about whether the American people, even if they mustered the will, have the power to stop it. 

Virtue, Machismo, and the Last Man

I've been reading Somerby about the GOP strategy to feminize Democrats, and his withering criticism of Maureen Dowd whom he depicts as doing in a more sophisticated, NY Times kind of way the same work being done by Ann Coulter.  I think he's right about this, and I think he's doing an important service in calling our attention to the distorting effects that it has on our political discourse.  But I think he fails to address an underlying problem which is the persistent mythos of the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party.  You know which is which. Without this narrative in the background, the feminizing scripts wouldn't stick.

It has been one of the marks of GOP branding brilliance to reinforce this mythos in their political strategy.  It works because it resonates on levels we are not completely conscious about. The power of this kind of mythmaking trumps sterile facts.  Facts are only useful insofar as they are dots that fit into the mythic pattern that connects them. In an ideologically heated argument, it is almost impossible to establish common ground in mutually agreed-upon facts. Facts that don't fit into one's opponent's mythos are easily dismissed or made to appear ambiguous or suspect.  Politics is not a struggle on the level of facts; it's a struggle for the assertion of one's mythos over another.  You win by out-narrating your opponent, not by trying to be reasonable. You have to come up with a more compelling mythos.

As I've written before, the GOP will have a political advantage so long as they understand the power of this kind of mythos and the Democrats keep insisting that they have the facts on their side.  If we've learned anything in the last six years it's that facts are politically insignificant.  The Democrats will fail until they find a way to out-narrate the GOP. But the narrative, if it is to work, has to resonate in the collective soul.  It can't be merely a head trip.  And I don't think Liberalism has the resources to provide such a counternarrative.

The problem with the Mommy/Daddy mythos lies in that our imaginations of masculinity and femininity are profoundly confused, and so we unconsciously fall back onto subliminal memories or archetypes which are deeply embedded in the human psyche, no matter what we consciously think to be the "correct" attitudes about gender.  Most people are thoroughly confused when it comes to gender issues these days, and the right wing knows how to exploit that confusion in a way that Liberals find repugnant.  But Liberals have nothing to counter it with except resorting to a moralistic political correctness, which is a head trip that in the long run has no real bite or staying power. 

So while I think the macho ideal of masculinity is the coarsest way of imagining what it means to be a man, there are not very many alternative images that define for young men an ideal of masculine virtue to which they might aspire. And the result, at least in the mainstream collective consciousness, is either a choice between machismo or the mushy man that Nietzsche call the Last Man.

Nietzsche understood and hated the flattening effect of modernity on the human soul, and he tried to develop an alternative within the nihilistic ontology he felt intellectually compelled to embrace.  But his solution failed miserably, because his uebermensh is too easily coopted by a fascistic mentality, and his will to power becomes a justification for the most abhorrent crimes. Despite all the rampant religiosity emanating from the right, our culture, particularly the culture embraced by the right, is nihilistic and crudely Nietzschean in ways we haven't fully grasped. It boils down to those who understand the will to power and embrace it, and those who are dominated. This is the mentality of the right.  There are real men, and there are wimps, masters and slaves. And Coulter and Dowd buy into the primitive fantasy associated with this mentality which requires that men prove their strength in order to make themselves worthy of the woman's respect. The strongest, most violent bull, wins the prettiest cow.  Last men are losers and worthy only of contempt.

Democrats in this fantasy usually come out as the losers but their behaviors reinforce the stereotype. The Dems surrendered the Presidency to the GOP in 2000 even though they won the election. The  GOP put its foot on the Dems' throat, and took it from them.  The GOP and the interests it represents are congregants in the cult of power, and they have no compunction about using power to take power from those whom they perceive to be weak.  Insofar as the Democrats let them get away with it, they reinforce this underlying wimp narrative.

Last Men are the creation of modernity and Liberals too often fit the type. Again, it doesn't matter what the truth is about most Democrats or most Republicans; the important thing is the role they play in the larger narrative.  It doesn't matter what individuals actually do or what they really believe.  What matters is how they appear in the public's perception, and if they align themselves with the Daddy party, they are perceived as strong masculine figures; if they align with the Mommy party, they are perceived as feminized and wimpy.   

Machismo attracts women like Coulter and Dowd because in the macho man there is a there there.  Why do we celebrate the violently powerful man in our popular cinema?  Dirty Harry, Jack Bauer, and James Bond are real men, even though they derive their charisma from a fascistic archetype.  We celebrate them because they radiate a masculine energy that is so lacking in most men of our acquaintance in our everyday lives. 

Fascists are unafraid to embrace a premodern machismo ideal of masculinity which they celebrate in the cult of power. The rule of law?  That's for liberal wimps.  Real men are not restricted by the rules.  They do what they need to do to get the job done.  Sound familiar?  The Boland Amendment was for wimps.  Getting wiretap warrants is for wimps. Sqeamishness about torture is for wimps. Civility is for wimps.  Bi-partisanship is date rape.  Politics is blood sport, and playing by the rules is for people who haven't the balls to play the game on its own terms, and they deserve to be squashed. Real men know what they want, and they take it.  They don't let anyone stop them.

This narrative provides a very compelling alternative to the soullessness of modernity and to the liberal narrative associated with it.  But is there an alternative to this odious choice between machismo and the Last Man?  Is it possible to frame an ideal of masculinity that provides a third option?  Is it possible to develop an ideal of masculine virtue that embraces strength without brutality, confidence without the need to dominate?  Some people might be uncomfortable with the whole discussion, but unless we work out a counternarrative that celebrates masculine and feminine virtue that resonates within the collective psyche, we are doomed to play things out on this more primitive level.  And as I suggested above, Liberalism doesn't have the spiritual resources from which such a counternarrative can be devloped.

Virtue obviously transcends gender.  Courage, fidelity, honesty, integrity are obviously not gender based, but the politically correct left has to understand that gender confusion is one of the primary tools the authoritarian right is using to has to bludgeon its way into power.  And I would argue that we are a society that has lost its soul to the degree that we have lost any deeply experienced sense of what it means to be a man or a woman.  Liberalism seems to be ok with that loss.

American men and women these days lack a robust masculinity or femininity; they have become rather flat-souled and dull. They've become psychically unisex, which is no sex. They lack what might be described as feminine virtue or masculine virtue, which are qualities of soul--not physical qualities or intellectual qualities, but soul qualities. And I've wondered for several years now if the obsessive need for women and men to achieve an ideal of physical feminine or masculine beauty and this whole bizarre focus on sexual performance, with boob size and penis length, isn't a compensation for a culture-wide loss of a soulful masculinity and femininity. It's an attempt to manifest on a physical level what is lacking on the soul level.

Men in contemporary American society have hypertrophied heads and genitals, and atrophied souls. I call it missing middle syndrome. Women suffer similarly, but not as badly.  But women miss the point when they say that they want to be appreciated for their minds, not their bodies.  That's the head part of the syndrome. Rather they should be appreciated for the quality of their souls, but we've almost lost any sense of what that means. So it's either heads or bodies. Where the soul should be there's an emptiness filled for the most part by anxiety, confusion, compulsive distraction, and depression.

Many men obsess about whether they are failing the women in their lives sexually, but if there is a failure in the bedroom it's rooted in a deeper failure to radiate a masculine spiritedness. They think they need to be bulls when in fact what they need to be is heroes, by which I mean exemplars of masculine virtue.  And I would also argue that men once they reach adulthood haven't been helped much by the masculinization of women. For if women scorn their men for lacking a robust masculinity, the men also long for robust femininity, which has become almost as rare. They are too often soul-starved by their women who have in their own way lost their souls.  It's what modernity does to human beings; it flattens them, leaches the spirit out of them, and leaves them soul-shriveled, spiritually disenfranchised, and bewildered.

And women are just as victimized by this mentality insofar as they feel that they need to be cows with abundant udders to be interesting to their men, but if they fail it's not a physical failure but because they lack a feminine spiritedness.  Their loss of femininity of soul has to be compensated by a hyperfeminizing of their bodies. Why this obsession with the vacuous Anna Nicole Smith the last several weeks? What does she represent to our collective consciousness? Isn't she an icon only because of her prodigious ability to have made herself into an object of consumption so that she could more effectively consume those around her? Isn't she in a sense the symbolic ideal of late capitalist culture celebrated in the late capitalist media?

But what have we to offer our children that contrasts with this kind of creepiness.  We know what we see on every magazine cover that confronts us at the supermarket checkout represents this sick obsession with bodies and performance.  We see how it affects our children. But we are hard pressed to offer an alternative that has as much vigor. Virtue is boring. I heard the nauseous Chris Matthews, while interviewing Libby trial juror Ann Reddington, call Patrick Fitzgerald "virginal" in the sense that there's something weird about such a straight shooter. "Doesn't he know how to play the game?" Matthews seemed to be asking. 

But Fitzgerald is one public figure that has truly exhibited virtue.  He is incomprehensible to the late capitalist media types like Matthews who can only understand human motivation in terms of the lust for sex, power, and money. To be virginal in respect to these is for such media types the worst sin.  Anna Nicole Smith they can understand and celebrate; Patrick Fitzgerald they can't.  A rabid ideologue like Ken Starr they can understand; a man motivated by public service and pursuit of the truth, they can't.

Why is virtue so boring? Because it is so rarely encountered in a way that commands respect. People who seek to be winners in our culture are more in line with Chris Matthews in thinking that virtue is for the naive, for people who don't understand how life works.  It's something that you're taught in school but give up once you enter the real world.  Nevertheless, there is something in every spirited young man's soul that aspires to an ideal of virtue, but there are very few men in contemporary American society who can robustly model that for them. There are lots of nice, decent men, but few robustly virtuous men.  Modernity doesn't provide a lot of opportunity for heroism. That's why the military is so attractive to a certain type of spirited young man who longs to achieve an ideal of nobility.

I have students, former soldiers, soldiers in training, in my classes who exhibit such a nobility. They are good kids, really good kids. There is a certain naive idealism in their attitudes, but there is a more important element, a noble element. They have a maturity and confidence that the more typical male or female student does not have. These kids are not bullies; they are heroes sent to do a bully's work. But when they come back from their tours to embrace normal life, they face the same problem other young men face, a system that seeks to redirect their energies toward objectives that are not worthy of them, and as R.W. Emerson said, "Every hero becomes a bore at last." 

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men, who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary. When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, of books, of religion, we admire their superiority, they seem to throw contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of a youthful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an active profession, and the forming Colossus shrinks to the common size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which always make the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the moment they put their horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no example and no companion, and their heart fainted. (Emerson, "Heroism")

Our culture provides no trellis upon which these young souls can grow to realize the greatness that lies within them and which longs to be realized. Our young men can be heroes in the primitive context of war, but become Last Men in the modern context of career and family.

A lot of women are unhappy in their marriages because their husbands, despite their early promise, failed or shriveled in the way Emerson describes. And the men feel the shame of it, and yet don't quite know how it happened. But in Emerson's day, as now, there were precious few models for them to emulate or to inspire their aspiration. In other words, there is no living tradition in which young people grow up and in which they encounter living examples of virtue and heroism. That's why the machismo model is so attractive to so many.  As crude as it is, it offers an answer to the question that modernity does not: What does it mean to be a man?

Carlyle, Emerson, Nietzsche were all 19th Century thinkers who hated how modernity shriveled the souls of men and women and drew on earlier ideas of virtue and heroism as a counterpoint for the leveling, materialistic forces that was making men into the spirit-challenged humans Nietzsche called the Last Men. Of course, Nietzsche blamed Christianity for promoting this slavish, weak-souled quality, and there is some merit in the accusation. But that's a theme I want to address in coming posts.

Because now more than ever we need an imagination of future possibility that has religious roots and which inspires in us, and perhaps more importantly inspires in the young, an aspiration toward robust virtue. Human beings are doomed to the flatness of the Last Man and the master/slave narrative associated with it so long as they imagine themselves as living in a materialistic, consumer-centric world.  In order to retrieve a more vigorous imagination of virtue, we have to retrieve a more spiritually vigorous ontology.  This is not a liberal project; it is a radical one.

Powerlust and Powerlessness

I was preparing a post on the the American right's obsession with power and the use of violent force as rooted in its feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, but Greenwald does the job for me in this Salon post.  Powerlust is a symptom of a pathology rooted in the feeling that one has so little personal presence in the world that the only antidote to prove to oneself that he exists is to violently dominate another.  The dominated cannot deny that you exist or think you unimportant. When the individual who feels powerless inflicts harm while part of a pack or crowd provoked by perceived threat or resentment, he is more easily able to absolve himself of any guilt he may feel about the  harm he causes.  An excerpt:

People who feel weak and vulnerable crave strong leaders to protect them and to enable them to feel powerful. And those same people crave being part of a political movement that gives them those sensations of power, strength, triumph and bravery -- and they need a strong, powerful, masculine Leader to enable those feelings. And they will devote absolute loyalty to any political movement which can provide them with that.

That is just the basic dynamic of garden-variety authoritarianism, and it is what the right-wing, pro-Bush political movement is at its core -- far, far more than it is a set of political beliefs or geopolitical objectives or moral agendas. All of it -- the obsessions with glorious "Victory" in an endless string of wars, vesting more and more power in an all-dominant centralized Leader, the forced submission of any country or leader which does not submit to the Leader's Will, the unquestioning Manichean certainties, and especially the endless stigmatization of the whole array of Enemies as decadent, depraved and weak -- it's just base cultural tribalism geared towards making the followers feel powerful and strong and safe.

The Coulter/Hannity/Limabugh-led right wing is basically the Abu Grahib rituals finding full expression in an authoritarian political movement. The reason people like Rush Limbaugh not only were unbothered, but actually delighted and even tickled by, Abu Grahib is because that is the full-blooded manifestation of the impulses underlying this movement -- feelings of power and strength from the most depraved spectacles of force. The only real complaint from Bush followers about the Commander-in-Chief is that he has not given them enough Guantanamos and wars and aggression and barbaric slaughter and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong.

This is why the threat posed by the right in this country isn't going to go away any time soon.  So long as politicians' willingness to exploit this feeling of powerless in these uncertain times is legitimated in the mainstream media, this nation is in very serious danger of being  transformed into the kind of authoritarian regime that the hard right lusts for. The Bush administration has been clearing the ground and building the foundation for it.  Because he appears weak now does not mean that the tide has turned.  Believe me, these folks on the right look at the midterms as a temporary setback.

See also this post based on an interview with Stephen Ducat.