After the Future

End of the Culture Wars

The bottom line on this vast and complicated subject is that the "culture wars" will never die in the fever swamps of the Right where they were nourished if not conceived, particularly on the abortion issues; that protecting the cultural status quo is a vastly more powerful position that progressives should aspire to occupy; and that the critical plurality of Americans are happy to declare a truce in the culture wars so long as progressives don't behave like conquering secularist radicals. Ed Kilgore.  See also here.

Kilgore's posts sanely sum up the state of things from a pro-abortion [rights] point of view.  And he understands, correctly, that abortion is the fly in the ointment that prevents any stable truce from being established any time soon. The broader culture will  adjust more quickly to civil liberties for gays and lesbians, and church/state separation principles, in my view, are not in jeopardy.  But abortion is different.  Something more fundamental is at stake here, and it's not the kind of thing people get over.

Roe was a mistake; abortion policy should be something local communities or states decide. It should be a bottom up decision, not a top-down one. An issue as ambiguous as this one should never have become enshrined as a constitutional right. The Feds should have stayed out of it, and now that they're in it, they should get out of it. Let the people vote on a state-by-state basis, and when they do, abortion policy will be more liberal in blue states and strict in red.  It's a little Missouri Compromise-ish, but it would be better than what we have now.

But Kilgore retorts to arguments to deconstitutionalize abortion policy this way:

Even if you think that's an appropriately "democratic" way to deal with abortion policy, it's certainly no prescription for turning down the temperature of, much less ending, the culture wars.

Ultimately, Damon himself offers perhaps the best reason for rejecting his argument for a "deconstitutionalization" of abortion policy:

Some Americans believe that an abortion is an act of lethal violence against an innocent human being whose rights (like everyone else's) should be protected by the state. Other Americans believe that the only legally relevant moral considerations in an abortion are the wishes of the pregnant woman -- which of course presumes that the fetus is not a human being in need of protection against lethal violence. These are contrary and incompatible metaphysical assumptions about matters of life and death and human dignity.

I couldn't agree more, God help us all. But I would contend that such matters of fundamental rights are best decided, for better or worse, in the context of constitutions and courts rather than legislatures. Maybe you think that's easy for me to say because "my side" has won in the courts, but the broader issue is that someone really does have to win on issues of fundamental rights where compromise is impossible. And I think any honest RTLer would agree with me on that point.

I understand his point, and it's valid. But let's bracket the question about whether a truce is possible in the culture war--it's probably not--and focus instead on whether the Democratic party should take sides in it. It would not have to if abortion policy was handled on the state rather than the federal level.

This is complex and messy, but my argument on this blog has been that the long-term solution for the recovery of political health is to separate out as much as possible issues that are proper to the cultural sphere from issues that are proper to the political and economic. Divisive issues rooted in cultural values conflicts should be handled where possible only on the local level so long as fundamental rights are protected. The right to an abortion is not fundamental; the right to life of the fetus is ambiguous.

A huge problem for Democrats since the seventies is its having been pulled out of what should have remained a neutral position on the matter. It has since, because of abortion and some other issues, been branded as the party of anything-goes cultural liberalism, which is not a worldview most people on Main Street feel comfortable with.  So far many more of them than should vote Republican, even if on particular issues they approveDemocratic policy positions. People vote on tribal-identity lines except in emergencies, and as Tom Frank has pointed out, the people who should be natural Democrats--the so-called Reagan Democrats--are no longer solidly Democrats because Reagan symbolized something Americans identified with on a tribal-values level, even if his policies were destructive of their political and economic interests.

I would argue that the Democrats' long-term health depends on its becoming more  neutral on divisive cultural values issues. It should retrieve the Capraesque mythos it enjoyed in the New Deal years. The Dems then were the party of the George Baileys, John Does, and Longfellow Deeds--it was the party of the ordinary decent fellow, the party that understood and embraced values like dignity, neighborly generosity, and tolerance held by ordinary decent Americans.

The Dems let Reagan steal the Capra mythos from them in the 80s, even though he was the ally of the Mr. Potters and D.B. Nortons. I think a guy like Obama can take it back, and I hope he does, but here's the thing: abortion is a rather large fly in the ointment, and both Obama and the Democratic Party are too identified with it. NARAL's aggressive pro-abortion rights positions don't align well with that Capraesque Main-Street sense of what is normal and decent, and because the national Democratic Party and Obama are perceived as aligning more with NARAL than with Main Street, lots of Main Streeters will continue to have a hard time feeling comfortable in the Democratic Party, even though that's where they belong.

The abortion issue is the gift that keeps giving to the right-wing elements in our political culture. They will continue to exploit it as a wedge so long as it remains so closely identified with the Democratic Party. Guys like Kilgore are right in arguing that the John Brown extremists in the pro-life camp will never be assuaged, the people who think

that every abortion is a homicide, and that legalized abortion has represented (to use a term you hear a lot in RTL circles) a Holocaust. Along with this conviction has come the predictable attitude that pro-choice Americans are at best "good Germans" complicit in a monstrous evil, and are at worst conscious and callous killers of human beings. The RTL movement, meanwhile, quite naturally views itself as analogous to the anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, or to the Allies, or to the German "Confessing Church." To most sincere anti-abortionist activists, their cause is a matter of overriding moral and/or religious obligation, not an exercise in constitutional law or civic politics.

Moral absolutists are almost always wrong, but we need them to bring into high relief the moral seriousness of the issues we are dealing with. We need them as we needed people like Daniel Berrigan to awaken us to the moral seriousness of the nation's drift into militarism. But these absolutists do not define policy.  I believe most Americans who live within the Capra centrist mythos are more flexible. What they don't like is the idea that abortion-on-demand is normative. I think that if policy was decided on a state-by state basis, most of the sympathy felt on Main Street for the view of abortion described in the quote above would be dissipated. Laws tailored to local sensibilities would allow for more flexibility and common sense. Right now with abortion enshrined as a constitutional right, there is no room for flexibility, experiment, or fine tuning. Let this be worked out democratically in the state houses.

But here's the bottom-line political point. The Dems on the national level should not take sides on abortion. The culture war might rage on, but let it be fought out in the state legislatures rather than in Washington. This should be perceived as neither a Dem nor a Republican issue. If abortion policy was determined on a state-by-state basis, it would make it easier for Democrats on the Federal level to elect legislators whose positions on the economic and civil liberties issues are more in line with Main Steet aspirations without abortion or other divisive cultural issues being a wedge issue or distraction.

It's not clear how this culture war would play out on the state level. My guess is that on the pro-choice side Libertarians who usually vote Republican will align with cultural-left types who usally vote Democratic, while on the pro-life side Bush Republicans, Reagan Democrats, and otherwise left-leaning Catholics will argue the pro-life side.  And maybe in some states the sane Capraesque center will mediate a policy solution that appeals to the  the common sense and moral seriousness that characterize Main Street Americans at their best.

Quote of the Day: John Cole

I understand the psychological need for the Republicans to feel relevant, and I understand their opposition to spending, but really, we would be so much better off if the Republicans just took a little breather, got themselves pulled together and composed, and stopped being the crazy uncle at the holiday dinner ranting insanely about everything. These guys need to get their act together and figure out that the “loyal” in loyal opposition is fealty to the country first, and not the party. (Read more.)

But would a breather really help? Are they capable as a group of thinking about anything beyond their own political self interest?  So they'll keep doing what they do until most of them get voted out of office.The Dems when in power need a legitimate, loyal opposition to keep them honest, but these guys have zero credibility.

As for the near-term future, It's really hard for me to see how any sensible, public-spirited moderate would be attracted to the Republican Party.  I know many if not most Dems operate according to a similar self-interested political calculus, but if Obama shows even the slightest effectiveness in the next two years, why would anybody run as a Republican unless he is a crazy-uncle type? 

The GOP's one hope is the Limbaugh Doctrine: Do everything you can to make Obama fail. In Limbaugh-think the success of a so-called Liberal like Obama is by definition bad for the country. Only crazy Republicans, the true Americans, know what's good for the country. 

Does that mean that I am optimistic about prospects for the recovery of our democracy?  Yes, cautiously so.  But we cannot underestimate the resiliency of the hard right and of its appeal to Main Street when some outside threat looms.

Obama & Centrist Coalition Building

It's clearly counterproductive to think anything along those lines is possible with Congressional Republicans. Making nice with the Republicans simply will not work. Obama has to find a way to erode the ground upon which these guys stand. Over the next ten years, it's got to be understood that the only place a Republican can get elected is in the backest of neo-Confederate backwaters. If he's to avoid making Clinton's mistakes, he has to go on offense hard and soon. He can do that by going over Congressional heads to the American public. If there's any coalition building to be had, it's out there on Main Street, not within the Beltway.

 

Sustainability: A Dem or GOP Value?

Deneen has put up an interesting post in which he points out that Liberals are more conservative when it comes to the environment than people who call themselves conservatives.  He talks, I think, accurately about the fundamental incoherence in both the liberal and conservative positions, and the post is worth reading here.

What interested me more, though, was a response to his post by Empedocles who has this to say:

The environmental movement today is based around two main tenets: sustainability, and localization. If I ask which political philosophy more closely embodies those two principles I am lead to the inevitable conclusion that (paleo) conservatives embody them far more than liberals. As far as sustainability goes, unfortunately under the neo-cons, the Republican party is as far from being the party of sustainability as can be. They’re now the party of debt, economic growth, fossil fuels, environmental destruction, military intervention, centralized power, and big business. Despite this, I actually think there is more hope for the Republicans to be the party of sustainability. The old school Republicans were as wary of big business as they were of big government, they were the ones who were for local businesses, were in favor of environmental protections, were for localizing political power, were noninterventionists, and were fiscal conservatives. There are still some of these around that might make a resurgence. I see nothing of the sort possible with the Democrats, who are far from the sustainability party as well. Despite being more open to passing laws protecting the environment, Democrats are the party of unchecked, unsustainable population growth, economic growth, widespread military deployments, and government spending. But more importantly, the Democratic party is the party of centralized political power, not localization.

He certainly seems to see the Republicans and the Democrats for what they are. But what struck me was his seeing the Republicans as having more potential to engender a politics of sustainability than the Democrats. I don't think that there is even the slightest vestige of the old Republicanism left in the GOP that makes it possible to take  GOP even remotely seriously. But I think it's legitimate to ask if the Dems should be taken seriously either.

I've written several times here about what I call the Whig spirit. (See  here.)  I realize that the use of this term has problems, not the least of which is its historical failure, but it comes closest in representing to me what Empedocles is talking about: A principled, forward looking, sustainability-oriented politics that understands that restraint and limits are essential elements of the human condition and at the heart of the meaning of political virtue.

I think some of the paleo-cons like Larison and Deneen are struggling with this, but in my opinion they mistakenly assume that tradition still has enough of a presence in contemporary society that we should still worry about conserving it. I accept that the meaning of modernity was to disembed us from traditional forms which we can no longer accept naively. For this reason there are no "forms" to be conserved.  There is, however, the underlying life and spirit that shaped those forms that must be continously rediscovered worked with in an ongoing effort to grow forward. Tradition no longer mediates the discoveries of the past for us.  They have to be rediscovered or uncovered, and I see that as primarily an interior process with social effects.

What He Said . . .

Greenwald today on Obama's executive orders:'

Whether these steps, impressive as they are, will be symbolic measures designed to placate certain factions, or whether they represent a genuine commitment on Obama's part, remains to be seen.  Much of it will depend on how much political pressure is exerted and from what sides.

Obama deserves real praise for devoting the first few days of his presidency to these vital steps -- and doing so without there being much of a political benefit and with some real political risk.  That's genuinely encouraging.  But ongoing vigilance is necessary, to counter-balance the Fred Hiatts, Brookings Institutions and other national security state fanatics, to ensure that these initial steps aren't undermined.

The transition and all the obfuscatory speculation and tea-leaf reading that comes with it is now irrelevant. Now it's time for action. So far, so good.  HIs speech today at State appointing Mitchel and Holbrooke was also encouraging. He's hitting the ground running, and maybe he'll get up enough momentum to get some things done before they figure out how to bog him down.

See also:

Yes We Did

Get Obama elected.  I will be interested to see what we can say we did on this date in 20013. But some quick thoughts. I thought the emotional resonance of this wonderful day was captured in the musical performances--Aretha's "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and Yo Yo Ma's exuberant cello.  The speech was a sober call to for us all to be grownups and to return to the true thing that make us most deeply ourselves, that we are all in this together, not just narcissists on our own self-absorbed trips. Understated, perhaps in its rhetorical form, but a slap at the guy sitting behind him leaving today for Texas. The American people, I think, are ready to rise to the challenge if a grown-up case for service and sacrifice is made to them, but soon enough we'll all be subjected to the childish antics in the Senate and House. So we'll see how all that works out.

The Oligarchs We Shall Have Always with Us

I came across this site called Right Web: Exposing the Architecture of Power that is Changing Our World.  Here's its description of its purpose:

Right Web is a program of Political Research Associates (PRA) that monitors U.S. organizations and individuals -- both in and out of government – that promote militarist foreign and defense policies, with a special focus on the “war on terror” and the Middle East. Right Web aims to foster informed public debate about these policies with feature articles and profiles of individuals and organizations that examine political discourses and institutional allegiances over time.

Efforts to push militaristic policies cross party lines, and so Right Web examines individuals and organizations across the political spectrum, as well as “nonpartisan” political actors. Reporters, researchers, and analysts have come to rely on Right Web for its well-documented research and analysis

I recommend it as a resource if you are interested in understanding the right-wing militarist mentality that I have been describing over and over in this blog as the internal enemy that must be resisted. I recognize that there's a place in every society for its Demostheneses and Churchills. There needs to be a voice that makes us aware of the dangers that confront us in a dangerous world. But that voice in our society is not a lonely voice on the fringes. It's the voice that dominates the system because of the complex way that the system demands war and more war. There has been no fair debate because war serves the interests of several oligarchical factions in this country who have had the capability to marginalize the voices of sanity and prudence.

I've been thinking a lot about this mentality and why it is so dominant. There are so many layers to it, but in an effort to understand why so many find it legitimate, I will temporarily occupy the mind of a sincere but fictional Neocon who lives in this mental world that purports to be democratic but is not.  It is the age-old mindset of the oligarch who cannot trust the fate of the nation to the people.

We Neocons understand that humans are violent and irrational. We understand the whole primitive complex that embraces glory, honor, and the need to meet violence with violence. If they hit you, they will not respect you if you don't hit back harder.  This is the way of the world. We understand  that the typical bourgeois liberal's attitude toward peace and war has little to do with the way the real world works.  We understand that power is the only thing that matters in politics, that nations will do anything to advance their interests--lie, manipulate, steal, murder, massacre, torture. We know that governments can do all the things that are forbidden to us as individual citizens because the law only applies to citizens. (International law is an unenforceable joke.) What we do to non-citizens is not a matter of law, but a matter of expediency. Anything is justified if it supports the national interests, and anyone who performs any deed that advances the national interest is a patriot.

Anyone who thinks differently is a dangerous fool or a traitor. Liberals laugh at Coulter, but she understands the way it is. Liberals think she's an over-the-top extremist, a comic entertainer, a send-up of the wackiest of wingnuts, but she simply states the obvious to anyone who understands how power works. The world is full of bold, dangerous people who understand that the world does not work according to liberal ideas of fair play. They understand that there is only the raw assertion of one's own will, and liberals who believe in peace and understanding are living in a dreamworld from which they will awaken only with the butt end of a rifle to the head.

Look at history. What is it but the long, violent story of war, of one group asserting itself and dominating another? What could possibly make anyone think that humans have changed or will ever change?  Dominate or be dominated. Eat or be eaten. That is the real world no matter what liberals fantasize otherwise. Americans have become complacent because their nation has been dominant; they can afford to be complacent so long as people like us are running the show. But as soon as we lose that dominance, everyone will think as we do. Fair play, rule of law, process? Please. Embracing those values puts you on the fast track to become someone else's meal.

Slack Tide

I find myself almost incapable of paying attention to what others are paying attention to now.  When it comes to what's going on in the political sphere, it's just wait and see what actually happens.  I find I have no interest in commenting on all the preliminaries. 

Either Obama is going to rise to the challenge or he is not. There are reasons to be optimistic; there are reasons to worry. We're at slack tide.  Nothing's moving one way or the other. Nothing to swim against, nothing to ride with.  We can only drift while we wait for the shift.

And so I find myself looking on the scene from a greater distance in the last several weeks.  It's been depressing how what we've seen for the last eight years has been so typical of the way humans from time immemorial work the system for their own short-term interests and wreck things for the ordinary person. The whole stupid human story in the political and economic spheres is that of someone wanting more than his share and pushing to get it until someone else gets sick of it and pushes back, and if he gets the upper hand becomes the one who wants more than his share and pushes to get it until someone pushes back at him.   And on and on it goes. Is it really any more complicated than that?  America is no different on the national scale than any other nation which has gone before us. We have a moment here and there where we might do something surprising, but for the most part we follow the time-honored pattern. 

The people who want wealth and power most are the worst kind, but they are the ones who tend to run the show.  There are rare exceptions, and sometimes they can make a difference. Normal people don't care enough to be in a position to fight the greedy, vainglorious, and powermad. And most people don't care that the greedy, et al. are running the show unless they can see how it affects them directly. So the inevitable happens: things go from bad to worse until the whole system falls apart, and we start over with high hopes for a better future vowing never again to allow these scoundrels to do what they do, but we soon enough forget, and on it goes as if it never happened before.

So it remains to be seen if Obama is one those rare public personalities who emerge who can make a difference. I don't know if he is.  He could be. Whatever he is now, he might rise to be something more later. One would not have such an expectation of anybody else on the scene.  But if he isn't, then get out your parachutes--we've got a ways to go before we hit bottom.

The Logos

We do not prove the existence of the poem.
It is something seen and known in lesser poems.
It is the huge, high harmony that sounds
A little and a little, suddenly
By means of a separate sense. It is and it
Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,
The breadth of an accelerando moves,
Captives the being, widens--and was there.

One poem proves another and the whole,
For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:
The lover, the believer and the poet.
Their words are chosen out of their desire,
The joy of language, when it is themselves.
With these they celebrate the central poem,
The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent,
Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,

The central poem is the poem of the whole,
The poem of the composition of the whole,
The composition of blue sea and of green,
Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems,
And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems are brought then:
Not merely into a whole, but a poem of
The whole, the essential that is compact of its parts,
The roundness that pulls tight the final ring

And that which in an altitude would soar,
A vis, a principle or, it may be,
The meditation of a principle,
Or else an inherent order
active to be
Itself, a nature to its natives all
Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose,
The muscles of a magnet aptly felt,
A giant, on the horizon, glistening,

And in bright excellence adorned, crested
With every prodigal, familiar fire,
And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos
And scintillant sizzlings such as children like,
Vested in the serious folds of majesty,
Moving around and behind, a following,
A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye,
A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear.
[Wallace Stevens, excerpted from "A Primitive Like an Orb."]

Wallace Stevens was not a believer (at least not in the sense of Dickenson, Hopkins, Eliot, or Auden), but he's close in his intuition here, and in his expression of it, to the basic intuition of the Logos, affirmed by the Greeks of old and the Romans. Christians identify the Logos with the Christ.  No matter the name, so long as it is recognized, intuited, as such--it's the common ground, the meeting place where we can gather to be refreshed and where there exists already the foundation upon which to build something new.

This new cannot happen unless we find an unalienated way to think and speak. We overcome our alienation by sinking into the thisness of what is real, by sinking into the foundations, which is the Logos--not up there in some otherworldly realm, but down here at the heart of things, which provides the matrix in which everything that exists finds itself.

Quote of the Day: W. B. Yeats

The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Experience. [From a letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham]

Torture (Updated)

The question that interests me is not whether torture is sometimes morally acceptable, but whether it is something we can move beyond, as we have done with human sacrifice and slavery.  I'm not saying that  moving beyond some attitude or behavior means that such things are never thought or done, but that certain behaviors become so beyond the pale that the idea of anyone doing them is considered an abomination. Child molestations happen every day; but they are an abomination. Normal people are disgusted by the very idea of them, and nobody feels ambivalently about them enough to even attempt their moral justification. 

Where we feel ambivalently about a moral issue is where we are most vulnerable to regression. I think it's safe to say that our attitudes toward human sacrifice, cannibalism, child molestation, and slavery are stable because normal people don't feel ambivalently about them. They are abominations, and while nothing is impossible, there is little risk of our regressing to accept them as normative. But our ideas about torture are not so stable in this sense. We don't like the idea of it, but many mainstream Americans still find themselves trying to justify it, or find it hard to condemn it as they would other behaviors considered unambivalently as abominations. Ross Douthat in an honest post articulates, not torture's justification, but the ambivalence he and many Americans feel in passages like this one:

I think it's very, very difficult to justify Harry Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any kind of plausible just-war framework, and if that's the case then the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities - and indeed, the tactics employed in our bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan more broadly - represents a "war crime" that makes Abu Ghraib look like a trip to Pleasure Island. (And this obviously has implications for the justice of our entire Cold War nuclear posture as well.) But in so thinking, I also have to agree with Richard Frank's argument that "it is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs" - in so small part because I find it hard to imagine myself being in Truman's shoes and deciding the matter differently, my beliefs about just-war principle notwithstanding.

The same difficulty obtains where certain forms of torture are concerned. If I find it hard to condemn Harry Truman for incinerating tens of thousands of Japanese civilians, even though I think his decision probably violated the moral framework that should govern the conduct of war, I certainly find it hard to condemn the waterboarding of, say, a Khalid Sheikh Muhammed in the aftermath of an event like 9/11, and with more such attacks presumably in the planning stages. I disagree with Charles Krauthammer, who has called torture in such extreme circumstances a "moral duty"; rather, I would describe it as a kind of immorality that we cannot expect those charged with the public's safety to always and everywhere refrain from. . . .

Yet of course the waterboarding of al Qaeda's high command, despite the controversy it's generated, is not in fact the biggest moral problem posed by the Bush Administration's approach to torture and interrogation. The biggest problem is the sheer scope of the physical abuse that was endorsed from on high - the way it was routinized, extended to an ever-larger pool of detainees, and delegated ever-further down the chain of command. Here I'm more comfortable saying straightforwardly that this should never have been allowed - that it should be considered impermissible as well as immoral, and that it should involve disgrace for those responsible, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds as well as the people who actually implemented the techniques that the Vice President's office promoted and the Secretary of Defense signed off on.

But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved - because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do.

Wow. There's enough ambivalence here to sink a ship. I applaud Douthat's attempt to grapple honestly with the problem, but what's he really saying?