After the Future

Leo Strauss & the Neocons

Andrew Sullivan is like the Matt Damon character in "Syriana"--decent, idealistic, smart, well-informed, but nevertheless naive about how things really work--too credulous of the the official cover story, too trusting of the guys in power to behave decently and according to their professed ideals.  He's just a glass-half-full kind of guy, I guess.  In any event he has been giving some attention to Leo Strauss and the neocon Straussians.  A lot of his defense of Strauss against his left-leaning detractors, in my opinion, is distorted by his Pollyannaish tendency to have blindspots with regard to the negative side of personalities he wants to admire. 

To his credit, he has shown the ability to actually absorb evidence that contradicts his Pollyannaism and to change his mind.  But there's still this naive quality that gives his writing in general a lightweight quality that makes it hard for me to take him seriously.  And so I have found his defense of Leo Strauss really misses what is toxicly anti-democratic in his influence--he realizes there's a problem, but blames some of his followers for distorting his thought.  But I would argue those apples don't fall far from the tree. They just take the nihilism that pervades Straussian thought to its politcal logical conclusion.

But, again, to Sullivan's credit he gave some serious space to an emailer who puts his finger precisely on the problem with Strauss and Straussians which is the doctrine of the "noble lie."   He goes on to make the distinction between "gentlemen" Straussians and "Nietzschean" Straussians. Sullivan obviously approves the former but not the latter.  Problem is that the latter are the ones who have the political power. Read the post in full, but the key quote is this one:

The Nietzscheans (for example, Bloom) take another path from the skeptical starting point. For them, there is one truth that IS certain: the distinction between those human beings who CAN endure the fact that there are no certain answers and those who CANNOT endure it. The Nietzschean Straussians that I knew as graduate students were utterly dismissive of the many ordinary human beings; they believed the scales had fallen from their own eyes and that they had been liberated from ordinary morality. Moderation is good only as a means or a mask, not good in itself. Yet at the same time, they understood Strauss's cautions about the limits of general Enlightenment and public reason. And so for them, the best regime was the American one, a regime that permits freedom of thought for the philosophers and, for the many, freedom for politics, for hard work, and (alas) for self-indulgence -- despite the risk of a plunge into consumerism and philistinism. Hence "The End of History and the Last Man" -- by a student of Bloom's. (Everyone forgets the last man part: it's not necessarily a happy ending.)

These Nietzscheanized Straussians that I observed truly believed in their superiority and in their right to influence politics and public affairs. Yes, as a student in his 20's mellows into his 40's and 50's, he will lose some of the Nietzschean hubris -- but perhaps not the conviction that the many need noble lies that he knows to be false. Not the conviction that he knows best, and can apply this knowledge universally. Hence Wolfowitz, the WMD feint in order to bring on war in Iraq, the plan to seed democracy throughout the Middle East and end all tyranny, the Rumsfeldian arrogance, etc. Disaster.

Sullivan's problem time and again lies in the way he fantasizes the world in light of his ideals rather than seeing the world as it is. It's one thing to argue philosophy on the level of principle; it's quite another to see how people use philosophy as a cover for their crimes.

Keeping the Media in Line

I've been amused by the right wing campaign to vilify the now stodgy NY Times for its "treasonous" act of disclosing the Bush administration's secret bank records monitoring program. "We're in a war against terrorists, goddam it.  How dare the NY Times undermine the war effort," goes this line of thinking.  Since terrorists will be with us until the end of time, this war is by definition without end, and so therefore will the President and his cronies be ever able to invoke national security to cover their crimes. 

So any time your opponent shows a little fight, attack him viciously to keep him on the defensive.  It's a strategy akin to swiftboating.  There's no substance to the accusations; it's simply a tactic to divert attention from the real issue and to make the NY Times think twice before it ever discloses information harmful to the administration again.  It's also, I'm sure, an appeal to the factions within the NY Times that are concerned only to cover the grey lady's corporate backside.

Speaking about keeping the media in line, I thought it might be interesting to refer readers here to The Daily Howler's retrospective of the first debate between Bush and Gore in October of 2000.  The Howler does a very good job of amassing evidence to show how the Courtier Class echo chamber works to  legitimate what's absurd and to delegitimate what is sensible in shaping public thinking.  In this case of the first debate, there was a very concerted effort to legitimate Bush's cluelessness and inability to grasp the issues and to delegitimate Gore for being sharp and knowledgeable.

The first debate pundit meme was that Bush won the debate because he didn't embarrass himself.  The Howler asks the obvious question:  Who sets this low standard except the Courtier Class itself.  It was a rigged game for the start, set up in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for Bush to lose unless he came across as a drooling Neanderthal.

Bush won, according to the pundits, despite polling that showed that Americans gave the debate to Gore by almost ten percentage points. The pundits said over and over again the Gore won on points, but dismissed that as a technicality.  Bush really won because, well, they wanted him to. How else can you explain the absurd low-expectations criterion?  They could just have easily focussed on how out of his depth he was (and has proven himself since to be).  It was a remarkable  bit of groupthink which seemed a willful refusal to see what was plainly there for all to see.

On page one of the San Diego Union-Tribune, for example, George Condon quoted Texas professor Bruce Buchanan. “Given expectations, I think Bush comes off a little better because I don’t think he was smashed,” Buchanan had said. The professor’s logic was bizarre on its face, but Michael Kramer matched it in the New York Daily News. Kramer said that Bush was “the winner,” offering this as part of his logic: “Bush, although clearly less knowledgeable on most issues…spoke in a soothing, conversational tone that helped answer lingering doubts about his ability to be president.” Was Bush being held to “a very low standard?” To Kramer, Bush countered doubts about his qualifications by speaking in a conversational tone! Bush had been “clearly less knowledgeable”— but soothing! But then, oddball judgments of this type were found all over the press.

Indeed, many papers expressed a strange equivalence, in which Gore’s superior “command of the issues” was matched by the way Bush had topped that low bar. Consider the lead editorial in the Charlotte Observer. “Certainly Mr. Gore dominated the event,” the paper wrote. “While the vice president’s command of a wide range of issues was impressive, Mr. Bush at times seemed timid and unfocused, unable to pursue discussions of some issues beyond a couple of key points.” But so what? “Expectations for Mr. Bush were low from the outset,” the paper explained, “and to many viewers he exceeded them.” The paper never explained a key point; it never explained how it knew, just hours post-debate, that viewers thought Bush had exceeded expectations. But many other major newspapers engaged in this mind-reading act. They told their readers what viewers had thought; they downplayed what viewers had said in those polls; and then they expressed the odd equivalence expressed by the Observer. Had Gore been “impressive” and Bush “unfocused?” Was Bush “unable to pursue discussions?” In the end, it didn’t matter, because Bush had surpassed his low bar.

Read the whole post here. The key thing the Howler tries to point out is that this low expectations meme was a pudit-originated criterion that, consciously or unconsciously, had the effect of branding Gore a loser when by any sane criterion he was clearly the winner.

Reason vs. Religon in Politics

Interesting post on this subject at Hullabaloo where an article, "Heaven Can Wait," appearing in Dissent magazine by Susan Jacoby is quoted at length. Jacoby wants to make the case that religion in politics creates more problems than it solves.  Reason is the only way forward:

the left needs to present its case in unapologetically moral terms. But those moral terms should be grounded in reason, not in pandering to the supernatural beliefs of Americans. Indeed, American presidents in the past—and not only the distant past—have had great success in combining reason with moral passion. Perhaps the most outstanding example is John F. Kennedy’s June 1963 American University commencement speech, now regarded as the beginning of détente with the Soviet Union. Kennedy spoke of peace as “the necessary rational end of rational men” and declared, “Our problems are manmade—therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.” Then Kennedy memorably observed that “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Could there be a more reasoned yet passionate statement of secular morality than the assertion that we owe our children a peaceful world not because we are immortal but because we are mortal?

Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that a great many Americans, including religious Americans, are sick of hypocritical politicians who pretend that their policies deserve support because they are the work of a Higher Being. The question is whether there are any political leaders left with the courage to appeal to voters as reasoning adults, with arguments based not on the promise of heaven but on the moral obligation of human beings to treat one another decently here on earth.

Yes and No. I don't think she's crazy, and I'm sympathetic to almost everything in this quote, but it also  betrays an obtuseness that I find typical of secular intellectuals.  I agree with her that secularese needs to be the lingua franca that a pluralistic society speaks in the political sphere. This is something I explained in detail in the Religion in Politics post I put up in February.  But I also think that reason isn't enough.  People don't derive the "moral passion" that she talks about from Reason.  She's combining two things as if they were the same. 

People don't fight for reasonable objectives.  They fight for deeply held values that are given meaning insofar as they are embedded in a mythic narrative.  The narrative provides the source for the moral passion.  People use reason to justify what they do and to explain themselves to others, but their motivation for action lies in longings that derive from levels of the soul that can be described either as super-rational or sub-rational. The  problem that Jacoby has with religion is that very often people with sub-rational motivations use super-rational language to justify their actions. 

So when she points out that the mainline southern churches supported slavery and segregation in this country, I would say that's an example of sub-rational motivations justified by super-rational language.  And that by definition is false consciousness.  This kind of false consciousness also explains the widespread, enthusiastic Christian support for this barbaric war in the Middle East.  The subrational motivations are revenge and fear.  The super-rational justification is to bring freedom and democracy to the oppressed. You don't have to be religious for this particular bit of mental bait and switch to work on you. But a certain kind of religious personality type seems more vulnerable to its use by demagogues.  So I have  no quarrel with Jacoby in her pointing that out about how religion is  used to support the most immoral behaviors.

My quarrel with her lies on a different level. What she doesn't seem to realize is that her own presentation of reason as the noble ideal that should inspire all political discourse is itself part of the Enlightenment rationalist mythic narrative.  For me this was a narrative that does have a beautiful nobility to it, but so does Dante's cosmological hierarchicalism. Both have little relevance in shaping the way we now experience the world, even though at one time they were they represented the highest achievements of their respective cultural eras. 

So no, she's not crazy, just quaintly irrelevant and out of tune with the current zeitgeist.  The question is not about whether reason is a good thing, but about which master does reason serve.  In other words, the important question is not whether we are being reasonable or not, but in whether we have bad or good will. Reason in itself has no moral content.  It is an important tool, and like any tool it's better to have one that is sharp and well oiled. But that's all it is.  It's not an end in itself.  It's simply a tool to help us work toward achieving goals that have super- or sub-rational motivations.  Everything depends on the origin of the motivation. 

So my problem with Jacoby lies not with her critique of religion as false consciousness, but with the inadequacy of the underlying mythic narrative that she appeals to as an alternative. Ultimately we all make a leap of faith into something, even if it's into the salvific power of Reason.  But reason is a silly thing to believe in. It's like believing in a computer or lawn mower. I go into more detail about this in two posts I put up in January here and here.

On Being 99% Wrong

Gary Kamiya has a good review of Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine, in this morning's Salon. Early on he says:

If there are any observers who still deny that the Bush administration is the most secretive, vengeful, reality-averse, manipulative and arrogant government in U.S. history, they will have a lot of fast talking to do after reading Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Percent Doctrine." A meticulous work of reporting, based on interviews with nearly 100 well-placed sources, many of them members of the U.S. intelligence community, Suskind's book paints perhaps the most intimate and damning portrait yet of the Bush team.

At this point, one could forgive readers for asking, "How many more damning portraits of the Bush administration do we need?" From yellowcake to Joe Wilson to Abu Ghraib, the list of Bush scandals and outrages is endless, but nothing ever seems to happen. As the journalist Mark Danner has pointed out, the problem is not lack of information: The problem is that Americans can't, or won't, acknowledge what that information means.

Readers of this blog know my take on why Americans won't acknowledge the overwhelming evidence piling up against this president--facts don't matter, only the mythic narrative does.  The dynamic is similar to the one that works for right wing Christians who cannot accept biological evolution and prefer some of the more bizarre forms of creationism. The basic commitment is to the myth, not to the facts.  Facts matter only insofar as they fit into or help to support the myth.  Everything else is filtered out or explained away. 

And so at a certain level the facts are indeed irrelevant; the argument is not on the level of facts but on the level of the myth, and it's because the left sees the myth of the rights as 99% wrong, and the right sees the myth of the left as 99% wrong that there's really no possiblity of reasonable discussion. Perhaps some attempt could be made to talk about the underlying assumptions, but most people don't have the time or interest or self-awaremess to do so.  But if there's to be any kind of meaningful dialogue, that's the level at which it needs to take place, not on the level of who has his facts right. 

And it's counterproductive. The right wingers know what they want to do, and they have no concern about whether they are doing the right thing or not.  Debate is for them a diversionary tactic, a way to confuse and paralyze their opponents with doubt. Right wingers love it when those who disagree with them want to argue because it's a way to keep them endlessly diverted from the more important task, which is not a head game, but a game of the will. It's a way for them to keep the Liberals forever dithering while they get stuff done. The more they talk, the less they do.  Even the conservative house members who resisted the Medicare Prescription Bill found this out.  Debate?  What debate?  They found out quick that they better either get out of the way or get run over. Their opinions didn't matter a bit, because they didn't have the power to stop the crony capitalist bloc within their party which did have the power to ram the bill down their throats. It's not about what's good policy; it's about who has the power.

Their argument can play loose with the facts because it's only necessary to wrap themselves up in their militaristic patriotic myth as their justification, and know that the few who seek to challenge them can be easily dealt with by ridiculing them as being hopelessly marginal.  They are marginal because they are so outside the mythic narrative the right wingers have established as the only legitimate frame for the discussion. The foundation for political power lies in controlling the mythic narrative.  Lots of credible people were against the war before the invasion--in fact, most of the world was.  But the antiwar point of view got only the most perfunctory acknowledgement in the media, and usually with a wink and a roll of the eyes.

So the argument is never really about the facts but about the legitimacy of the mythic frame. This is why it was so important to swiftboat Kerry.  He had to be made to appear ridiculous, and his war record worked against that.  The swiftboating was not designed to disprove Kerry was a war hero.  It was simply enough to raise doubts about it.  And it allowed his image as a liberal war protester from Massachusetts  to emerge as the more dominant element in his identity because it fits better with the negative mythos as it lives in the imagination of Red State types in which all Liberal Democrats are weak-minded, unprincipled malcontents, and so therefore not presidential.

What we have going on in our country now is similar to Spain in the 30s.  There were a lot of people who were not fascists who nevertheless sympathized with Franco because they felt more comfortable with the traditionalist mythos that he relied upon for legitimacy. The Republicans inspired by their own anti-monarchial and left-leaning mythos had overthrown the monarchy early in the decade, and Franco and a coalition of right wingers sought successfully to to overthrow the republic. It was then, as it if for us now, never a matter of facts; it was a matter of which mythos you felt more identified with--the future-oriented, left-leaning myth of the Republicans or the traditionalist myth of the rightists. 

I think the choice is similar for Americans right now; it's a question of which mythos you're more comfortable with--the more cosmopolitan mythos of the left or the traditionalist, militarist mythos of the right. It's not a question of supporting this or that individual policy proposal. No policy can be considered i isolation because each is a building block in the construction of a much larger agenda.  Individuals, of course, can indulge in independent mindedness, and ideally that's what you'd want.  But the reality is that it makes no difference in the power equation.  What matters is the mythos that animates a party's base because that's where the power lies.

The bottom line in politics is not about what is right or wrong but about who has the power and what they want to do with it. Individuals who in a show of independent mindedness can, if they want, rationally assess the merits of every bill that passes through the legislature, but their opinions about the merits of these bills make not a whit of difference because they have no power as rational individuals.  The power lies with the mass, and so the party which is more effective in develoing a  mass of loyalists who trust their leaders no matter what has the advantage.  This is not a task accomplished through reason but through mythmaking.

And so it comes down to competing myths and their assumptions about what is real and unreal.  And maybe that's all there is in the end.  It doesn't matter who's factually right or wrong; it only matters who has the power to exert his will and that power relies on having a loyal constituency which accepts the mythos that  legitimates it.  I think I understand what the Cheney/Rove regime is trying to do with the power that they have.  They are doing what they can to make sure that what they are doing is kept secret, but enough information has come to light in books like Suskind's and others to give us enough reason to worry. We've gotten to the point where it's not about being reasonable anymore--that time is past.  It's now about choosing either to resist or to collaborate with the agenda or these American right-wingers.

Liberals are good at developing a negative mythology about the right, but not so good at developing a positive mythology to inspire people to move forward on a progressive agenda.  They have a mythos of the No, but not of the Yes.  The right wing has both a No and a Yes, and it's in that its power lies.   Kamiya indulges in a little blue negative here to illustrate the point:

Perhaps then we can ask how it happened that the government of the United States was hijacked by a bullying, fact-averse religious fanatic and his puppetmaster, an evil courtier out of Shakespeare. How we were plunged into a disastrous war simply because a cabal of ideologues and right-wing zealots, operating in autocratic secrecy, decided they wanted war. And how all of the normal workings of a democratic government -- objective analysis, checks and balances, transparency -- were simply trashed by an administration waving the bloody shirt of "terror."

For those operating within the Red mythos, this demonization of Bush and Cheney is ridiculous function of blue mythos which needs fascistic villains to explain why everything is so wrong.  I'm not for demonizing anybody, but what if they are that bad?  I think there is good reason to believe they are, and I think there's plenty of evidence to back it up.  And if those facts need to be woven into a mythic narrative to drive the point home to those who don't care about facts, then so be it.  The fact is that some really bad actors appear from time to time in history, and I recognize that it might be hard to recognize just how bad they are if you are their contemporaries. History will be the judge about just how bad they really are, but in the meanwhile, we have to make our choice now, and my choice is to support anyone who will resist them.

My problem with the Democrats is that too many of them continue to dither and are unwilling to make that choice. They are collaborating when instead they should be resisting. In doing so they are accepting that the mythic frame established by the right defines political reality.  Instead they should be fighting to establish an alternative and more appealing mythic frame.  Kamiya goes on:

But there is little reason for optimism that such a reckoning will take place anytime soon. The Democrats' failure to address the historic debacle that is the Bush presidency is so vast, so complete, that it must stem from reasons deeper than merely its pathetic fear of appearing to be weak on "national security" -- that meaningless shibboleth invoked by political consultants who would nervously triangulate if they were being devoured by a great white shark. Even the most hawkish Democrat must surely realize now that message separation is vitally needed, that merely quibbling around the edges of Bush's policies while waiting for him to collapse is a fool's game and leaves Democrats disorganized, confused and open to Karl Rove's cut-and-run smears. The best response to a bully is to hit him in the mouth -- as Rep. John Murtha did when he blasted Rove, whose combat experience consists of launching attack ads, as a fat-ass hypocrite.

That centrist Democrats like Hillary Clinton cannot clearly reject Bush's catastrophic war seems to reflect their deeper inability to articulate, or perhaps even to understand, two things: that Iraq has severely damaged our national security, and that the process by which the Bush administration sold their war has severely damaged our democracy. Yes, those are harsh claims, which go beyond Beltway decorum. And yes, we are at war. But gentlemanly behavior can be a betrayal of the country, as Suskind's sad portrait of Tenet makes clear. And the mere fact that troops are in the field should not end all debate. By refusing to use these legitimate arguments against Bush, the Democrats are not only committing a tactical political error, they are allowing the disease he imported to fester.

Couldn't agree more.

GOP Secret Weapon: Myth

There is a very interesting article by psychologist Renana Brooks I posted about a couple of years ago. It's worth another look. Some key grafs:

Bush's handlers project the President as a man of character. His team has carefully crafted an image of him as a man who is strong and moral, someone who sticks to his principles and is capable of making tough decisions. This phenomenon was foretold by media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who warned: "Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be."

Theory soon became reality. Ronald Reagan was the first American politician to demonstrate the power of what I call the character myth, a project launched by his speechwriter Peggy Noonan, whose biography of him was titled When Character Was King. The character myth relies on the psychological phenomenon that a person who speaks frequently and passionately about morals is generally regarded as a moral person.

According to the character myth, a person who demonstrates that he has "character" need not present any evidence in support of his policies or decisions. They are simply assumed to be correct, since they come from a person with the ineffable quality known as "character." Even though Reagan was divorced and many of his Hollywood friends hardly saw him as a paragon of morality, he managed to present himself in politics as an exemplar of "family values." Reagan was seen as having character for sticking to his principles. He was widely viewed as someone who cut taxes, even after actually raising them. Americans simply ignored all data that did not fit the myth.

Similarly, Bush's handlers use the rhetoric of morality to bypass people's resistance to his ideas and to convince them that they should not go beyond their core belief that "Bush is doing the right thing." This imagery of strength and morality is inspired by the ideas of conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, who has strongly influenced many within the inner circle of the Bush Administration. . . .Strauss feared the mediocrity that he believed was inherent in democratic societies. He argued that when a strong political leader explains his policies he should develop a mythology for the consumption of the general public that hides his true motivations, because the people will not accept the boldness of the leader's initiatives if they are presented  in an unvarnished fashion. This mythology should use the language of morality to mask the candidate's real interests, which are his own survival in power and his ability to continue to exert dominance over the populace.

Psychologists have long understood that people who hold views that are mutually inconsistent, or who perform actions that depart from their values or that threaten their positive self-image, will experience discomfort. This is known as cognitive dissonance. People naturally choose to remove the discomfort through rationalization, thus repairing their self-image as people who are reasonable and moral and act in ways consistent with their values. Bush's leadership style and use of language essentially have created cognitive dissonance in the electorate. The more that Americans observe the Bush presidency pushing policies they do not support, and would normally question, the more they confront the choice of whether to oppose him actively or rationalize away their discomfort.

Many Americans have chosen the latter because the President has convinced them that the situation is desperate and that only he can handle the continuing crisis. The more they depend upon Bush, the more they rationalize away any objections they may have to his specific ideas and policies. In this manner,  Bush has forged an emotional, visceral relationship with the nation, successfully bypassing conscious resistance and stripping away any sense that he needs to answer to a higher legal or constitutional authority beyond his personal moral force.

Myth is not a negative term for me; I wish the Democrats understood better how mythopoesis works rather than just using the word only in its pejorative sense. The GOP understands the power of mythic narratives, and the Dems, rationalists that they are, don't.  They are into laundry lists of sensible programs to solve problems in sensible ways. BO-ring. Uninspiring. That's why they're going to continue to lose.  I'm not suggesting that the Dems abuse the power of mythic narratives the way the GOP does, but I just wish they understood better how important mythos is in helping people to imagine who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. 

People want to feel as though they're a part of some bigger, some larger, more meaningful movement in history.That's why mythic narratives are seductive and  a tool that demagogues know how to use effectively.  And that was at the heart of the demagoguery selling the Iraq war.  NY Times reporter Chris Hedges understands this dynamic and explores it in his book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. He writes from his experience covering the war in the Balkans, but his insights are easily extended to our motivations for going into Iraq. War is one of those bogus things that gives us a mythic sense of national greatness, and it's delusional and almost always leads to no good end because no one can control the dogs of war once they are unleashed.  They should never, ever be unleashed except under the most extreme provocation no matter how idealistic and pure we think our motivations. 

So many Americans supported the war buying into the administration's mythos--but now that the mythic fog has dissipated, they are beginning to see the war for the ugly thing it was from the beginning--a brutal horror show which provides a cure worse than the original ailment--all the idealism and good intentions notwithstanding.  Every war, no matter how savage, had an idealistic cover story.   

This business of mythos is something that I struggle with because while I think that there is a legitimate human longing for a mythopoetic dimension in our human experience, it's a longing that more often than not leads people into behavior akin to looking for love in all the wrong places.  Because so many people continually fail to find love and settle for cheap thrills does not mean that love does not exist.  It just means that they haven't found it yet.  And that's our situation with regard to a culture-wide, grounding, health-producing mythos or metanarrative. We don't have one; we haven't found it yet. 

A lot of people would argue it's better that we don't.  And it's understandable because at this point our only way of imagining it is in ideological terms--as if totalizing Islamist or Christianist, Socialist, or Fascist models were the only possibilities.  And it's true--lots of people would love it if they could force Americans into one or another of these ideological molds.  So, some would argue, it's better that things stay fragmented and pluralistic so that there is no center and periphery, no dominant in and disenfranchised out. I get that.

And it's a moot point, because fragmentation is our future, at least in the forseeable one.  Because even if the Christianist Right has some success in imposing its bizarre mythos on the rest of us in the short run, it cannot possibly last in the long run. It's too alienating, repressive, and out of synch with what it means to be a normal human being. It has no poetry, no beauty, no eros.  It's just a tight-assed form of control freakism. Tyrrants are always eventually overthrown, but that doesn't mean tyranny does not lie in our future. 

A healthy alternative to either fragmentation or totalizing ideologies is impossible to imagine now.  And I think that it will remain impossible as long as we're in this in-between stage.  I suspect that moving beyond "in-between" will require our suffering through a political or environmental catastrophe of some sort in the future.  We seem to be built in such a way that we need them from time to time  to shake us out of our comfortable narcosis of the moment. It's only when we are shaken awake, usually against or will, by some unpleasantness that we become alert to a deeper apprehension of the mysteries that abound all around us and to which we are all mostly otherwise insensate. 

For no mythos that has genuine life-giving potential is possible unless there is a widespread apprehension of the mysteries behind the appearances. Those kinds of experiences give rise to mythopoetic articulation, and such an articulation will have legitimacy not because it is verifiable by the rationality and the scientific method, but because the heart knows its truth. For the time being, it would seem, the culture in this in-between times thinks it's better not to try to apprehend the mystery that exists outside the cave of the senses--better to just keep buying the cheap myths that keep us anesthetized.   

Cut & Run

If you haven't seen Jack Murtha's "Meet the Press" response to Karl Rove's New Hampshire speech in which Rove accused Dems who want an Iraq exit strategy of cut-and-run defeatism, you can see it here. (Wait till page fully loads.) I suspect that Murtha is not just speaking for himself, but for a significant constituency in the military leadership with whom he has good relationships and high credibility.  Maybe that gives him capital to fight back in a way that other Dems think that they can't.  But that's no excuse for such Dems--nothing is going to be handed to them, and they can be sure that they will be outmaneuvered if they adopt such a passive attitude. 

The best way to fight the cut-and-run accusation is to show some backbone, as Murtha is doing, and go on the offense rather than to worry so much about how the other side is trying to brand them. The Dems need to fight to make the case

• that there's no effective leadership to salvage whatever little might be salvaged in Iraq--as long as Bush is in office things will continue to get worse rather than better;
• that what we're doing in Iraq now is a pointless waste of blood and treasure--even if (big if) there were achievable, worthy objectives behind the decision to go to war, they are not achievable now;
• that the Iraqis ultimately have to figure things out for themselves--we can't make them do it. 

If there was ever any hope of salvaging anything in Iraq, it was lost when the country  re-elected George Bush.  I'm not saying Kerry would have succeeded, but he would have had a better chance of coming up with a sane policy.  What we're doing there now is insane, and we need someone like Murtha who has some credibility to just say it--but then he needs to be supported by others in Congress. What Republicans understand and what Democrats don't is how to give ideas--even ridiculous ideas--cultural legitimacy.  The Democrats are inept about making even sane ideas seem legitimate.  It requires a concerted organized effort to say over and over again what a ridiculous waste of life and money our non-policy is the cause of in Iraq.

"Stay the course" is not a strategy; it's political posturing.  And anybody who buys that as an effective policy is not thinking but simply reacting to a Pavlovian stimulus--the fear of not appearing manly or strong.  The cynical Rove knows which bells to ring to get unthinking Americans to react.  I'm hoping that the Dems will bet that that Americans are better than that; obviously Rove is betting they aren't.

But if the Dems take that bet, they have to make their case.  They have to give Americans a robust, thoughtful alternative to the Cheney/Rove non-policy. The case for withdrawal has to be made in a way that most decent Americans can see that it's the right thing to do--especially those Americans who thought that invading Iraq was the right thing to do in 2003.  Democrats running for Congress this fall should make it the centerpiece of their campaign, but they won't unless they get support from the the current leadership in the house, and they are not getting it so far.  A few courageous individuals like Murtha are speaking out, but few are following.

If the Democrats are pathetic, it's not because they want to cut and run in Iraq, but because so few will fight to make the case for withdrawal to the American electorate.  Karl Rove is betting that's a fight most Democrats won't take on.  He has good reason to think it's a bet he'll win.

America's Evolving Identity

I randomly tuned into "Scarborough Country" last night which was in the middle of a hot debate about "white America." There was Pat Buchanan, who actually sounded pretty reasonable compared with Jared Taylor of American Renaissance. Taylor said his position was analogous to Rabin's about Israel when Rabin said that at least 80% of Israel's population should always be Jewish. Taylor thought that 80% of the American population should always be white. It's a matter of keeping America America.

Buchanan was more moderate. He said that we should completely halt illegal   immigration and have a moratorium on legal immigration to give American society a chance to assimilate those who have already come into the country. He fears   that the U.S., especially in the states bordering Mexico, is in danger of becoming the Balkans or Canada with its Francophone separatists. He also suggested that   this was Mexico's attempt to win back what it had lost back in the 1840s, and   that the southwest was reverting to the Third World.

The pro-immigration people in the debate said what might be expected, but   what struck me about Buchanan and Taylor was their assumption that American   cultural identity was no longer robust enough to transform immigrants into   Americans, that the immigrants were going to pull America down rather than   America pull the immigrants up. Buchanan kept saying that the country that   he grew up in was a good country, implying that the one he's living in now is no longer good. He is clearly fearful that American identity is being lost in this massive invasion by the "Other" who he thinks are more resistant to assimilation than the European immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

What's interesting about the immigration problem is how it's not really a   clear-cut, right/left issue. Plenty of people on the right want open borders   because it's an endless source of cheap labor. Plenty of people on the left,   concerned about raising the wages of the working poor, want to close the borders. So nothing's likely to change.

But my interest in this subject isn't primarily economic, but cultural. American   identity is interesting and unique because it isn't primarily defined by its   premodern past. America was born out of a rejection of that past. And while   white English Protestants working with ideas from the European Enlightenment   created the basic framework that sets the rules for how American society works,   the basic content is dynamic and evolving.

I'm not a multi-culturalist, but a cultural fusionist. American identity is   not in some essential way linked to the America Pat Buchanan grew up in, nor   will it revert to a premodern culture in the way he fears. Once a culture upgrades   to modernity, it never reverts to earlier versions, even if there are reactionaries   in the culture who would like it to.

The Western Enlightenment framework has established what modernity means,   but the Modern Age expired around World War I. We're in between "ages" now,   and for want of a better name we call our present transitional era the "postmodern." The   American and global postmodern future will be an evolving story that develops   primarily within the Western framework, but it will be a story of the emergence   within that framework of a global fusion culture.

This does not mean only the Americanizaton of the globe, but also the globalization of America. That's what scares Buchanan and Taylor. As premodern cultures modernize, the already modern cultures are retrieving and assimilating premodern cultural forms. Already we're seeing it in religion and spirituality, in the plastic arts, and in music. It's a hodgepodge now, but in the long run some coherent synthesis is inevitable. The postmodern = modernity + premodernity. This means maintaining modern critical consciousness as we retrieve elements from the premodern that the modern rejected as irrational. That's my working hypothesis anyway. The framework for the future was created by dead, white Europeans--and we are deeply in their debt--but the long-term future is not white and European. And that's ok, so long as things keep moving forward.

An ongoing reflection on what "moving forward" means is the primary   purpose of this website. For better or worse, in the short run at least, American   culture, such as it is, leads the way.

(For those who maybe interested I've just uploaded the archives from this blog posted in its pre-TypePad incarnation.  This post from 11/13/03 struck me as relevant in relationship to the current brouhaha about immigration.)

Vote Conservative--Vote Democrat

I've been telling some of my more skeptical readers that I see myself as a conservative. A conservative is not necessarily a man of the right. Rather the essence of the conservative is his understanding how fragile civilization is, that we're all walking through history on a thin sheet of ice which separates us from the barbarism that lies beneath. Occasionally a society breaks through the ice. We saw it in Germany in the thirties and the Balkans in the nineties. We saw it in Rwanda and Somalia. We saw a glimpse of it as parts of our society broke through in New Orleans. The best kind of conservative understands that you have to tread softly. That the ice is composed of religious, political, and economic traditions and institutions that keep barbarism walled out.

The barbarians aren't at the gates; they are us. We are all barbarians once the ice breaks and we plunge into what lies below. We won't think of ourselves that way, of course. We will think of ourselves as doing what it takes to survive, of protecting our property and our family. We're all potential Michael Corleones--idealists until our "interests" are threatened.

Conservatives tend to be pessimists about human nature. They see themselves as attuned to how precarious and insecure our civilized life is. They understand how important it is to shore up those traditions and institutions that prevent the awful rather than promote the good. Since they don't believe that politics can do much good, they are inclined to support only those policies that will do the least harm. Conservatives are profoundly distrustful of any top-down engineering projects. But they are not averse to modestly scaled progams that meet real needs. But they are allergic to an ambitioius Jacobinism that seeks to sweep away the old to make way for the new.

That's the substance of my argument against Libertarianism.  This idea that markets should rule is an idea that makes sense within a limited sphere but becomes perverse when made into an absolute.   With lots of things, maybe most things, the principle that those who use should pay makes sense. But it becomes perverse when it leads to the undermining of a health public spiritedness. The attitude that characterizes the mentality of older people once their kids are grown: Why should I approve the local school levy?  Let those with kids pay for the schools.  If people want to improve the county or city parks, public transportation, or the road system, let those who use them pay, and leave me out of it.   And God forbid that we should think of providing any kind of social safety net for those who are crushed by the market forces.  Why should I pay for that? It's every man and woman for him or herself--that's the kind of cranky America our country is evolving or devolving into under the influence of this Libertarian mentality.

Lots of ordinary Americans are seduced by the Libertarian logic, with the deregulation, privatization, and minimal tax policies that follow from it without understanding the implications.  They don't see how it contributes to the inevitable social stratification that will be defined by money.  The rich will live in their gated communities, their own private sanctuaries with first-class parks and roads and transportation that they will indeed pay for, but it will be for their own private use. 

Why shouldn't they? some might ask. Behind the question is the hope that everyone could have that for himself if they work hard enough to become rich enough to buy their way in. We assume that social mobility will always be a feature of American society. But the barriers between classes are going to rigidify.  They always do, and they are already.  It's in this sense that I and others are justified in saying that we are evolving or devolving into a Latin American- styled oligarchy. You can say that you don't believe that will happen, but what are the counterbalancing forces that will check this trend?

The curious thing about our present situation in America is that the Democrats are the conservatives and the Republicans are the Jacobins. The Liberals in the Democratic party are the stodgy party of stability, and the radicals in the Republican Party are doing everything they can to dismantle the domestic infrastructure established by the coordinated effort of both Democrats and Republicans in the last seventy years. And they are working to destabilize the multilateral international order that had been developing since the fall of the Soviet Union.

So the political choices that are available to us are, on the one hand, the stodgy conservative/liberalism of the Democrats, and on the other, the unhinged Jacobinism of the Republicans who are doing everything they can to jump up and down on the ice so that we will all have the pleasure of a plunge into the babarism below.

So it is to be hoped that Americans will come to their senses and in the Congressional elections vote conservatively for the Democrats. These Republicans are drunken good old boys who have driven the country off road and into the swamp. They are reckless fools, and they need to be reined in. That's the first order of business, but assuming we are able to push these guys out of the pickup truck of state and get the rig back on the highway, then what?

I would say then that the focus shifts from the political sphere to the cultural. I don't mind having stodgy, conservative leaders running the political shop--that's what the Democrats have become. I'm fine with its having the primary responsibility for keeping us from plunging through the ice or into the swamp. Where the important stuff needs to happen is in the culture, and politics will follow. And my quarrel with Liberalism is not for its role in shaping what happens in the political sphere--it's fine there. I think that it needs to be confronted in the cultural sphere.  Ultimately a healthy forward looking politics must grow from impulses that arise in the cultural sphere.  In the mean time it's enough to prevent the politicians from not making more of a mess of things. 

I've been telling some of my more skeptical readers that I see myself as a conservative. A conservative is not necessarily a man of the right. Rather the essence of the conservative is his understanding how fragile civilization is, that we're all walking through history on a thin sheet of ice which separates us from the barbarism that lies beneath. Occasionally a society breaks through the ice. We saw it in Germany in the thirties and the Balkans in the nineties. We saw it in Rwanda and Somalia. We saw a glimpse of it as parts of our society broke through in New Orleans. The best kind of conservative understands that you have to tread softly. That the ice is composed of religious, political, and economic traditions and institutions that keep barbarism walled out.

The barbarians aren't at the gates; they are us. We are all barbarians once the ice breaks and we plunge into what lies below. We won't think of ourselves that way, of course. We will think of ourselves as doing what it takes to survive, of protecting our property and our family. We're all potential Michael Corleones--idealists until our "interests" are threatened.

Conservatives tend to be pessimists about human nature. They see themselves as attuned to how precarious and insecure our civilized life is. They understand how important it is to shore up those traditions and institutions that prevent the awful rather than promote the good. Since they don't believe that politics can do much good, they are inclined to support only those policies that will do the least harm. Conservatives are profoundly distrustful of any top-down engineering projects. But they are not averse to modestly scaled progams that meet real needs. But they are allergic to an ambitioius Jacobinism that seeks to sweep away the old to make way for the new.

That's the substance of my argument against Libertarianism.  This idea that markets should rule is an idea that makes sense within a limited sphere but becomes perverse when made into an absolute.   With lots of things, maybe most things, the principle that those who use should pay makes sense. But it becomes perverse when it leads to the undermining of a health public spiritedness. The attitude that characterizes the mentality of older people once their kids are grown: Why should I approve the local school levy?  Let those with kids pay for the schools.  If people want to improve the county or city parks, public transportation, or the road system, let those who use them pay, and leave me out of it.   And God forbid that we should think of providing any kind of social safety net for those who are crushed by the market forces.  Why should I pay for that? It's every man and woman for him or herself--that's the kind of cranky America our country is evolving or devolving into under the influence of this Libertarian mentality.

Lots of ordinary Americans are seduced by the Libertarian logic, with the deregulation, privatization, and minimal tax policies that follow from it without understanding the implications.  They don't see how it contributes to the inevitable social stratification that will be defined by money.  The rich will live in their gated communities, their own private sanctuaries with first-class parks and roads and transportation that they will indeed pay for, but it will be for their own private use. 

Why shouldn't they? some might ask. Behind the question is the hope that everyone could have that for himself if they work hard enough to become rich enough to buy their way in. We assume that social mobility will always be a feature of American society. But the barriers between classes are going to rigidify.  They always do, and they are already.  It's in this sense that I and others are justified in saying that we are evolving or devolving into a Latin American- styled oligarchy. You can say that you don't believe that will happen, but what are the counterbalancing forces that will check this trend?

The curious thing about our present situation in America is that the Democrats are the conservatives and the Republicans are the Jacobins. The Liberals in the Democratic party are the stodgy party of stability, and the radicals in the Republican Party are doing everything they can to dismantle the domestic infrastructure established by the coordinated effort of both Democrats and Republicans in the last seventy years. And they are working to destabilize the multilateral international order that had been developing since the fall of the Soviet Union.

So the political choices that are available to us are, on the one hand, the stodgy conservative/liberalism of the Democrats, and on the other, the unhinged Jacobinism of the Republicans who are doing everything they can to jump up and down on the ice so that we will all have the pleasure of a plunge into the babarism below.

So it is to be hoped that Americans will come to their senses and in the Congressional elections vote conservatively for the Democrats. These Republicans are drunken good old boys who have driven the country off road and into the swamp. They are reckless fools, and they need to be reined in. That's the first order of business, but assuming we are able to push these guys out of the pickup truck of state and get the rig back on the highway, then what?

I would say then that the focus shifts from the political sphere to the cultural. I don't mind having stodgy, conservative leaders running the political shop--that's what the Democrats have become. I'm fine with its having the primary responsibility for keeping us from plunging through the ice or into the swamp. Where the important stuff needs to happen is in the culture, and politics will follow. And my quarrel with Liberalism is not for its role in shaping what happens in the political sphere--it's fine there. I think that it needs to be confronted in the cultural sphere.  Ultimately a healthy forward looking politics must grow from impulses that arise in the cultural sphere.  In the mean time it's enough to prevent the politicians from not making more of a mess of things. 

Mind over Matter

Some thoughts on the subject after a chat with my fifteen-year old son about his debate with a classmate who argued for scientific materialism.  One of the great things about having kids is how their questions  force you to think  through things again and to formulate answers for an audience who only takes you half seriously.  So this is my attempt to answer his questions, for what it's worth:

Science is a very limited discipline.  It focuses only on developing mechanical explanations about how the natural world works.  Any good scientist will tell you that science has no business in trying to interpret what its discoveries mean outside of mechanical explanations which are its proper domain.  Science is concerned aboutt answering the How question, but has no business with the Why.

Thinking about Why--about questions of meaning--is the domain of philosophy and religion.  There are some people who are understandably very impressed with the clarity and  effectiveness of scienctific explanations about how the natural world works.  And in reflecting on that have developed a philosophy--it's called scientific materialism.  Since science has been so good at devleoping clear and certain explanations about the physical world, people promoting this philosophy have tried to extend the basic limited assumptions of science to try to answer the Why question.

Since science limits itself only to phenomena that can be  measured or weighed, they will admit no evidence into their project to answer the Why question in materialistic terms  except what can be measured or  weighed.  And that pretty much from the get-go eliminates any question about the existence of God. Discussion about the existence of God is excluded from the outset, unless you can produce some physical evindence that proves he exists.   It also eliminates any positive answer to the Why question  because if Matter precedes Mind, the world is an accident--and we humans are accidents, too, and the fact that we have minds and self consciousness, well that's an accident as well.   So it boils down to believing  the world is here for a reason  or that the whole thing is absurd--that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose.

Scientific Materialism is just as much a belief system as any religion is.  Materialists cannot prove that you’re wrong if you believe in God, and you cannot prove that they are wrong for believing that matter is the ultimate reality. So It comes down to a choice about which you think is more plausible, and it beats me why anybody would want to believe that things are fundamentally absurd if there's no proof of it.  But people are motivated to believe what they do for all kinds reasons. Materialists will tell you that they think they are being hard headed and realistic, and that people who believe in God are like children who believe in Santa Claus.  I guess it makes them feel superior or more grown up to think it, but it's a pretty arbitrary way to look at things.

In any event, Materialists are difficult to argue with because they think they stand on more solid ground, and if they are to be persuaded they are wrong, they demand concrete, material evidence.  They argue that they are right because they can point to the material world and say that there is no argument about whether it exists or not, but that you cannot do the same for your fairy-tale spiritual world, which must exist if there is a God.  They will demand that you  show them the spiritual world—give them some evidence of its existence.  I think there is evidence, but it's not likely they'll accept it since they exclude any evidence that cannot be measured and weighed.   

Many people who have a hard time with relgion are people who have only had encounters with the worst examples of religion rather than the best. They think that people who profess religious beliefs are hypocrites because they behave just like everyone else--or worse.  I don't think there's any arguing that much evil has been done in the name of religion or by people who were the public face of a particular religion, but that’s a straw-man argument.  You don’t evaluate  something by looking at its worst examples, but at its best.  And most of the best men and women in history, even recent history—like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King—were profoundly motivated by their religious beliefs and religious ideals.

Materialists will then argue that you don’t have to believe in God to be good or to act in an ethical way.  And that’s true.  Beliefs are a head thing, and what one thinks is important, but it's not as important as the inclination of the will.  That's a subject for another time.  But I think it can also be said that most of the great ethical ideas have their origin in religion, and it’s hard to imagine if there were never religion that any kind of ethical ideals could have developed. They are hard to explain in purely materialistic terms, at least in any way that I find satisfactory.  Materialists are the heirs of religious ethical ideas whether they believe in the religion that originated them or not.  Materialists will try, but I think they have a hard time explaining on purely materialistic grounds the human spirit’s aspiration to the high ideals—to justice, goodness, beauty, compassion.

What is this self-conscious element in human beings that strives for those things—that strives for anything? The willpower and human intentionality that lies behind the greatest human symbol-making achiements in the arts, science, philosophy  in my mind are completely different in nature from the random, groping dynamics that drive biological evolution. These are spiritual impulses and spiritual longings.  If humans were nothing more than a sack of chemicals, why should they care about striving toward something higher?   I have a hard time believing that any arrangement of chemicals, no matter how complex, would feel the urge to do that kind of work.

Materialists think they can explain all this in materialistic terms, but that's called reductionism.  A reductionist is from my point of view like someone who is color blind and who tries to explain everything in shades of in black, grey, and white.   It's not untruthful, but it's missing something, and missing it makes  all the difference. And the problem for the people who see things in color lies in that they cannot prove to colorblind people that there are colors; they can only describe the world as they see it, and hope their descriptions are convincing enough to be credible.  But that there is color cannot be proven to someone who cannot see it.    

In my experience the people who are inclined to be materialists are rationalists who want complete certainty about what is true and not true. Their attitude is that if it can’t be proven true, then it isn’t true.  But the fact of the matter is that there is very little that we know that is certain—even scientific truth is open to be changed if new evidence comes to light that shows current understandings were wrong.  150 years ago everyone thought Isaac Newton’s description of the way the cosmos worked was a scientific certainty; but 20th century physics  turned the Newtonian understanding about how the physical world worked upside down.

Newton was right as far as he could go, but there is so much further to go.  And I would say the same is true for evolutionary science. Whatever scientists in this field think they know for sure today is likely to be revised tomorrow. They are coming up with the best explanations they can within limits.  But there is so much that they don’t know and don’t understand.  Along these lines, there are arguments being made today, which would be difficult for me to explain without digressing too much, that the primary reality is Mind, not matter.  Most of humanity through its history believed that Mind or Spirit was primary, and I think that eventually it will be what even most scientists come to think once again.

Some in physics do now, but most people in biology and evolutionary science have a hard time accepting that idea—although many biologists are religious believers and have no problem accepting Darwin’s explanation for the mechanics of evolution.  Does that make them bad scientists?  Of course not. These biologists just don’t buy the idea that evolutionary science is the same thing as a philosophical  explantion for the meaning and purpose of life on earth. As I said above—science doesn’t deal with questions of meaning—philosophy and religion do. 

The difference between being brain smart and being wise lies in having some common sense about what is likely to be true and what is not.  It’s more important to develop ‘good judgment’ and good instincts about what is true or untrue rather than to obsess about being certain. We couldn’t live our lives if the only things we thought were true were things that could be proven true with scientific certainty. 

Can we be certain that someone loves us?   How do you measure it?  How do you know for sure? People can say they love you and not mean it.  It happens all the time.  There are other clues and evidence, of course.  And people with good judgment learn how to read the clues, but you can never be sure about what such clues point to with scientific certainty because there are just some things—probably most things–-that cannot be proven in that way.  And yet it can be something you know, that you feel confident about, and it’s that kind of confidence that comes closest to what religious faith is.  It can’t be proven scientifically, but you can feel a deep confidence about it.

Even if you have some level of confidence about it now, it will be frequently challenged in the course of your life, and in my experience that’s what pushes you to a deeper understanding about what it is that you truly  believe.  You can’t just accept that God exists, that he is good, that he loves you and cares about you just because someone in authority says so.  You have to develop your own feeling of confidence about it.  But that confidence is usually grounded in knowing that people you trust, smart people, honest, good people have themselves developed this confidence and live their lives in that confidence.  Those are clues that need to be investigated. How they have developed that confidence for themselves is something that you need to discover for yourself.

 

Power Politics

I've been struck lately, especially in response to some of my posts over the last week with how conservatives and libertarians have this irrational fear of the Left.  I say irrational because the left has no power.  The idea that the Left poses any threat to the power structure of this country is an absurd abstraction, a bogeyman of the mind that  no reality.  If it is a threat, where is its power base?  Among college professors and flaky Hollywood types?  The liberal blogosphere?  Your left-leaning friend at the coffee shop with whom you always argue? Think about it--do you really think that any of these is causing America's power elite to lose sleep at night?

The power base for a progressive agenda used to lie with big labor, but for complex reasons labor is toothless now. It  couldn't even get the Democrats to say No to NAFTA.  They are as impotent and ineffectual as the offense of the Kansas City Royals.  But this is precisely why we are in danger.  Because there is no organized, well-financed power base on the the left, the right is free to do as it pleases. It's not about approving the agenda of the left, it's about having some way to check the agenda of the right. 

That's why so much of the debate that goes on particularly in Conservative circles strikes me as surreal.  They are so obsessed with the red-herring, abstract threat that the U.S. might become the Soviet Union or Cuba that they don't see where the real threat lies. Or there is a tendency to see that what's going on in Washington right now is just politics as usual.  Things swing back and forth.  The GOP had its day, and now it looks like they've screwed things up enough, so we'll give the Dems a chance, and so it goes, swinging back and forth between the parties in this infinitely tedious two-step to nowhere.

But I think that underestimates the movement conservatives who really do have a long-term strategy for returning the country to the good old days before government regulation, income taxes, and social safety net programs. If you don't think this is what's going on since at least since 1980, I think you're just bought the GOP propaganda narrative.  They want you to believe that nothing much is going on--that they are just making some common sense adjustments to the system to stimulate the economy or to make the government less intrusive.

A big part of their strategy is to make the Democratic party as impotent as the Republican Party was in the South in the post-reconstruction era.  The Southern oligarchs were able to keep the rank-and-file whites in line by playing to their tribal resentment of Yankee Republican elites.  And they played the race card to implement a divide-and-conquer strategy that insured that poor whites would never see that their interests lay with the interests of  poor blacks who, if they could, voted Republican because it was the party of Lincoln.  This strategy pretty much insured that Democrats always won.

In other words the Southern Democrats were able to maintain a virtual one-party system in the South by keeping the conversation off of power and money and on issues relating to tribal identity. There was the rare loose cannon, like Huey Long, who was able to break ranks, but for the most part the Southern one-party system ran like a well oiled machine, and Republicans were there for window dressing to give the appearance that democracy was happening, but elections were as rigged and predictable as elections in Mexico.

Now it's clear to me that the GOP is now using a similar tribal identity strategy in their promotion of the culture wars since the 90s to achieve exactly the same effect.  People vote for the people who present themselves as members of their tribe and trust that they will do the right thing.  That's the nature of the con. And the whole point is to keep you distracted in your living room talking about cultural values while their cronies are robbing your kitchen, bedrooms, and garage. 

The disarray of the Democrats has given Karl Rove, the man with the plan, as his protege Bush calls him, an historic opportunity which he has so far effectively exploited.  Rove realizes that the Dems are toothless and has done everything he can to make sure they stay that way.  He has made them appear weak and pathetic,  and for the  most part they haven't given the American electorate reason to think otherwise.

The Dems are easy not to take seriously, and they will continue to be. They are well on their way to becoming for the early 21st Century on the national level what the 20th century Republican party was in the reconstruction south.  Why? Because they have no compelling hold on the American electorate's imagination.  They are a laundry list of social entitlement programs without any compelling narrative or mythos to counter the very powerful, fear motivated mythos of the Right. 

This is why I think that even if they are successful in taking back congress this fall, they will still largely be ineffectual. But it's precisely the impotence of the Democrats that puts the country in danger.  It's not about some rational evaluation of the relative merits of the Democrats or the Republicans; it's about resistance to the right-wing corruption of the political process.  That's the only thing that matters now.

I'd like to believe that this disastrous administration would expose and discredit the engineers of this GOP strategy once and for all, but it's clear that even if this  GOP strategy suffers a setback in the coming elections, it will be back, and it will build on the foundation that it has already laid for a corporation-dominated, crony-capitalist system to flourish for years into the future. 

Little about that will change if the Dems take office again.  They haven't the power base to effect any changes in it, and the DLC branch of the the Dems is actually quite comfortable with the system as it has been corrupted.  The Democrats at best represent a No to the excesses of GOP, but not a Yes which inspires a robust counter program that most Americans will feel any enthusiasm.

And so we live in a country now where those with wealth and power are pretty much free to impose their will without fear of being checked, and the rest of us go along, either because, like the Libertarians, we think fatalistically that whatever the markets want the markets should get. Or like those of us who would resist, we have no power--and are for the most part dismissed as flakes who are making a mountain out of a molehill. And we're accused of fomenting class warfare.  But as Barbara Ehrenreich says,  "Yes, there's a class war. It's totally one-sided and it's time for the rest of us to mobilize against the aggressors."

Saying Yes

Stephen Colbert at Knox College Commencement:

Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blinder, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.

Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. Yes is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

And that’s The Word.

Couldn't agree more.  But the trick is to find that which is worthy of your Yes. Is there any quest that is more important for a young man or woman?  It's those that don't bother, that passively find themselves on life's conveyor belt who will be easy marks for demagogues. There is no merit in a Yes to falsehood masquerading as truth. 

I think it should be also pointed out, if it is not obvious, that Colbert's satire is not in the service of cynicism, but of uncovering the truth.  The mockery of that which is contemptible is an essential exercise for anyone who wishes to remain sane in a world where contempt for the truth is standard operating procedure.

So the No is important, but it can't stop there.  Our Yes has to be a light that shines in the murk of so much negativity.  In the long run what matters is not our shrewdness in saying No, but in the amount of light we have emitted over the course of our lives in saying Yes.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about "cheap grace."  Well I think in the same sense you can talk about the Cheap Yes and contrast it with the Yes which is dearly bought. And so the quality of the light that you emit will correlate with the quality of that to which you give your Yes.

Stolen Ohio?

Farhad Manjoo, Salon staff writer, debunks the Rolling Stone Ohio Stolen election  article by Robert F. Kennedy in today's Salon.  Manjoo says nothing is new in Kennedy's article, and most of his points have been proven wrong or inconclusive.  The subject doesn't interest me enough to get into the technicalities, but it was interesting to read all the Salon subscribers writing in to say that they are going to cancel their subscription for printing such right-wing drivel. The true believers on the left are as little interested in debating the evidence as the true believers on the right.

It wouldn't surprise me if it was eventually proven that the election there was stolen.  It happens.  It happened all the time in Chicago for the Democrats.  It's been proven, as in the New Hampshire phone jamming case, that Republicans of recent vintage do illegal things to tamper with the electoral process, and it  seems pretty clear that there were serious irregularities in both Ohio and in Florida. 

I think the sanest defense of what Kennedy wrote, whatever the article's flaws, was to get the story of irregularities into print. I'm not sure Rolling Stone qualifies as a major print publication, but the story has so far as I know only been discussed on the net.  Another words, it's a first step toward getting more public attention focussed on an important issue.  There's enough smoke there to warrant more intense scrutiny. 

I make no judgment about it at this point, but I resist the admonition "to get over it."  This is a very big deal, and it deserves far more attention than it has been receiving. The irregularities in both Florida and Ohio need to be investigated with subpoena power, and whether these dirty tricks threw the election to Bush or not, everything should be done to prevent either party from doing any of them ever again.

There's a lot of smoke around the Diebold voting machines as well.  Again, the accusation that they've been hacked is one of those things that nobody has proven, because there is no way to prove it--that's what's so disturbing.  The one thing that is known is that they are fairly easy to hack. 

Liberal Sanctimony

One of the accusations from some of the readers at Ambivablog that I did not address is their feeling that I am a typical liberal elitist who thinks he 'knows better' than the beknighted fools who were conned into voting for Bush. The truth is that I think many decent people were conned into voting for Bush.  The evidence for that is piling up day after day, and you have to be the most willful ideologue with a pathological case of cognitive dissonance if you are among the 30% or so who still approve of his performance or still think that he's an honest broker for his policies.

I think that voting for him the first time around was understandable, but not the second time.  Too much evidence was available in 2004 for anyone who was half awake to what was going on to give this adminstration another four years. The feckless Democrats bear some of the blame for not providing a robust alternative, but still.  A vote for Bush in 2004 means either, like big energy, big pharma, and big media, you approve of his underlying agenda, which makes you complicit crony capitalist corruption of the political process.  Either that or you took at face value what he actually said were his more conventional conservative values,  which means you were conned. 

The motives of the former group are transparent, those of the latter more more difficult to fathom.  So a big theme for my writing here has been simply an honest attempt to understand why this con was so successful.  I can understand why those who were conned feel that this is condescending, but in turn I would say to them: Get over it.  You were wrong, admit it, learn from your mistake.  I have been in your position many,many times--that's the only attitude that enables you to go forward. 

I don't feel any sense of gloating in saying this, but I am, quite frankly exasperated by anyone who at this point in time can still defend this administration and its policies.  It has been an unmitigated disaster, and if you were a supporter or still are, you bear responsibility for enabling it.  And, yes, I'm angry about that, and so it's understandable that from time time I direct my anger toward those of you who continue to defend the indefensible.  You don't need me or anyone to hold your hand or to gently reason with you; you need a slap upside the head.

That being said I will do my best to enter into an honest dialogue with anyone who presents himself as sincerely seeking the truth, no matter how different his views are from mine.  God  knows I have no monopoly on truth, and that there is more that I don't know than I do know.   But I make no apologies for my intolerance of foolishness or pigheadedness. And while there's plenty of that to be found among Liberals, they're not the one posing the gravest threat at this moment.

And for the record I'm not a Liberal.  You don't have to be a Liberal to hate what this administration is doing to our country.  You just have to have some common sense.

"Conservative" Doesn't Mean What You Think

Ed. Note: This is the post I said I would be crossposting at Ambivablog (and Donklephant) in response to comments by her readers here:

Thanks to Amba for inviting me to respond to those of you who take exception to my posts about Normal USA and Whom the Gods would Destroy.  The negative reactions come from either misunderstanding my intent or from fundamental disagreements.  I’d like to address the latter; I think Amba herself did a pretty good job of trying to address the former.  My goal is not not convince anyone I’m right, but only to lay out my case in such a way to promote some serious discussion about bridging a gap between two fundamentally different world views. I challenge you; you challenge me. Deal?

So I think the best way to go about this is to lay out several propositions, any one of which could be developed into a full-length essay.  Challenge me on any one of these, because if you disagree with my conclusion, it’s probably because you disagree with one of these propositions.  This might help to give the discussion some focus. So here goes:

First.  To live in society means to live in a state in which people restrain their liberty for their own and the common good. The best societies are democratic because people get to develop a consensus on the nature and extent of those restraints.  To live in “the state of nature” is to live in a state where everyone is technically free until they run into someone who wants to enslave them. Hegel is the guy who worked out the whole master slave dynamic as it operates in pre-social situations. In the state of nature, might makes right. The powerful dominate the weak. In the state of nature, freedom is something only the powerful really possess. The powerful work hard to aggregate power to themselves, and they are free only until they meet someone more powerful who succeeds in dominating them.  The New Hampshire license plate slogan, “Live free or die” is rooted in this basic dynamic. The aristocrat of freedom is the one who chooses to die fighting rather than to submit to enslavement to save his skin. The duel is a vestige of it as well. The whole idea of entering into society is to develop more civilized mechanisms for working things out so the powerful don’t go round doing as they please to the not-so-powerful.  In its most developed form this alternative is called the rule of law.

Second. No one likes living with constraints, and we all chafe under them. It’s frustrating, and it’s a hassle. People seek wealth and power because the wealthy and the powerful live with fewer constraints. People who have power tend to abuse it.  Why?  Because they can, and that’s the whole point of getting it, to act with as few constraints as possible.  And to be able to act without fear that anyone is going to stop them.  One could argue that this desire is fundamentally a form of infantile narcissism, but I’ll leave that alone for now. The only point that needs to be made here is that it exists and it is a cause for all kinds of social pathology. Societies develop laws, mores, and norms which are designed to put constraints on pathological behavior, and the rich and powerul will always use their wealth and power to loosen things up when it comes to the constraints that they have to live with. They have the resources to make it happen if the rest of us  let them. 

Third. To be a conservative means to conserve. It’s not the same thing as being a man or woman of the right.  To be a rightist means to lean toward the authoritarianism in which might makes right, i.e., to lean more toward the end of social spectrum that is closer to the state of nature in which the exertion of power is the highest value. To be a rightist means, by extension, to celebrate the glories of the military and the control powers of the police which work to do the will of the powerful. To be a conservative, on the other hand, means that you lean toward the rule of law and the preservation of cultural mores and values. I consider myself to be a conservative in the Burkean tradition. Burke in his famous work on the French Revolution decried the Jacobin mentality that led inevitably to the social chaos known as the Terror. The Jacobins’ mistake was the mistake of all social engineers since, that they could systematically dismantle the old system and create from scratch a new one—mostly all that does is create more problems than it solves. I am against Jacobinism in all its forms. (See Claes Ryn for more here.)  I am subsidiarist, which means that I am against all top-downism. I think that initiatives (except in national emergencies)  should come from the bottom up, which is the way it should work in a democratic republic. So I would like to dismiss any idea that I am a socialist, if by socialism is meant the top-downism of command economies, Maoist cultural revolutions, legislated moral behavior, or nation building.   

Fourth. Classical Liberalism in the economic sphere was an ideology which was developed to liberate a new class of capitalist investors from the constraints of mercantilism, the early modern top/down command economic system. Liberalism became associated with the whole cultural shift from medieval aristocrat-centered feudalism to modern bourgeoisie-centered democratic capitalism. Liberal had a progressive meaning in its early stages because it was about progressing beyond medievalism, and later it was associated with the policies that were about progressing beyond the social brutality of 19th Century unrestrained classical capitalism. Classical liberalism unleashed an unprecedented new social dynamic in the world which Schumpeter later called creative destruction. It created unprecedented wealth, technological innovation--and social dislocation and chaos, especially for those whose lives had been agriculture-centered.  There is hardly anyone who will dispute that the transition from a traditional society to a modern capitalist society is brutal.  Is there any one who would argue that it has had a tremendously destructive effect on traditional societies and the values tht came with them? And is there anyone who will argue that the behavior of the early winners in this transition followed the logic described in items #1 and 2 above?  Social Darwinism emerged as the ideology which justified this survival of the fittest mentality, which was just the old law of the jungle rule that the powerful dominate the weak. This system reached its high point in the period between 1870 and World War I.  This early form of capitalism was pretty much as close to being back in the state of nature as modern societies ever got.  Something had to give. 

Fifth. In the social chaos that followed WWI, two great threats emerged—fascism and communism.  Social democracies, first in Sweden, then the New Deal in the U.S., then the Popular Front in France, and so on, were developed as a third way.  According to point #3 above, neither fascism nor communism is conservative—they were both centralized command systems that sought to re-engineer their societies.  All three were attempts to deal with the failures and chaos created by 19th century laissez-faire capitalism. Social democracies, I would argue were relatively speaking, the conservative solution that naturally evolved—in the Burkean sense--in democratic societies in response to the brutality and social chaos created by 19th century classic capitalism.  Fascism and Communism were the Jacobin alternatives.

Sixth. We Americans are human beings and as such we behave no differently than anyone else. The presumption ought to be that Americans who have enormous wealth and power will behave like everyone else in history who have had it, i.e., abuse it, and that they will do what they can to get more. If Social Darwinism was their mythos in the 19th Century.  Ayn Rand Libertarianism is their mythos in this country at least since 1980.  As point #2 states above, no one likes living with constraints, and Libertarianism is the ideology of no governmental constraint. But the problem lies in that taking the no-constraint argument to its logical conclusion, you’re back in the state of nature. In the state of nature the strong dominate the weak. 

These are some questions I put to you, dear Libertarian Ambivablogistas:  Do you or do you not agree that the underlying movement conservative/GOP agenda since the Reagan revolution has been to return this country back to the pre-New Deal era?  If you say no, give me evidence, because the evidence for yes is pretty strong.  Second, if we return to the pre-New Deal era—if we privatize everything, deregulate whenever an industry lobby demands it, reduce taxes to starve the beast so it has no muscle, what means will you have to protect you and your family when the world is dominated by corporations who can act without any counterbalance to restrain them?  Do you really want to return to 19th century power arrangements? What makes you think we won’t if this reactionary agenda is successful? The problem is not big government, but who controls it. And we ordinary Americans have been pretty much sitting around and just letting it be taken from us. And the result is crony-capitalist legislation like the Medicaid Prescription bill.

So where does the real threat come from?  Every system can be abused, but the question for me is in which system do the abuses have the most potential for harm.  In which system are abuses more likely to be redressed?  Libertarians are afraid we’re going to become Soviet Russia, when it is far more likely we are moving toward becoming something like oligarchic Mexico or Brazil. 

I’m for evolution—that’s what the word progressive means to me.  I’m for slow steps forward, keeping what works, improving what doesn’t, but moving forward.  The Reagan/Norquist/Libertarian program is based on devolutionary state-of-nature agenda.  It benefits the already rich and powerful and strips away the tools that ordinary people have to protect themselves from the predations of the rich and powerful. What part of this am I not getting right?  To me nothing could be more obvious.  So if it is I who am befuddled and delusional, make your case.  Give me some evidence or a coherent argument.  Because I haven’t heard it yet.