I'm going to restrain an impulse I'm feeling now to go on a rant about the MSM and the fatuousness of the Beltway media and their fatuous analysis of what this election means. But it also strikes me that the fatuousness does not lie with the media, but with the people who take it seriously. The MSM execs are anything but fatuous in promoting the fatuous in their news programming and commentary. I'm talking about the Chris Matthews, Joe Kleins, and Wolf Blitzers--the ones that are supposed to define the sensible center. The center as the MSM defines it is not the real center. It's a center that serves their agenda because it excludes voices as fringe that pose a serious, credible challenge to the assumptions of the power elite whose interests the MSM represent: Everybody focus on the futuous, and nobody gets hurt.
People like Chris Matthews and those who take him seriously accept the whole unbalanced, unfair, skewed system as it is, and they accept the basic assumption about how the world works as it has been defined by those who are gaming it. Right now the American system is a lot like a casino where the games are rigged to favor the house, but the house allows a winner now and then to give the others enough hope that they keep buying into the game as the house has set it up.
We needed a serious, respectable
political alternative. And right now there is none. But even if you are someone who disagrees with the basic approach and positions of the political and economic left (as opposed to the cultural left, which is different), I hope you can agree that we need it as a robust opposition to provide a counterweight to the power elite. Right now there is nothing in the public forum that most Americans are exposed to that offers a substantive, fact-based, principled, and intellectually sound critique of the "casino" system as it currently operates. There are no authoritative voices to challenge and explain how rigged the system is.
It is a very important objective for the power elite at this time is to define the center as Liebermanesque and to associate the political and economic left with the cultural left proponents of sexual liberation issues like abortion and gay rights, issues they know the political center will always be uncomfortable at best with. The serious economic and political left, insofar as it exists, is marginalized as the "extreme" or "radical" or "flakey", and rendered completely irrelevant and voiceless. Look what the media did to a centrist like Al Gore because of his reputation as an environmentalist. He was dismissed and continuously branded by leading representatives of the fatuous MSM as flakey, and not to be taken seriously.
But I would argue that this will not change so long as the general public associates the left with the radical style of the sixties and seventies. "In matters of grave importance, it is style, not sincerity, that is the important thing," says Gwendolyn in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.The left has been effectively marginalized not because of the substance of its analysis and its position on the issues, but because of its style. Even though the political and economic left come closer to representing the interests of most of the people in the middle, the people in the middle feel no affinity for the left aesthetic or for its basic radical secularist sensibility--and the MSM exploits that. And so a party like the Greens, insofar as it is associated with that sensibility, is condemned to irrelevancy.
That's something the propagandists on the right understand, but strategists on the left don't. And I believe the secularist style of those who drive left politics in this country will keep them estranged from the center that any political movement needs to win over if it's to be successful. It doesn't matter how much the political interests of the center do in fact align with the left--too many thoughtful, decent people in the center are simply never going to accept the substantive critique and proposals of the left so long as it is associated with a leftist aesthetic.
Abortion is a substantive issue, but it has far greater symbolic connotations for many Americans in the middle. The typical left-leaning secularist thinks that the only people uncomfortable with abortion rights as they now exist are the wacko right. They think of themselves as advanced thinkers ahead of the curve, and it's just a matter of time before the rest of the culture catches up to them. They believe that the religiosity of most Americans is something that they will eventually grow out of and that American culture will secularize and become more like Europe's.
They simply do not take into consideration the possibility that people are uncomfortable with something like abortion because deep down they know it's just wrong. And I would argue that the feeling of its being wrong is not going away, and abortion is always going to be an issue that will segregate the left from a populist center whose political and economic interests they represent better than, say, the DLC wing of the Democratic party. If you are a pro-choicer committed to a larger progressive agenda, you have to realize how deeply alienating the abortion-on-demand mystique of the secular left is for many Americans who would be sympathetic to a left critique of the American economic and power structure. The clash of cultural values on this and other issues presents a huge obstacle for developing a large, broad-based, progressive movement focussed on economic and political issues.
And so all of this plays right into the hands of the propagandists of the power elite and its media lackeys. The word "left" is always put in quotes, because it always connotes irrelevance and flaky radicalism. I'm interested in a left politics that has a middle American political sensibility, and I just don't know if it's possible for such a thing to emerge in American society as it is currently structured. It might be due to the limitations of my imagination or intelligence, but that's the reason I'm relieved but not excited by the Democratic victory last week. The Republicans are horrifying; the Democrats are just plain bad. The Democrats, as things are currently skewed, are the left wing of a constituency that comprises mainly the country's corporate and power elite. The ordinary people in this country, including most of us in the middle are a base that is waiting for someone to represent it. We are deluded if we think the Democrats are ever really going to do that.
If the American political sphere were structured the way I think it ought to be, the kind of rightist, authoritarian power politics represented by the GOP over the last twenty-five years would be completely and forevermore repudiated. The Republicans are just an embarrassment and that they are taken seriously at all is a testament to the power of the fatuous agenda of the MSM. If our politics were not skewed so far to the right, DLC types like Lieberman and Clinton in a would define the traditional interests of corporations and the power elite at the right end of the political spectrum, and people like Nader, Kucinich, and Chomsky (and maybe Sanders--don't know that much about him) would represent a serious and respectable left end of the spectrum. And then we would have some interesting debates. Right now all we have is a fog of fatuousness that veils what's really going on. The left needs a larger than life type like G.B. Shaw to bring things into focus for the rest of the country.
The point I'm trying to make here is not about specific policies or positions, but about how the debate is skewed so that the basic assumptions of the casino system are never challenged. If they were a legitimate, serious left, then a politics of the real middle would emerge from Americans listening to the merit of the arguments presented by both sides and figuring out what was best for America, not on the basis of tribal affinities and style, but on the basis of a much more probing understanding about how our system works and in whose interests.
As it stands now, this debate is horribly skewed to the right. The people who think of themselves as in the "Lieberman" center right now, are simply coopted by this MSM definition of the center, and they are collaborators, whether consciously or unconsciously, with the agenda of this country's power elite. And that's the way it's going to be until a legitimate, credible left emerges that has a style that middle America can take seriously.
Late Update: Bill Maher makes similar points here. He's probably not too sympathetic to my points about the leftist aesthetic, though. But I'd be fine with a more out-of-the-box left than we have now, if there were also a left with a centrist sensibility that was taken seriously and had widespread credibility as the representatives the broad interests of the American people.