After the Future

Legitimacy, Authority, Power

It might be interesting someday to try to understand better why so many Christians came to understand "belief" so narrowly as intellectual assent to certain propositions, and why it was so important to them to draw such clean lines between what was heretical and what was orthodox. Insofar as it has done this, it has created obstacles for belief that need not be there. I know that a lot of it can be explained by power politics and the need for social control, and I accept those explanations as providing part or even most of the explanation. But a part of it comes from the responsibility incumbent upon the wise, those who have comprehended at the deepest levels what had been revealed in the Christ event, to say "Not that" to ideas that miss the point.

It would have been better if those who had this better understanding were able to say it gently, and calmly point those who have missed the point in a direction that would take them deeper. And it did often happen that way, but it also happened the other way--with anathemas and violence, and it's why the Church, rather than having the spiritual authority it should as the custodian of important disclosures, has delegitimated itself over and over again. It's attempt to control the uncontrollable has made it time and time again to appear foolish and grandiose. The legitimacy of the truth claims the Church makes would have much greater authority had it not resorted to the use of power, and instead trusted that the beauty and truth they sought to protect was capable of taking care of itself. For the power tactics too often used on behalf of protecting that truth did more than anything to raise the question whether the truth they sought to protect was there at all.  So I understand why people feel skeptical about Christian truth claims, and are inclined to just stay away.  What kind of thinking person would want to be associated with that lot, anyway? 

Believe me, that's a question I've often asked myself.  The Quakers have often looked like a very appealing alternative.  If I had the power to do so, I would integrate Quaker ideas practices about power with Catholic liturgical practice and its sacramental sensibility.  Instead of fixating over developing propositionally clear ideas about what the Christian truths mean, I would have taken a more Jewish approach.  Let there be different midrashic schools or traditions of interpretation, and let people judge which schools have the greater authority by the quality of their thinking, and by the quality of the human being who is produced within those schools.  By their fruits you would know them. 

That being said, I wanted to address some of the concerns that were brought up in the comments to my "Cosmic Dancing" post earlier this week.  The bottom line ideas were that philosophy can take you so far; in fact it can establish nothing certain about why humans are on the earth and what their purpose is.  It can develop alternative belief systems, but their grounding is no more stable or secure than the grounding of traditional religious belief systems. So ultimately the question comes down to which  belief system  provides the most plausible and compelling narrative. In other words, which narratives have the most legitimacy and the most authority? By what criteria does anyone make a judgment about which narrative is worthy of his commitments?

And so as a Christian in a world where where it is no longer possible to simply accept what was given to us a children from the tradition, I have to choose, and if my choice is to have integrity, it has to be able to explain itself in terms that go beyond aesthetic preference.  And it has to seriously take into consideration the critiques of that choice by others who have made different choices. And it has the responsibility, as best it can, to explain the choice in terms that can be understood to others who have made different choices.  And for me the explanation hinges on the understanding the authority and legitimacy of revelation.

So  perhaps because I've been reading up on Heidegger (see Rudiger Safranski's bio --very interesting), what follows is in a Heidegerrian key, but it's only one angle that possible for getting at this subject.  For Heidegger the most important human problem is the forgetfulness of being.  The problem is not to determine what is propositionally true, but rather to awaken from our forgetfulness and to find ways to allow Being to reveal or disclose itself. He tried to redefine philosophy as the task of recovering Being from our forgetfulness of it; as such philosophy becomes not so much a quest for propositional truth but rather for ways to use language to disclose Being's mystery and depth. 

The poets Holderin and Rilke were closer to what Heideggerian idea of philosophy's task than were the methodical Kant and the system-building Hegel or any philosopher seeks one way or the other to explain everything. These poets were not interested in propositional truth but in articulating what Being in its depths revealed to them. It's this kind of truth that Heidegger uses the Greek word "aletheia" to describe.  Philosophy is about the pursuit of aletheia who discloses herself to those who love her.

Using this Heideggerian frame, could we agree then, that great poetry is measured by its power to reveal or disclose aletheia?  And if so, could we agree that that those who seek truth read great poetry in the hope that their reading will be the occasion for a disclosure similar to the one experienced by the poet?  And can we suggest, then, that the scriptures of the great religious traditions are texts that disclose aletheia in a way that great poetry does? And so should not all people who seek truth approach the scriptures of the great religious traditions with the same loving attitude in the hopes that aletheia will disclose her secrets there?  They were never intended to be collections of propositional truth statements, and when they are treated that way we forget, we fall asleep to their original purposes and create obstacles for their disclosing their deeper levels of meaning. 

And while it is most important to experience or awaken to these disclosures for oneself, it is also important to learn about the disclosures made to others who have lived before us and who are our contemporaries. Theology is therefore nothing more than midrash, the attempt to interpret and articulate what has been disclosed without any pretensions that one's interpretation is exhaustive or commensurate with the source of the disclosure. Philosophy or Theology fail if they are simply head trips or power trips.  They begin with an encounter with the mystery of Being or Spirit, and their legitimacy and authority are measure by the depth and authenticity of the experience they attempt to describe.

The idea that all interpretations are equally valid is just silly. Some interpretations have greater authority than others, but in the way that you might say that Yehudi Menuhin's interpretation of Bach is more authoritative than the average violinist's. But Menuhin does not exhaust Bach.  Others may have equally authoritative or better interpretations.   Quality speaks for itself; we don't need anyone telling us which is best, although it's a subject worth discussing and trying to understand why people have the opinions they do.  In the same way, you can say that certain versions of Christianity have little or no authority, and people like Dorothy Day or MLK can be compared to Jerry Falwell and James Dobson in the same way that you can compare Dostoyevski to Dan Brown.

So the Christian midrashic tradition begins with the encounter of a relatively small group of people with the risen Christ.  Something happened; they were profoundly affected by it; the encounter became a lens that affected their understanding of what had happened before it; they wrote parts of it down, and people since then either believe the testimony shaped by these encounters or they don't.  But in order to believe the testimony, I think one must have an analogous encounter with the Risen Christ in which he discloses himself. I think for different people this happens in different ways. For some it is an encounter disclosed through sacred texts, for others an experience of the him similar to the one experienced by the disciples.  There are several other ways, but for most it begins with an encounter with another human being who has been himself or herself transformed by the encounter who lives in a way that is a living testimony of this ur-Christian encounter. That's what we mean by a living tradition.  The encounter can be spontaneous, but it can also be passed along  as one generation  with kindled hearts kindles the hearts of the generations that follow.

The legitimacy of Christianity sustains itself not on some mechanical cultural programming or attempts at ecclesial social control, but on the living flame kindled from generation to generation. And the discussion about the truth claims of Christianity can only be made legitimately by those who in some measure have had that encounter and the flame kindled--and among those there's lots of room for discussion and different interpretations.  It's otherwise like the tone deaf trying to discuss whose interpretation of Bach is better. Quality speaks for itself, but you have to have the capability and openness to recognize it.
 

Manichaeism

Greenwald's new book A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency has been getting a lot of internet play in the last week.  As the subtitle suggests, the problem is the Good vs. Evil mentality that is at the heart of Bush's "Manichaean" vision of the world.  We can debate whether or not Manichaean is the best word--my term for it is "naive idealism", and I wrote a post about it in October 2005.  Check it out if you're interested in my two cents about this subject.

Americans, of course, are not the only ones infected by it.  It's a disease that's either in remission or in full outbreak anywhere in the human species.  Unfortunately it's in full outbreak among both American and Islamic religious fundamentalists, and it's a problem insofar as the rest of us have let them get hold of the levers of power. As with any such virulent disease the means must be found to isolate and contain it when it breaks out. 

Cosmic Dancing

I've been trying to figure out why Jacques Derrida is important, off and on, for some time now.  I don't question that he is someone who is to be taken seriously, but it's an open question whether he's worth the effort, and whether there is really any there there.  I think by his own rejection of traditional ontology he would have to admit that there is not; there is only the play of differences. And one has to ask, if that's all there is, who cares?

But if that was an attitude I might have held earlier, I don't now. I see Derrida more as an effect than as a cause. The cause is the collapse of Enlightenment Modernity as a believable, workable grand narrative, and the effect is the philosophies of unusually thoughtful and sensitive minds like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.  We owe them our gratitude to alert us of our changed situation and in the help they offer to understand what it means.  I realize most people go on with their lives as if these thinkers never existed, but they deserve our respect for pushing and challenging us in the way they do. But their attempt to wash the slate clean and start over again is a quixotic task, if by doing so they think they will be able to ground their thinking and imagination in what is most deeply true.

Of course, Derrida would reject that there is any 'deeply true' to be grounded in.  Indeed one of the primary tasks of philosophy for him is to deconstruct thought wherever it thinks it has found such a ground. All of our knowledge is simply a dance of different effects which, like the colors in a kaleidescope, combine and un-combine in different patterns from which we humans derive a certain provisional and very slippery meaning.  But the project to freeze this dance into clear concepts makes it into something that it is not, falsifies it, cheapens it, robs it of its fluidity, and accomplishes nothing except to give us the false sense of power in our delusional quest to control the uncontrollable. 

That's really the point of deconstruction, isn't it?  To provide a kind of philosophical enema to remove the blockages to which human thinking is prone.  The obstructions to be cleared are found everywhere, but a red flag goes up wherever these blockages take the form in binary oppositions such as male/female, light/dark speech/writing, nature/culture, presence/absence, etc. with the first being considered superior to the second. Deconstruction is the program to subvert the dominant element in these pairs by different techniques, but mainly by showing the implicit contradictions at the foundation of the assertion of the superiority of the former.  Deconstruction is the performance of clearing the obstruction, not so that the inferior may now take its place, but so that dance might resume.

There's a part of me that finds that project very appealing, and I like its contemplative, Buddhistic, apophatic sensibility.  For it's as if for Derrida philosophy is not the effort to find truth, but rather the effort to dislodge the impediments that prevent our contemplation of it all around us, and when we do, it is simply there, it's 'thisness', the dance of effects he calls "differance", and there is nothing really meaningful that can be said about it--it just is what it is.  For to want the meaning of it is to want what one cannot have, and to ask for it is to miss the point. All that can be said about it is what it is not, and that's pretty much the heart of Derrida's project--to say "Not that". For there is no there there;  it's all just play, randomness.  Our meanings are temporary patterns gleaned in the interplay of different effects with no more significance than the interplay of notes in a musical score.

So, interesting, but where do you go with it?  I think that the apophatic theme is an important one, but it is not new, and it needn't be the whole story.  Christians and Jews believe that this ground of being about which nothing meaningful can be said nevertheless has revealed himself.  And so while philosophy perhaps can go no further than Derrida has gone, theology can go further because of revelation. Theology picks up where philosophy leaves off.  It finds content where philosophy finds the void.   Honest philosophers end up where Derrida ends up; that's why philosophy isn't enough.

So I understand why many thoughtful people cannot accept the possibility of revelation, but I wonder if their position the rigidified kind of thing that falls into the binary opposition reason/faith, and as such is in need of some deconstruction.  For many who refuse the possibility of revelation are simply prisoners of a rigidified mental framework that is  an arbitrary belief system with its own fabric of prejudices and assumptions. The point is this. Move with Derrida as far as he goes; it is better to be with him than to be locked up in some rationalist's jail cell, but it's still possible to make another move, to go beyond the limitations of philosophy.

I would also say that deconstruction is really the underlying dynamic of the gospels and it is articulated powerfully in Mary's Magnificat:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour;
he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed;
the Almighty has done great things for me and holy is his name.
He has mercy on those who fear him,
from generation to generation.He has shown strength with his arm
and has scattered the proud in their conceit,
Casting down the mighty from their thrones
and lifting up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty.
He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
to remember his promise of mercy,
The promise made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and his children for ever.
(Luke 1:46-55)

The Christianity of the gospels is subversive of all rigidified power constructs--not to get that about the Gospels is to miss one their most important themes.  They are all about taking the world as it is shaped by the myriad narratives of power and greed and turning them upside down, and inside out.  So I'm sympathetic to the need for deconstruction, and I'm quite interested to apply it to the power dynamics as they operate in religious institutions, but I don't believe that what you release in unclogging the blockage there is the "play of difference", but rather the cosmic dance of the Holy Spirit.

I'll be pushing this argument further by considering other themes that have arisen in postmodern thought.  My approach is not to see the implicit or explicit nihilism in it as as something to be condemned, but rather to accept what it gives us as an honest account of the way things are within the limits of reason, within the limits of thought closed to data made available in revelation and the time-tested testimony of the great seers, mystics, and saints. The postmodern thinkers bring into view the stark choice presented to anyone who seeks to be intellectually honest: either we live in a world that is fundamentally meaningless or in a world that is not.  The only evidence for the meaning option is in the testimony referred to in previous sentence. Either their testimony is believable, or it is not. If it is, how then do you work with it?  And how do you prevent it from rigidifying into a club for one group to hit another with?  Deconstruction can be a very useful tool for that purpose, and so ought to be employed.

So if you can live within a nihilistic meaning framework and get along with a little help from your friends, best of luck and Godspeed. But know that your choice is ultimately an arbitrary one, a choice to leap into the abyss as arbitrary as the choice another might make to leap into the arms of God. And also know that a society framed by metaphysical meaninglessness almost certainly will regress into power- and greed-driven barbarism, which is pretty much where we're headed, if you haven't noticed.

Religion in society does not eliminate greed and powerlust, but it seeks ways to discipline it, and it inspires possibilities that counterbalance it.  And so I agree with the neocons on that score; I don't, however, share their paternalistic cynicism that religious meaning frameworks are lies, even if they are noble ones.

So me, I'm interested in exploring the choice for meaning, which has far broader and more interesting possibilities.  And while I don't think believers should be imposing their beliefs in the political sphere, I do believe that the work believers do in the political sphere provides the best hope of overcoming the impossibility Niebuhr points us to in the quote I use in the blog epigraph:

Without the ultra rational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of a jsut society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible.

Nostalgia

As a phenomenon of postmodern culture, nostalgia is a manifestation of a deracination of both the self and culture. It arises from a deep sense of displacement, or dis-ease, with the present, and an inability to trust the future. There may well be a lurking awareness of nihilism which marks modernity. The strategy is to get ourselves "back to the garden" and this entails the construction of a 'past' which can be inhabited. Given that such a 'past' is our construction and we control it, we can be assured that it is secure. Nostalgia is a form of escape in which there is a willing suspension of our suspicion. It is not constructed out of any historical accuracy, but out of an emotional imagination, a creation that derives from our anxieties, and our need to relieve them in a place of safety and psychic warmth. Of course, such a strategy is an admission of failure, the song of an exile that has abandoned hope and therefore reconstructs an ideal homeland or Eden.  This strategy is , at bottom, not a response to the challenge of nihilism, but surrender to it. (James Harvey, S.J. in Radical Orthodoxy: A Catholic Enquiry, pp.153-54.)

That's as good a definition as I've read, and it brings into high relief our current peril in a decadent era.  Nostalgia is a longing for a return to the womb; it's Lot's Wife Syndrome.  And in a decadent era, when we have lost our culture-wide sense of future possibility, the right appeals to a fantasy past to substitute for its loss of the future.

The nihilism at the heart of right-wing nostalgia is worse than the nihilism of the left because it is unaware of itself--it is disguised as something else.  The Nazis didn't promote themselves as nihilists.  They promoted a grandiose fantasy which was nihilistic through and through. By their fruits you will know them. 

The neocons are cut from the same cloth.  See "The Neocon Nightmare World" post for more on that.  I think that the mistake a lot of decent Americans made who supported the Iraq War was based on a superficial understanding  of this administration's vision and motivations.  These Americans projected their own idealism onto this neocon project thinking of it as the having the same moral justification as coming to the rescue of Rwandans or Bosnians. (See here for more on that.) But it was never a humanitarian mission from the point of view of the neocons.  Theirs was always a grandiose nihilistic fantasy, and by their fruits you will know them.

And so until we frame a renewed culture-wide imagination of robust future possibility, we are vulnerable to the nihilist fantasies of the Right. Fred Thompson is trading big time on this sort of thing.  He saw how Reagan worked it, and now thinks, why shouldn't an empty suit like me work it in the same way? Talk about nihilistic fantasies.  And if he succeeds, it will be an enormous testament to precisely what I'm describing here. 

If a potent antidote is to be found in a renewed sense of future possibility, it has to be grounded in an imagination of the future that resonates as deeply true, plausible, and life-giving. In other words the culture needs to develop a "true mythos".  If you think the phrase is oxymoronic, you probably won't be interested to return to this site.  But  that's what I'm struggling to understand--the conditions for the possibility of a true mythos.  As I suggested the other day, I'll be commenting from time to time on issues of current interest, but the main thrust of what I want to do is get after the future.

If Sullivan Gets It, . . .

If someone as mainstream as former Bush cheerleader Andrew Sullivan gets it, there is no excuse for anyone else.  The only explanation is willful blindness. Commenting on Glenn Greenwald's new book he says:

The genius of the American constitution, however, is that it provides the framework for such immoral moralism [Bush's Manichean project to defeat the forces of Evil] to be checked and moderated. Alas, we have also seen these past few years how dependent such a system is on the integrity and courage of the people in it.

It depends on an elite willing to stand up against their own power, and it depends on a people alert to the erosion of their freedom. Today, both guardrails against tyranny appear weakened, and the pushback against a radically authoritarian executive has been weak. We have an elite class in Washington either too cowardly to stand up to the power grab or too co-opted by the perquisites of power to care. And we have a people seemingly content to watch freedom being stripped from them - because, right now, it's mainly people with brown skin and funny names being railroaded by the executive branch. Al-Marri and Padilla can be distanced. And the Hollywood fantasies of Jack Bauer can distract from an honest moral assessment of how far we've degenerated in so short a time.

There is still a chance to repair the damage - but given how much we have lost since 9/11, the constitutional consequences of another major attack are likely to be terminal to the American experiment in liberty. If a Giuliani or a Cheney is in power on such a day, we can kiss goodbye to the constitution. If I sound overly alarmed by what has happened to American liberty, it's because I honestly didn't expect to see habeas corpus, the most basic freedom we have, so casually thrown away and torture so casually enshrined in the American system. I never believed an American president would not only claim but exercise the power to detain any person in America and jail and torture them with impunity - indefinitely. But these are the facts; and my own book was an attempt to account for them within the conservative philosophical tradition. Glenn Greenwald comes from a very different place, but we have sadly come to the same conclusion.

Maybe at some point he'll get how his Thatcherite libertarian conservatism has greased the skids to get us into this mess. Sullivan understands the limitations of left Liberalism, but not of his own conservative Liberalism, which is essentially what  Thatcherites and Libertarians are.  On the plus side, their small-government principles incline them to oppose authoritarianism.  On the minus side, Libertarian  market ideology with its concomitant embrace of deregulation removes the constraints from the power elite and provide it with the ideological cover it needs to accumulate the power necessary for promoting an authoritarian agenda.  Isn't this exactly what we've seen? 

As Sullivan points out, the system requires "an elite willing to stand up against their own power."  But why should it?  When in human history has it done so for more than short while? What kind of sane system depends on the already powerful to self-limit their power?  What kind of understanding of human nature would incline anybody to think that possible?  Even if 90% of elites are indifferent to power accumulation, what motivation has this majority to prevent the 10% minority which lusts for it?  The majority is easily bought off or coopted with tax breaks and other perqs designed to neutralize its opposition. Isn't this exactly what we've seen happen?

And when inevitably this elite does not self-limit, what means have the rest of us to staunch the erosion of our liberty?  Well it requires the power of government to set those limits, and if government has been so weakened by Libertarian principle, we have no means.  We will become inevitably like those authoritarian regimes in Europe and Latin America with its "terrorist" resistance in the mountains or underground in the cities, and their anti-authoritarian sympathizers getting disappeared.  That's the price that the rest of us will pay for our lack of vigilance and for our too-easy willingness to accept these criminals at their word. 

Sullivan has seen the error of his early Bush support; the question remains whether it's too late.  The degree to which we take seriously any of these 2008 Republican presidential candidates, each trying to out-Jack Bauer the other, is an indicator of the degree to which we have failed to understand our predicament.   

Update: See also this piece by Robert Parry.  An excerpt:

. . .historians will scroll through front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and every other major newspaper – as well as scan the national network news and the 24-hour cable channels – and find not a single story connecting the dots, explaining the larger picture: the end of a remarkable democratic experiment which started in 1776 and which was phased out sometime in the early 21st century.

How, these historians may ask, did the U.S. press corps miss one of history’s most important developments? Was it a case like the proverbial frog that would have jumped to safety if tossed into boiling water but was slowly cooked to death when the water was brought to a slow boil?

Or was it that journalists and politicians intuitively knew that identifying too clearly what was happening in the United States would have compelled them to action, and that action would have meant losing their jobs and livelihoods? Perhaps, too, they understood that there was little they could do to change the larger reality, so why bother?

As for the broader public, did the fear and anger generated by the 9/11 attacks so overwhelm the judgment of Americans that they didn’t care that President Bush had offered them a deal with the devil, he would promise them a tad more safety in exchange for their liberties?

And what happened to the brave souls who did challenge Bush’s establishment of an authoritarian state? Why, the historians may wonder, did the American people and their representatives not rise up as Bush systematically removed honorable public servants who did their best to uphold the nation’s laws and principles?

One could go down a long list of government officials who were purged or punished for speaking up, the likes of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Read more.

Why Liberalism Can't Get It Done IV

Digby revealed herself last week.  She came out of pseudonymity to receive an award on behalf of the progressive netroots at the Take Back America Conference.  I think that people like Digby and Greenwald represent what's best about Liberalism, and I admire their intelligence, eloquence, and moral passion.  The speech Digby gave, which is worth reading here or viewing here, illustrated both the strengths and the weaknesses of the "Liberal" netroots.

It's main strength lies in its revulsion at what movement conservatism is doing to this country and in its refusal to be conned by its self-justifying propaganda; its weakness lies in that's all it's got, and it's not enough, and it doesn't know it.

From where I stand, this kind of Liberalism is the true conservatism fighting against noxiously regressive reactionaries to preserve what's left of our social democracy. The idea at this point that movement conservatism has anything of value to offer American society is simply not to be taken seriously. It needs to be taken seriously only insofar as it's important to recognize the very serious threat that it poses to the commonweal. So the Liberal blogosphere does a pretty good job of confronting that threat, but in doing so it is fighting a rear-guard action, which is important to do, but I am more interested in looking for and thinking about a line of advance.  My argument in the last week is that Liberalism on its own does not have the resources to effect that advance.

Now I may be wrong or right about that.  We'll see.  But I'm going to proceed as if I'm right and see where it leads. So I am going to let Digby and Greenwald do their thing, and I will read them faithfully, and from time to time I might comment on their and other posts originating from the rear guard.  But whether I'm successful in this role or not,  I look at what I'm trying to do as in more the role of a scout, surveying the landscape that lies ahead, trying to discern what route might lead us safely forward.

I don't expect many readers to be interested in this.  Most find the fight in the political arena more stimulating and accessible.  But my focus in the future will be more in developments in the cultural sphere, and that means getting into philosophy and theology in a way that I suspect many readers will find hard to follow because it's likely to get a little technical. I was thinking of starting a second blog to run parallel to this, one, but that would take more time than I have to give.  In any event, I'll be writing more in a thinking-out-loud mode about difficult material that I don't have much control over as I'll trying to figure it out for myself.  So I'm just giving y'all a heads up about what to expect starting this summer. I hope at least some of you hang in there with me.

Why Liberalism Can't Get It Done III

In the gospels it says that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. This is not the platitudinous condemnation of economic injustice, but rather a shrewd observation about human psychology. The point is that those who have wealth have the ability to create a world that is exactly how they want it, and this world becomes a prison which filters out anything that would intrude into it from the world outside--including grace.  That's the price you pay when you have the means to create a the world in your own image.

It's a prison designed to keep the inmate safe and comfortable and moderately well entertained.  They never have to deal with the world as it is; they live in a world of their own construction in which they are self-sufficient and isolated from "reality" in a way that the poor are not. The poor, who certainly find ways to live in other kinds of hells, nevertheless find it harder to live in self-created delusional worlds because they have fewer resources to block out the real world, and so they are of necessity more vulnerable, and in their vulnerability more open to the movement of grace in their lives.

I think that you could make the argument that the inability of so many Americans to see through the delusional thinking of our current political leaders is a function of their participating in the poison fruits of the affluent society.  We have all to a certain extent been caught up in this ancient syndrome that until recently was the exclusive privilege of the rich, i.e., to build and live in castles of delusion. You could say that the affluent society has democratized delusion. And our national anxiety is in large part derived from our unconscious knowledge how flimsy a structure it really is.  It is metaphysically vaporous.  We've been building our very own Towers of Babel, and at some level we realize that sooner or later it will all come crashing down.  Things can't possibly keep going this way.  Something has to give.  Everything looks more or less normal, but deep down we know that the whole business is rotten and near collapse.

I recently watched the movie version of John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation".  And it struck me that this was the story about how rich people live in such self-created prisons and of how not-rich people, like the insane Paul Poitier (Will Smith) character, long to live in the prisons that these rich people have created. It's also the story of how one of the inmates, Ouisa (Stockard Channing), wakes up to her condition and escapes. She's the camel that somehow found a way out through the eye of that needle. Her path out derived from her "imagination" of how she is connected to people outside that prison she realized she was living in, and in a curious way, Paul, the person who wanted in, became for her the way out.

The exercise of freedom is meaningless unless we're willing to live with the consequences of our choices. Our choices, for better or worse, are what make us real; our history is what gives us metaphysical ballast. Do we make bad choices? Of course we do. But the test of our character is how we respond to the consequences of these choices. The consumer culture in which we live reinforces a mentality that would have us look at these choices as if they were poor purchase decisions for which we have the option to either return or discard what we've bought.  We don't really want to believe that our past has anything to do with who we are; we want to believe that we are infinitely capable of reinventing ourselves.  But what kind of person is capable of that kind of reinvention except someone who is a cipher--a nothing.  But it's precisely this kind of person that modernity and the Liberal imagination of the human has created and celebrates.  The Liberal sensibility hates the past and its limitations, and whether consciously or unconsciously, people who have been acculturated into modern society have this attitude toward the past.

In the affluent velvet prison the inmates are told continuously that they are happy and if they're not, to go shopping.  Because their happiness is measured by their capacity to consume--goods and services, people, experiences. Whatever--we swallow them like junk food, defecate them, and move on. We are not nourished by such consumption, and we're not changed by it, except for the temporary bloated feeling that they cause. We soon forget about them and the sum or our lives is so many forgettable moments. 

This kind of thinking is the air we breathe. But I don't think we have much a sense of how this creates a kind of solipsistic hell in which we all find ourselves; nor do we understand how this contributes to the anxiety that pervades cultures in the affluent, developed world. It's a hell that 's created by the illusion of choices, illusory because they are choices that don't make a difference, that contribute not a whit to our spiritual substance because we almost always get do-overs. Or we find some excuse for running away from the consequences of our choices. 

Because being human in a consumer culture is not about developing into a man or woman of substance, it's about being "happy", and the consumerist definition of happiness reinforces a kind of infantilism that keeps us passive and dependent,  which we don't mind so long as we're relatively comfortable. Our prisons are comfortable, and we have good reason to believe the official propaganda that the consumer choices we make in them are what really makes us free.  It supports us in our  continuing denial of the truth, a truth we don't have the stomach to confront. Is there any wonder we have become so incapable of demanding more of our political leaders? We don't want them to tell us the truth, because it's a truth we'd rather not know about.

So who are we, then, really? What is the nature of our identity in the modern Liberal imagination? Identity in the psychosocial literature has come to mean something that is an arbitrary construction defined either "by the social roles an individual performs, the 'reference group' to which he belongs, or, on the other hand, by the deliberate management of impressions or 'presentation of self,' in Erving Goffman's phrase," writes Christopher Lasch in The Minimal Self.

There's no there there in the individual's identity understood in this way. It's changeable, shifting, and chameleon-like. It's Woody Allen's Zelig on the one hand or Madonna's inventing and reinventing herself on the other. In this understanding of personal identity, we are either subsumed into the group and its group think or we make ourselves up as we go along. And such reinvention is possible because neither is there a there there when it comes to the social world that is over against the individual. It has lost its solidity; it has become whatever we want it to be.

The psychosocial meaning of identity, which has itself passed into the common usage, weakens or eliminates altogether the association between identity and "continuity of the personality." It also excludes the possibility that identity is defined largely through a person's actions and the public record of those actions. In its new meaning, the term registers the waning of the old sense of a life as a life-history or narrative--a way of understanding identity that depended on the belief in a durable public world, reassuring in its solidity, which outlasts an individual life and passes some sort of judgment on it. Note that the older meaning of identity refers both to persons and things. Both have lost their solidity in modern society, their definiteness and continuity. Identity has become uncertain and problematical not because people no longer occupy fixed social stations--a commonplace explanation that unthinkingly incorporates the modern equation of identity and social role--but because they no longer inhabit a world that exists independently of themselves. Minimal Self, p. 32.

I think that this is an accurate description of identity formation in a choice-driven world as contrasted with a given world. In a traditional society, everything is given, and you just accept that this is the way it is because this is the way it always was. In a consumer society, very little is given. And what is given can be easily rejected as one moves on to live a life with little reference to what was given to him as a child. When the social worlds we live in are chosen or rejected as the whim seizes us, we experience our social world as temporary and interchangeable with any other social world and any other group of people. Even if we stay with one group for a long period of time, we know that we can leave it at any time. In fact if you stay in one place for too long--like a job--you are perceived as stodgy or lacking in ambition.

There's a freedom and an exhilaration in knowing that we can always keep our options open in that respect, but it's counterfeit freedom and cheap thrills.  And we pay a price: The world no long maintains its solidity; its quality of being over against us and pointing to something unfathomable and unconsumable has collapsed. And the people and objects in our world lose their ability to be anything more than what makes them useful to us; we keep them in our world so long as there is value in them to consume, and we toss them as soon as they lose their consumable value. We get into relationships with people to "get our needs met," and we get out of them when it's clear that they are unable to give us what we have become convinced they or someone else should give us. There is an objective world of things, but there is no longer an objective world of meaning or value, because the things, including the people, are simply the value we project into them, and this has mostly to do with their usefulness to us, how they meet our needs.

This is reinforced by the therapeutic values of much of the human potential movement which has vulgarized the idea of self actualization into another consumer commodity. Think about how commonplace it has become, even when we are encouraged to volunteer for some social service. We are never "sold" on the idea because it's the right thing to do; we're told instead about how fulfilling the experience will be, and how much you get back when you give. Well, maybe/maybe not. This approach links doing the right thing to false expectations, and it makes of volunteering another experience we treat as a consumable object. We go into these experiences and stay with them only so long as we get something out of them.

My goal is not to shake my finger at the world as if to say, "How dare you be what I think you ought not to be." My goal is simply to see our predicament with as much clarity as I can, because I know that I'm as implicated in all of what I describe here as consumer culture as anyone else. As I've said before, we're all neck deep in this historical current, and I do not propose that we remove ourselves from the stream, only that we keep our head dry, and to make the effort to navigate in this stream rather than simply allow ourselves to swept away by it. But we can do much better than the modern/postmodern nihilistic imagination of the human.

Ultimately the goal is to create a society that reinforces the project to become what we were created to become--beings with a destiny to realize that they are only most profoundly free when as the realized image and likeness of God, beings with enough diamond-hard metaphysical substance that someday they will be able to see God face to face with the uncreated source of all that is, and not be vaporized in the encounter. 

Why Liberalism Can't Get It Done II

Admittedly, most of what I have written since I began this blog has focused on the threat that we are now facing from the right. And I think that threat is real and its looming in the American future is oppressive. But Liberalism has prepared the ground, and it's important to understand Liberal culpability in setting things up in such a way that we are now so vulnerable. 

Even though for now it offers the only opposition available, I do not think that the opposition proffered by Liberalism to the threat from the right can be an effective counterweight in the long run. Liberalism is in disarray. It neither offers intellectual vigor and a compelling imagination of the future, nor does it any longer command a power base that can effectively counter the growing power of the big-money, power right. If some alternative to the oppressive future that the rightists would fashion for us is to be found, it will not come from Liberalism.

Liberalism has always been the ideology of the modern project, and the modern project has always been about the emancipation of the rational individual from the constraints of custom and tradition. Liberalism is about the rejection of the superstitious, feudal, premodern past and the embrace of unbounded future possibilities engineered by human brainpower. There are certainly some people who still believe in this kind of Liberalism, but it's a liberalism driving on fumes. Liberalism has become now more of an old habit than it is a lively, animating cultural impulse.  And its anemic vision is not something most people, especially politicians, are willing to stick out their necks to defend as a matter of principle.

It's not a question of what we would like or prefer; it's a question of looking clearly at our situation and understanding its pitfalls and opportunities. The pitfall is that with the passing of Liberalism a kind of cultural vacuum has been created that is now being filled by the worst human impulses, and those are working through the GOP in an egregiously regressive way. See the post I put up earlier this week about how the continuing appeal of fascism is a serious contender to fill that vacuum. The possibilities lie in the challenge to the human spirit and imagination to frame something new, something that moves us forward out of the limitations of modernity into broader possibilities for global humanity.

The Democrats are not the answer. If you think the election of Democrats is anything more than a temporary expression of national revulsion at the incompetence and corruption of the GOP, you're kidding yourself. The right will find a way to regroup and advance its attack.  And it has a very strong chance of success because so many of the structural  factors (courts, money, media, weakening long-term economy, and a confused, anxious, easily manipulated electorate) favor it, and the long-term trend lies with the right unless something more vigorous can rise to counter it. In my view the human being as envisioned by the secular left is so limited, flat, and at root nihilistic, so circumscribed by the limitations of modern rationalist materialism, that it cannot possibly offer a way forward.  And that limited modernist vision of the human underlies the Liberal worldview and fundamental values that shape the active base of the Democratic Party and the Greens as well.  And so long as it does, most Americans will not be able to identify with it, even though they might vote Democrat for reasons of expediency.

So I support the Democrats out of such expediency, but I do not believe that the Democrats are anything move than flimsy breakwall incapable of doing more than slightly slowing down the momentum of political and economic forces that favor the right.   

And it's important to understand how Liberalism has played a role in getting us into this predicament, because when its spirit dominated the cultural zeitgeist, it was largely responsible for destroying the traditional-values and economic infrastructure that provided the institutions needed for a flourishing republican political culture. That infrastructure is all but gone, and there's no use in crying over spilt milk, but it's important to understand that the people who destroyed it are not in a position to understand what's needed to build something sane and lifegiving to replace it. 

A sane Liberal solution is unlikely because of Liberalism's flawed understanding of the human being. Classic Liberals look at everything that comes from the past as unnecessary baggage that impedes progress toward the future.  Classic Liberals believe that humans are tabula rasa, blank or empty slates, closed to mystery or transcendence, capable of being engineered by Skinnerian or Leninist social scientists or of endless Madonna-like invention or reinvention. 

For the classic Liberal the human being is a cipher, and the consumer-oriented economy created during the Liberal era became the perfect means to fill this cipher's emptiness.  I'll have more to say about this later this week, but for now it's important to understand the fundamental emptiness that characterizes the Liberal vision of the human, and how Liberalism is root and branch implicated in the nihilism and materialism of consumerist culture. And it's important to understand that many decent Americans are repelled by this vision and are too easily exploited by religious charlatans. The hunger for transcendence is a deeply human, a universally human trait. It is not in itself a delusional, but it is a hunger that too often is  satisfied by junk food. And right now there are a lot of peddlers of junk food these days.

I am implacably opposed to everything that movement conservatives are seeking to accomplish in their program, but I do think that the critique of Liberalism that comes from some of the more thoughtful conservatives needs to be absorbed. Movement conservatism is a loathsome and dangerous phenomenon--far more so than Liberalism.  But if we are to find a way forward, we have to come up with something better than what Liberalism offers. And we have to understand why movement conservatism is so appealing to many decent Americans.

At this point Liberalism is the only alternative to movement conservatism, and people who are opposed to the right by default have to align themselves with Liberal ideology. For some like me, that's not a comfortable fit, and so I'm struggling to find something that fits better, but I'm not interested in being a party of one. I'm hoping to find something that resonates broadly and in the long run will provide a more robust alternative to the Liberal/Conservative choices available to us at this time.  I'm also interested in finding ways to connect what I'm writing about here with the work others are doing. Perhaps some readers can help me with that.

In future posts I want push further this argument that Liberalism is a failed project and why it is no longer useful except as a temporary breakwall, and I want to begin to think through some ideas about what an alternative imagination might look like. It's not that I have anything already clearly set in my mind about this. But its basic outline lies in some ideas I have already briefly presented when I wrote about 'first and second naiveté' and 'retrieval'. I know these ideas seem abstract and unhelpful now, but my hope is to bring them down to earth and to make them work in a way that can help us, at least in our imagination of the task, to break this impasse.

Why Liberalism Can't Get It Done I

I have some important differences with Christopher Lasch, but I'm 95% in agreement with his basic understanding about what's happening to us as a society. I know of no one else who is more eloquent or insightful. The following passage from The True and Only Heaven (1991) summarizes very effectively the basic premise upon which this website is based:

But if humanity thrives on peace and prosperity, it also needs an occasional taste of battle. Men and women need to believe that "life is a critical affair," in Richard Niebuhr's words. They cannot be satisfied merely with the opportunity to choose their goals and "life-styles," in the current jargon; they need to believe that their choices carry serious consequence. In the Christian cosmos, the forces of good and evil wage a mighty struggle for man's soul, and every action had to be weighed in the scales of eternity. Communism endowed everyday actions with the same kind of cosmic significance, as Keynes and many others understood. In 1940, George Orwell made the same point about fascism. The Western democracies, he observed, had come to think that "human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, the avoidance of pain." Whatever else could be said about it, fascism was "psychologically far sounder than any hedonist conception of life." Hitler knew that men and women wanted more than "comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control." "Whereas socialism and even capitalism . . . have said to people, 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

I've been talking a lot about fascism lately, and I know that in doing so I risk falling into the category of the stereotypical 'man of the left' who uses the term as an insult for anyone whose views are to the right of his own. But if I've also gone to great lengths to show that I am not a Liberal. That I am closer to a Burkean conservative than I am to the kind of Liberalism that is at the secular-left heart of the Democratic Party, and that it is from this Burkean standpoint that I criticize the "Jacobinism" driving current GOP policy.  As I've argue before, to be a conservative at this moment means to be a defender of the New Deal compromise.  And that means fending off the attacks on it by bow-tie conservatives like George Will, Thatcherites like Andrew Sullivan, and Libertarians like Ron Paul who present themselves as principled small-government conservatives.  See here and here for more on this.  I have argued that Libertarians don't understand the unintended consequences of their principles.

And I have said repeatedly that I do not believe that whatever hope we have for a better future lies with the secular left, whose conception of that better future is at root closed to transcendence in its implicit if not explicit materialism and nihilism. But the failure of the left to offer a counterbalance to the backlash from the right over the last twenty-five years is at the root of my fears about how profoundly seductive the program of the extremist right.  People have a profound longing for a "more" that the secular left cannot provide, and Fascism offers that more.  It's a perverse, evil more, but that doesn't diminish its seductiveness.

So my concerns about fascism are not rooted in some over-reaction to current events.  Rather, I see current events as fulfilling my worst fears about what we Americans are capable of, not because we Americans are particularly evil, but because we are human in a fallen world.  I think that another weakness of liberalism is its Rousseauan/Lockean tabula rasa naivete about our lack of fallenness and our a priori inclination to perversity if we are not offered a robust alternative. Liberalism does not offer that robust alternative, and right-wing Christianist Dominionism is the incarnation of the perversity, the Devil himself quoting scripture. Lasch goes on:

In the same year, Lewis Mumford offered an analysis of the "sleek progressive mind" that could easily have been written by Orwell himself. Progressives, according to Mumford, believed that human nature is deflected from its natural goodness only by external conditions beyond the individual's control. Having no sense of sin, they discounted inherent obstacles to moral development and therefore could not grasp the need for a "form-giving discipline of the personality." They scorned the discipline gained through manual labor, the endurance of discomfort, and the nurture of the young. They sought to free mankind from all manner of hardship and adversity, from the boredom of domestic drudgery, and from natural processes in general. Societies based on progressive principles, Mumford wrote, renounced every larger goal in favor of the "private enjoyment of life." They had created a race of men and women who "deny because of their lack of experience that life has any other meanings or values or possibilities." Such people "eat, drink, marry, bear children and go to their grave in a state that is at best hilarious anesthesia, and at its worst is anxiety, fear, and envy, for lack of the necessary means to achieve the fashionable minimum of sensation."

A loathing of this view of life is precisely what animates principled conservatives in this country--and I quite understand why they loathe it. Such liberal societies are good only for producing "last men."

Confronted with this kind of indictment, progressives usually reply that discipline and adversity are all very well for those who can take a certain level of material security for granted, but that impoverished masses can hardly be expected to listen to such appeals. Until everyone enjoys a decent standard of living, material improvement will therefore remain the overriding objective of democratic societies. The trouble with this argument is that the political pressure for a more equitable distribution of wealth can come only from movements fired with religious purpose and a lofty conception of life. Without popular initiative, even the limited goal of democratization of comfort cannot be realized. The favored few cannot be expected to consult the needs of the many, even if their own interests may be served, at least in the long run, by raising the general level of consumption. If the many now enjoy some of the comforts formerly restricted to the few, it is because they have won them through their own political efforts, not because the wealthy have freely surrendered their privileges or because the market automatically assures abundance for all.

Popular initiative, however, has been declining for some time--in part because the democratization of consumption is an insufficiently demanding ideal, which fails to call up the moral energy necessary to sustain popular movements in the face of adversity. The history of popular movements, including the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties--the last such uprising in American history--shows that only an arduous, even tragic, understanding of life can justify the sacrifices imposed on those who seek to challenge the status quo.

The idea of progress alone, we are told, can move men and women to sacrifice immediate pleasures to some larger purpose. On the contrary progressive ideology weakens the spirit of sacrifice. Nor does it give us an effective antidote to despair, even though it owes much of its residual appeal to the fear that its collapse would leave us utterly without hope. Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice. [excerpts from pp. 79-80]

This is why I say that hope does not lie within the political sphere. Politics is the sphere of power, and if left to its own internal logic, the political drive is about the acquisition of greater levels of power. Those who seek power can never have enough of it, and the only check on their "natural" (or perverse) tendency to get what they want is for a countervailing power to oppose them. Politics is therefore the battle of countervailing powers to achieve domination, and a countervailing power inspired by suprarational ideals is the only kind that if victorious can put a stop the otherwise endless process of one strong man toppling another.

I believe the founding of the American republic was one such victory, but such victories are never permanent. The republic has been slowly corrupted for over a century now by the seductions of global power. The original ideals have slowly been emptied of their meaning to a point now when I hear politicians speaking the words freedom and democracy I cringe rather than feel the force of the ideals that used to stand behind them. They are zombie words now.

If there has been a note of pessimism in my posts since the 2004 election and why I have not been too encouraged by the 2006, it's because I see the momentum toward perversity as unstoppable until something genuinely new emerges to offer a counterbalance that can redirect us. I don't see the election of a Democratic congress or administration as a solution--at best it slows down this movement toward the consolidation of power in the hands of fewer and fewer power elites. Whatever their rhetoric about traditional values, the bottom line for them is power acquisition, and they have not shown that they have any compunctions about its abuse if it serves their goals. It's very, very disturbing.

The only counterbalance to this natural trend of the powerful seeking ever greater levels of power can come from popular movements, and it is very discouraging to me that whatever opposition there is right now to this very dangerous trend toward power concentration comes only from Liberalism, which for the reasons explained in the excerpts above, simply does not have the moral resources to put up much of a fight. Sooner or later a spirited opposition will arise, but, if I'm right, it won't be effective unless it is motivated by a "loftier conception of life" than the materialism the secular left proposes.

I am pessimistic, but not without hope. As Lasch points out, optimism and hope are not the same thing. I think that in the long run human beings will figure it out, but the story of our doing so will be, as it has been to this point, fraught with struggle and tragedy.

The Two Primal Fears

Fearlessness and courage are not the same thing.  If you don't have fear, you have no need of courage.  For courage is the virtue by which we master our fears and do what needs to be done. Courage is action rather than reaction, and the measure of one's courage is in his ability to master his fear when fear seeks to take hold of the steering wheel.

The kind of tough talk we get from the right wing in this country is not courageous; it's hysterical. It's compensatory for feeling weak and out of one's depth. It exaggerates threats and proposes actions that are not motivated by courage but rather by thinking that is adrenaline soaked and without poise and dignity. It's shameful. Such talk doesn't come from courageous thinking; it's not thinking at all; it's pure, instinctual survival reactivity. It's like freaking out if you see a mouse, and thinking you're courageous because you didn't jump up on a chair but instead threw a stick of dynamite at it. How satisfying to high-five your wife and kids in the rubble of your kitchen.  How noble to have sacrificed so selflessly in the cause of defeating the enemy. 

That's the right-wing's m.o. in a nutshell, but the kitchen they're destroying is the constitution and the rule of law.  And, of course, there will be no celebrating when the family is awakened by a family of raccoons that have invaded the house through the dynamite created breach in the wall.  So should we throw more dynamite to get rid of the raccoons? And does throwing all this dyanmite really protect us from the wolves and other varmints that are waiting for their opportunity? I'll leave it to the reader to make draw the obvious political analogies.

Stupid, adrenaline- or instinct-motivated actions are not courage. Courage is a supranatural virtue that enables us to behave in a counter-instinctual way--to neither fight nor to flee, when every cell in your body is screaming for you to do one or the other, but instead to remain cool and clear headed under pressure and to find the course of action appropriate to the situation. If risking one's life is required, so be it. But courage is the opposite of the folly that leads to unnecessary risks.  And the tough talk of our government stinks far more of folly than it ever has of courage.

America at this time is a highly anxious, deeply fearful country. But what do we fear? I think humans experience fear in two basic ways: fear for their physical survival and fear of humiliation. The first is about basic issues of life and death, the second about identity and self-worth. It's possible to be physically secure but living in a state of indignity and humiliation. It's possible to live with enormous dignity while at the same time living in a chronic state of physical insecurity.

Conservatives have always argued against the paternalism of the welfare state because of the unintended negative consequences of its good intentions. It aims to provide for the physical security of people while unintentionally robbing them of their dignity. Liberals have always argued that dignity for anyone isn't a possibility if he or she is always living on the margins of physical survival. Conservatives counter by saying that people earn their dignity and self worth by becoming self-reliant and meeting their own physical survival needs. Liberals counter when they say that's nice in theory, but very difficult in practice, and the most enterprising of the poor people are forced to meet their survival needs by entering into criminal activity because legitimate means to earn a living are not available to them. Conservatives counter that it's better to be poor and honest than to be a successful criminal. Liberals counter . . . and on the argument goes.

Both are right and both are wrong, but my point now is that the two are intertwined. It's at root a question of social or cultural psychology. There are many cultures where people live lives of joy and dignity with hardly anything in the way of material prosperity by US standards. And in the developed countries like the US there are lots of people living lives of anxiety and high stress whose standard of living is a hundred times those of the first group.  The first group lives with cultural security and physical insecurity.  The second group lives with physical security and cultural insecurity. For the latter, its cultural insecurity is the price it has paid for its affluence and relative physical security.

I would argue that the real fear for most Americans has little to do with threats to their physical survival, but with threats to their identity, individual and collective. There is something about American culture that promotes what I would describe as a dignity deficit with a correlative anxiety surfeit. People who have dignity are secure in their identities. They are people who know who they are. They have confidence and poise.

The mechanisms that promoted identity formation in traditional societies are not at work in American society, and while it's important to understand the historical cultural reasons why this has happened, it's important first to identify the problem. Many, many Americans, especially conservatives, are living in a continuous state of anxiety about being humiliated. It seems silly and counter-intuitive that the most powerful nation on earth should have a populace which should feel this way, but I think it's key to understanding the American predicament right now.

I think that the reason for it with conservatives lies in their continued reliance on traditional structures to give them their sense of who they are.  Modernity and the forces of consumer capitalism have worked relentlessly to destroy the traditional values infrastructure of American society.  And people on the cultural right who remain identified with traditional values feel attacked and threatened as these larger cultural and economic forces erode the infrastructure that gives them their sense of identity and "metaphysical" security. 

So it's not surprising that they feel deeply anxious.  And I sympathize.  But where I lose patience with the cultural right is in their obtuseness in misidentifying the causes of their anxiety in the physical threat posed by Communists or more recently Islamo-fascists.  No, the real cause of their anxiety is creative destructive materialistic forces unleashed by consumer capitalism, which these same conservatives enthusiastically embrace as the key to American greatness. 

Why are Americans fearful and anxious?--because at the roots of their souls their identities are riven by an unresolved contradiction they have failed to recognize.  They want their cake and to eat it, too. They want all the benefits of consumer capitalism, and they want their traditional-values infrastructure.  The contradiction is symbolized by Wal-Mart, the ravenous company that nevertheless drapes itself in red-state values while it destroys traditional family-owned business and exploits red-state workers in small towns throughout the country.  But Wal-Mart is what makes American great, right?  We're fighting in the Middle East to defend American values, right?  And what better represents American values than Wal-Mart, right?  Wal-Mart short-circuits the red-state brain functioning and forces it into a state of resigned, anxious passivity toward the forces that are destroying the fabric of their lives.  Easier to just work up  a frothy hatred of ragheads than to resolve the contradiction.

What's the solution?  Whatever it is, it's not to hand out buttons to people that say, "I'm special." It has to start with ordinary people getting smarter about understanding why they feel the way they do, so that then they can develop an effective, courageous, strategy to force the system to stop exploiting them and rather to be responsive to their interests. 

Filling the Bourgeois Spiritual Vacuum

Because we live in an age that is dominated by bourgeois values and the bourgeois     worldview, we assume that this is the way it will always be because what else could be better?  All the world strives to become what the democracies of the West have become, right? They're not perfect, but is anything better imaginable?  Francis  Fukuyama, echoing Hegel, asks whether bourgeois democracy isn't the whole goal (end) of history.  Is the bourgeois human type, then, the pinnacle of human development? Let's hope not.

There is much to commend in the bourgeois as the ideal type who replaced the courtier aristocrat as the modern age supplanted the medieval. He was the self-reliant family farmer, the tradesman, the entrepreneur, and the businessman whose initiatives propelled the West into the modern age. But in late modernity, the bourgeois has become a degraded into the consuming organizational man or woman and now has a moral stature very similar to the degraded aristocrat of the 17th and 18th Century. The bourgeois has become increasingly the Last Man who is interested only in his bread and circuses.

Nazism was among other things born of a kind of revulsion with the degraded bourgeois, and its appeal lay in its enshrinement of the older ideal of manhood embodied in the Aryan warrior as the national type. That longing for a more noble, pre-bourgeois past is a key to the emotional appeal of fascism. We look now at Hitler and Mussolini as clowns whom now it is hard to believe any one could take seriously in their day. But if we are to learn anything from that experience, it’s important to understand what made fascism so attractive to so many people, particularly the young.

For what might be described as the spiritual condition of late modernity that gave gave rise to fascism has not gone away; if anything it has gotten worse.  The spiritual vacuum created by the dissolution of modern rationalist optimism continues to define the cultural mood of the contemporary West.  The West is thrashing around trying to find its lost soul, and for that reason feels all the more threatened by a more primitive but aggressive cultural movement looming in the Islamic East that seems to have no such problem with its soul or sense of purpose.

We have lost faith in the ideals of Enlightenment humanism and with nothing having taken its place, we have defaulted to the Last Man, the man who is incapable of transcendent aspiration. An echo of Enlightenment ideals born in the modern era and of the transcendent ideals born in the premodern era, still shapes the contemporary world to some extent, but it's doubtful these echo ideals will stand up to pressure.  They didn't stand up in Germany, which was a great creative center for the development and propagation of Enlightenment rationalism, and we are deluding ourselves if we think that we Americans are strong enough to stand up to the kind of pressure we're likely to face in the coming decades. The Last Man doesn't care about ideals; he only cares about his security and his entertainments.

The events of the last six years in a time when the pressure has been relatively weak are very ominous in this regard.  Things are going to get tough, but they haven't yet, and even so Americans have shown that they are easily frightened and manipulated and quite willing to trade their liberty for security. For me the real problem lies in that there is no sufficiently robust counterbalance to the free-floating anxiety and fear that pervades the culture at a time when it should feel relatively strong and secure.  We are so easily scared because we lack confidence in ourselves. There are always going to be threats of one sort or another, but by world-historical standards no country is safer or more secure than the U.S. at this time.

A self-confident culture would have the poise and intelligence to deal with threats to its security in effective proportionate ways. Instead we have responded to them hysterically and with disproportionate brutality. A self-confident culture would trust that it's ideals and moral stature would sustain it in the long run.  But since America has no such confidence, it has reverted to behavior typical of the insecure bully which obsesses and preens about its masculinity (see below), and in doing so makes things far worse than they need to be.

This is a proto-fascist cultural state of mind. Fascism is not something that presents itself in obvious ways. It happens when a nation feels insecure and is full of resentment. The people who welcome fascism don't believe they are supporting a dictator; they believe they are supporting a savior, someone who will deliver them from their fear. The Germans who voted for Hitler didn't think he was an evil guy; nor will Americans believe that of any fascist leader they may embrace.

Intellectuals will be taken in as well, but for different reasons.  In retrospect we wonder how people with the acuity of Martin Heidegger or Ezra Pound could have fallen for fascist rhetoric and could have bought into its twisted vision. But for them, and for so many others, the attraction lay not so much in what fascism affirmed, but in what it rejected—modernity and its Last Man mediocrity. We look in hindsight at Heidegger and Pound and regard them as morally deficient for their fascism, but what attracted them to fascism was not its brutality, but rather its hatred for modernity and its business culture, and the hollow, timid, flat-souled, overly cerebral human type it created. Fascism, in other words, is a product of bourgeois self-loathing in a world devoid of grace.

As such fascism is best understood as a primitivistic, anti-modern movement that attracted people with its romanticism of a return to the purity of its warrior tribal origins as a way to be anti-bourgeois. It is a masculinity cult that celebrates the bold, audacious will to power--an adolescent preoccupation, perhaps, but no less dangerous for that. It’s a lot easier to imagine a boy idolizing a gallant warrior, even if he’s an outlaw—even if he’s a Nazi storm trooper--than to imagine him doing the same for the bourgeois investment banker, accountant, or shopowner.

The left makes its anti-bourgeois statment by tattoos, body-piercing, the celebration of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The right by its celebration of the gun. The effete, cosmopolitan, liberal bourgeois find it extremely difficult to understand the appeal of the National Rifle Association exactly for this reason. Owning a gun, like piercing one’s tongue, is an effective way to say I’m not one of those empty corporate or bureaucratic suits who has no real idea who he is or what he stands for except to measure his life by his climb in the hierarchy or by the amount of money he has made. “I own a gun,” says the NRA redneck. “I am a hunter warrior--don’t mess with me. Just try taking my gun away, you gutless bourgeois.  Make my day.”  Either way, left or right, these responses are fantasies that have nothing to do with the world in which we live.

So my point here is not to justify fascism or the NRA mentality, but to try to understand its pervasive and persistent appeal. It goes back to a longing to assert ourselves as a people of valor by showing that we are willing to refuse craven self-interest, and to gallantly risk all for an honorable cause. We don’t look at Nazis that way, but that’s how they looked at themselves. We don’t look at Islamic terrorists that way, but that’s how they look at themselves. And all of our action movies celebrate the same pose. We admire the gallant risk taker, the man with guts, not the sweet guy who wants everybody to be safe and happy.  And for that reason fascism remains a compelling and attractive way to fill the West's spiritual vacuum, and in America, that's why Dominionist Christianism, a zombie form of Christianity, is rightly considered a form of protofascism.

This obsession with guns and with masculinity is all regressive and nostalgic, especially now since real warfare has offered little possibility for gallantry, from the mindless mechanical slaughter in the trenches during WWI to the bureaucratic futility of Vietnam to the high-tech risklessness of the airwars in Serbia or Afghanistan. The warrior has evolved into the technician, and the technician is a classic bourgeois. Perhaps that's another reason the neocons were for the last decade so eager to go into Iraq--Americans needed to prove to themselves they still had the guts to fight on the ground.  The Democrats fight girly, high-tech air wars in which Americans don't get hurt; Republicans fight their wars in the streets and Americans get hurt by the thousands. Boo yah. And thousands more will die pointlessly until we get rid of these chickenhawk fools trying to prove to themselves they are not the scared little boys deep down they know they are. 

Greenwald has been talking about this need to prove one's manhood in a post yesterday about Chris Matthews and Fred Thompson's pheromones. He makes points similar to those made here and by others about the Republican cult of masculinity and of its strategy to feminize the Democrats, who let's be frank, are too willing to play along.  He points us to an old post by Digby in which he talks about the chickenhawk pathology of nerds who need to prove they're men by talking tough without ever having put themselves in harm's way. Both are worth reading if you want to get a better grasp of how pathetic and pervasive this mentality is.  But the point is that these are the behaviors of men who do not really know who they are, who feel weak, who are trying to fill a spiritual vacuum with some fantasy derived from the premodern past.  They are exemplars of the failed bourgeois, and as such they are dangerous protofascists and they need to be kept away from the levers of power.

And then let us hope that we will sooner rather than later be able to retrieve a post-bourgeois (whatever that is) masculine and feminine spiritedness, a "mensch"-iness, to use the Yiddish term, that is at the heart of all virtue.  That is a spiritual task for the cultural sphere.

Second Naivete

As those who have been reading this blog for some time know, for me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. And the essential thing that distinguishes the one from the other lies in that in premodern cultures people live for the most part in a 'given' world and in modern cultures people live in a chosen world--or at least in a world where choices are available in a way they are not in a classic premodern society. The zombie traditionalist who haunts modern societies is in effect a premodern wannabe. Such a one longs to live in a time when the world would once again be delivered to him as a given with a universally accepted order, accepted without question across the entire culture. No choices, no confusion, no fuss, no muss.  There is only what is right and wrong according to what it culturally defined as normative.

I believe the objection of the zombie traditionalist, for instance, to homosexual marriage/civil unions is not primarily a religious or spiritual issue. It has more to do with how he sees yet another element of what remains of the world given to him by tradition being attacked. In other words, what frightens him is not that these "sodomites" are all going to hell, but that they are the latest agents of modernity’s campaign to destroy what remains of the world given to him by traditional authorities. They fear that the whole society is being dragged into hell, and for them hell equals normless social chaos--"relativism."

Zombie traditionalists don't really care about the tradition; they care about social order--an order with as little real freedom in it as possible. For without a strictly normed social order, they don’t know who they are or how they should act. All of that has to be given or prescribed for them.  As a type, they have very little interior sense of a moral compass.  They are all superego,with a minimal awareness of what it means to have a conscience.

In a pluralistic socieity, which is by definition relativistic, they don't know who they are, and they feel like cornered animals whose territory in that corner is shrinking. They see themselves as an endangered species, and now they are lashing back, fighting for their survival. And they have taken the mainstream culture by surprise, because the mainstream never took them and their worldview seriously. They've been a laughing stock since the Scopes trial, and they burn with resentment toward those like the cosmopolitan "Darrows" who have been laughing at them all these years.  This is the source of their hatred of liberals; it's born of resenting their condescension. And this burning resentment is the driving force behind the backlash mounted by the cultural right in the last thirty or forty years, a resentment that has been enflamed by GOP elites whose political rhetoric to galvanize support for their agenda to destroy the restraints but on them since the New Deal.

Is there just cause on the part of the traditionalists for their resentment?   Let's put it into historical context. There is a basic dynamic working in history for the past five hundred years that promotes the individual, his freedom and rights over against the society and its traditional norms, rituals, and obligations. It was the archetypal dynamic that characterized the conflict between Catholics and Protestants 500 years ago, and it now the same dynamic that characterizes the conflict between Islamist radicals and the West. And on another level it's a dynamic at work in yet another way in the conflict between traditionalist red-state mentality and the cosmopolitan blue-state mentality. The first mindset in each of these pairings in relation to the second is more group-, authority-, and ritual-oriented. The second mindset is, relative to the first, more individual and choice oriented.

The modern cosompolitans see themselves as heroic individualists fighting the  repressive, irrational constrictions of the the ancien regime, and they see the first as frightened, naive bumpkins. Those in the traditionalist group, if they are not among the zombie traditionalists, have historically seen the moderns as the American Indians saw the European settlers--as people who have no understanding, people who have lost their soul because they have lost their connection to everything worth being connected to because they have become so alienated and selfishly individualistic. Those in the premodern traditionalist group see themselves as people who understand the deeper interrelatedness of things, an interrelatedness that is celebrated in the rituals that the second group judges to be irrational and meaningless. The traditionalist group sees the moderns as having shriveled souls and as such rendered incapable of responding to the mystery in things that is to them self-evident.

So there's a part of me that connects with the traditionalism of the first group, but I would make a distinction between a living traditionalism and a zombie traditionalism.  A living traditionalism is supple, adaptive, sacramental; a zombie traditionalism is brittle, rigid, non-adaptive, a mere going through the motions. The second is for the most part more characteristic of the extreme cultural right in this country right now, because the traditional forms they celebrate really don’t convey life in the way they do in a living traditionalism.

Zombie traditionalists, for the reasons given above, are like confused, frightened children, and as such deserve our understanding and compassion. They are like the kind of people who are attracted to cults. Or like the kind of woman that is attracted to a physically abusive man. Alone such people are usually harmless, but when organized they are the necessary base required for the development of an authoritarian society.  For authoritarian elites depend on this kind of fearful, confused, personality type as the base for their ascension to power.  Their fear and confusion is  manipulated by authoritarian demagogues into a frothing resentment at people who resist being sucked into their dysfunctional system and who judge them negatively.  Authoritarian elites need a confused, slavish sector of the population who in turn need an authoritarian elites to tell them what to think and what to do. Like women in abusive relationships, they are more likely to resent sane people who try to intervene than the people who abuse or manipulate them.

The point is that in the U.S., and I presume increasingly in the other developed countries, living traditionalism is increasingly rare because the social institutions that conveyed the life of their traditions have been destroyed. And people in those societies either adapt and become cosmopolitans or they become the zombie traditionalists who are so easily manipulated by authoritarian elites. That's our predicament now, and it's hard to see how it's going to get better any time soon. Living traditions, wherever they still thrive, have proven themselves incapable of adapting quickly enough to the onslaught of changes that have accompanied advancements in technology and the the disorienting effects of affluence with its dizzying array of choices that increase exponentially with each passing decade.

Sure, there are still lots of people with traditional values, but they are disembodied traditional values. They no longer have a lived context that makes them sustainable and life-giving. I consider myself to be a traditionalist, but when I am with zombie traditionalists, I feel suffocated and depressed. There's no life there. There's no wisdom, just this dead-wooden formalism.  It's all cellulose and no sap.

I am amused when people talk about creating “new” traditions. I know what they mean, but probably the word ‘ritual’ would be more accurate. And I think that creating new rituals is really what needs to be done. We need rituals that will en-soul our life together again. But if a ritual is eventually to become a culture-wide tradition, it cannot be arbitrary. It has to resonate deeply. It has to have a kind of “authority,” or it’s just cast to the side as soon as people tire of it or some other behavior presents itself as more compelling.

In other words effective rituals arise in response to deeply felt needs, and they have to work. They have to satisfy the need, and they have to be more satisfying than the “unhealthy” behaviors people are inclined to embrace without them. So the question for me is whether the creation of such “new traditions” is even remotely possible in this fragmented social environment at this time in our history.

I don't know for sure, but for me the idea of retrieval/second naiveté offers a clue as to how it might happen. Both words come from Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher of religion that I read years ago as an undergraduate. I’m not sure I’m using these terms precisely in the way he does, but the idea is that in premodern societies where everything is a given, you have “first naiveté.” You simply accept uncritically the world as the ancestors have passed it on to you. With the coming of critical consciousness, you start questioning the assumptions on which naive consciousness is based, and inevitably you lose your naive faith that the way things are defined as “given” really has much to do with the way things are.

Socrates' teaching the youth of Athens to think critically in this way was the crime that got him executed.  Traditionalists don't like their assumptions to be questioned.  But what began with Socrates as a relatively small movement became a culture-wide trend among most the creative thinkers by the time of the Enlightenment in the West, and by the early twentieth century, this project had run its course as it became clear that there is no rational basis for any of our assumptions.  The existentialist, the late Richard Rorty, and the French postmodern philosophers make that case pretty compellingly. And so the possibility of saying Yes is either impossible and one lives in a state of detached irony or it is the result of an irrational leap of faith if not into the arms of God into other possibilities, Communism and Fascism being popular choices in the last century.

For while critical consciousness is good at saying No—at debunking and irony—it’s not very good at saying Yes--it accomplishes nothing postive. And so in order for it to be possible to to say a deeply resounding Yes, one possibility lies in going back to revisit the world as it was presented to naive consciousness, but now with “second naiveté.” This does not mean 'going native', i.e., reverting to first naiveté, but opening up to or becoming vulnerable to the reality that was self-evident to the premodern consciousness with first-naivete--but without losing critical consciousness. So the challenge becomes one of rediscovering what has been lost, remembering or resurrecting     what has been forgotten. My hunch is, and that’s all it is, a hunch—that if “new traditions” are to be created, they will not have enough ballast or resonance unless they are in one way or another the retrieval of older, previously rejected traditions and rituals, but now adapted to our very different circumstances.

(This post is based on an essay I posted as Zombie Traditionalism II.  See also the post entitled "Retrieval" which also helps to build this them.  I want to use these as a reference point to probe a little deeper into these cultural themes. Also note I've put up a related post entitled "From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen" in the Don't Miss list to the left.  That's where I suggest some clues for how we can now at least as individuals, and perhaps in small communities as well, say Yes.)

Update: An exmple of Second Naivete:

On Angels by Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice -- no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can.

Why We Embrace the Corporate State

A report from the Taming the Corporation conference by Alec Dubro tells us why the left has the correct analysis but not the power to do anything about it.  Only 40% of Americans believe that corporations contribute the public good, so why do they submit to their rule?  Because ordinary Americans don't have the power to do anything about it, and they don't have the power because they're not motivated and organized to do anything about it, and they're not organized and motivated because they're comfortable and who is really proposing a compelling (comfortable) alternative? For now, at least, we're too coopted by the system to do anything about it.  Here's Dubro:

None of the conference speakers asked, or even mentioned: What do we get out of corporate rule? It must be a lot, and not all of it can be venal and soul-destroying. It’s true that you need money to participate, but a surprising number of people have plenty of money, easily absorbing, for instance, the much-decried price rise in gasoline and heating fuel. And with money and the right skin tone, most Americans have more personal freedom than most of them can profitably use, as you can easily observe by the range of bizarre, and frequently sinful, leisure-time activities that consume them.

So, to partially answer my own question, we get from corporate culture: big homes, comfortable cars, investment counselors, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, personal watercraft, beachfront condos, hundreds of TV channels, central air conditioning, cheap airplane flights, cheaper electronic gear, and pizza on demand. You and I may not cherish these things, but millions do, and are not anxious to give them up for a new, uncertain economic system to be named later.

Even many people with minimal money and little promise of advancement identify not with the opponents of corporate rule, but with its guardians. While the conference drew a few hundred people to an interesting and provocative discussion of the structure of U.S. political and economic culture, any decent motivational speaker can draw a paying audience of thousands who live from paycheck to paycheck, and who want to succeed within corporate boundaries.
...

The vision of a post-corporate America put forth at the conference was one in which security and equality reigned. But that left out what corporate state traffics in: the possibility of success. It’s what the conservatives misleadingly call freedom, but it’s not entirely a fraud. Lots of people want to do better, and we need their support.

The Taming the Corporation conference did a superb job of documenting and analyzing the problem. If it were just a matter of winning an ethical, moral or environmental case against corporations, we would have already overturned corporate rule. But we haven’t because we haven’t offered a plausible or demonstrable alternative that appeals to the people who walk around on a sunny weekend day having a pretty good time and not worrying too much about corporations.

This sounds right to me. Our understanding of the causes might be different depending on whether we lean left or right, but any sentient American knows that something is not right with us now.  I believe it's because we've become a consumption-centered, bread-and-circuses culture which defines its freedom by the quality of our circuses and the quantity of our bread. We are that for want of a plausible attractive alternative. Lots of Americans have little bread and their entertainments are tawdry, but there are not enough of them dissatisfied enough to make a difference. Until there are enough and until they get organized, nothing is going to change. And we'll continue to wage war when it's in the corporate interest to do so, and build and install useless missile systems, and be feared and hated around the world.

And slowly the dissent that is tolerated now will be quashed, and so will the easy access to information and communication.  Why should the corporate state even allow for the possibility of an organized opposition?  It will all seem so innocuous and tame--like the passage of the Military Commissions Act--and moderates will strive to see that the people pushing this program have legitimate points and the people protesting will be portrayed in the media as leftist cranks.

I don't necessarily believe things have to turn out so bleakly as this (Al-Marri is a hopeful sign), but I think there is a far greater possibility of it than most Americans think. For this reason, I'm going to make an effort henceforth to limit posts about issues happening in the political sphere.  I feel as though everything I say about politics is tediously repetitious, and since I have no positive program to offer,  I am going to try to focus more on things going on in the cultural sphere that give me hope, and which in time may have an impact in shaping what happens in the political and economic spheres. Bono at the G8  Conference last week is refreshing in this regard.  Check out this interview he did on NPR. For now, at least, this is the best we can expect.

The Cavin', Craven Dems' Meta-message

The problem for the Dems lies in their living down to the GOP's stereotyping of them:

Behind Rothenberg's analysis -- like the analysis of the risk-averse pollster-consultants who have been running Democratic candidates into the electoral ground for a decade -- is the assumption that voters hear the words Democrats say but don't pick up the meta-message they're conveying with their actions: that they're too frightened to do and say what they believe. Democrats can tell voters that they're strong on national security, but the public can see with its own eyes what Dems do when confronted with aggression. If voters don't trust Democrats with national security, there's nothing the matter with Kansas. Kansans are seeing them clearly. They know cowardice when they see it. And Democrats have repeatedly displayed cowardice for a decade. The irony is that every time they haven't -- like when they started to challenge Bush on his equation of the Iraq War with the 'war on terror' -- the public has responded."

"Voters," Westen told me, "don't like pollster-driven politics or politicians, and with good reason: They want to know what their leaders' values are, because if they know their values, they know how they're likely to represent them -- not just on today's issues, but on tomorrow's, about which we may have no inkling today. Political scientists have found that people prefer to vote for candidates who share their values, but they prefer a candidate who is strong in his or her convictions -- even if they don't share those convictions -- to one whose convictions are hidden in the fine print. Being strong and principled isn't about being left, center, or right. The fact that voters associate values with the right reflects the fact that conservatives wear their values proudly on their sleeves, and they display their principles in their voting records. Conservatives don't vote for bills they don't believe in. If the public associates principles and values with the GOP, it's time Democrats start showing voters that there's another set of principles and values out there: theirs." (Drew Westen quoted by Arianna Huffington

Among the conservatives of my acquaintance the term "liberal" is synonomous with "unprincipled."  I think that Dems simply don't understand that much of the contempt directed toward them has less to do with policy and more to do with the kind of political calculation exemplified by Rothenberg.

Now I realize that there are as many or more unprincipled Republicans as there are unprincipled Democrats, but the Republicans are aggressively unprincipled and and the Dems are passively unprincipled.  The Republicans for that reasons have become dangerous, and need somebody to stand up to them. The Dems represent a national constituency that is smarter and more sophisticated in its understanding about the complexities of the world, but their superiority in this regard is useless if they are incapable of asserting themselves against the crudity of the cultural and corporate right. Wouldn't it be nice if the Dems would show as much muscleheaded, unsophisticated toughness as Bush when it comes to issues they care about? 

Ideological considerations aside, which team are most Americans going to identify with--the bullies or the sissies?  If you're an employer hiring from one pool or the other, which pool do you think you're going to pick from most?  Do you want aggressive or passive employees?  Me: I want principled employees who are willing to fight for what they believe in.  I know what certain individuals in the Dem party believe in, but I don't know what the party believes in, and whatever it is, I don't expect the party to fight for it.

Tom Tomorrow makes the same point here.

Sophomoric Conservatism II

Greenwald posted yesterday on a theme similar to what I wrote about Saturday.  My post was prompted by a column by George Will, but segued into a criticism of Andrew Sullivan. The thrust of Greenwald's post is to take a look at the growing trend within conservatism to repudiate Bush as unconservative.  There are some who have even taken to calling Bush a liberal. It's facetious. The point is, though, that movement conservatives' distancing themselves from him has nothing to do with Bush's lack of conservative principle.  Greenwald:

What is most glaringly apparent from this entire spectacle is that outside of a handful of honest conservatives too small to merit much discussion [the ones who objected to Bush early on as a radical rather than a "conservative" (and were viciously attacked as heretics, non-conservatives, even liberals)], the right-wing "conservative movement" -- which eagerly ignored its own "principles" when Bush was popular and re-discovered them only when it needed to repudiate him -- has conclusively demonstrated that its only real "principle" is its own political power.

Power is the only thing that matters to rightists, which are a different kind of cat from the rare principled conservative. Rightism is more a kind of personality disorder than it is a set of principles. And rightism has been the disease that has infected the Republican Party for over twenty years now culminating in the current administration.The crony capitalism and militarism that are at the heart of the big government and big spending of the Reagan and Bush administrations has nothing to do with liberalism and is completely consistent with-right wing politics over the last century in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

In any event, this is a paragraph in Greenwald's post that Sullivan seems to have missed, because in a post today he focuses on another one:

The media's function is not merely to pass on self-serving conservative propaganda but to report actual historical fact, to point out when such propaganda deviates from objective truth. The "conservative movement" now desperately trying to depict Bush as an anti-conservative vigorously argued the exact opposite for the last six years. No account of the conservative movement's chicanery can be remotely accurate without prominently highlighting that fact. George Bush is tied irrevocably around the neck of the right-wing movement because they tied themselves to him when they thought doing so would be politically beneficial.

To the above paragraph by Greenwald Sullivan responds:

What about those of us who complained about spending in 2002? Who backed Kerry in 2004 because of Bush's unconservative record? Who opposed torture as soon as the evidence emerged? Who dissented from the FMA and Schiavo? Who opposed compassionate conservatism from the start? Who wrote books explaining how Bush was not a conservative? I guess there weren't many of us in public. Give Bruce Bartlett some props. But our existence is also part of the objective truth of the past six years.

My problem with Sullivan is not that he hasn't the capacity to recognize what this administration really is, but that his conservatism was an impediment early on to his predicting what it would become.  No one was a bigger Bush cheerleader in the beginning, and none a greater disparager of those as "Bush haters" who saw this man with clearer eyes for what he was. 

Sullivan is not a complete fool, but he doesn't seem to understand how power works, and he doesn't connect the dots when it comes to the irrelevance of his conservative principles when it comes to the way the Republican party operates.  His mistake is one that conservatives and center right people have made consistently.  They think because someone says something they want to hear, that makes them better fitted to run government.  Small government conservatives are among the naivest of the naive. Big government is here to say; the only question is whose interests it will serve. These principled conservatives haven't caught on to how they have been enablers of rightism even if they are appalled by it. If there are any Sullivan admirers, please defend him and explain why his brand of conservatism has any credibility whatsoever.  I just don't get it.