It is easy sometimes to lose sight of how extreme a period this is in America's history, how profoundly our national character has been degraded and how fundamentally our country's core has changed over the last six years. Glenn Greenwald
Well, yes, but let's put that into some perspective. I'd argue that the seeds of this profound change started to germinate in the 1920s, and what started growing then is reaching full maturity now. Bush would not have been a possibility if the old American republican ideals hadn't died, and their demise began in the 20s and 30s. It's been a slow letting go, but Reaganism/Bushism, which is a counterfeit American idealism, has arisen to replace it. Let me explain.
Since I bandy around the words premodern, modern, and postmodern so much, I thought it might be useful to define terms and to have a reference piece to which I can direct people who have questions about it. Some of this for long-time readers is repetitive, but it might be a useful review and it explains more clearly the frame in which I understand what's happening to us.
Since my background is in philosophy/history, I think of the “modern” as the period from the Renaissance to the end of WWI, which would put us now in the postmodern, for want of a name that describes it more on its own terms. I think of historical period we’re in now as related to the modern in much the same way that the modern related to the medieval--the 'modern' was the post-medieval. As medieval habits of mind and medieval social institutions lingered on into the modern period in the West, so now do modern ideas linger on into the postmodern period, but they no longer represent the most dynamic forces shaping its social life.
My problem with Liberals lies in that they cling to old modern habits of mind not realizing the game has changed. Modern liberalism doesn't offer a real answer, and that's why it is so weak in the the face of reactionary passions. Everyone senses it has no legitimacy anymore. Nevertheless, given the choice between liberal political choices and reactionary choices, the liberal ones are far less dangerous and destructive.
The New Deal that I often celebrate in this blog, as are social democracies everywhere, is a product of that old modern liberalism, and as I've argued several times, to be a New Deal Democrat is to be the real conservative, because it preserves some order, some sense of the common good, in the face of the Social Darwinist chaos into which the Libertarians and reactionaries would plunge us. But the New Deal is not a way forward, it's simply a holding action. That's why nobody's very excited about New Deal style policies, and why they seem "old thinking". It's not because it's bad policy; it's because the zeitgeist has passed it by.
Anyway, that's what the philosophers and historians mean when they use the word 'modern'--it's the optimistic, humanistic project that began during the Renaissance and culminated during the Enlightenment. I think there's some confusion about the word because it's not how architecture, which coined the word postmodern, or art historians use the term. In the art and architecture world modernism is associated with the rejection of the late 19th-century of stuffy, post-Metternichian, Victorian positivism, traditionalism, and formalism; it’s the same thing that we think of as the early avante-garde. I see it as the second phase of the Romantic impulse, which arose as a negative reaction to the emotionally sterile rationalism of the Enlightenment. But moderns, whether irrationalist Romantics, rationalist philosophes, or scientific positivists, shared a great sense of optimism about progress and future possibility and a sense that history as a movement toward a better future for all. It's that end of optimism that marks the end of the modern.
But art and literary historians divide modernism into two phases, the pre-WWI and the post WWI. The first phase still shared the optimism of Enlightenment rationalism, and saw stodgy traditionalism standing in the way of progress. These modernists were the late 19th/early 20th century impressionists, symbolists, futurists, etc. in the arts and were the progressives in politics influenced to varying degrees by Marxist ideas, and as such were usually supportive of anything “revolutionary” or anti-traditional. They saw the great enemy, especially in Europe, as the lingering medieval institutions like the church and the landed aristocracy, the class system, and the bourgeois materialist philistinism that kept progress from progressing.
I see these pre-WWI modernists as pretty much in the same spirit as the 18th-century Enlightenment rationalists, but in an industrial-age key. Meaning for them came from fighting against the late 19th-century entrenched cultural and political establishments in the hope of giving birth to a utopia imagined in any of a number of ways. And I see the post-WWI modernists as the beginning of the post-modern, a new frame of mind defined by its no longer being able to take seriously the optimistic, progressive Enlightenment rationalist frame of mind. Here we have Eliot, Pound, Heidegger emerging in the 20s as looking backward rather than forward, trying to recover what had been lost, trying to find a primal immediacy or a lost integrity in a world whose culture and sense of shared meaning lay in sherds. They would define the incipient cultural right wing of the post modern impulse.
Of course, modernism lingers, just as the medieval mindframe lingered, but if the post-modern is about the loss of hope in progress, in order, in anything making any objective sense. It’s a loss in this sense of common sense. It’s a movement that is shot through with despair and cynicism. It’s a period of “decadence”, which Jacques Barzun defines as a period when a society loses all sense of future possibility. It’s a period in which nobody believes the same thing as anybody else. And yet subjective belief is the only thing anybody has, and so almost anything is believable, because what standard is there to evaluate whose beliefs are more truthful than anyone else’s? It’s all a subjective, surreal dream, and a sense of objectivity, of there being any absolute truth, is considered naïve and dangerous.
Post WWI Modernism (or what I call postmodernism) is about the re-assertion of the irrational—the Adler/Nietzschean will, Freud’s libido, Heidegger's angst, Jung’s collective unconscious, Picasso’s dissociated cubism, the subjectivism of Derrida, the relativity and uncertainty principles in physics. It’s romanticism without the optimism. It’s about fragmentation, disintegration, radical subjectivity, radical individualism, loss of community and loss of a sense of belonging to something larger. It’s about living in a world in which nothing is given and everything is chosen, where freedom of choice is the one sacred value about which there is no dispute. And it’s about the panic reaction of people who find they cannot cope with the uncertainty and chaos of all that. This fragmentation is embraced by the cultural left wing of postmodernism; the cultural right wing hates it and wants to find a way out of it.
And so in such a anxiety-soaked dreamscape the political leader who dominates is the one that weaves the most compelling dream. Hitler/Goebbels were in this sense the first major postmodern political leaders, and WWII was the first postmodern war. Cheney/Rove over here are perhaps as skillful, and the endless War on Terror is the second major war in the postmodern era. If there is another possibility, it hasn’t emerged yet. Leftist politics are too much a function of discredited pre-WWI modernist optimism, and in this country just seems flaky. So the nostalgia- and anxiety-driven right wing faces no robust opposition anymore, and won’t so long as some sense of plausible future possibility can be imagined and a broad consensus developed around it.
My own belief is that we are currently in a transitional phase, that we’re in a period similar to the 14th century in Europe with its plagues, wars, schisms, and despair, which gave way to the springtime we think of now as the Renaissance in the 15th century. But in the meantime we muddle through as best we can and hope the crazies don’t do too much damage. It’s not looking good right now. Nevertheless, I have an un-extinguishable faith in the human spirit and in the mysterious working of grace. This too shall pass. But the absolutely worst thing we can do is force things, even with the best of intentions. The brown shirts and the revolutionary guard always have the most idealistic of intentions and the most lofty justifications for their brutality. And anybody who presents him- or herself as an idealist in this sense must be resisted.