After the Future

The Anti-Majoritarians

Jonathan Chait in TNR:

In February 2006, the conservative journal Policy Review published an essay that was shockingly heretical, though perhaps unintentionally so. In it, Carles Boix of the University of Chicago argued that there is a link between democracy and economic equality:

In an unequal society, the majority resents its diminished status. It harbors the expectation of employing elections to drastically overturn its condition. In turn, the wealthy minority fears the outcome that may follow from free elections and the assertion of majority rule. As a result, it resorts to authoritarian institutions to guarantee its social and economic advantage.

Of the many taboos that prevail among conservatives, the one forbidding any serious discussion of inequality is perhaps the strictest. Any forthright examination of this topic will lead one quickly to the realization that American society has been spreading apart rapidly for three decades and that Republican economic policies have without a doubt contributed mightily to this gulf. So conservatives usually ignore the subject of inequality, except perhaps to minimize its scale or importance.

Why, then, did Policy Review, which is published by the staunchly conservative Hoover Institution, open its pages to such apostasy? Well, it didn't intend to. Boix's essay (which was brilliant and widely discussed) concerned the inculcation of democracy abroad and did not deal directly with the United States. And the circumstances Boix envisioned--mainly, developing countries attempting a transition to democracy--are different from those in an advanced democracy. Americans, fortunately, do not have to worry about kleptocrats, political violence, and massive vote fraud.

Where Are We Going?

I don't feel much of a need to comment on the Obama transition. I don't have a particular template to impose over this process to evaluate whether things are going well or poorly, and I have no interest in decoding every move as some augury of the administration to come. The country's electing Obama was the best possible outcome; it remains to be seen whether it will make a difference or whether it's too late to matter.

This country has lost its way and it's an open question whether it can find it again. So that's the bigger and more interesting question: Where are we going as a society, and how much control do we have over the direction we're taking? It's another way of asking whether this country is capable of self-rule or whether it will be ruled by events out of its control. 

I expect in the short run for the same old mistakes to be made because even with the best leadership, a new habit of mind has not yet been formed on a consensus level within the leadership class that is capable to see other possibilities. There are too many people with a stake in the status quo, and they are not always or mostly bad people--just unimaginative. Why did most Americans vote for Bush in 2004? Mainly becuase most of them weren't paying attention and it was easier to go with the guy you knew than the new guy.  And the new guy didn't make a compelling enough case for changing regimes.

The situation is different now because we are in crisis mode, and everybody knows that something has to give.  But institutional inertia, and the inertia of group psychology requires that the old methods and thinking must be proved completely ineffective before new thinking and methods are considered or embraced. Most people are not visionaries and when they look into the future, they are capable of seeing only a continuity of the recent past and even those who want change, are not capable of convincing others until every chance is given to the old methods to fail. So we should expect more continuity than change in the next year or so.

It's all a matter of timing and having the right people in position when the timing is right for change. The wrong people were in position on 9/11, and we saw the dread consequences of that. So my hope for Obama at this juncture does not lie in his coming into the job with a laundry list of programs to change the way politics are done in Washington. I think we are in the midst of reality forcing a change and that we need somebody with intelligence and strength who understands what he's up against and will frame the best possible course of action given the realities that confront him. Either Obama is the man of the hour or he isn't.  We'll know soon enough.

Scientistic Humanism vs. Personalist Humanism

Scientism is a world view that promotes natural science as the only legitimate authority over all other interpretations of life. If it can't be explained in naturalistic terms that make sense within the materialist frame within which science operates, there is no plausible or legitimate explanation. Personalism (see also here) affirms the absolute value, dignity and freedom of every human person. And a corollary is that the weakest and most vulnerable need the protection of the stronger. 

In American society the first is dominant, but it operates in a kind of tension with the second. "No man left behind" is a personalist motto used in the military and echoed in the Bush administration's education policy. These slogans suggest that the strong have a profound responsibility toward those who are weak or hurt, and almost all Americans would affirm the ideal. If Americans were completely utilitarian in their thinking, these slogans would have no bite--Americans would rationally take for granted that the weak and wounded should be left to die so as not to burden those who are strong and healthy. If someone were to be completely rational in a utilitarian mindset, it would make no sense to risk the lives of the strong to save the lives of the weak. Some people in fact think in these utilitarian rationalist terms, but normal people think of them as morally retarded.

Scientism, insofar as it justifies itself in humanistic terms, relies on utilitarian logic. It propounds to be an agent of progress in developing technologies that promote the material convenience and happiness of human beings and defines happiness as the diminution of pain and the maximization of pleasure. This fundamental frame of mind provides the foundation for consumer capitalism and the technological innovations it finances. And it is fundamental to the worldview of all Americans who live and work in its mainstream culture. It promotes the kind of soft nihilism that was lampooned in film WALL-E, which takes this kind of scientistic consumerism to its logical conclusion in the depiction of life on the starliner space ships. I see the film an attempt to dramatize in popular terms the conflict between Scientism and Personalism. The film would have no dramatic heft if viewers didn't feel the tension between these competing frames of mind, even if most viewers have no idea what the terms scientism and personalism mean.

Liberal Social Order

(Revised 11/21) One of the basic differences between Social Conservatives and Social Liberals lies in the former's belief that chaos will ensue once traditional values and mores are completely jettisoned.  As conservatives often say, Liberalism, for all its contempt for traditional mores, still lives off of the tradition's capital. And conservataives warn that once it is spent comes the flood.

I used to be sympathetic to that argument, but living in Seattle, which is about as secular liberal as it gets, one has to be impressed that people live quite decent and orderly lives without feeling the need for church or for a strict traditional moral code. I think the worst thing that you can say about them is that they are boring and rather one-dimensional, but they are very orderly, fair-minded, and polite. American liberals are all Hobbes's children whether they realize it or not. Liberals live not in the fear of God, but in the fear of violence and disorder.

Secular theorists would argue against the tradition's moral capital argument with some variation of contract theory. Any reference to God or natural law is unnecessary. People agree to control their impulses and to deal fairly with others because they see it's in their best interest to do so. Liberals fear conflict and disorder, and they have been purged of the primitive, violent impulses mainly derived from the ancient sense of honor that they find so hard to understand driving behavior in premodern societies whether in the middle east or the local urban gang. People with education and a certain level of bourgeois acculturation seem to recognize this in a way that the uneducated underclass and populist traditionals don't. Or another way of putting it is liberals have had the thymos squeezed out of them. Today's U.S Senate is a model Hobbesian society--a bunch of timid bourgeois joined together in for purposes of mutual self-preservation and risk aversion. The last thing one has come to expect from any one of them, with a few exceptions, is a spirited fight for principle.

Education and a certain bourgeois breeding, which has little to do with religious values, has bleached the primitive, violent passions out of the souls of educated whites--and people of any color who become liberal bourgeois by acculturation. A white liberal has come to mean having a certain "niceness"; they are people who don't cause a ruckus. To use Plato's terms they're all about eros and have abdicated thymos--consumers not fighters. Guided by the utilitarian ethic which admonishes them to seek pleasure and avoid pain, they are people who generally calculate where lies the the path of least resistance and take it.  They don't want trouble, and "wild and crazy" for them is almost always a pathetic affectation.

Through a Glass Muddy...

Even in the muckiest mud, seeds left to us from past moments of verdant growth lie hidden, and we should not be too surprised at some point some of them germinate. A cultural springtime is part gift, but also, because culture is always a human artifact, part effort and human imagination. We have to work with what we are given, and a part of that comes from the past, but the energy to make things grow comes from some where else.  That's the fire I've alluded to, and I would argue that the fire comes from the Future and is the ground of our hope. Will we have enough collective sense to work with it? (h/t Forestwalker):

Transformational Presidencies

Robert Kuttner:

One of the most instructive aspects of transformative leadership is the relationship between the president and social movements. Lincoln had the abolitionists, pushing him to move faster. FDR had the industrial labor movement. And of course LBJ had Dr. King and the civil rights movement. Sometimes these presidents actually encouraged these movements; sometimes they disappointed the movements.

The intriguing question is what happens to the great mobilization of people who organized for Obama. How does it shift from a campaign machine into a true social movement?

I think the big reason why Obama will become Bill Clinton rather than FDR is that it's not clear to me that there is any organized social movement to push him. I might be wrong here, but if there is one, I don't see it. Presidents and the legislators he needs to get things done are under enormous pressure from well-organized and well-funded factions to do what is in those factions' interests. They get what they want unless there are other equally well-organized factions to exert counterpressure.

Presidents can't just can't do what they want; they need organized support. And where is that going to come from: Move-On? The blogosphere? Something surprising that we don't see yet? Perhaps.  Maybe I'm just stuck in rear-view mirror thinking. It could be that the kind of social movements that drove change in the past will not be its drivers in the future. But I'm not clear how it's going to work.

It could also be that the Republican Party will have become so dispirited that it will not put up much of a fight, i.e., that its legislators will cave for Obama the way the Dems caved for Bush, but I doubt it. The difference between the Republicans and the Dems in the last couple of cycles has been that the Republicans in addition to the well funded support of corporate interests, particularly in pharmaceuticals, defense, and energy, have had broad, well-organized support among the religious right and social conservatives. These GOP legislators knew that if they broke ranks, their future in politics was likely over.  We know better than to assume that Dems will have the same discipline in supporting any transformational program initiated by Obama because they have no fear of being punished.

I know there are more moderates and liberals than there are people on the hard right, but are they even remotely as well organized and capable of punishing intransigent Dem legislators? I don't think so, but maybe that will change. The key question is where will most of the pressure on them be coming from? We can be sure that the corporate interests will do what they always do to coopt Dem legislators who are for sale. So where will the pressure come from to keep these legislators in line, assuming Obama even attempts to effect the transformational?  The picture is pretty blurry right now, and so it will be interesting to see what things will look like as they come into clearer focus.

I'd be satisfied if he could just repair the damage done to the constitution and to our reputation abroad, and initiate some programs on energy and infrastructure.  Healthcare is going to be a bear.

P.S. Maybe the Beltway establishment will be Obama's organized, well-funded pressure group. 

The Flame of Living Tradition

Deneen reports on The Future of Conservatism conference at Yale where he was a presenter. He was particularly impressed with Anthony Esolen, whose presentation he briefly summarizes as follows:

I can hardly summarize what he said, and am told that a recording will be available on the I.S.I. website before too long, but a basic insight was how deeply ignorant we have become concerning the absence of an actual culture in our time - understood as a vast, almost intuitively known and usable storehouse of collected wisdom, myth, story, poetry, song, worship, memory, and knowledge from the past. We are likely to know such things as the ending of this unforgettable line - "Rice-a-Roni, the..." What we lack is a vibrantly alive connection to that storehouse that was once available to even the "uneducated" in what we often dismiss as ignorant and backward societies. Still, weaving the tales of our own cultural inheritance, recalling to us the tales of Homer, plays of Ben Jonson, the words of Shakespeare, the epic lines of Milton, the verses of the Bible, Esolen began to reconnect all of us with a culture that is rightfully ours and invited us to become fully capable of a true form of leisure - from which culture derives, and which in turn makes possible true leisure - drawing on the wisdom of Josef Pieper. It was a moving and inspiring performance, and the audience was visibly roused and cheered.

Maybe I don't fully understand what Deneen wants to say, and I look forward to hearing Prof. Esolen's talk when it becomes available, but is his point that consumer culture is inferior to what it destroyed? Of course it is. We are swimming in a  culture whose values have been almost completely subordinated to the requirements of consumer capitalism, and the result is the "deep" mud  to which I referred in yesterday's post.  We're so spiritually impoverished we mostly don't have the imagination to know what we've lost--how one-dimensional is the culture we live in and how flat-souled we've all become adpating to it. We're wallowing in the mud, and in doing so think ourselves superior to all the rich, vibrant cultures that preceded us.

Nothing is given anymore in the way it was. If to live in a living tradition means to have passed to oneself the living flame of the culture's wisdom from the previous generation, there is no longer a flame to pass. It has been extinguished in the mud. We can lament it and long for the good old days, or we can accept it as reality and try to find a way forward.

Artifacts have been left by spirited men and women who preceded us, but that's all they are, clues that point to something they knew that we don't. So I'm not so interested in the artifacts except as a tool to understand better what our ancestors understood and that we need to understand once again, but with second naivete. So there are resources upon which we can draw, but they are not something we are born into or live into as a normal part of acculturation. We have to dig into them and into ourselves to find where the nexus point lies.  That nexus point is the flame that animates living, vibrant cultures, but it's gone underground. We have to work to recover that flame by other means and if we succeed find disciplins appropriate for our time and situation that protect it from being snuffed out. That requires effort and faith, and if enough people keep the faith and make the effort, then maybe there'll be a tipping point into renaissance.

Looking Ahead

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into
the future.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.

--Marshall McLuhan

For a McLuhanish essay I wrote some time ago, see here. The point is that we all have habits of mind that make it extraordinarily difficult to see what's really going on. The goal of this blog is to identify those habits of mind as obstacles and to seek more effective habits suited to our real circumstances.

I'm not saying I'm particularly good at it, but only that's what I'm trying to do. But a working assumption that undergirds just about everything I write here is that the conventional wisdom is mud and has almost nothing to do with the way things are; it is only important to understand it as we must understand the nature of the spell that beguiles us if we are to find a way to break it.

I certainly don't know more than anyone else, but as we move forward, I see the task as the striving to be vigilant to discern signs of the burgeoning new, the things that cannot be seen in the rear-view mirror.  Or another way of putting is that while it is impossible to avoid dealing with the mud in which we're all submerged, the more important task is the struggle to get our heads above the mud as best we can, even if only momentarily, to scan the surface to see what might be growing there.

It's Not about Left or Right . . .

. . . It's about forward or backward. I think it was Newark mayor Cory Booker who said that on one of the news shows the other day. Of course what forward means to someone who leans left vs. someone who leans right is where lies the rub. But I agree with Booker, and I'd like to talk about the tension between forward and backward, which relates to the tension between left and right, liberal and conservative.  Sanity and health, as I've said before, lies in living in the tension between such polarities.  Insanity follows from a one-sidedness that denies the validity of the other element in the pair. So I want to talk about how I see a more healthful relationship between conservatives and liberals, one that might actually lead to a cure of our current illness.

I've been spending a lot of time lately boning up on the thinking of conservative intellectuals, who compose a rather diverse group.  But the one thing that unites them is their opposition to the flattening uni-dimensionality they associated with the Left, which they perceive to have been slowly destroying America since at least the time of the New Deal. I think it's clear that they were never really "conservative" if by conservative you mean trying to conserve something that was under threat of being lost, because in the 40s through the 70s it had already been lost, and they knew it--there was nothing  for them to conserve. It was for them a question of restoration of something lost.

And so after 1964 it looked to the world as though they would be doomed forever to play the role of a minority opposition. The establishment was Liberal. And so for this reasons the most interesting among them saw themselves as a remnant of counter-revolutionaries, which would someday restore America to what it had been before the Depression and Roosevelt and the socialist apparatchiks that had infiltrated the government in the 30s had destroyed it. I think these conservatives were wrong to think that the old thing could be restored, but I think they had justifiable concerns and that it's important to take their concerns seriously without accepting their polarizing restorationist program.

What Now?

What can be realistically expected? I think there are two basic scenarios: 1. Obama will be Bill Clinton, version 2, and we'll have business as usual but done a little more competently and pragmatically than during the Bush years.  2. Obama will be a transformational candidate like FDR, JFK and Reagan. 3. Obama will reveal himself to be the hard-left ideologue that the right fears him to be, and he will propose far-reaching and expensive government programs and tax policies to redistribute wealth, to hamstring business, and to elevate left-leaning minorities into positions of power and influence.

The third scenario isn't even worth considering, even though Rush and Fox will do everything they can to make it look like that's what's happening. The first scenario is very likely, given that the inertia within the Beltway is enormous, and getting it to change course will require an enormous  effort and political dexterity.  In this scenario Obama administration will make the same missteps, with updated versions of "Ask but don't tell", and nannygate in its first few months, the news shows and the blogosphere will obsess about the same old inanities.

It will be some variation on this movie theme we've all seen before: Obama like Clinton will be continuously playing defense, and he'll be rendered ineffective and a joke, just like everybody said such an inexperienced compromiser would be.  And in 2010, the Republicans will make a comeback in the midterms, and we're back where we started.  We shouldn't be too surprised if it plays out like this, and it probably will if Obama is just another run-of-the mill politician playing the game, the kind of president Hillary would have been. I don't think he is, but I'm not certain he's not.

Turning the Page

This is a good day for America and so promising for its future. I'm struggling to find an apt way to put what I'm feeling. I'm not as articulate about it as I'd like, because I don't quite grasp it as something fully formed in my mind.  But it's as if the fever with its delirium has broken, and while we still don't feel very well, and we're still weak and woozy lying there in sweat-soaked sheets, we feel that a shift has occurred--that we're going to get better. And all the people who care about us, sitting  silently on vigil at our bedside, worried to death about whether we would pull through, are now chatting, smiling, and relieved. At least that's how I feel this evening, relieved and proud that Americans could deliver for this unlikely candidate such a resounding, decisive victory. We haven't chosen utopia; we've simply chosen health.

There is nothing but upside, and whatever the reasons--the economy, wanting to punish Bush, Sarah Palin, the war--Americans, whether they consciously intended it or not, have chosen to put the man in office who has the most potential to effect a necessary transition from a sick America to a healthier America. In the coming months and years deologues of the left and the right will complain and criticize about the particulars--and I will, too--but at a more fundamental level we have chosen to get better rather than to remain ill. And today that's all that matters.

We've been pluralist for a long time, but it has sickened us. It has been confusing and scary for so many people. The importance of this moment is not primarily Obama's potential to effect new, specific policies, liberal or otherwise--we will judge his effectiveness as policymaker and statesman four years or eight years from now--but now something already is significantly effected. We have turned a page in our understanding about American identity. And with that comes new possibilities that were unimaginable even a few years ago--especially in the aftermath of November 2004. The idea of those charming kids playing at home in the White House and out on the lawn--and that becoming something that all of us come to think of as normal--that this family is now to be our first family. It's just hit me how hugely significant that is.

"Real America", as the Sara Palins define it, has just been dealt a significant blow. Her party has relied on a narrow, primitive imagination of what it means to be an American, and its exponents will be pushed to the margins of relevancy as the new, but not yet realized, richer imagination about who we are pushes its way to the center.  It's what we have always been; it's just that we haven't really been able to embrace it and to accept it, and really to celebrate it.  Obama will help us to realize what America has always been in potentia and to be ok with it, and to move beyond all the ways old America has restricted us as a people.

I'm not saying that there won't be backwaters of resistance, but that we have just experienced a tipping point, and the things that seemed to matter so much to so many about race and ethnicity and Otherness will stop mattering. We've tipped over into another space where  almost everyone will soon, maybe in two or three years, will be wondering why we ever thought or felt such things--the way it's hard for adults to remember what they felt and thought when they were children.  It will become an irrelevancy. A significant majority of Americans have made the grownup choice.  They have put aside their age old resentments and fears and have embraced competency and sanity.  It's a good day for America.

Contractarians and Beehives

By way of Ross Douthat I have come across this very interesting 2007 post in Edge by psychologist Jonathan Haidt in which he argues that there are five fundamental moral stances in any society. I remember being quasi aware of it at the time it came out, but for some reason didn't grok it.  There was also a NYT article about his findings around this time that triggered a flurry of interest.  Briefly summarized (with my addition of the taboos), the five foundations of moral sentiment are:

1. Harm: Don't do anything that will cause others to suffer. Taboo: murder.
2. Fairness/Reciprocity: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Taboo: taking what's not yours/inequality.
3. Ingroup loyalty: Always do what benefits the tribe. Taboo: treason.
4. Hierarchy: Respect for authority and social order and for the existing norms established by authorities. Taboos: disobedience, irreverence
5. Purity: A sense of the sacred and profane, that some behaviors are sublime and others disgusting. Taboos: gluttony/intoxication, fornication, perversion.

The main take away is that the first two predominate in Liberals, who have little sense how 3-5 serve moral purposes.  Conservatives embrace all five, but tend to value  the latter three more highly. The Times article quotes Haidt: “Imagine visiting a town where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex ‘doggy-style’ in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.” "Disgusting?" Will Wilkenson  asks (in an interesting Libertarian take on Haidt's work).  "No doubt. Immoral? If your thought is, 'Well, they’re not violating anyone’s rights,' then, Haidt predicts, you probably didn’t vote for Bush."

So many interesting things to develop from these ideas, and I plan to in the future, but I thought I'd start with Douthat's response, which I found intriguing. In an earlier post on Haidt's work, Douthat quotes Haidt's piece in Edge, in which he talks about the first two moral stances--harm and fairness--as typical of modern contractual societies, and the last three has characteristic of beehive societies:

The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose. . . .

The beehive approach, in contrast, takes the group and its territory as fundamental sources of value. Individual bees are born and die by the thousands, but the hive lives for a long time, and each individual has a role to play in fostering its success.The two fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and subversion from within. Either one can lead to the death of the hive, so all must pull together, do their duty, and be willing to make sacrifices for the group. Bees don't have to learn how to behave in this way but human children do, and this is why cultural conservatives are so heavily focused on what happens in schools, families, and the media. . . .

One might ask, If the beehive is an image of how a healthy tradition-centered society works, isn't it also an image for how a totalitarian society works?  Are not Communist and Fascist societies also beehives?  The longing for life in a beehive in postmodern societies, i.e., societies in which a living, vibrant connection to the ancestors no longer exists, is precisely what leads to totalitarianism. I would say that totalitarianism is the bizarro reverse image of a healthy traditionalist society, as for instance Dante's Christendom or on another level, any aboriginal tribal society.

If both totalitarian and traditionalist societies are alike as beehives in what do they differ.? I would argue that you get totalitarianism when a people, stripped of its traditional way of life, tries to live a kind of atavistic traditionalism in which the state substitutes for tradition, and force substitutes for sacred authority. Societies that evolve democratically into social democracies are in far less danger of left totalitarianism, but because of their complacency are vulnerable to a coup from the right. I'll come back later to defend that idea.

But first I want to retrace my steps. My argument for some time now has been that zombie traditonalists, people who live in groups where traditional forms are no longer animated by the cultural life that originally gave rise to them, are more likely to embrace a totalitarian regime. Why? Because they long for a way of life that has been lost; they are confused, alienated, and anomic.  A people deracinated from its tradition might cling to empty traditional formalities out of habit, but they are peculiarly receptive to anyone who will fill the empty form with something that seems like life, even if it's warmed over death, so long as it makes them feel like they are living. In other words they are vulnerable to cultism.

How many times have we seen it? Oh, how alive it makes one feel, the thrill, to join in a frenzied book burning or to lynch a black man or gas some Jews or disappear someone's father or husband or invade a heathen country?  And as thrilling as it is, it's also ok. They're doing God's work.  How do they know? Because this is what the  cult leader/authorities want and they are with their neighbors doing it. How shamed  would they feel if they were to refuse to go along. They're doing it to protect the tribe. It's a sacred duty. 

That's how it works for people who live in a cultic, self-reinforcing bubble world and anyone who challenges them is automatically identified as the treasonous Other. That's the kind of world that the hard right lives in at this time in our country. They have no real connection to the living, now dormant, tradition of the West. They live within some of its empty forms but with this other death-in-life that fills them.

Zombie traditionalists embrace what the cultic death mongers offer them because they crave to belong unthinkingly to a given world in which the choices are all made for them.  These deathmongers speak their language and appeal to their aggrieved sense of tribal identity.  This is what Franco, Petain, Mussolini, Hitler, and the Latin American dictators have all done. It's what all cult leaders do. They take advantage of people who hate how modernity has stripped their world of communal warmth and sacred mystery. These leaders promise them falsely that they can get it back.

Ok, but that's not what a thoughtful conservative like Douthat wants.  He wants exactly the opposite:

One of the central questions of our time, to my mind, comes down to balance: How far do we want to go in the contractual direction, and to what extent do we want to preserve and shore up the beehives? To what extent do we need to provide space for the dissenters to breathe, and to what extent do we want a society where the conformists can flourish? My preference would be to inhabit a society that's formally contractualist, that protects the rights of minorities and provides opportunities for dissenters and free spirits to find their way in the world, but that is undergirded by sturdy beehives - by rooted communities that are, as Haidt puts it, high on social capital and low on anomie. This is the American model, I would argue, from Tocqueville's time down to our own: a nation balanced between contractualism and community. And the question becomes, for those who think this model has been a great success, where do you strike the balance? And which side of the equation needs shoring up? . . .

Traditional forms of social organization are weaker in today's America than they were fifty years ago, but they're still much, much stronger than in Europe, where the economic left has held the whip for decades.

That's very similar to what I've been saying in my pieces over the years.  In the political sphere we are all secular contractualists, but in the cultural sphere we develop a rich spiritual life that provides social cohesion and an antidote to anomie. I'm willing to argue the point with those who disagree, and I suspect Douthat would, but isn't that the formula for the kind of European or New Deal style social democracy that conseratives hate?

I would also argue that Douthat is wrong about Europe. Maybe some day I'll mount a more concerted case to support the point, but I think the developed European countries have done a much better job of maintaining local cultural vitality and traditions than we have done in the States. The Libertarian individualists among us have played a more influential and destructive role in the States than they have  played in Europe, and the Europeans, I think, with varying degrees of success have  found the balance that eludes us--or at least they do it better than we do. Americans might be more religious and Europeans more secular, but Europeans by and large have a sense cultural identity that is more securely rooted than Americans, and perhaps because of that they have been able to balance that better with fairness proposition. And let's face it, a lot of American religiosity is weird and zombie-esque.

So here's my point, and I'll try to elaborate more on it in future posts or in response to comments if there are any. The antidote to statism that conservatives rightly fear  is vibrant local cultures. In that I agree with Douthat. But vibrant local cultures in the past meant "given" traditionalist, usually agricultural cultures.  That "givenness" is no longer a healthy possibility for the establishment of vibrant local cultures in the future.  We will all increasingly  be living in a pluralistic world. This Palinesque "real America" vs. everyone else is toxic and ugly and needs to be utterly rejected as any basis for a beehive.  I'm not sure, but I hope that's not the kind of thing to which Douthat refers when he says we need a contractual world "that is undergirded by sturdy beehives - by rooted communities that are, as Haidt puts it, high on social capital and low on anomie."

I am certainly open to be persuaded I'm wrong on this, but I don't think there really is a network of healthily functioning beehives out there in America--they've been slowly dying off since Toqueville's time and ceased to exist at all in the post WWII period culminating in the sixties and seventies. I understand the conservatives' lament, but lamenting cannot bring back what has been destroyed. And so this is  where I part company with the principled conservatives.  I like Douthat's idea of balance and redressing imbalances, but in America there is no existing healthy counterbalance to Liberalism--it has to be created. In the meanwhile we are mainly a contractual society because that's all we've got that we can all agree on.

We desperately need social worlds high on social capital and low on anomie, but these worlds have to be built in a pluralistic environment, and traditionalists, zombie or otherwise, don't do well with pluralism. But to me pluralism is at the heart of the grand American experiment: E pluribus unum. This idea that the Real America is only to be found in the small towns is a crude parody of the American ideal. We Americans are the small towns, and the strip malls, and the ghettos, and the gated communities, the exurbs and suburbs, and the big urban centers; we're gays and straights, Muslims, feminists, Asians, Mexicans, blacks, traditionalists, libertarians, and  crunchy cons.

And we can fight and argue and still develop a sense of our all being in this together at higher level than tribalism. We can develop a heterogeneous patchwork of cultural possibilities, lifestyles, artistic and spiritual responses, and we can all benefit from the diversity and the cross-fertilization that will come of it. But we've got to be honest, and we've got to really want to understand why the Other is the way he or she is. And you can only do that with Others who are willing to reciprocate. I don't think harm and reciprocity are adequate foundations for the development of a deeply moral life, but that's where we start together. The last three are more hindrances than helps.

I don't care about preserving the social forms--the existing beehive husks; the forms can take care of themselves. I do care about the cultural vitality that gives social forms their shape. As a Christian I believe that what most deeply undergirds our feeble attempts to live together and to move through history is the Logos.  And because he is there at the heart of everything, there is always the possibility of renewal, always the possibility for recovery--not of the forms, but of the dynamic, subtle power that moves us, evolves us together toward our telos. Forms come and go, and we must not make idols of them. The more important task is to be cuturally creative, and that in the end, if such a process is truly fruitful, is always and everywhere, the produce of grace.

Redfining the American Dream

"The income gap between the rich and the rest of the U.S. population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself," then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 2005.  WaPo

Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual. Mark Levin @ the Corner

Is the American Dream only about getting rich?  Isn't it really about promoting a nation in which there is a flourishing, economically stable, culturally creative, technically innovative, self-reliant middle class? Why is it assumed that some upper limit on wealth acquisition is transgressive of some sacred American taboo? Prosperity, yes--and the more broadly dispersed the better. Concentrations of wealth, no.  As Greenspan says, it threatens the "stability of American capitalism itself."

And isn't it true that the ideologically rigid laissez-faire capitalism Levin extols promotes the aggregation of wealth and power by the few, the destruction of stable, traditional communities and traditional mores, and the impoverishment and political disengagement of the middle class?  Doesn't a mixed economy like the one we got during the New Deal work effectively to protect and promote a flourishing middle class?  Which model, Obama's New Deal version 2 or Levin's Social Darwinism version 2, promotes the American Dream you think is healthiest for America?

The crudity of people like Levin's thinking is impossible to take seriously, but I think there are legitimate concerns about top-down statism that I want to talk about going forward.  We are in a very interesting transition period, and it's important that Dems don't screw it up to leave room for the Levin types to make a comeback.  

The polarizing NRO types will be screaming socialism when the healthcare issue becomes the topic du jour. The one thing Obama has going for him is that corporate America, as Wal-Mart has shown, has no problem using the government dole if it lowers its overhead. And corporate America is sick of paying outrageously volatile insurance premiums. Corporate America's desire for a solution is far more important for getting things done than what the ideologues at National Review think. 

The trick will be to avoid a debate dominated by polarized thinking and to find a way to live in the tension between the local, free individual and the massive presence of the postmodern state. It's not either/or, and finding the middle way is the only way forward. I still have hopes that Obama might be the man of the hour in helping us finding that way.

Far Left/Far Right

CNN's Campbell Brown in her interview on The Daily Show earlier this week described her new show, "No Bias, No Bull" as trying to fill the center space left between her time-slot competitors the "far-right" Bill O'Reilly and the "far-left" Keith Olbermann. Stewart seemed to think her far left/far right characterization of these two apt. It says a lot about our political geography that a millionaire employee of one of the country's largest corporations could be considered a man of the far left. This is precisely the kind of media narrative that keeps us disoriented and confused, and excludes from the publbic debate anybody who is truly left, and so therefore insures that our politics stays right of center.

For whatever you might think of Olbermann, he's not a man of the left. To think that his views are shaped by some far-left reading and political associations is close to ludicrous. His thinking and sensibility is shaped more by his experience as a sports reporter who has made a career of being outraged about this or that. Now he's outraged about what this particular GOP administration has done to undermine the rule of law. Good for him.  But that doesn't mean he's left.  He's not even close to being left. Noam Chomsky is left.  Ralph Nader is left.

Olbermann's positions on the Bush administration's undermining the constitution are no different from Libertarians like Ron Paul, Reagan Republicans like Bruce Fein, and many of the paleocons at The American Conservative magazine. For all his faults, and there are many, his show was important because it was the one place in the MSM where someone was calling a spade a spade. Strenuously opposing what Bush Cheney has done is not a left/right thing. Anybody with any sense opposes them, and opposes what McCain would do.

Scott McConnell, editor of that far-leftist rag The American Conservative, tells us why:

Remember the neoconservatives? Three years ago they were a hot topic, as people all over the world tried to understand why the United States had invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Then interest waned. First Paul Wolfowitz, then Doug Feith, then Don Rumsfeld left the administration. George W. Bush, who asked his dad “What’s a neocon?” in the summer of 2004, took their counsel less. Core neocon concepts—a blend of forceful rhetoric about expanding democracy, contempt for most existing democratic countries, and enthusiasm for starting wars—began to seem unhinged from reality. They had dreamed up the Iraq War to transform the Middle East, argued it was pointless for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, agitated for attacks on Iran. Without repudiating them directly, Robert Gates and Condi Rice eased them from the stage.

John McCain wants to bring them back, in triumph, on horseback. . . .

That’s not all. Top McCain advisers like Robert Kagan seek to reignite a Cold War with Russia: Kagan recently told a Washington audience he wouldn’t want to live in a world in which Russia had a preponderance of influence over Georgia. Elliott Abrams, son-in-law of Norman “World War IV” Podhoretz, is reportedly in line to head McCain’s National Security Council. As a Bush appointee, he’s worked at stymieing the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Expect a McCain administration to back the Netanyahu policy of turning the West Bank into isolated bantustans instead of a Palestinian state. Read more.

But we live in a world in which nothing is real except as it fits into some media-determined marketing niche.  Our degraded political discousrs is just another great example about how the market just rules, man.