After the Future

Why Liberalism Can't Get It Done I

[Ed. I'm reposting this piece from 2007 in response to Patrick's pointing me to an interesting lecture by Patrick Deneen.  I think it reinforces and expands on the basic points that Deneen makes.]

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."

Libertarian Takedown

Tristero at Hullabaloo:

. . . to the extent that libertarians hold up the individual as primary and fail to recognize that individuals simply cannot physically exist without a social/cultural/environmental context, libertarianism is worthless. To the extent that libertarianism does recognize the complex dialectic between the individual and her/his social and physical environment, libertarianism is indistinguishable from liberalism.

As a moral philosophy, by failing to recognize an indisputable physical and ethical reality - namely, that the conflict between the one and the many is primary - libertarianism is all but useless. As a political philosophy, especially when it comes to issues affecting the "rights of businesses", libertarianism is often deeply immoral, providing flimsy rationales for destructive acquisition, thievery, fraud, and greed - typically, and ironically, in the service of the largest corporations, not individuals. When political libertarianism does pursue goals worthwhile to the individual and to society - eg, in calling for the end of sodomy laws - they add no arguments to the debate that liberals and progressives haven't already expressed.

The whole piece is worth reading.

My sense of the kind of typical, often very intelligent person who is attracted to Randian Libertarianism or the candidacies of people like Ron Paul is that they are like fundamentalists or old-fashioned communist party members or anybody, really, that has a need to live within a closed ideas system.  They embrace a rigid set of ideas, sometimes simplistic, sometimes complex, that has a certain interior logic or sense to it so long as you stay inside its bubble.  Problems arise, though, when they try to make the complexity of the world fit into their bubble, because too much of it does not and cannot fit. It's a form of idolatry, if by idolatry we mean the absolutizing and worshipping of a partial truth.

Here's a post I wrote expanding on the second rate-ness of Libertarian thinking a couple of years ago.

Obama & Big Pharma (Updated)

Caught between a pivotal industry ally and the protests of Congressional Democrats, the Obama administration on Friday backed away from what drug industry lobbyists had said this week was a firm White House promise to exclude from a proposed health care overhaul the possibility of allowing the government to negotiate lower drug prices under Medicare.

This is the lede in a NYT article about Obama's backing away from what the industry clearly thought was a deal to keep the government from negotiating drug prices--you know shades of the Bush Medicare Prescription Bill. And despite the article headline and lede, it's not at all clear that Obama is backing away:

On Converting the Slaves

Ta-Nehesi Coates has a thoughtful post on the slaveholders' making Christians of their slaves that is worth reading, but I reproduce here a comment by Doctor Cleveland:

It's a classic example of how ideology controls perceptions, where the slaveholders (in this case) just couldn't see what they were doing because they couldn't acknowledge some basic truths.

I mean, if you're going to keep a large group of people in bondage, why would you ever tell them the Moses story? It only makes sense when you understand that the slaveholders couldn't imagine that anyone but themselves could ever be the Israelites. They couldn't imagine themselves as Pharaoh, even while they were building their big cotton pyramids.

What's telling about the decision is how the white supremacists not only would not but could not make a distinction between what they were doing and Christianity. To keep a dirty system going, you have to selectively but profoundly misunderstand it. (You can't be Pharaoh without pretending to yourself that you aren't.) But because you can't look at what you're doing in the cold, hard light, you make gigantic misjudgments.

Goes to what I've been saying about the essential subversiveness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. When its liberating, lifegiving juice has been squeezed out of it by the control-freak Pharisees, Inquisitors, and Christianists, it morphs into its opposite.  That's what the so-called new atheists mostly don't understand.  They see as a danger, and I think rightly so, this rigidified husk of a faith tradition that has become an emotional and intellectual cage. In its essence, it's the opposite.

Christian discipline, a regime designed to promote emotionaal and intellectual liberation, cannot work if it is coerced.  It must be chosen, as one would choose to submit to the discipline or practice regime required if one seeks to improve as an athlete or a musician.  It becomes a parody of itself when it is used as a tool of social control.

Fighting for Healthcare Reform (Updated)

It's easier to fight against something you hate than for something you feel ambivalently about, and that's the problem with Dems' healthcare program.  It's such an ambiguous mishmash of compromises that's it's hard to get enthusiastic about it or even to develop a coherent argument to defend it--not that coherent arguments would make much difference at this point.  What would we defend, anyway, when we don't even know if the final bill will have a robust public option in it or not.

We don't know squat, really, about which committee's bill is going to be closest to the one that finally comes out of reconciliation. I think we have good reason to fear that we are going to get a bill that will be for healthcare very similar to what the FISA bill was for civil liberties. If Obama was OK with the FISA bill, why shouldn't he be OK with some watered down healthcare reform that doesn't really reform at a level that matters, and quite possibly will make things worse in the long run. I think the Dems ineptitude and their proclivity to get played by shrewder, more aggressive opponents might very well make things worse when some so-called reform bill finally gets passed.

The Second Civil War 2

In February, I wrote a fantasy post in the form of a movie treatment about how a second Civil War might erupt.  I was unaware until recently that HBO actually presented a movie with this title in 1997. I finally got around to watching it recently, and it's pretty bizarre, but interesting in the category of life imitating fiction and "people were thinking about this twelve years ago?!"

It stars Beau Bridges, Dennis Leary, Phil Hartman, James Coburn, James Earl Jones, and I don't quite know what to make of it. It's a farce, of course, but it's a bloody farce, and it's got everything in today's news from a Governor love-sick over a Latina reporter, to the right-wing, obsession of closing borders, to nuclear bombs going off in Pakistan, to the cynicism of the media which cares about nothing except a 20-share.  It's not great movie making, but it's worth seeing, if only to reflect on how far we haven't come.

Reconciliation

Both in reference to Obama and as a general observation, David Bromwich gets to the heart of the matter:

[Obama's] aversion to strife was plain from his conduct in the primaries and the general-election campaign. But the degree of avoidance we have seen could never have been predicted. Obama's training, one recalls, was in the community-reform methods of Saul Alinsky; and yet he seems to have adapted the relevant ideas in foreshortened form. The Alinsky process of reform, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out, goes from powerlessness to power in several stages. There is, first, the public recognition of powerlessness; then the airing of injustices, by legitimate polarization and active protest; then proposals of concrete reform; and only at last, power-sharing and reconciliation.

The strange thing about Obama is that he seems to suppose a community can pass directly from the sense of real injustice to a full reconciliation between the powerful and the powerless, without any of the unpleasant intervening collisions. This is a choice of emphasis that suits his temperament.

Reconciliation, however, can't be genuine or lasting without some polarization, a careful (not generalized) exposure of injustices, and a fight that feels like a fight. In the absence of these, reconciliation dwindles into a rhetorical device; it leads to short-term salvation formulae and a renewal of discontents. The same objection applies to Obama's wholly rhetorical notion that he can overcome the illegal actions of the Bush-Cheney administration by pardoning lower-echelon executors and "facing the future."

This longing for premature reconciliation was the central reason for the failure of reconstruction after the American Civil War. Reconciliation is always the ultimate goal, but not at the price of turning a blind eye to injustice or in accepting as true delusional thinking.  Some things are worth fighting for, and it is delusional to think that those who unjustly possess more than their fair share of wealth and power can be reasonably persuaded to give some of it up. 

We're in a situation now where, since Reagan, Americans have allowed certain groups within the country to take more than their fair share, and the chickens are coming home to roost. Now that they have it, they are not simply going to say, "My Bad. Sure we can work this out." History teaches us that the more threatened the powerful feel, the more violent they become in the defense of what they have. And my take is that it's going to get worse. We ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to the violent defense of entrenched interests.

Reform and the Politics of the Lie

There has to be a reason that the US, of all the industrialized nations, the richest country in the world, is so hostile to social welfare programs. There are a lot of contributing factors, not the least of which is our vaunted individualism. But one of the fundamental reasons America is so resistant to programs that provide for the common good is that there is a long tradition of rejecting any proposal that taxes white people to pay for programs that benefit non-whites. --Digby

In the last year or so I've been doing some reading about the 19th Century American history--the  Civil War, Reconstruction, expansion into the West, the industrial transformation of the economy.  It was a wild, violent, intensely racist, corrupt, bare-knuckled era. I guess I've been trying to figure out what has changed, and I am interested why certain mindsets are sustained from generation to generation with some people and in some regions, while in others theybecome irrelevant. 

My working hypothesis has been that the old traditionalist scripts could not be sustained over the long haul, that they would lose their potency with each passing generation as the the demands of a more complex, globalizing, and pluralistic world made their claim on anybody who was participated in it. Survival in a globalizing world will require that people develop a more cosmopolitan sensibility**, and I still think I'm more right than wrong about that. But events over the last decade--really since the Clinton impeachment fiasco--have given me a new respect for the resiliency of the old, traditionalist scripts.

And so it's clear that the wild, violent, intensely racist, bare-knuckled mentality has continued to thrive as a normative mindset on the political cultural right. Why such scripts survive is a bigger subject than I want to get into here, but it's an important question. So a somewhat simple answer will have to suffice for now: when people deep down know something is wrong, as for instance any normal human being knows that the idea of white supremacy is wrong, and when that idea is linked to one's collective identity,  there is a tendency to defend it with a viciousness that seems unhinged. And the intensity of the irrationality is linked to the individual's dependency on the collective or cultural script to define his identity.

If I do not know who I am apart from my tribal identity, if I have little or no personal autonomy or interior sense of my own worth, then I will violently defend any part of the mindset script that comes under attack, because to attack a part is to attack the whole, and to attack the whole is an attack on me, on my deepest sense of who I am, my dignity and sense of honor, and since I am nothing apart from that, it's an attack on my very existence. I think it's similar to how an alcoholic cannot admit that he has a problem, and how he will come up with ingenious, energetic justifications, impelled and energized by his desperate need to continue in his bad habit.  It's just too hard to face the bitter truth about who he really is. And one persists until bottoming out or in some cases an intervention bursts his delusional bubble. And of course, the intervention is always perceived as a violation, as patronizing, as a crossing of boundaries.

In the runup to the Civil War and during reconstruction were many arguments advanced to defend slavery, white supremacy, the violence of the Klan, and many of these arguments were clever, well-argued, and appealing, and I believe many if not most people who advanced these arguments were sincere, the way alcoholics are sincere. I think, probably, Glenn Beck is sincere in this sense. Someone like Bill Kristol, I think, knows  he is lying. But I'm more concerned about how to confront the lie in those who sincerely believe it.

So I'm not concerned to condemn individuals but to find a productive way to neutralize the destructive effects of the delusional mindset--not just on the individual possessed by it but the rest of us who are harmed to the degree that we to live with the destructive behavior of people and groups possessed by it. Judgments about individual culpability are always more complex, but it is possible to judge a mindset as morally inferior or superior, realistic or delusional, constructive or destructive. And then it is possible to have a conversation (or intervention?) about the degree to which an individual (or party, church, cult, movement) participates in a delusional mindset. Too many people think that if a person shows himself to sincerely believe in the lie, that he deserves our respect. Of course. But we have to be clear that the "lie" does not  deserve our respect. How to respect the one but not the other is the great communications challenge for the next decade.

**And I am also interested to understand how faith, particularly Christian faith, can be sustained and flourish in people who have such a cosmopolitan sensibility. I'm working on a piece about that now.

Small-State Senators & Special Interests

From Nate Silver:

. . .senators from small states tend to be relatively more dependant on special-interest money -- it makes up a larger share of their overall take. Senators from the ten smallest states have received, on average, 28.4 percent of their campaign funds from corporate PACs, versus 13.7 for those in the ten largest. There is a tendency to think of senators from small states as being populists, and there are a few instances in which this is accurate -- Jon Tester of Montana and John Thune of South Dakota, for instance, are relatively non-dependant on PAC money. But for the most part, something the opposite is true, and senators from small states in fact have more incentive to placate special interests.

It is worth noting, by the way, that the six senators on Baucus's mini-committee are especially egregious in this regard. They rank #1 (Mike Enzi), #6 (Chuck Grassley), #11 (Kent Conrad), #13 (Baucus), #14 (Jeff Bingaman) and #20 (Olympia Snowe) in the share of contributions received from corporate PACs (an average of 47.5 percent of their funds overall).

So please let's stop with this idea that these healthcare "moderates" are primarily concerned about to their conservative constituencies back home.