After the Future

Bruce Bartlett on 'Epistemic Closure'

In The American Conservative: 

A couple of weeks before the 2004 election, Suskind wrote a long article for the New York Times Magazine that quoted some of my comments to him that were highly critical of Bush and the drift of Republican policy. The article is best remembered for his quote from an anonymous White House official dismissing critics like me for being “the reality-based community.”

The day after the article appeared, my boss called to chew me out, saying that Karl Rove had called him personally to complain about it. I promised to be more circumspect in the future.

Interestingly, a couple of days after the Suskind article appeared, I happened to be at a reception for some right-wing organization that many of my think tank friends were also attending. I assumed I would get a lot of grief for my comments in the Suskind article and was surprised when there was none at all.

Finally, I started asking people about it. Not one person had read it or cared in the slightest what the New York Times had to say about anything. They all viewed it as having as much credibility as Pravda and a similar political philosophy as well. Some were indignant that I would even suspect them of reading a left-wing rag such as the New York Times.

I was flabbergasted. Until that moment I had not realized how closed the right-wing mind had become. Even assuming that my friends’ view of the Times’ philosophy was correct, which it most certainly was not, why would they not want to know what their enemy was thinking? This was my first exposure to what has been called “epistemic closure” among conservatives—living in their own bubble where nonsensical ideas circulate with no contradiction.

Agree with him or not, Bartlett is a sane conservative and a member in good standing of the reality-based community. David Frum is another. Read the full article to learn how both have been ostracized by the Fox/Murdoch right-wing propaganda complex. Bartlett's ideas might be wrong. His argument, for instance, that the contemporary Republican Party has a legitimate historical claim on the Black vote is silly. The GOP after Nixon's southern strategy is no longer the party of Lincoln. But it's an argument that isn't crazy. In fact, it would be salutary if the GOP could return to its older traditions, and it's clear that Bartlett sincerely sees himself standing in that tradition.

When people call on Liberals to be less sanctimonious and judgmental about Conservatives, I get it. There's little good to be obtained in such a stance, and it's rhetorically ineffective. But it's also important to understand that there be a distinction between sane conservatives and those who clearly are not, and those who are not are living in epistemic closure, which is a form of collective delusion. With such people no sane conversation is a possibility.

A rhetorical strategy for promoting a pragmatic policy approach needs to be developed for right-leaning Main Streeters who are not locked into epistemic closure, but we should have no illusions about the possibility of persuading those who are in the bubble that Bartlett describes. If a guy with his conservative credentials can't do it, how in the world can anybody to his left? 

 

Civilization and Its Discontents

It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks that mark the end of the civilizing impulse that animated the West from the time of the Renaissance. World War I was the war that marked the end of the modern era, and World War II was the war that marked the beginning of the postmodern. That's how I have come to think of it, anyway.

Freud's 1929 book was a development of ideas he introduced in his 1927 book, The Future of an Illusion, in which he attacks organized religion as a collective neurosis. Both books have become more or less the background music that plays in most secularist thinking since then. Until recently it has been impossible for any self-respecting modern intellectual to accept that religion is anything but a form of delusional wish-fulfillment born out of the fundamental inability human beings have to accept the real ugliness and horror in the world, not the least of which is the prospect of their own deaths.

Civilization, according to Freud, is essentially the product of the fundamental tradeoff humans make to live in an ordered, secure world. The rule of law is the foundation of any civilization, for without it the law of the jungle prevails, and according to that law, the strong dominate the weak. Without the restraint of civilizing laws, the stronger prey on the weaker, the former searching out the latter to satisfy their instinctual drives, which boil down to sex, money, power.

I am inclined to think of Power as primary, and the other two as secondary. Power is aggression. Aggression is about one person or a group of persons seeking to dominate another. As Hegel pointed out way before Nietzsche, Freud, and Adler, this aggression is not economically motivated; it's about prestige. It's about the ego rush one feels in victory. Wealth and sexual satisfaction are a byproduct. They are the trappings of power. You must be powerful if you were able to acquire all that wealth and to obtain all those slaves and wives.

Premoderns understand this seeking after prestige as essential for their "honor." Their value as human beings depended on how much of it they got, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them would be to lose it. The Chinese call it "losing face" which is basically the same thing. You lose your honor, you lose your face, you lose your identity. You're nobody. Your identity is in this sense completely a social construction. There's nobody at home behind the mask.

In its most primitive form this is a prestige battle to the death. The truly noble person is the one who would rather die than submit. This sentiment is echoed in the New Hampshire state slogan and imprinted on all New Hampshire license plates: "Live free or die." The slave is the one who makes the calculation that it would be better to live serving the one who vanquished him than to be slain by him. He chooses submission. Any feudal hierarchy is based on this fundamental transaction. And it's why Roman emperors and medieval kings were always having to put down rebellions by ambitious generals, dukes, and barons who lusted to have more face.

The whole point for those in the old aristocracy was "honor", and honor was something that depended on station, and station was something you took by force of arms. The question they would ask themselves was basically: Do I have have the balls or don't I? This is barbarism, of course, but at least these men were men, not alienated, faceless wimps sitting in cubbies in big, anonymous, high-rise cages. It was a barbarism mitigated to a certain extent in the high middle ages by the Christian-inspired chivalric code and the tradition of courtly love.

But it affected not at all the earlier Christian rulers, the Roman emperors and their Germanic successors in the west. The whole underlying prestige-centered honor code was barbaric through and through. The ideas 'face' and 'honor' are utterly inimicable to the spirit of the gospels. The whole movement of Christianity is one away from external identity props and toward the discovery of an interior identity, the face that is created in the image and likeness of God, where we live as citizens of the Kingdom born within, as the gospels describe it. The idea of face and honor are absurdities for citizens who abide there. But that's not something you can organize a civilization around, unless you have a critical mass of people who have this interior sense of the order of things, and clearly there was no such critical mass in the post-Constantinian Christendom, nor is there one now, or perhaps ever. 

Until such a day when a critical mass develops, a true Christianity is more of a leaven in any civilization in which there are true Christians. It's influence is subtle, and it works more on the periphery than at the center. 

Back to Freud: His point was that civilization in suppressing aggression creates alienation. Alienation is what happens to human beings when they are cut off from their instinctual life. It happens when they make a choice for safety and conformity of the group that comes with renouncing one's impulse life. It is the condition of the slave. This, according to Freud, is the source of the discontent that must necessarily come with civilization. Becoming civilized in modern societies (since Hobbes anyway) requires submitting to the law, and submitting is always an act of slavishness.

Most of the "advanced" thought since Freud has been about finding ways to more become instinctual and less civilized, but at the same time "nice." Wild and crazy, but loveable, like John Belushi or Jack Black. These are our contemporary models for what it means to be un-alienated. The way this works in practice is while continuing to suppress aggression, give more free rein to the pursuit of sex and money, and to put a happy face on both. Consumer capitalism provides the political cultural framework that celebrates this solution to the problem of alienation. And it works insofar as it satisfies what is most vulgar and barbaric in human desire, but fails in all the truly important ways. And then we fight endless wars to give an outlet to those who need to earn a 'face' through mortal combat.

Freud's idea of civilization is the opposite of what I mean by it, but it's understandable because his experience of it is mainly of its collapse. The people he was treating were living in forms that had no inner vitality. That was Nietzsche's big idea--there was no there there anymore; there are only the empty forms, like a copse of dead trees. They point to something that once lived but no longer does.

Nevertheless people hang onto those dead forms and because their sense of self is deeply entiwined with them, and this clinging to lifeless forms is the essence of alienation, because in order to be un-alienated you have to be in touch with Life, something green and living. For Freud that meant the suppressed instinctuall life of formalistic Victorians, a suppression of life impulses that arise from below, so to speak. But the late 19th century in its mechanistic materialism created as sytem that also suppressed life that descends from above, so to speak. 

The goal of civilization is not to suppress life but to create forms for its expression in such a way that we are raised up above the barbaric and purlely instinct-driven. But that does not require a suppression of instinct, but rather humanizing it. And the humanization, I'd argue, is only possible by the intrduction of something outside the barbaric eat-or-be-eaten system, and that would be the leavening effects of 'grace'. 

Freud and Darwin would have described the situation accurately if the world were indeed a closed system. But something enters from outside the system that has this leavening effect. You don't have to be a believer to know what it is. We've all experienced it at one time or another. True advances in the human story occur when grace and human instinct combine to create something new. The instincts are the raw material. Grace is the active principle inspiring our imaginations, and the human will works with both to bring something of value into the world. It can be a small thing; it can be a great thing. But if it is worth anything, all three were essential in its making.

In the early years, many of the Christians who "got it", the ones who understood that the kingdom was within and that one's identity was not solely determined by social constructions, headed out into the wasteland. In the period in which we live, celebrated by T.S. Eliot's famous poem, people who get it no longer have to flee into the wasteland because the wasteland has come to us. They get that's our life now, and so we must learn to wander in it, in a way analogous to the Israelites of old, but as with ordering from Amazon, no need to go out, it has been delivered to us right at home. Nevertheless we long for the fleshpots of Egypt and find it hard to hope that there might be any landscape physical or psychic, exterior or interior, in our future that is flowing with milk and honey.

Calling Out Andrew Cuomo

And if Republicans get their majority, with the tacit support of Cuomo, the governor will have once again shown that he is not the progressive figure he will likely try to sell himself as if he runs for president. His tenure so far has been marked by flashy liberal victories on issues like gay marriage, along with a quietly conservative economic agenda . . .

Cuomo doesn’t hide his conservative tendencies — they’re part of his sales pitch, especially upstate and outside New York City — but he’s in an enviable position of being able to run and govern as a conservative while retaining a progressive reputation, because he’s, you know, a Cuomo and a big-city blue state liberal governor who got gay marriage passed. (Source)

We need to see more reporting on the records of so-called Democrats whose real interests align with Big Money. The basic formula is to establish one's progressive bona fides on cultural issues, and then govern like a Republican. How long are "real" Democrats going to be conned like this?

Quote of the Day: Peter Kuznick

Americans were very hostile to Britain until the 20th century, till the World War I period, because that was the empire, and we were consciously anti-imperial. John Quincy Adams has a great speech that he made on July 4, 1819, in which he says we don’t go forth in search of foreign monsters to destroy. He says we might become dictators for the world, but we would lose our own spirit as a nation. And that’s what we think has happened, the United States in some ways has lost its soul as a nation. We started to lose that soul in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We lost it during the 1950s with Eisenhower going from 1,000 nuclear weapons when he takes office to 23,000 when he leaves office, to 30,000 when his budgeting cycle is finished. We lost it in Vietnam. We’ve lost it repeatedly, but we think it’s not all gone. That’s why we’re fighting to salvage what we can and turn this around. (Source)

I think that's right, and I've argued before that we may have won the war because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in winning it that way we lost our souls. You can make all the utilitarian arguments you'd like about how it shortened the war, and the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden was worse, but dropping the atomic bomb changed us, it fueled our paranoia, and we haven't recovered. Kuznick is optimistic that we can recover. I want to believe he's right, and I have sanguine moments when I do think we can recover. But it starts with our refusal of empire, and with our assuming a more modest role in the world as one nation among others. 

Ever wonder why so many right wingers are so bent out of shape about the so-called illegal immigrant problem? Many right-wing Americans, especially those who identify with the frontiersman narrative, fear that the Mexicans, from whom 19th-Century Americans stole Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, are looking for payback, and that the invasion of the the southwest by undocumented Mexicans is a stealth strategy by Mexicans to take back what was stolen from them. So put up that ridiculous wall. At a deep, unconscious level that same mentality assumes that the world wants payback for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ever wonder why the U.S. feels the need to have a military budget that exceeds the the military budget of the rest of the world combined? Ever wonder why we're so afraid that we feel compelled to arm ourselves to the teeth? Sure it's economically driven; it makes a lot of important people rich. But there are other, deeper reasons. I'd argue that a big part of it is because we are the only country that has used atomic weapons on civilians to such destructive effect, and deep in our psyche, especially if we already have the paranoid tendencies typical of the hard right, we expect payback.

9/11 wasn't a surprise or an aberration for people with this mindset. It was to be expected, because what goes around comes around, and it proves that we will be destroyed by those who hate us as soon as we show the least weakness. So now we must be frisked at airports, and we must arm ourselves to unprecedent levels, and we must garrison the world. Not because the world hates our freedom, but because we are bullies and we know that all the people we've pushed around over the last sixty years are going sooner or later to push back. At root it's not an offensive strategy, but one one saturated in fear about payback. 

Better and Worse

Over the years, the GOP has effected a propaganda coup in its branding the Democrats as the party of out-of-touch, effete, quiche-eating elites who have nothing but disdain for red America's rednecks. This worked particularly well during the Bush years, but not as well for the Romney campaign because of his plutocratic image. For that reason alone, I thought it unlikely that Romney would win.

As with any negative stereotyping, there has to be an element of truth in it for it to work. And the really great thing about this particular piece of political propaganda is that it takes the political correctness of the so-called liberal elite and turns it on its head. One of the great mortal sins of multi-cultural political correctness is to think that some cultures are superior to others. But of course the one culture it's ok to sneer at is redneck culture.

Sneering is the affect of snobs, and snobbery is always repugnant. But that doesn't mean that you are therefore forbidden from judging whether something is better or worse. And insofar as redneck culture is a place in which Nietzsche's Last Man is a presence, it can, indeed, be judged as 'not good'. For the Last Man hates anyone who suggests that there is something better or higher than what he is capable of attaining. He celebrates mediocrity as the virtue of the common man, and despises as elites anyone who aspires to something more. He is too sensitive to slights to his dignity, and full of resentment toward those who do not see him as a fine fellow.

The Last Man is the lover of safety and security, the man or woman who cannot think for him or herself, who is always taking his cues from the "master," the strong, steady paternalistic leader. Romney's aggressiveness in the debates were meant as a strong signal that he is the alpha dog, and Obama's hesitant thoughtfulness made him look as though he was being dominated. That was the political meaning of that event--not debating points.

The Last Man follows the alpha dog, no matter where he leads. George Bush's image was largely manufactured  to make him appear as the strong man precisely to exploit this slavishness in the Last Man type.  And the argument that Romney is making about the 47%, the moochers and "gift getters", is that the Democrats' base is dominated by Last Men, but, alas, Last Men who will not follow him. But insofar as there is a culture of dependency, that is a Last Man characterisitic. The question is to what degreee people are dependent of their own choice or to what degree they have been forced into it. 

The mentality of the Last Man, wherever it appears, is repugnant. And so are those people who embrace and defend that mentality. Such people talk about freedom with romantic fervor but haven't a clue what real freedom means. They give it up willingly to the strong man who asks it from them, and for this reason they make a great soldiers because they are so easy to command. Tell him to jump off a cliff and he'll do it without a doubt or a question. There is a kind of primitive idealism here that rulers love and praise as courage and loyalty, and for good reason, because without it they would be unable to perpetrate their crimes. 

Am I being unfair in painting red-state rednecks with this Last Man broad brush. Probably. I realize that there are many fine people who come out of this subculture. James Webb has made something of a career of praising its postive attributes, and I get that. Nevertheless I think it's possible to critique the social psychology of the group, without judging its individuals. And while I'm sure that some would argue with it, most would agree that the need for values conformity is stronger among southern whites and among whites in the bible-belt evangelical churches than it is, for instance in the more cosmopolitan coastal subcultures. I don't think I'm asserting anything particularly controversial by saying that this conformist mentality is rooted in a fundamental cultural insecurity, and that as such it has been a key emotional driver in the areas that tend to vote red.

There are lots of nice, decent people in this American red-state subculture, but there is something fundamentally primitive, fearful, and regressive in the social attitudes that unite them as a group. These attitudes, of course are not restricted to this subculture--they are fairly common among the I'm-a-victim and the politically correct left. It's found among certain reactionary Catholic groups. But wherever the Last Man shows his face, you find a form of cultural leveling that is one of the chief symptoms of our current cultural decadence.

One of the canons of the politically correct left is that all cultures are equal, and that's just plain stupid. Cultures that value reasoned discourse, which promote and protect human rights, which are open to diverse opinions and cultural values, and which have strong spiritual and artistic traditions are superior to cultures that don't have these characteristics. Some cultures might have strengths in one or another of the elements on this list, but the most advanced societies are the ones in which all of them work robustly together.

There is an odd attitude abroad, associated with this leveling attitude about cultures, that holds all art is equal. It's all subjective judgment. What one person does or likes is no better than what another does or likes. But is there any question that Dostoyevski is better than Danielle Steele, that Bach is better than Lennon & McCartney? This isn't to say that Lennon and McCartney or Steele don't have value and cannot be enjoyed, but it's ridiculous to assert that one thing is better simply because you enjoy it more. There are standards, and these standards, while they may be subjective, are also transpersonal--they transcend one's personal likes and dislikes. The standard assumes that there are levels of spiritual aspiration which some attain and to which others aspire. To say that there are no standards is to say that there is nothing worthy of our aspiration. This is commonplace thinking in a culture that has become decadent.

The whole idea of a advances in civilization relies on the assumption that there are great souls who have broken new ground and that some of these may have gone beyond what the rest of us can understand or achieve. But that does not mean that because we don't understand or cannot replicate what they have done that we can dismiss it as "not for me."

This is essentially what the anti-elitists on the cultural and corporate right are saying. Science?--not my bag. Great art? Who needs it? Now the great propaganda achievement is to reduce to mere snobbery this aspiration to achieve greatness or to understand and appreciate it. Are there sneering snobs who look down on those who haven't reached their level of achievement? Certainly there are, and we would rightly describe their snobbery as a moral deficiency because we do have standards by which we can judge certain states of soul as morally deficient. So is it reason enough to describe all aspiration to higher levels of cultural achievement as elitism or snobbery? That would be moronic. And we can judge it moronic by standards that we have for judging it so.

The point is that if there are standards, there are ways of judging good and bad, better and worse. And the cultural right is correct to insist on preserving such standards. And they are correct in criticizing the soul-deadening qualities of contemporary American life. But as as I have argued elsewhere, the cultural right misdiagnoses the causes of our ailment. Our soul sickness is not the product of cultural elites--left-wing professors, Hollywood moguls, and nihilist artists; it's rather the product of the social adjustments made necessary by the creative/destructive forces released by freemarket consumer capitalism. The best intellectuals and artists are simply struggling honestly to understand what has happened to us in this neither-here-nor-there era that we call the postmodern that more than anything is the creation of consumer capitalism.

These forces have all but killed the living, vibrant, spiritual traditions of the West, and what we are left with are the empty forms which too often seem attractive primarily to personalities who have an emotional need for order and security and find it in an alienated, conformist, smiley-face Christianity. Such a Christianity is completely at odds with a Christianity that has any depth or authenticity. The symbol for the true Christianity is not a smiley face, but a man dying on a cross.

Death and Resurrection compose the essential rhythm of Christianity. Without the first the second is meaningless and impossible. And Christians who understand this should have the inner resources to live with steadfast hope through those times when death seems to be the main cultural theme. For we are living now in a period when the old thing has died, and we are waiting for the new to be born. We are in a cultural winter waiting for a springtime of the spirit. It will come, maybe not in my lifetime, but it will come. And our job now is to prepare for its coming rather than trying to resuscitate the corpses of old forms which are dead and gone. Resurrection is not resuscitation; it is the creation of something completely new by transforming that which was old. It's a movement forward, to a higher level, not backward to something that we have already left behind.

We are like the apostles in the upper room on the Saturday after Good Friday. We are dazed, confused, shocked at the seeming invincibility of the forces of death and evil, and we feel incapable of hoping that there is some other possibility. But there is, and we must not lose faith.

The Two Rights

There are two factions within the American Right: the plutocratic right, for which Romney is a kind of caricature; and the cultural right, whose identity is so deeply entwined with values have been under attack since the dawn of the Enlightenment and are being pushed over the cliff now by consumer capitalism. These two factions should be enemies, but the first faction realizes that it needs the second, and many of its members pretend to share the second faction's traditional values despite not caring at all about them. (Former Baine partner and Romney supporter, Edward Conard, on Chris Hayes's show admitted as much last weekend.) And so the mythos of the Republican Party is the mythos of the cultural right. It has to be to hold the alliance between these factions together.

The characteristic they both share is the feeling of being (in very different ways) an embattled minority that is vulnerable to be swept away by a hostile majority. They both (in their different ways) fear for their survival. Those on the plutocratic right fear that in a democracy the non-plutocratic majority will vote for its own economic interests at the their expense, and for that reason feel that they must take a stand on No New Taxes. It's as if they have their collective finger in the little hole in the dike that as soon as it's removed the flood will come that will sweep them away. The cultural right, on the other hand, fears that secular liberalism is destroying its mythos and with it everything they believe is meaningful and important. It's very similar to the fears that excite traditionalist Muslims.

I think there are some in the plutocratic right who share the cultural right's mythos, especially where they overlap in the rugged individualist frontiersman narrative. But there are a lot of people on the plutocratic right who share little with the traditionalist cultural right but see an alliance with it as essential to make it competitive in elections.

It will be interesting to see if that alliance can be maintained in the GOP if in fact the GOP has to broaden its appeal to accept groups that do not embrace the cultural right's  narrative.  Another kind of survival is at stake here, that of the GOP. 

Quote of the Day: Chris Hedges

Any mass movement that arises—and I believe one is coming—will be fueled, like the Occupy movement, by radicals who have as deep a revulsion for Democrats as they do for Republicans. The radicals who triumph, however, may not be progressive. Populist movements, from labor unions to an independent press to socialist third parties, have been destroyed in the United States. A protofascist movement that coalesces around a mystical nationalism, that fuses the symbols of the country with those of Christianity, that denigrates reason and elevates mass emotions will have broad appeal. It will offer to followers a leap from the deep pit of despair and frustration to the heights of utopia. It will speak in the language of violence and demonize the vulnerable, from undocumented workers to homosexuals to people of color to liberals to the poor. And this force, financed by the most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, could usher in a species of corporate fascism in a period of economic or environmental instability. (Source)

Weimar redivivus?

I don't know. I understand Hedge's logic, and I've often argued that we face more of a threat from the right than we do from the left because the left is so toothless. The Left is a figment of the hard right's imagination. Obama a socialist? I wish. 

I wrote this piece tongue-in-cheek a couple of years ago, and every once in a while the page hits go up on it because some rightwing types have discovered it and takes it seriously. 

I don't know.

 

G.E.R.M rebuffed across the Country . . .

. . . except in Washington State, where a really awful Charter School ballot measure  won by a very narrow margin. (GERM = Global Education Reform Movement, which is essentially a neoliberal program to privatize public education. The Gates Foundation, which was a huge funder behind this ballot measure, is one of the chief purveyors of GERM. )

David Sirota talks about it here:

If your only source of news about American education came from docu-propaganda like “Waiting for Superman,” Hollywood politi-schlock like “Won’t Back Down” and elite-focused national news outlets in Washington, D.C., and New York City, you might think that the so-called education “reform” (read: privatization) movement was a spontaneous grass-roots uprising of good-old-fashioned heartlanders generating ever more mass support throughout the country. You would have no reason to believe it was a top-down, corporate-driven coalition of conservative coastal elites trying to both generally undermine organized labor and specifically wring private profit out of public schools, and you would similarly have no reason to believe it was anything but wildly popular in an America clamoring for a better education system.

In other words, you would be utterly misinformed — especially after last week’s explosive election results in three key states.  (Read on)

GERM is a classic example of poorly informed thinking that is about ten or fifteen years behind the curve. Charter Schools are an 80s idea that have done nothing on a scalable level to improve educational outcomes for kids in poverty. Some are ok; a lot more are pretty bad. They are a false, simplistic solution for a far more complex problem.

They are attractive as a public policy option only for those who think the market will solve anything. There are far more effective ways to deliver innovation and greater levels of freedom to educators in the trenches. GERM and its various programs are solutions created by technocrats who don't understand the least thing about how kids learn and how teachers teach. It's a public policy disaster that is embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike

I think that's what makes the Washington State bill particularly galling. Just as the rest of the country is catching on to how "reform" is really about privatization, Washington finally caves after resisting now for so many years, and it's largely because so many people think that Charter Schools are only about giving parents more choice. No--they cannot be understand in a political vacuum. They have to be understood as one of the weapons in this larger privatization agenda. 

 

 

 

Mythos & Logos 2

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The American colonies were first settled by Protestant dissenters. These were people who refused to submit to the established religious authorities. They sought personal relationships with God. They moved to the frontier when life got too confining. They created an American creed, built, as the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset put it, around liberty, individualism, equal opportunity, populism and laissez-faire.

This creed shaped America and evolved with the decades. Starting in the mid-20th century, there was a Southern and Western version of it, formed by ranching Republicans like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Their version drew on the traditional tenets: ordinary people are capable of greatness; individuals have the power to shape their destinies; they should be given maximum freedom to do so.  --David Brooks

***

Maybe the fact that the Christian-Caucasian-libertarian-capitalist-nationalist cultural faction has absorbed another bitter political defeat will spark some new dynamic in American life. But I wouldn’t bet on it. An angry, declining minority that believes itself oppressed can be an unstable and dangerous phenomenon. The worst sin of the secular-multicultural-communitarian-internationalist-environmentalist faction (other than all that oaky California chardonnay) is its smugness and superiority, its sense of historical mission and its confidence that it has nothing to learn from its diminished opponents and bears no responsibility for their plight. Pride goeth before the fall, as a text prized by both sides for different reasons puts it. If we can’t find a way to address the American cultural divide, beyond insults and quadrennial beauty contests, it is sure to destroy us. --Andrew O'Hehir

O'Hehir is right: mythos doesn't go down without a fight to logos (i.e., the demographic facts), especially when the mythos in question is that of the hard-bitten individualism of the American frontiersman. This myth has been transposed from the frontier to the business world, and the people who celebrate it now are mostly wealthy white males like Bill O'Reilly or Rick Santini, who think they succeeded entirely on their own.

But as Brooks's column points out, and which Chris Hayes discussed on his show Saturday morning, that myth does not appeal to Asian Americans, who are now the highest earning group in the U.S. and would seem to be a demographic that should vote overwhelmingly for Republicans. They voted instead overwhelmingly for Obama. Why? IMO, because the the frontiersman mythos qua white male fantasy is poorly adapted to the real world in which we now live, and people who are not inheritors of that myth just don't get it.

Even former Romney advisor Avik Roy, a brown Asian American, doesn't get it. In the clip embedded above, It's very interesting to listen to to him defend intellectual conservatism, which seems so reasonable--so logos-centric--while at the same time he is so tone deaf to the mythos that animates it. Ta-Nehesi Coates and the others set him straight on that, but he really seems unable to grasp what Roy's mother can. He talks about how she won't vote for Republicans because in her view people of color have no vital role to play in the Republican mythos.

Dude, listen to your mother: you're just a token brown guy. 

 

 

Triumph of the Will

You have to admire how right wingers are so certain that their simplistic, 19th-Century program will save America. But it's precisely this unblinking certainty that the world as it exists has any relationship to the world as it looks in their fevered imaginataions of it that makes them so frightening:

 

(h/t: TPM)

Outside Game, Inside Game

From "Will Wall Steet Be Punished?" by Andrew Leonard:

But let’s not get too excited. What’s money to Wall Street? The $400 million or so spent by Wall Street in support of Romney is a rounding error for the financial sector. If anything, the amount Wall Street spends on lobbying is likely to rise in the next few months, as the battle to finalize Dodd-Frank’s rules hits the home stretch.

That’s right, Dodd-Frank, signed into law by President Obama more than two years ago, is still unfinished. Hundreds of rules have yet to be finalized — including those related to the all-important Volcker rule — the provision of Dodd-Frank that would prevent banks from making proprietary trades with taxpayer-insured capital. Even worse, hundreds of necessary Dodd-Frank rules haven’t even been proposed.

A Romney win wouldn’t have stopped those rules from getting hammered out, although the people making the critical decisions would change, and could be expected to be more receptive to Wall Street “concerns.” The point is, Wall Street is likely to spend even more cash now to lobby the rule-makers than it would have before, despite the hundreds of millions wasted during the campaign. The spigot remains on.

There's been a lot of talk about how these millionaires wasted their money on losing races, as if to point out that money doesn't really influence elections. Money spent stupidly rarely accomplishes anything, and while I'm sure there will always be the wingnut millionaire who will be willing to spend millions on a losing cause, Wall Street will not spend its money stupidly.

I do believe that people numbers can beat money numbers when the electorate is aroused and relatively well informed, and as been pointed out ad nauseam the demographics favor the more liberal party in the future. But people numbers only matter in the outside game, in elections. The smart money will realize, if it doesn't already, that it can only do so much to influence who gets elected in coming years, and that it can be far more effective in the inside game--coopting these elected officials once they arrive in D.C. or Olympia, Albany, or Sacramento.

The inside game is much easier and more predictable game to play--and cheaper--because the money interests need only to capture one or two senators on this committee or that to block a bill or gut it. The money game is an inside game, and it's way too complex and technical to ever mobilize the electorate to care about it.

People like Larry Lessig realize it. He was rather eloquent in the closing minutes of the video I posted the other day in talking about it and how we have to fight it anyway. His sentiments were very close to those of the Reinhold Niebuhr quote in this blog's epigraph at the top of the page about the vision of a just society being "an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible." I don't know if Lessig is a believer in the conventional sense, but you have to be in some other sense to say what he said. 

And the key word in that quote is "approximated"--we're not talking about achieving a just society, just doing what we can to push back against the enormous forces that could care less about such a thing.

Traditional White America

I don't know if the real Bill O'Reilly is more of a sendup on himself than his mocking imitator:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

 

Michael Lind on Realignment

Michael Lind this afternoon in a post on Salon:

When party systems collapse in American history, the new party system tends to emerge from within the dominant party.  The defeat of the Confederates meant that the politics of the Gilded Age would be fought between the business and farmer wings of the hegemonic Republican Party.  During the New Deal era the intra-party disputes between liberals and Democratic conservatives foreshadowed the disputes between parties in the Reagan era.

If this pattern holds, then in the next generation the “right” is likely to be closer to the neoliberal wing of today’s Democrats than to today’s ultra-libertarian economic conservatives, whose views about entitlements and regulation will marginalize them by 2020 or 2030.  If the post-Reagan Republicans adopt something like the centrist New Democrat neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, then the Democrats may respond by becoming a much more consistently progressive, pro-government and New Deal-ish party on economic issues. 

I wrote this earlier in the comments section for the Obama Speech post:

Another idea for realignment might be for the sensible business types in the GOP to break off from the GOP extremists and join with the Neoliberal or corporate Dems to form a new party. It would really be the old Republican Party, but it will have to call itself something else. The "Money Party" probably won't work. It will embrace free market libertarian ideas, and will leave the extreme cultural conservatives to form their own fringe party.

The Democrats would then re-embrace its original tradition of populism -- progressive on economic issues, and moderate on social issues. Its nucleus will be traditional labor, ethnic Catholics/Hispanics, African Americans, Main Street progressives, and maybe in time even southern working class whites. And then a fringe party (it's nucleus the current Greens?) can form further to the left and it can push the populist Democrats to deal with bigger issues that are not exactly "kitchen table"--environment, gay rights, surveillance state, aggressive foreign policy, criminalization of everything, etc. over time. Just thinking out loud here, but this would bring a better balance to our politics that it currently does not have.

I think demographic changes will clear force party realignments, whether or not Lind or my scenario has any basis in reality.  I think that cultural conservatism will always have its deadenders--as Lind says in his article--

No doubt some Reaganite conservatives will continue to fight the old battles, like the Japanese soldiers who hid on Pacific islands for decades, fighting a war that had long before been lost.  But as a formula for achieving a governing majority in the United States, Reaganism is finished.

Whether this kind of change will have much of an impact on Obama's second term is doubtful, but I think in the long run, he's right. But one might also ask whether it will make that much of a difference if this new, secular, non-nostalgic culturally left politics will have the political awareness and the will to take on Big Money. 

 

 

Does Money Matter?

Of course it does. It's not that it favors Dems or Republicans, Liberals or Conservatives; it's about how narrow moneyed interest are allowed to step all over the broader good of the Republic.

In part it's about the outside game--how money shapes elections and who gets to run in them (both locally and nationally), but more importantly it's about the way money shapes the inside game, what happens even to decent, idealistic elected representatives once the K-Street gang gets them cornered in a D.C. alley. 

Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law professor and author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress and How to Stop It, summarizes succinctly the argument of his book in the video below. This is well worth the 28 minutes it takes to watch, and it's well worth sharing with both sensible conservative and liberal friends. This is an issue that transcends party loyalties, especially the party loyalty of "ordinary people."

  

Obama's Acceptance Speech

Most of it seemed kind of canned, flat, laundry listy--what makes America great, etc., etc., etc.

But it ended on an impassioned, stronger note: We're not as divided as our politics suggests. We're the United States of America. Not red and blue. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions.

Yes and no. No empirically; yes aspirationally. But realistically?

And is he signaling that he's going to keep keeping on with his futile attempts to reach across the aisle?

The only way the country becomes less divided is if the extreme right wing in this country is de-legitimated, and I don't think its defeat tonight will do that. The only way it gets de-legitimated is by losing control of legislatures. GOP extremists still hold the House, and we have no reason to believe that GOP extremism in general and its irrational, short-sighted, petty obstructionism will end. 

But back to Obama: Andrew Sullivan made the point on Colbert last night: Obama is a moderate Republican. So was Bill Clinton.

Obama, in other words is Eisenhower or Neslon Rockefeller, and that's ok. I'm fine with one party staking out the political territory that a business-friendly, culturally pluralistic Republicanism defines. But that's a right-of-center party, and it's not the party I want to support. It's a party Wall Street and corporate ellites can be comfortable with; it's not a party that represents the interests of "ordinary people," to use Tom Frank's term. 

That's where the realignment has to take place. There has to be a party that counterbalances the power of big money.  

More on the money issue later, because it is the most important thing we have to deal with now on the national level.