After the Future

Mythos and Logos 3

In “The Battle for God,” Karen Armstrong illuminates a slightly different, though related, difference, contrasting the modalities of mythos and logos. As Armstrong explains, logos is concerned with the practical understanding of how things work in the world, while mythos is concerned with ultimate meaning. Either modality can be used by liberals and conservatives alike in their everyday lives. But macro-historically, there’s been a distinct bias—and weird twist on top of it—at least since the dawn of the modern era. That’s when logos began becoming so all-pervasive that it seemed destined to dislodge mythos, and some defenders of mythos (now commonly known as fundamentalists) fought back paradoxically by assuming the framework of logos, and arguing that their mythos was literally true—a move that true traditionalists would have found to be deeply in error, because it devalued the essential purpose of mythos.

The congruence with Mooney’s argument is obvious: There’s a clear kinship between logos and the Enlightenment model of reason on the one hand, and mythos and persuasion on the other. If conservatives under George W. Bush once again proved themselves incompetent in the logos of governing, liberals under Obama proved themselves incompetent in its mythos.

Paul Rosenberg has a couple of long pieces in Salon that support my argument in "The Silicon Valley Flood" posted the other day. The first is with George Lakoff, whose work is important and to which I plan to return when I start developing the semiotic themes that I've been dancing around lately. The second is with David Dunning. The first interests me because I want to talk more about the theological implications of how language structures our world; the second, because it focuses on how language is used in two fundamentally different modes as  'Mythos' and 'Logos'. Logos is about the 'what' the facts, seeing the world as clearly as possible and working in it as competently and effectively as possible. Mythos provides the meaning infrastructure that shapes the way we think. 

Mythos is more foundational because it's where the meaning and the purpose lie. It's what orients Gordon Gecko to work in the world in the way he does or Mother Teresa to work the way she does. The Wall Street Mythos is every bit as much a mythos as the Christian one is. But the point is that both mythos and logos interact in important ways--one's mythos creates a filter through which the 'facts' are perceived--even when the data is shared, mythos connects the dots in patterns that look different and mean very different things depending on which mythos works as your meaning infrastructure.  

Mythos is in that sense foundational: everybody has a foundational mythos whether he or she is conscious of it or not. And in the end, a la William James, the test of the truth of your mythos is directly related to whether it allows you to work with the Real effectively or ineffectively, whether it broadens and enriches your experience of the Real, or whether it narrows and impoverishes it. Both Fundamentalism and Scientism provide narrow, impoverished mythic narratives. I believe the Judaeo-Christian mythos has depths and riches that have yet to be explored. 

Competency in your work in the world requires a mythos that is suited to the reality that you are working with. If your mythos leads you to make persistent, disastrous mistakes, or if things just aren't working right, then clearly your mythos is misaligned with the Real, and adjustments are necessary. Gorbachev tried to effect these adjustments to the Soviet mythos in the 80s, and every sane person in the U.S. hoped that Obama would effect similar adjustments to the hybrid neoliberal/neoconservative mythos that proved itself disastrously misaligned with reality during the Cheney Bush years. Obama failed because he didn't understand that he had to deal with the foundational problem--the mythos problem--before he could deal with practical or logos problems. He made the fundamental Liberal mistake of overvaluing logos, to think that being reasonable and practical was enough, when instead he should have been trying to change the fundamental story. I think the country was ready for a different story. Obama as campaigner showed himself capable of telling that story; Obama as government bureaucrat has proved himself incapable.  

The Liberal mythos, as I argued the other day, values competence but is grounded in what I describe as soft nihilistic metaphysics that by definition rejects as delusional any mythos that affirms ultimate purposes. And Rosenberg, quoting John Jost, points out that Liberals just don't have what it takes when it comes to a street fight:

True, we find some support for the traditional “rigidity-of-the-right” hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity — all of which may be liabilities in mass politics and other public and professional domains.

A worldview that embraces competency, a logos mythos, so to say, cancels itself out and loses to a worldview that embraces ultimate purposes almost every time. Marxism succeeded to the degree that it did because it affirmed ultimate purposes, even if its ultimate purposes were misguided or delusional. Reality has a feedback mechanism that sooner or later lets you know if your ideas are delusional, but as we've seen in this country, the disasters of the Iraq War and the 2007 economic meltdown didn't provide evidence enough that the mythos that guides the GOP or neoliberal Democrats is delusional, so Americans keep sending Republicans to Washington.

I think they do this for reasons somewhat different from Tom Frank's explanation: they do it because Republicans give the appearance of standing for something and Democrats just don't. Republican policies might be toxic and delusional, but Republicans present themselves as being committed to "ultimate" values that Americans care deeply about. Democrats look more like our worst stereotype of what a politician is: the weak-kneed hypocrites who stand for nothing but the advancement of their own careers. I believe that the country would back progressive politicians who stand for core American values. That's why Jim Webb's candidacy intrigues me. 

So that's a part of it: When a particular mythos has captured the collective imagination of a group, it is virtually impossible to argue against it on a logos level. This is what people mean when they talk about cognitive divides or conservatives and liberals working with different epistemologies--one's epistemology follows from one's metaphysics, and one's metaphysics follows from one's Mythos, whether that mythos is consciously or unconsciously affecting one's thinking. One's mythos will not be given up until disaster proves conclusively that it is misaligned with the Real. Or it can be given up when an alternative mythos that shares its foundations with the reality-misaligned mythos emerges that proves itself better adapted to the Real. 

The latter is to be preferred to the former. When the old mythos collapses as it did in the Soviet Union in the 80s or Germany after WWI, it's usually replaced with an even more primitive and regressive mythos that has to run its course toward yet other disasters. These primitive myths have more in common with the primordial flood that pushes us from behind than with grace and freedom that call us into the future.  

More Americans have chosen Republicans in congressional elections (Presidential elections are different) because Democrats don't offer a robust enough alternative mythos that would motivate people to care enough to vote for them. So I'm arguing that secular progressives will continue to fail in the political and economic spheres, no matter how competent or practical their policy prescriptions, so long as their mythos is grounded in a soft nihilistic metaphysics/mythos no matter how humanistic and well intentioned. The Weimar Republic was humanistic and well intentioned in that Liberal sense.

So the answer for progressives does not lie in adopting an expedient Noble Lie that competes with the mythos of cultural Right. Such a contrived mythos will have as much staying power as the reality-misaligned mythos of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.  A mythos that works has to be grounded in the Real--the spiritual Real, the Real that comes to us from the Absolute Future, and that's why secular progressives will never be able to give us what the country and world needs if they are to move forward into a truly progressive future. But such a mythos cannot be developed out of thin air--that't the Jacobin fallacy--it has to grow out of the tradition, and in the Western world that means the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Those of us who believe that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is deeply aligned with the Real must find a way of presenting it as a robust alternative mythos that might actually help to move us into a the more deeply human future we all of us most deeply long for.

[See also Mythos and Logos 1 and Mythos and Logos 2]

The Silicon Valley Flood

The culture of Silicon Valley today sits somewhere on the autistic spectrum and exhibits the elemental qualities of water. Water will always find its way, it will find the unseen cracks, and find ways through obstacles and even tear them down, as a tiny leak can bring down a mighty dam.

Water is an amazing disruptor in nature -- materializing from thin air, it can torrent and push aside mountains, or it can patiently work at opening up tiny cracks in solid stone, freezing and expanding, thawing and flowing.

Water doesn't need ethics or morality it is a force of nature. It will always find its right level. It's an appropriate metaphor for Silicon Valley's culture of amorality. (Tom Forensky)

I am trying to formulate a way of thinking about "progress" that fits into a bigger evolutionary narrative, and so any notion of progress for me must embrace a notion of moral development. It is certainly possible to progress economically and technologically and to regress morally. it happens all the time, and Google is a case study over the last ten years. Earlier in the article Forenski points out:

Google became an important thought leader in the burgeoning social corporate responsibility movement, which was kick-started earlier by Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff. 

Corporate Social Responsibility was important because it was important to the software engineering community. It was essential in recruiting the best engineers. A company bus and a company lunch didn't cut it with that generation of coders.

Today's Silicon Valley culture is dominated by a peculiar amorality, a narcissism that claims Ayn Rand for its aspirations, even though few have read her books or even their dust jackets.

It's as if everyone has forgotten, "What the right thing to do is." And Google has worked hard to play down its "Don't be evil" rule.

There are moments in time when human beings have a glimpse of the transcendent, but usually that's all they get, and they either remain faithful to the memory of what they came to understand in this glimpse, or they allow themselves to be swept away by the primordial flood, the forces in nature and within ourselves that trend toward entropy and dissolution. And it was so easy for the elites at Google, who had such a glimpse, to allow themselves to be swept away.There are always elaborately contrived justifications for being swept away. In this case, a little Ayn Rand here, some neoliberal market ideology there.  It's not something most people in Silicon Valley (or anywhere in our consumer culture0 think about; there are these occasional moments of wakefulness, and then it's back to sleep in submerged in the flood.

So the other day in my post "Sacramental Semiotics" and the comments that follow it, I was tentatively feeling my way toward explaining the "Big History" understanding of how evolution works that I have been thinking about that moves beyond purely naturalistic metaphysics. A naturalist metaphysics is a closed system; a metaphysics that is open to transcendence embraces the naturalistic "facts", but does not see them as the only shaping force in history or evolution. 

A purely naturalist metaphysics presents a universe and the life world on earth as dominated by  randomness, chance, sometimes stunning beauty, and often impersonal cruelty. Heat death is its telos. Why anybody chooses to embrace a purely naturalistic metaphysics (IMO) has little to do with seeing the world as it is; it has everything to do with seeing the world through a certain world-weary lens skeptical about, if not cynical about, all grand narratives. 

Through such a grand-narrative skeptic's lens, the old religious orthodoxies seem antiquated and absurd. And while the great Eastern religious and philosophical traditions may for a while (in the sixties and seventies) have seemed to provide a possible legitimate alternative for allowing the possibility of a spiritual dimension, those traditions have been trivialized by Hollywood and New Age flakiness. So without a credible, robust narrative that presents a credible spiritual alternative, the intellectual class reverts to a complacent, soft nihilism. Nihilist, because when people in this class have an encounter with the transcendent, as all humans do whether they recognize it as such or not, they have no way to hold onto it or understand it, so they reduce it to the aesthetic. The soft nihilist narrative allows for an appreciation of the "spiritual" experience, but cannot give it any meaning, because, a priori there is no meaning.  

This nihilism leads to moral complacency because while your typical secular intellectual wants to be moral, that means little more than being nice in a politically correct kind of way. And they are nice, but because there is no grounding for deeper moral commitments, those moral commitments are easily discarded when they become inconvenient. That's my reading about what happened at Google. It was "nice"  for a while not to be evil; now it's ok. Whatever momentary glimpse some had about the importance of 'not being evil', it was too easily swept away by the flood, by the primordial, amoral forces that grope randomly for primitive survival and advantage. 

And these points reinforce the argument I've been making over the years that the secular Left offers no real promise of a progressive or more just future, not because at some level many who are at home in the secular Left don't sincerely want Justice. Many do. It's just that they don't have a way to hold on to it because they don't believe in it as a transcendent ideal. If the bigger meta-story is randomness and senselessness, and if it just ends in heat death, why should anybody care deeply about the future, especially if one is relatively comfortable in the present?  Why would anybody choose to suffer and sacrifice for a purpose larger than maintaining his comfort? Yes, there are the few romantic nihilists, the Che Guevara types, who are willing to make that sacrifice. But in a comfortable country like the U.S. all they can do is criticize the injustices that pile up left and right and wait for the contradictions to heighten enough so that the masses become uncomfortable enough to find the resentment that will motivate them to act.  

But a politics of resentment is just another way that the primordial flood works; it leads nowhere good, and certainly not in a direction that I would call progressive. Justice, if it is to have any real staying power and any transformational effect, has to be grounded in more than a passing social mood inspired by a fleeting glimpse of the Transcendent. A commitment to transcendent ideals has to be grounded deeply in peoples' souls, in their collective imaginations and traditions, where it is understood that the Absolute Future is the only truly progressive transformational force in history. 

So the counternarrative that I am trying to articulate would embrace Justice, for instance, as a transcendent ideal, if by transcendent we mean something that exists outside a system that in our experience of it is best explained in naturalistic language. But rather than imagine this transcendent realm as something that works from above,  in some static Platonic world of ideas, we imagine it as working dynamically toward us from the future, the Abolute Future, working in time shaping history and evolution. I imagine history as being propelled by this raw, primitive energy that pushes from behind us, but which is given shape as it meets the Absolute Future which is flowing against it. Let me repeat here what I wrote as a comment in the preceding post:

It's all about the future, the Absolute Future, streaming toward us in a counterflow against the chaotic noise released in the big Bang. That's the story of evolution for me: the groping, random, cruel, noisy, chaotic entropic energies streaming from the past--Teilhard's Alpha point--and the ordering, coding, truth and beautifying flow coming to meet it from the future--the Omega point. And caught right in the middle is the human being, who determines whether the forces of the past win or the forces of the future do. Goodness, deep goodness, comes into the world when humans choose the Future, even in the smallest of matters. 

The angel Gabriel was in this sense a herald of the Future. A simple choice is presented to Mary: yes or no, no matter what the cost, choose. Refusal or Amen. So must we all choose. The Magnificat is an eschatological song of deep truth and beauty inspired by her encounter with the Absolute Future. This is the archetypal choice for any of us who long for peace and justice. It is the template for analogous choices we too must make all the time.

So I don't know if this orientation of our spiritual imagination toward the future is helpful for anybody else, but it works for me because of the problems it solves on so many levels. And not the least of which among them is to introduce a way of thinking about history as having a purpose while at the same time recognizing that much if not most of what works in history is random, cruel, and amoral. And to recognize that randomness, cruelty and amorality are the default unless resisted. Amorality becomes 'evil' when humans fail to resist and allow themselves to be swept away by the Flood. Good comes into the world humans resist by choosing a place to stand in the Absolute Future. Good and Evil have no meaning except as they relate to the fundamental human choice to either choose the Absolute Future or to refuse it.

Sacramental Semiotics

For what does elemental matter--the microscopic stuff of stars, planets and DNA molecules--look like in a post-Einsteinian universe? The first thing to say, I suppose, is that matter is bound or condensed energy, captured from the torrential, buzzing flow set loose by the big bang. Just as water moves through a whirlpool and simultaneously creates it, so are we and the stars disturbances (or warps) in the free flow of ballooning, random energy sounded with the opening chord of our cosmic symphony (whether it was the first or just one of many). Democritus and the classical atomists (or the Hindus) had it about right: the atoms that compose all the object-like entities in the universe are vortices, eddies or fluctuations within a vast cosmic river. . . [which began its flow with the Big Bang]

Hence it is an anachronism (and a sign of cultural lag) that the word atom should any longer serve as a metaphor of our insularity and shut-in-ness. It is precisely the opposite. Due to its field properties, atomic structure means that the whole universe is woven into us and we into it. It may be true, as Aristotle had it, that the soul is potentially all things. The point is that at an invisible (because microscopic) physical level, everything is actually implicated in everything else--the one in the many, the many in the one. Or to put it in a medieval frame, the macrocosm is in the microcosm. 

From David S. Toolan, S.J., "At Home in the Cosmos," America Magazine, 2/24/1996

I want to introduce another theme for this blog, to which I've adverted indirectly over the years, which is that our social imaginary hasn't yet caught up with what physicists are telling us about how the universe works. We (me included) have (mostly) a rather nineteenth-century materialist imagination of the world, and it's precisely the limitations, the rather crude limitations, of that imagination that allow for all the silliness now that passes for the new atheism that sees itself pitted agains the pre-Darwinian imagination of religious fundamentalists. It's silly because it's locked into a way of thinking about the Real, both its spiritual and material dimensions, that has been made obsolete, and if anything, science is moving toward a retrieval of older understandings of the sacramental nature of the Real. 

Elsewhere in the article Toolan says, "

these areas of a post-Einsteinian world begin to show striking affinities to the chancy, interconnected and semiotic universe presupposed by Catholic sacramental theology. Moreover, as Northrop Frye once observed, to begin to think of God in the way scientists now do of atoms and electrons--as forces, fields and energies rather than 'things'--may prove a way of recovering our biblical ancestors' sense that God is linguistically a "word of power," not a noun but essentially a verb."

In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, ... and through him all things were made." There is entropy and chaos and then there is the Logos; there is noise and there is information and organization, which are deep linguistic structures, the codes at the heart of the universe. This is an idea that has been a part of modern and postmodern thinking at least since the time of Charles Peirce whose semiotics laid the foundations for Heisenberg and Bohr, Crick and Watson. Everything is code, signs working with other signs. Everything is Word. More on Charles Peirce's semiotics in the future, but for now let's hear what Toolan has to say:

We no longer need to carry the physicist's energy and the humanist's signs and symbols in separate accounts. One balance sheet will do. Information physics has given us back a semiotic universe, a nature that--like the medieval sacramental universe--gives signs. University divisions of the natural sciences and divisions of humanities while working at different parts of the spectrum, need not figure themselves as concerned with utterly disparate matters. The natural sciences, we may now say, deal with primitive sign systems and their protolanguages and protogrammars, whereas the humanities deal with the more developed sign systems and meanings of the animate star dust we call human cultures.

There is a telos, an Omega point, toward which all creation groans, and this telos is the slow, eons-long process of a largely unconscious, inarticulate Natura becoming aware of itself. The human being is the 'warp' in the cosmic flow where this 'becoming conscious' occurs and through whom this awareness is given a voice. And humans speak what they learn most truly and deeply when it is the Word, the deep Real, the Logos, the substrate for all that exists, that speaks in and through them. For since the beginning the Logos has sung the ongoing cosmic song of creation, a song we humans over time are learning to sing with greater depth and greater complexity and greater beauty. In the end it is the song sung in full throated joy by the communion of saints.

Jim Webb for President

There are things that Jim Webb has said and done over the years that have rubbed me the wrong way, but better him than Hillary. He's an economic populist who is to the left of Hillary's foreign policy and someone who resides in Glenn Greenwald's Hall of Fame for integrity. That alone makes him preferrable to HC, but he will be branded by the cultural left as a cultural conservative, a Reagan Democrat, which means that he's not really a member in good standing of the Democratic tribe. It's not a tribe that many people want to belong to or care about anymore. I certainly don't, anyway. 

I've written here with intense feelings of nausea ad nauseam about how the Democrats have alienated themselves from Main Street, from the people who talk about politics in churches and bars, in barber shops and union halls. In other words exactly who the Democrats have until recently represented against the interests of the moneyed elite. A guy like Jim Webb will have a lot of Main Street appeal, and he's right on the issues where HC just is not. HC is just another neoliberal elite. 

In other words Webb is exactly what the country needs, someone who can transcend the culture war and who points the country toward the real issues, not the distracting ones. He's a Democrat who can speak credibily to what is legitimate in populist resentments without being a Tea Party moron. 

Noah Millman has some intereesting things to say about how he might handle this kind of branding by the cultural left (my underscores):

So what can he do to make it more likely that he is read as challenging Clinton on foreign policy and economic policy primarily, which I believe is what he wants?

I think – and I admit, I’m in danger of committing the pundit’s fallacy here – that he needs to get out in front of this kind of positioning with counter-positioning.

He can’t simply disavow his past positions on these issues – first of all because in some cases he still believes them (in other cases, not), and second because that would vitiate a primary source of his appeal as someone who actually stands by what he believes. Rather, he needs to make it clear that he’s not running on them – that, in fact, he’s in part running against them as organizing principles of our politics.

He needs to say, in effect, that he used to be a Republican because the GOP seemed like the party of people like him: a Scots-Irish military man. But when he left the GOP, it wasn’t just because he’d decided its policies were wrong – though they were. He also left because he no longer was willing to respond to that kind of appeal, an appeal to identity. Because that appeal made it hard for him to see the ways in which the GOP’s actual policies were detrimental to ordinary Americans.

Heck, he can quote Thomas Frank if he likes. The point of saying all this is to say further: and I didn’t join the Democratic Party in order to adopt a new identity, or to keep fighting the culture war but now from the other side. There are issues, he can say, on which my views have changed. And there are issues where I respect that my party and I don’t agree 100%. And there are also issues where I will try to convince my party to change. (For that matter, there are issues where Webb didn’t need to change to be in the mainstream of the Democratic Party – like abortion – and issues where Webb is more liberal than many Democrats – like penal reform and executive power.) But I am not running to make the Democratic Party more appealing to people who look like me, or who have my cultural background. I became a Democrat because I realized that the Democratic Party already held the best promise of standing for ordinary Americans, and for rejecting the kinds of policies, foreign and domestic, that have done them so much harm. And I’m running for President to make sure the Democratic nominee keeps that promise.

Nothing is more important in our national politics than pushing back against the country's drift toward an authoritarian plutocracy. Elizabeth Warren is the political left's darling to play this role, and I would certainly vote for her before I would vote for HC if she should run. but even if EW were elected, she's an outsider, as Obama and Carter were, and would likely be as ineffective as they were. Webb understands how Washington works, and he will have credibility with the saner operatives in the Deep State in a way that Warren could not.

But too many Democrats in the primaries will think it's more important to get a woman in the oval office or that it's a step backward to get another white male in it when a qualified woman is available. That's what gets them juiced up--issues like wealth distribution, imperial foreign policy, and the surveillance state are important, but they are a snore compared to identity politics issues. That's precisely why the Democrats lose the "little" elections as they did earlier this month. The people on Main Street who actually vote don't like or identify with tribal Democrats. I usually vote for them because there is no saner alternative, but I don't identify with them.

I would love a gig as this guy's speechwriter. Or better Millman should apply for the job. And focus on the themes underscored above. If there were in the 80s Reagan Democrats, let's create a new political category for the next decade: Jim Webb Republicans, Republicans--even the saner Tea Party types--who find themselves supporting a straight-talking, populist Democrat. Now if some billionaire would adopt him, Webb just might have a chance. 

 

 

 

Frank & Perlstein . . .

. . . take their act on the (rail)road. Great conversation about the tragedy of the 1970s in the U.S. A few excerpts:

RP: Before Reagan is even elected. And then when Reagan does run for president in 1980, the secret weapon in his quiver ideologically is supply-side economics which basically breaks the back of one of the most powerful appeals that the Democrats have traditionally had, which is taxing the rich and spending the money on the middle class. Which terrified Republicans because, they said, no one shoots Santa Claus. Right? But supply-side economics says: we can inject prosperity into the economy by cutting taxes and…

TF: The Republicans become Santa Claus. 

RP:They become Santa Claus. And it’s absolutely brilliant. Just as Democrats themselves are abandoning Keynesianism because, of course, Jimmy Carter’s first act as president is canceling all these Keynesian water projects all over the country.

TF: Is that right? I didn’t know that.

Yeah. Because he had this deep distrust of a politics of economic populism. He thought it was kind of embarrassing. And they used to say in the Carter White House, “The best way to get Carter to do something was to say it wasn’t going to be popular,” which is very much like Obama.

I’m not sure I understand this. So if something was popular Carter didn’t want to do it?

Yes, because it would show that he was stern and Baptist and wasn’t a demagogue.

Really?

Yeah. I’m sure it’s the same way in Obama’s White House.

It's simplistic, but I could see it as a factor. People may say I'm weak and feckless, think Carter and Obama, but I know in my heart of hearts that I am not. I had the strength and integrity not to pander to the masses. That everybody else sees this as pandering to moneyed interests never really occurs to them because they are truly convinced they are making the hard choices that are best for the country. Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons--the tragic flaw at the heart of a  moralistic idealism that afflicts so many liberal democrats.

Is it possible that Obama is now willing to do the popular thing now because now that he's a lame duck, no one can accuse him of pandering for votes? I hope he does, but I'm not optimistic that he'll be effective. It's too late in the game--it's garbage time, and any points he scores are garbage points.

The conversation ends with this summary of the '70s by Perlstein:

TF: Is anyone nostalgic for the ’70s?

RP: I am. And for the following reason: If you read my preface, I explain that Americans at the level of popular culture, at the level of grassroots politics, were thinking very hard about what it would mean to have a country they didn’t believe was God’s chosen nation. What would it mean to not be the world’s policeman? What would it mean to conserve our resources? What would it mean to not treat our presidents as if they were kings? That was happening! And the tragedy of Ronald Reagan most profoundly wasn’t policy — although that was tragic enough — but it was robbing America of that conversation. Every time a politician stands before a microphone and utters this useless, pathetic cliche that America is the greatest country ever to exist, he’s basically wiping away the possibility that we can really think critically about our problems and our prospects. And to me, that’s tragic.

Maybe. Carter's famous anti-consumerist 'malaise speech' was in its way politically courageous and an honest attempt to speak the hard truth to Americans who didn't want to hear it. So, sure, better stern Calvinist sobriety than Reagan's voodoo and nostaligic delusion. But the more important changes were structural and behind the scenes. Reagan was simply an appealing front man for them, more appealing than Carter, at least, who was bending to the same forces, whether he was aware of his doing so or not. I cannot think of any one person on the scene who had he been elected could have  effectively resisted. Certainly not Ted Kennedy. 

Deep-Staters in CIA Celebrating GOP Takeover of Senate

What goes on in Washington committees would be comic opera or even institutionalized buffoonery but for the fact that there are real world consequences. If torture is not discredited as a tool for national security it will undoubtedly be used again in the wake of another terrorist attack, further damaging U.S. credibility and inevitably distancing Washington from its actual and potential allies. The Republican effort to scuttle negotiations with Iran might also feature an intelligence sidebar. Incoming House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has already announced his intention to look into any involvement of the Agency in secret negotiations with Iran being conducted by the White House. He wants to discredit the process by claiming that the intelligence role had not been acknowledged in oversight briefings before his committee, suggesting that the Obama administration was covering up and is heading towards a bad deal with Tehran.

And so it goes. Feeble congressional attempts to rein in and establish some accountability relating to the out-of-control intelligence community are now dead. Worse still, the likely acceptance of a GOP perception that the United States is experiencing a national security failure as it confronts a broad array of intractable foreign threats fits in neatly with the Clapper warning about a “perfect storm.” Budgets will rise and concerns over extraordinary measures being used to confront the menace will be placed on the back burner. How long will it be before we again start referring to the “global war on terror?” (Philip Geraldi in TAC)

Diane Feinstein was a hack, but the new guy, Burr, is one of the crazies. That's the choice we have in national politics these days: hacks vs crazies. According to Geeraldi

. . . [Burr[ basically supports the CIA position that torture produced information critical to the killing of Osama bin Laden, commenting that “The information that eventually led us to this compound was the direct result of enhanced interrogations…” Burr is regarded as a right-wing conservative and has earned the ultimate accolade of a zero rating from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Now some might argue that Feinstein herself did her best to preserve the executive branch’s right to assassinate Americans overseas, to spy secretly, set up black site prisons and to engage in other activities that are best not discussed in polite company. Many of these activities were carried out by the CIA, but Feinstein did draw the line at torture, which is one of the few illegal acts that the Obama administration credibly claims to be against, placing Feinstein on safe ground bureaucratically speaking.

The Democrats are weak, feckless, Neoliberal hacks, but there is at least some vestige of caring about the common good among many of them. One day the country will figure out, probably by having to learn the hard way, that the GOP is not the party of small government and traditonal values, but the party of the Machiavellian Hard Right. It does not provide a legitimgate counterbalance to Left Liberal technocratic overreach; it is rather the party most deeply aligned with factions within the Deep State whose agenda is guided by imperial ambition and endocolonialist control. 

The Neocon Nightmare World

[Ed. Note: While Neocons are not in the news so much these days, but they are waiting in the wings, and for reasons given in recent posts, it's just a matter of time before they make their comeback. This is a repost of a 2007 piece (slightly edited) that was a repost of a 2005 piece. See also these posts related to Strauss here and here.]

When I first picked up Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in the nineties, I feared that it would be a Rush Limbaugh-like rant against Liberal decadence. In some ways you could say it is, but unlike Limbaugh, you have to take Bloom seriously. He's got a case to make, and both he and Christopher Lasch make similar and, for me, persuasive cases for the inadequacy of secular Liberalism as a dominant culture-wide value system or worldview.

Neither Bloom nor Lasch have developed an alternative that makes any sense to me, but Lasch's celebration of the kind of religious progressivism, quite alien to the spirit of Liberalism, that inspired the Civil Rights movement comes closer. For Bloom's thinking, as fairly typical of the thinking of all the Straussian neoconservatives, is a symptom of decadence rather than an antidote for it. Lasch understands the problem, but struggled in a much more wholesome way to develop a solution. The mistake the neocons make, in my opinion, is their belief that there should be no pluralism either in the political or cultural spheres. That a healthy society needs a unified cultural/political mythology to give it strength and coherency. Toleration for if not an enthusiastic embrace of pluralism is for me the litmus test for political sanity. 

But pluralism isn't the same thing as individualism. Both Bloom and Lasch understood that a society pays a price when it values individualism and freedom above all other values. For both men the laissez faire in Liberalism creates a fragmented, atomized society. This is a problem for Lasch because it diminishes the possibility for human community life, destroys local traditions and neighborhoods, and creates a culture of narcissism, a culture of minimal selves--of lost souls who don't know who they are, a society of ungrounded people who are empty of any real interior life, and who are therefore weak and easy to manipulate.

In other words, Liberalism creates a vacuum in the life of a society where instead there should be a soul. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so the emptiness is filled with the crudest kinds of impulses. But the antitdote for the fragmentation of pluralism is a localist communitarianism, not top-down statism. Lasch was a communitarian; the neocons, with their flipped Trotskyist ethos, are statists.

Shadia Drury's says of Straussians like Bloom that he "believes that America fails to provide a culture that can be embraced, loved, and appropriated by its citizens. She offers them only an opportunity to devote themselves to the satisfaction of their brutish nature. Far from teaching them to have contempt for themselves and their brutishness, it teaches them smugness and self-satisfaction. America provides her people with nothing splendid and sublime to bow before." It's  not the job of the state to provide aspiration to the sublime, and any state that tries to do it is dangerous. The American patriotism that tries to be this sublime thing in American civil religion is the crudest kind of jingoism that appeals not to what is humanly noble, but to the crude nationionalism that feeds the need to feel superior. 

For Straussians feeling superior is good enough if it is a unifying social force. The problem lies with a society that is fragmented, because it is weak. An open, multicultural society in which every thing is equal, in which no value or cultural ideal is considered any better than any other, an anything-goes" different strokes for different folks" society loses any sense of cohesiveness and is very vulnerable to manipulation by a willful, well-disciplined minority that has no qualms about violently asserting its own values and suppressing any other value system as inferior and to be annihilated.

In other words, the easygoing, nonjudgmental, cultural laissez faire of Liberalism invites its own destruction by those whose attitudes are anything but laissez faire. The anything-goes decadence of the Weimar Republic created the conditions for the Nazis to bully their way into power. Strauss, a German Jew who fled the Nazis, saw structural similarities between the anything-goes liberalism of Weimar and the anything-goes mentality of the American Liberalism. He believed it was inevitable that the U.S. would succumb to an aggressive minority of thugs if Liberalism continued to be the main shaping force in American politics and culture.

For many of the neocons, politics is thuggery, and you fight thuggery with thuggery, so the only thing that matters is whether the thugs you approve of are running things. The thuggery that we began to see assert itself on the right starting with Newt Gingrich, the impeachment of Clinton, through to the the bullying of Tom Delay in the House are all justified by Straussian theory. It's thuggery in the cause of the higher good. They really believe that. Liberalism must be destroyed or America will be destroyed by its enemies.

For the Straussians, following Carl Schmidt, politics is not the sphere of compromise and working things out, it's the realm of domination of the weak by the strong. For the neocons, politics is war. It's about controlling the political process or being controlled, annihilating or being annihilated. They understand power as the central truth, and every other value has value only insofar as it promotes power. And the neocon influence in the Republican party seems bent on proving their theory right by doing everything it can to discredit and destroy Liberal ideas and Liberal institutions. And so far, judging by the compliance of the Democrats, they seem to have proved their case.

All of this has become so much clearer for me after reading Shadia Drury's Leo Strauss and the American Right -- particularly the virulence of the conservative attack on Liberalism, which until recently I had naively dismissed as crackpot. Most normal people think of wingnuts like Limbaugh, Robertson, and Coulter as comical, barely sane troglodytes. These rightists, on the other hand, take Liberals very seriously, and see them as a cancer that is destroying American society and making it spineless and weak, and as such all the more vulnerable to its enemies. They believe that Liberalism is destroying America, and they are totally committed to preventing that by destroying Liberalism. "Let the Liberals laugh at us," think the wingnuts. "We'll see how hard they laugh when eventually we put our boot on their throats."

The great virtue of the Liberal credo is its belief that a society can be built on facts, rationalism, and enlightened, pragmatic self-interest. But I also think that over the long haul that's not enough. Conservatives understand that a society needs myths, religion, and to stand for something worth dying for. Otherwise, as Drury points out, "it is little more than an animal farm." I would say that a postmodern America needs to find a way to integrate both the Liberal and Conservative credos. But it's not the state's job to provide or reinforce any particular mythos.

But the conservative part is dangerous if the myths are not true narratives. By' true narrative' I mean that they are true in a metaphorical or analogical sense--they use symbol and story to point to transcendent truths that are genuinely life-giving and profound. For the neocons, myths are simply arbitrary fictions whose value lies in their effectiveness to anesthetize and galvanize the masses. How to distinguish between the true and false myths is a tricky business, but it boils down to: By their fruits you will know them.

Until reading Drury's book, I thought that the alliance between the intellectually sophisticated neocons and the simplistic religious-right extremists like Falwell and Robertson was a marriage of convenience engineered for short-term political gains. But Drury makes clear that the neocons believe that the religious right is essential for continued American dominance because it provides the requisite myths that justify American supremacy.

The neocons themselves don't believe in the myths of religion--they are philosophers who have transcended the need for such childishness. Like the nihilists on the cultural left, they believe that philosophy necessarily leads one to understand that there is no God, that there is no truth, that there is only the void. But the few, the true philosophers, can confront the bleak truth of this metaphysical nihilism. And the truly great philosophers are the creators of the great metanarratives that inspire great cultures.

Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammad constructed magnificent fictions, according to the neocons, that these individuals themselves did not believe, but which they saw as meeting the needs of the people who could not live without such splendid illusions. The arrogance and cynicism of this kind of thinking is beyond comical. You have to be a madman to take it seriously, and yet these guys surround Bush and are directing policy.

This is why in my opinion Straussian neoconservatism is just as decadent as the nihilistic philosophies of the cultural left. Both left and right are nihilistic at their root; the difference lies in that the the Straussian rightists see themselves as socially responsible because they understand that society needs its myths and illusions and should not be disabused of them. They oppose the cultural left, which wants to evangelize its nihilism. Drury says of Bloom:

But it is important to recognize that Bloom does not condemn the universities for failing to inculcate the truth. On the contrary, he regards the truth as too dangerous to be spread liberally by universities intended for mass education. His point is that the universities because of their commitment to openness, have failed American society on two counts. They have failed to educate either the many or the few. First, they have failed to impart to the many what Strauss calls the noble lies or the salutary myths; the myth of of openness is destructive, not salutary. Second, the universities have failed to provide the few with what Bloom regards as an education in the real sense: a capacity to transcend the myths of the cave and see the truth. To do this, philosophy must dismantle culture, and Bloom warns that this is a "dangerous business." Philosophy breaks the spell of culture. It liberates man from the charms by which culture holds him captive. It is therefore a threat to civil society.

Strauss thought that the Athenians were correct in their condemnation of Socrates. Socrates was indeed corrupting the youths of Athens by breaking the spell the collective myths had on their minds and which undermined their ability to be loyal citizens who loved their city above all others. For the neocons, a society must believe in its superiority and it must be fanatically committed to its preservation precisely because of its belief in its superiority. It doesn't matter if in reality its customs, values, and achievements are no better or worse than that of its enemies. Power determines what the truth is, and history is written by the victorious. Does this sound familiar? We have Americans in power now who believe this.

For the Straussians, if a society does not believe itself superior in every way to its enemies, it will be defeated by an enemy who is not intimidated and that believes itself superior. The neocons therefore have formed an alliance with the Christian Right not for political convenience, but because the Christian Right naively and fanatically accepts the myth of American superiority and of its special God-given role in world history. The neocons support the wingnut attitude that anyone who does not believe this myth is an America-hater and, as Ann Coulter puts it, is guilty of treason. There is no gray area. There is no room to criticize. It's my country right or wrong--any other attitude leads to inevitable defeat by another society that believes in itself more.

Sane people dismiss extremists like Coulter as comical crazies. But the very fact that her views have been legitimated by her ubiquitous presence in the media in the last decade points to the drift of things in this country toward insanity. What should by now be clear to everyone is that the right is not just indulging in a lot of crazy talk. They are walking their talk.

They look at the mainly passive, disorganized, fragmented Democrats and they say to themselves, "This is an enemy easy to defeat. The Liberals have no unifying religion or myths; they are fragmented, weak, and ripe for the taking." And they were taken in 2000. And they were taken again in the runup to the war in 2002. And they were taken yet again in the swiftboating of Kerry and the shenanigans in Ohio in 2004. The wingnuts have proved correct their critique of the Democrats as weak and spineless time and time again.

Does that mean that anybody who wishes to oppose the neocons must resort to thuggery to defeat them? No. But I do not believe that secular liberalism has the resources to defeat it. Even if the Democrats win in the short run, the problem remains for the long run. We need a tough, principled, idealistic politics in the spirit of King, Mandela, Gandhi. These men were not nihilists. They were genuinely religious humanists who understood evil and knew how to fight against it on their own principled terms, not on the terms defined by the thugs.

The Straussians are convinced that we all live in a nightmare world and that there is no ultimate purpose or meaning to human existence, and they seem bent on turning our world into something that conforms to their imagination of it. It will be an American capitalist nightmare world that the neocons believe nevertheless all Americans should embrace with patriotic fervor. They believe that the masses have to be anesthetized and controlled with myths and religious fictions, but that the grownups have to run things, and the grownups understand that it's all about power, and that so long as the U.S. has the enormous power it now possesses, it had better use it or lose it.

This explains their gambit in Iraq--it was an opportunity to fill a geopolitical power vacuum with American power after the collapse of the Soviet sphere of influence in the Middle East. It's a gambit that has failed--the Muslims there are not Liberals, and they do not fold so easily. But I for one am worried about what the neocons have up their sleeve now that their policies are being discredited by their failure. They will not walk away with their tail between their legs. They still believe they are right even if their tactics were ineffective. They will not be gracious in defeat. Look at Cheney, for god's sake.

And they are not going away. Wingnuttery in America will always be a problem so long as there is a vacuum in American society where there should be a soul. How to solve that problem in a sane, progressive way is for me the most pressing issue that confronts Americans in the 21st Century. 

Contempt for the Liberal Class

Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.”

That phrase, delivered with sneering emphasis on the second word, may have been a key to the whole confusing affair. Tom Frank

Contempt for the 'Liberal Class' comes from both the Left and the Right. If the near Republican sweep last week demonstrates contempt from the Right, it masks what is also a contempt from the Left. Chris Hedges' keelhauling of Liberals in his book The Death of the Liberal Class explains why the Left finds the Liberal Class so odious:

The media, the church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions — the pillars of the liberal class — have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power. Journalists, who prize access to the powerful more than they prize truth, report lies and propaganda to propel us into a war in Iraq. Many of these same journalists assured us it was prudent to entrust our life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. Those life savings were gutted. The media, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, at the same time renders invisible whole sections of the population whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principle focus of journalism.

In the name of tolerance — a word the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., never used — the liberal church and the synagogue refuse to denounce Christian heretics who acculturate the Christian religion with the worst aspects of consumerism, nationalism, greed, imperial hubris, violence, and  bigotry. These institutions accept globalization and unfettered capitalism as natural law. Liberal religious institutions, which should concern themselves with justice, embrace a cloying personal piety expressed in a how-is-it-with-me kind of spirituality and small, self-righteous acts of publicly conspicuous charity. Years spent in seminary or rabbinical schools, years devoted to the study of ethics, justice, and morality, prove useless when it comes time to stand up to corporate forces that usurp religious and moral language for financial and political gain. (Source)

The Liberal Class is the 'establishment' in Washington, but it's also as much the establishment in liberal Seattle as it is in conservative Omaha. Those who compose the Liberal Class may disagree about gay marriage and abortion in those two cities, but they agree when it comes to neoliberal principles that organize the economy. They agree when it comes to globalization; they agree when it comes to hatred of unions; they agree when it comes to top-down education reform; they agree when it comes to regulating Wall Street or running oil pipelines from the Tar Sands of Alberta.

Daniel Bell wrote an article that I want to write more about in the future about five kinds of conservative. Libertarians (Ayn Rand, the Pauls), Populists (Tea Party,) Evangelical Christians (Huckabee, Palin, Goehmert, etc.), Neconservatives (Cheney, Kristol, Krauthammer), and Corporatists (Catholic conservatives like Wm F. Buckley and Antonin Scalia). The names in parens are my examples, not Bell's, but I think that taxonomy stands up as well today as it did in '87. The one end of the spectrum is Liberal and anti-statist; the other end is anit-Liberal and Statist--an extreme example would be Franco's Spain, which Buckley sometimes defended. I don't think the paleo-conservatism of The American Conservative magazine fits well in any of these categories. It is anti-statist, and a defender of traditional values--but it is is also anti Libertarian and in that sense anti-populist, if by populist we mean these days the populism of the Tea Party. I am very sympathetic to its POV, but its POV has close to zero influence in shaping policy. 

None of these groups votes Democratic, and yet the Libertarians, who dominate Republican policy thnking at this time, are quite sympathetic to Neoliberal economic and social policy as described above. Because Neoliberalism, whether in Republican or Democratic attire, dominates the Washington consensus and is the ideology of the ruling class in Washington--and wherever else elites hold sway. And yet, for now at least, Libertarians, dominate Republican thinking and are of all the five conservative groups most comfortable with Neoliberal policy thinking. This is the point that Frank is making in the rest of the article--the Tea Partiers and Evangelicals are electing Republicans who, whether they believe this about themselves or not, will fit right in when they get to Washington. They think they are sending people there who are anti-Liberal establishment, but nothing could be further from the truth. 

Neoliberal policy eventually leads to social chaos, and the the Neocons and Corporatists are waiting in the wings to clean up the mess. And they will be the only option unless something emerges on the progressive Left to present a robust alternative. This is what I meant when I wrote the other day that Leo Strauss will likely supplant Ayn Rand in shaping the Republican mindset. It's far more intellectually sophisticated than Libertarianism, and it is very seductive. I could see the Washington consensus become dominated by it very easily.

The Neocons have more in common with managerial Liberalism that the Corporatists, but both Neocons and Corporatists are about as anti-populists as you can get, and the Corporatists are about as anti-Liberal as you can get. That's precisely why it will appeal to Washington elites when the Libertarian-driven crash inevitably comes. If you're not familiar with the magazine, read First Things. It's an interesting attempt to join theologically conservative Catholics with evangelicals in shaping discourse in the public sphere. It supported the invasion of Iraq, a Neocon project, and aligns for the most part with a thoughtlful Wm. F. Buckley  Catholic corporatism--probably moreso now than does Buckley's National Review, which has become an unreadable partisan rag.

I am not at all sympathetic with its POV, but  First Things is not unreadable in that way, and if we are moving into a post-Liberal, post-Secular era, as I think wet are, here is a good possibility that it will be dominated by conservative thinking until a post-secular progressive alternative can form.  So we might as well understand what we're in for. More on Leo Strauss as I have time. I'm reading Gottfried's Leo Strauss and the Coervative Movement in America. 

 

Dewey, Lippmann, and the Problem of the "Public"

After WWI, Lippmann was very pessimistic about the prospects for American democracy. Dewey while he was more optimistic nevertheless agreed with Lippmann about the social dynamics that were hollowing out democracy. Lippmann wrote The Phantom Public in 1925 and Dewey wrote The Public and Its Problems in 1927 in response.

For Lippmann the public was incoherent and fickle and for the most part clueless. It had become an impotent bystander concerned about its private interests and affairs, which  overlapped hardly at all with public affairs.  Public affairs  became the exclusive domain of experts constituted by the college educated which in turn came mostly from privileged classes. C. Wright Mill wrote The Power Elite in the 1950s, which essentially described the ecosystem of the elites who ran America. Whatever one might say about them, they were for the most part public spirited and retained, probably from their Calvinist upbringing, some sense of the common good. So while at first Lippmann embraced an elitist approach to managing public affairs, by 1955 in The Public Philosophy he saw that the elites were as clueless as everybody else. Things had just become too complex for everybody. Elites were not pleased with his defection, but Lippmann was proved right, and David Halberstam wrote the epitaph for the liberal managerial elite and their pretensions to be the best and the brightest. 

Dewey was a committed democrat, and his ideas about democracy are worth laying out in some detail, but not here. He understood everything that Lippmann understood, and still retained hope that what had become a hollowed-out parody of democracy that Lippmann described could be supplanted by a restored vigorous democracy and laid out a program for it, that I think is plausible, but clearly before its time. Maybe someday. In the meantime Lippmann more accurately saw what the American public had become and would remain: passive spectators managed by an elite that didn't know what it was doing, but blundered ahead heedlessly thinking it did. The Vietnam War was the proximal cause for the final toppling of whatever residual confidence the public had in its 'expertise'. 

And so the liberal progressive ethos that dominated the 20th Century American managerial elite has been under attack and in decline ever since. It has become permanently delegitimated in ways that I really hadn't come to understand until after 2008. I still retained hope even then that it could make a comeback.  And while part of me is says good riddance to the technocratic arrogance, it's not like we're getting anything better to replace it. If the old Liberal elite were still influenced by a Calvinist ethic of social service and commitment to the common good, the new elite is more influenced by the Social Darwinism of Ayn Rand.

And worse, the basic big government and cold war infrastructure that the old liberal managerial elite created has not been dismantled by the ascendant Right; it has instead been taken over by the illiberal mentality exemplified by Dick Cheney, i.e., a militarist mentality obsessed by secrecy and a need for security. And so the quasi-paranoid, fear-soaked mentality that was allowed to flourish during the Cold War persists now even though the US faces no threat even remotely as dangerous as the one posed by the Soviet Union. And yet we see the dramatic expansion of the Cold War security state, which in turn has created the infrastructure for a repressive, authoritarian, endocolonialist surveillance state with a militarized police.

The Ferguson story is on one level the old story of racist habits in American society that we so far seem unable to break; but more chillingly it has brought into greater public awareness the degree to which the police in this country has become militarized. A number from the November Harper's "Index" really jumped out at me:

Estimated number of times SWAT teams were deployed in the United States in 1980: 3000. In 2013: 60,000.

Yikes.

So this is pretty disturbing, but we're beyond doing anything about it now. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or the ACLU isn't going to save us. Life will go on as usual for most of us in the powerless public; maybe some of us can do some useful things on the local level, but the general American ethos will continue to get meaner. How mean it can get, I don't know. There are still factions within the American elite that want to play nice, but in a fight between the mean guy and the nice guy, the smart money knows on whom to bet. And the mean guy never seems to get enough, and he doesn't care about playing fair. If push back comes, it will come from communities of faith; it's not going to come from the secular left. 

Election Day

Significance of GOP victory deserves a thought or two.

The bottom line is that our democracy has become so hollowed out and most people so alienated that what we're watching is simply a street fight between factions in the country's power elite. For some it has entertainment value, but it's not even an interesting matchup any more. The hard right libertarian faction has been wiping the floor with a weak opponent, a feckless, dispirited remnant of the old liberal managerial elite, which loses ground with every passing decade, even if it seems to win a round now and then as it did in 2008.

We're seeing again the continuation of a pattern in place since 1980 in which the hard right obtains power, then aggressively rigs things in its favor, pisses everybody off, gets voted out, and then consolidates its gains while obstructing the Democrats until it gets back in power again. Which it does inevitably because everybody is frustrated with the obstructed Democrats inability to get anything done. The American people apparently don't pay attention enough or care enough to break this pattern. The hope of Democrats that they have a long-term demographic advantage is ridiculous so long as they continue to be a party that nobody could be bothered to vote for. 

The idea of giving the Republicans any kind of serious responsibility is crazy because its leaders are captured by an Ayn Randian ideology that makes them crazy. At least the old liberal managerial elite had some sense of the common good, even if their technocratic attempts to achieve it were often misguided.

So it is what it is. But we shouldn't see this as democracy in action. This country ceased being a robust democracy decades ago, already before WWI, but elections like this matter as a kind of bellwether regarding the state of the nation's soul, and it looks like things will continue to get worse unless something happens to wake us up. I'm not optimistic, and  I think in twenty years time we could very well wind up becoming a corporatist authoritarian state like many of the countries in Latin America during the 80s. The Leo Strauss faction will eventually supplant the Ayn Rand faction. 

But not in the next two years because we're still protected to a certain extent by inertia in the Deep State and because Obama will veto anything really crazy that the new GOP congressional majorities come up with, but a vicious pattern continues, and it will continue to continue.

I still have very limited amount of time to read and think, but I want to write more about the long decline of the managerial liberal state. I was never a fan, but the libertarian alternative always struck me as adolescent. I was inclined to accept the managerial state as a necessity so long as there was a means to constrain it with a collective commitment to the principle of subsidiarity. Maybe eventually that's where we'll end up, but not in my lifetime.