After the Future

Political Correctness and the Democrats' Tactical Idiocy

It's interesting that the New York Times, the primary vehicle for promoting elite ideological thinking in American society, ran two contrasting stories in their Daily podcast about how political correctness is playing such a divisive role in America's cultural divide. On Tuesday and Wednesday it focused on the state of the Democratic Party in Missouri and the attempt of long-time New Deal style Democrat Joan Barry to change a plank in the state party's platform. This podcast was hosted by Sabrina Tavernise who wrote a piece earlier in the week about Barry: 

Joan Barry has been a member of the Missouri Democratic Party for 53 years. As a state legislator, she voted regularly for workers’ rights, health care and programs for the poor.

So when the party began writing a new platform after its crushing losses in 2016, Ms. Barry, a member of its state committee, did not think it was too much to ask for a plank that welcomed people like her — Democrats who oppose abortion.

At first the party agreed and added it. Missouri’s Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill, even called Ms. Barry to praise her.

But within days, Ms. Barry began receiving angry emails and Facebook messages. People called her a dinosaur, a has-been and worse. Her children started to worry.

The cosmoplitan left wing of the Missouri Democratic Party freaked out when this  plank was added, and eventually forced it to be removed. It reinforces the message that if you are Catholic or have other traditional values, even if you are left on the economic issues, you have no home in the Democratic Party. And Barry talks quite candidly about how she, like so many other culturally moderate Democrats, have come to feel that they are no longer welcome in the Democratic Party. This is tactical idiocy in the name of ideological purity. 

This morning, the Daily podcast focused on Louis C.K.'s return to the stage at the Comedy Club in New York, and Michael Barbaro, the Daily host, talks with Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Club, to ask him why he thinks it's ok to let him perform again. Barbaro is a caricature of a kind of squishy, cosmopolitan political correctness, and Dworman is a thoughtful free speech-libertarian who argues that it's not up to him to toe the politically correct line. Barbaro seems unable to accept this, and he keeps badgering him about what his moral principles are. The only answer that Dworman gives is the right one: it depends. Barbaro wants to know where he falls on the ideological spectrum, and Dworman, like most normal people, just doesn't think in those ideological/moralistic terms, even if Michael Barbaro thinks he should.

David Brooks the other day wrote about a new political typology developed by More in Common:

"Every few years one research group or another produces a typology of the electorate. The researchers conduct thousands of interviews and identify the different clusters American voters fall into.

More in Common has just completed a large such typology. It’s one of the best I’ve seen because it understands that American politics is no longer about what health care plan you support. It’s about identity, psychology, moral foundations and the dynamics of tribal resentment.

...What is new is how cultish this dispute has become. The researchers asked a wide variety of questions, on everything from child-rearing to national anthem protests. In many cases, 97 to 99 percent of Progressive Activists said one thing and 93 to 95 percent of Dedicated Conservatives said the opposite. There’s little evidence of individual thought, just cult conformity. The current situation really does begin to look like the religious wars that ripped through Europe after the invention of the printing press, except that our religions now wear pagan political garb." (David Brooks, NY Times)

So what do we mean by "political correctness"? Well, it would be uncontroversial if it was only about having common sense and common decency regarding rules of behavior and speech designed to minimize offense between groups with different values and worldviews in a pluralistic society. But it has come to mean a rigid moralism--what Brooks calls cult conformity--that is as intolerant and judgmental as any traditionalist moralism that cosmopolitan Liberals might find offensive. It's the mirror image of that kind of priggishness, except that there's more room for forgiveness in the traditionalist camp.

I recognize that political correctness rules are generally resented by legacy groups that feel their values should be playing a dominant role in pluralistic American society. That sense of entitlement is unjustified, but their sense that their values are held in contempt by the cosmopolitan Left is not unjustified, and it's understandable that the resentment they feel in response to cosmopolitan contempt leads some to want to push back. And it's precisely this resentment that Bannon and Trump have been exploiting.

I agree that it can be difficult to know where one draws the line between legitimate frank speech and speech that is obsessively overconstrained for fear of giving the least offense. But the bottom line is that common sense and common decency should govern what is appropriate, and for most of the cosmopolitan Left, it's not about common sense and common decency; it's about ideological purity. I'm not trying here to exonerate or diminish the destructive effects of the politically Right's destruction of decency and truth norms. But the cosmopolitan Left has to look into the mirror to understand the role it's playing in fueling the resentment the Right thrives on. 

What I saw in Joan Barry and Noam Dworman were two models of common sense and common decency, and it's precisely because their common sense and common decency fall outside the norms defined by the political correctness that shapes the moral priggishness of cosmopolitan elites, and it's because the Democratic Party has become dominated by that priggishness, they have been and will continue to lose the people they need most if there is any hope of pushing back against the truly dangerous bad guys--people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, the ignorant thugs in the Congress, the extremist ideologues on Fox News, the Koch brothers and their billionaire radical Libertarian fellow travelers, and Wall Street and the corporate class that could care less about what's good for anybody except their shareholders. 

For years now I've been arguing that serious people on the Left, and I include myself in that category, need to bracket the cultural issues and focus on the structural economic issues. It's not that the cultural issues don't matter; it's just that to prioritize them is tactically self-defeating. If the cosmopolitan elites who currently run the Democratic Party believe that as the Joan Barrys die out, they are going to win in the long run because young people, Blacks, and Latinos are going to align with them, they are delusional.

Since neither Dems or the GOP represent the real needs of non-elite Americans, it's easy to understand why they side with the Party that at least speaks their values language, and that's why we're in the situation that Brooks describes above. It's no longer about policy for most Americans; it's about whether you are on the Blue team or the Red, and team allegiance is determined by whether your values are traditionalist or cosmopolitan. This is what guys like Steve Bannon understand and will continue to exploit. And if we have any hope of avoiding this slow drift into fascism, this kind of smug sanctimony from cultural elites and those who are influenced by them has just got to stop. It's self-defeating idiocy. 

I think Brett Kavanagh is an Eddie-Haskell creep, and I don't want him on the Supreme Court, but the Kavanagh circus was a disaster for the Left, and I blame the cluelessness of Dem elite thinking typified by Feinstein for that. She played right into the Bannonites' hands. I understand the justifiable rage of #metoo, but Dems have to be more tactically sophisticated. Diane Feinstein made a serious tactical blunder by holding the Blassey Ford letter until the last minute. She should have given it to the FBI right away so that all this could have been handled out of sight, but I think she thought that another Clarence-Thomas-type circus would work for Dems, but clearly it did not, and clearly this has been a net loss for Dems when the upside was always very, very small.

Most people are inclined to be more tolerant when they feel secure in their own identities and in their livelihoods. But the longer the country continues to drift toward greater levels of economic inequality, more people will be pushed to the economic margins, the more people who are marginalized, the angrier and more resentful they will become, and the more resentful they become, the more vulnerable to right-wing demagoguery.

Most Americans, including Blacks and Latinos, are culturally conservative, and that makes them more culturally vulnerable to a demagoguery from the Right. But that doesn't mean that they are conservative on the structural economic issues, on issues of fairness and equity, on the issues that people like Joan Barry care about and have dedicated their lives to. This is why the culture wars are a losing strategy for Dems and a winning one for the Republicans. Guys like Steve Bannon understand this, and there are people smarter and more sophisticated than Bannon who are planning on exploiting this truth well into the 2020s and beyond. 

Dem elites think that because they are better on economic issues than the Republicans that's good enough, but it's just not. If the Republicans represent the 1% and their radical Libertarian ideology, the Dems represent the top 15-20%, and its Neoliberal ideology--its market-solves everything, Aspen-Ideas-Festival cultism. Because Neoliberalism is not quite as bad for non-elites as radical, Koch-brother-style, radical Libertarianism, the Dem elites think that non-elites have no where else to go, but clearly that's been proved over and over again to be not true. And because Black and Latino voters have no real reason to vote for Dems, they usually don't vote at all. Even if they come out in greater numbers in this cycle, the Dems have got to give them reasons to keep coming out for the next several decades, and I have no confidence that current leadership really understands what that will take.

I fear that smarter right-wing demagogues in the coming decades will find ways of winning over greater numbers of Blacks and Latinos for reasons that have already won over marginalized Whites. Race and fear of the Other have been a big part of their current strategy with low-information Whites, but smarter right-wing demagogues will find ways to demonize some other Other that will play to the fears and resentments of low-information Blacks and Hispanics. Milo-Yiannopolis or Proud-Boys fascism will continue to attract alienated, marginalized whites, some other kind of hip, fascistic cults will emerge for young Blacks and Latinos. This is our future, unless somebody gets serious about addressing the real structural imbalances in our political economy. The cultural issues will be much easier to resolve when most people feel good about their future prospects, and they will become worse as those prospects for non-elite young people get worse. 

A Post-Secular Ideology of Justice

Naivete is the great taboo for all intellectuals. At all costs avoid the appearance of it, especially in this era during which the hermeneutics of suspicion legitimates or delegitimates most of our high-level discourse. But this hermeneutics of suspicion traces back to Golden Age Athens, the Age of the Sophists there, prominnent among whom was Socrates. The Sophists' project was to call into question the validity of all received conventional wisdom, myth, customs, and norms--and because the citizens of Athens saw Socrates doing just that, and in doing so corrupting the youth of Athens, he was condemned to death.

Although, naive consciousness is just as prevalent a condition among most humans today as it was in Socrates' day, the naive consciousness from which we must be liberated falls under the general category of 'ideology'. Ideology is the ethos of a society that in most cases operates as the superstructure of values that legitimates what are the appropriate attitudes and behaviors that determine right or wrong, heroes and villains, what's central or peripheral, what's honorable or what's shameful, what's valued and what's taboo. In other words, it's superego, the inner voice of Big Daddy. I argued in a post last month that superego is the voice that we must be liberated from and that we must replace it with the voice of 'conscience', which is completely different. Rousseau gets it when in Emile he says--

Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God! In thee consists the excellence of man’s nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee, I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts— nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another, by the help of an unbridled understanding and a reason which knows no principle. (p. 254 in Foxley translation)

Rousseau is pointing to an experience that all of us have but we secularists are reluctant to name for what it is--a deep sense or the rightness and wrongness of things. While on the one hand we expect everyone to behave well, we get uncomfortable when someone tries to suggest that there is a something that transcends or subjective idea of right and wrong or our cultural ideas of them. So while I recognize that all our value judgments are culturally mediated, I want to insist that there is something that transcends the concrete cultural manifestation of it. There is written in the hearts of every human being, more accessible to those with supple hearts than to those whose hearts are hardened for whatever reason, what is lawful and what is not. I'll follow what Lewis in The Abolition of Man calls the Tao, which points to its transcultural reality in post-Axial societies. 

In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta— that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality. As Plato said that the Good was ‘beyond existence’ and Wordsworth that through virtue the stars were strong, so the Indian masters say that the gods themselves are born of the Rta and obey it. 16 The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.  ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’  The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.(pp. 18-19)

This sense of the transcendent source for law was recognized in all the the great post-Axial societies, from Taoist China to Golden Age Greece. For Christians, the Tao is the Logos, and Jesus's saying in Matthew 5 that he has not come to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill it I take to mean the transposition of the law from something that is imposed from without (extrinsic law and superego) to something that is discovered within (intrinsic law and conscience). The Tao/Logos defines justice. The just man or woman lives according to the Tao; the just society's laws and ideology are aligned with or are at least aspiring toward alignment with the Tao. I don't think you need to be a Christian to "get" this. I think most people who don't have a thought-out metaphysics already believe it in some vague sense. 

Because our lives and our societies are never completely aligned with the Tao, we must always be striving individually and collectively to move individually and collectively toward greater alignment with it. The Tao should therefore be understood as a dynamic rather than static reality; and as such something that is disruptive to all individual habits and social forms that are unjust. How do we know this? The voice of conscience tells us. The Tao for which conscience is the voice is therefore anti-ideological when ideologies serve merely to prop up social systems that are unjust, but we humans cannot operate in an ideological vacuum. We need an ideology that justifies and reinforces just customs and practices, so the challenge is to develop an ideology that embraces the Tao. So what's called for now is an ideology of progressive transformation. It is in this sense that an ideology that embraces the idea that the arc of history bends toward Justice is justified.

This is not something that we should expect to develop from the cultural Right which is so deeply and naively implicated in current structures of injustice. But is it something that we can expect to come from the secular left?  Clearly not insofar as any idea of the Tao is incomprehensible to it or dismissed as 'naive'. 

Eagleton on "Theory"

'Theory' indicates that our classical ways of carving up knowledge are now, for hard historical reasons, in deep trouble. But it is as much a revealing a symptom of this breakdown as a positive reconfiguration of the field. The emergence of theory suggests that for good historical reasons, what had become known as the humanities could no longer carry on in their customary shape. This was all to the good, since the humanities had too often proclaimed a spurious disinterestedness, preached 'universal' values which were all too socially specific, repressed the material basis of these values, absurdly overrated the importance of 'culture' and fostered a jealously elitist conception of it. It was for the bad, since the humanities had also kept warm some decent, generous values brusquely disregarded by everyday society; fostered--in however idealist a guise--a searching critique of our current way of life; and in nurturing a spiritual elitism had at leas seen through the phoney egalitarianism of the marketplace. Literary Theory, p. 207

I feel from time to time the need to make clear that while it may appear so, my defense of humanism is not a defense of the Liberal humanism that emerged during the Enlightenment. It is a defense of "the human", whom I would define as a linguistic being in a historical/material world who is open to transcendence. I understand the humanities to be the full spectrum of intellectual and creative activity in which being human is so understood. As such it's an area within which we find it possible to think and to be actively engaged with culture and its institutions that live in a tension between preserving what the best humans--i.e., those humans most radically open to the transcendent: its greatest prophets, artists, and philosophers--have bequeathed to us while at the same time subverting all the ways in which what they have bequeathed has had the life squeezed out of it by an elite clerisy/professoriate for ideological or other purposes.

On the one hand, a true humanism should subvert positivism in all its ideological guises, but it should also subvert the kind of nihilistic, anti-positivist, transgression for transgression's sake, debunking for the sake of debunking that has infected too many humanities departments, elite creative writing programs, film studies programs, museums and arts institutions of all kinds. This is less a problem now than it was a few years ago, and I'm not saying that there aren't some very valuable things to be found in the efforts of people in those institutions, but in most cases it's found in the efforts of those who resist what Eagleton, a few paragraphs above the one quoted above, describes how the humanities clerisy functions:

Postmodern theory is part of the postmodern marketplace, not just a reflection upon it. It represents, among other things, a way of amassing valuable 'cultural capital' in increasingly competitive intellectual conditions. Theory, partly because of its high-poweredness, esotericism, up-to-dateness, rarity and relative novelty, has achieved high prestige in the academic marketplace, even if it still provokes a virulent hostility of a liberal humanism which fears being outside by it. . . Theory has been one symptom in our time of the commodifying of the intellectual life itself, as on e conceptual fashion usurps another as shortwindedly as changes in hairstyle. . . .theory has become a kind of minority art form, playful, self-ironizing and hedonistic, one place to which the impulses behind high modernist art have now migrated. It has been among other things, the refuge of the disinherited Western intellect cut loose by the sheer squalor of modern history from its traditional humanistic bearings and so at once gullible and sophisticated, streetwise and disorientated.   p. 206

Cultural sophisticates are just as guilty of 'group think' as the benighted masses from whom they hope to distinguish themselves. I want nothing to do with either the hipness of postmodern theory or the stodgy, liberal humanism that it seeks to subvert. There is some value to sift out from all of that, and I want to give it its due, but both are otherwise symptoms of a deep alienation that I argue comes from a misalignment with the transcendent Deep Real. Postmodern theory seeks to subvert Liberal Humanism because it thinks its assumptions about the 'human' and what it means to be a human subject are untenable, but surely the assumptions of Postmodern Theory need to be subverted because its nihilistic assumptions are untenable. The idea that it's more courageous to be a nihilist is just another form of faux-Nietzschean, phoney, elite group think. There was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum.

I want to argue instead that while I agree that the fundamental assumptions that support the Enlightenment narrative are no longer tenable because it's impossible to defend a metaphysics that assumes stasis and the possibility of certainty--I think that God does play dice and he did so in the creation of the human. And so it is nevertheless possible to present an alternative humanistic metaphysics that embraces dynamic change, chance, and the provisionality of all knowledge while yet asserting that there is such a thing as transcendent truth and goodness.

Justice is not just something we make up. While it's something we never possess or see anywhere in its pure form, it is nevertheless something that we see all around us as working in institutions and in the lives of individuals where it manifests in greater or lesser degrees of approximation to it. It's that ability that any deeply human being experiences that enables him or her to discern this "greater or lesser degree of approximation", and it's  that commonplace experience that provides the premise for my argument. Such an experience, of course, is culturally and linguistically mediated, but the point is that there is something there that is mediated.

This blog is my modest effort to "keep warm generous values brusquely disregarded by everyday society".  I believe that those generous values  are intrinsic to what makes us human, but also that what makes human beings capable of generosity depends on the kind of culture that cultivates it.

Our beliefs and customary practices open up and close off human possibility. Those who work for a just society are those who think it's possible to create one that gives its citizens the best chance to develop that kind of generosity.

It should be clear to anybody who has any sense of the deep meaning of justice that American capitalism promotes beliefs and practices that are toxic for the development of a just society. It's not just the political economic system that needs to be transformed but the fundamental beliefs that ordinary Americans accept as commonplace. Without the latter, the former can never have a chance. 

Americans must wake up from their delusional individualistic fantasy that anything is possible, the sky's the limit, that anybody can be whatever they dream of becoming--if you're willing to work hard for it. This collective delusion breeds narcissists who think that their individual happiness has little or nothing to do with promoting the flourishing of others. And by others I don't mean just friends and family--I mean the stranger, i.e., the broadest understanding of the neighbor. Americans justify their narcissism by aspiring to become billionaires so that they might distribute their excess to causes they deem worthy, but never consider that the system that allows them to become billionaires in the first place is fundamentally unjust. 

That's why an American restlessness of spirit is endemic to the American soul. It's always looking for happiness in precisely the ways that are guaranteed to disappoint it. People want to be autonomous, independent, a power to themselves, unrestricted by the demands of others--or of justice. They want to do as they please. This is the essence of the American Dream, and it's what makes Americans so restless and unhappy. This fantasy is so deeply woven into our national character that is is hard to imagine how it could possibly be dislodged. The only way likely is for an alternative to replace it. It's not something people will be able to say No to until something emerges to which they can say Yes.

Quote of the Day: Christopher Browning

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. (Source: "The Suffociationn of Democracy" in the NYRB)

I think an argument could be made that historians will judge Newt Gingrich's role as Speaker in the 90s  as the real culprit, but McConnell's role in the destruction of the Senate has been remarkable for its myopic effectiveness..