After the Future

Whence the Republicans?

The Republican Party as currently constituted is a minority party representing a demographically narrow segment of the American electorate. It needs stasis — institutional and constitutional — to survive. Democrats do not. Just the opposite, they need a political system that can grow with and respond to change within our society. Progressive government is necessarily active government. And if we can speak of original intent, it was not the intent of the founders of this country to have a static government, a static constitutional order, or — for that matter — a static society.

The question of whether Democrats will abolish the filibuster or expand the courts or create new states, should they win power, is actually a question of whether Democrats will bring dynamism to the American political system. The prospect is daunting. But if they have any desire to reverse the damage of the past four years — if they want to return to something like normalcy — then the path to stability begins with transformation.  

--Jamelle Bouie

What kind of future does the Republican Party have? A lot depends on what happens in the next week--perhaps especially in the senate. There are so many moving parts, and none of us has his or her arms around enough of them to really understand what is happening to us now. I think that the presumption is that while this is an unusual election in many respects, it will go more or less normally--Trump will fuss and fume, but he will lose, and he will leave. Things will return to normal again with Uncle Joe. If the Senate remains Republican, we will go back to the same old gridlock, the same old commitment by the Republicans to say No to everything, especially taxes and regulation

But this "normal", while we have become accustomed to it since the Gingrich/Clinton 90s, is no longer tenable, because stasis is no longer a possibility. We have a Republican Party committed to this untenable stasis and in doing so has lost its mind. Its justification for supporting Trump has become the reductio ad absurdum of the Republican commitment to obstruction and stasis. Better chaos, better the destruction of cherished institutions and traditions, better to support Caligula than to give an inch to the evil, demoniac Democrats. 

This kind of crazy sees evil where's there's only a difference of opinion. There's an episode in The Office in which Dwight Schrute is being pranked by Jim about vampires, and Dwight responds: " I don't have a lot of experience with vampires, but I have hunted werewolves. I shot one once, but by the time I got to it, it had turned back into my neighbor's dog." (See also "Dwight Schrute was a Warning".)

It's a good gag, but it's a telling one about a kind of mentality that is ruled by various specters of fear. Even when the evidence is clear that there was no basis for it, this mentality will fabricate ways to justify its delusionally destructive behaviors. It becomes a self-reinforcing system in which people get locked. Dwight was truly crazy because he inhabited this mentality with little support from those around him. But there's another kind of crazy when you accept an insane idea born of paranoia because everyone you know believes it. That's what the majority of sane Americans are faced with after next week--a significant minority, at least a 100 million people, who are captured by a collective, fear-driven delusion. 

If Republicans lose both the Senate and the White House, there will be little soul searching among them. There is little reason to think that they will snap out of their collective delusion. Theirs is not unlike the collective insanity of southern Democrats in the run-up to the Civil War. Even the eventual calamity of defeat didn't snap them out of it. The delusional thinking promoted by the Lost Cause fantasy required that southerners continue to see Yankees as werewolves rather than as neighbors with different opinions. 

The connection between the mentality of the slave power before the Civil War and the current mentality of the Republican Party is a theme I've developed in several posts, perhaps best here. But it's something a recent book by Heather Cox Richardson lays out in greater detail in How the South Won the Civil War. She explains how paranoid oligarchs from the antebellum south continued their paranoid politics after the war through a one-party system under the auspices of the Democratic Party until the 1960s, how they spread their noxious worldview into the west, and how through the Senate they came to dominate in Washington. It was nuts and evil then, and it's nuts and evil now. And as in the 1850s it's threatening to destroy us now. And it's particularly tragic how normal, decent people get caught up in it and are crazed by it. I don't think the people are evil; I think the mindset that has captured them is. 

The only way for sanity to reassert itself is if the Dems win both the White House and the senate. If they do, they must say No to the normalcy of the last thirty years. They must do exactly what the Republicans most fear--abolish the filibuster, expand the court, and add some states. In other words they must use raw power the way the Republicans have done.

I believe most Democrats, especially the moderate, institutional types who get elected senators or presidents, do not want to take such drastic measures, but, as in the 1850s, the sane are being forced into a corner by the insane. Paranoids assume the worst in those who are willing to negotiate. But treating a non-enemy as an enemy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So that's the situation we're in now. The Dems have got to use extreme methods to fight the extremism of right-wing collective insanity. 

Republicans' paranoia justifies for them their raw use of power, and so of course the Democrats' use of it will only increase their paranoia by "proving" their fears correct. But there's nothing the Dems can do that will alleviate Republican fears, and so they cannot be governed by concerns that their acting boldly will make things worse. As in the 1850s, compromise cannot work with people who are captured by this kind of hysteria. Politics cannot cure the soul-sickness that leads them to embrace Trump, but it can address the underlying economic and structural issues that aggravate it. The churches should be the ones to provide a cure, but they are too sickened themselves to be of much help. 

I don't know if there is any solution in the long run except inevitably to break the country up. I've written about this before here. Taylor French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation recognizes the pressures building toward such a break up similarly to the way I do, but he makes the case for a path to reconciliation by embracing cultural pluralism. I've been preaching from that text for years, but I don't see it happening.

French is a sane, religious conservative, until recently a life-long Republican, but now a Never Trumper who fairly and sympathetically presents both sides of the cultural divide. But I doubt his sanity and decency will prevail among most people who still identify as Republicans. And the cultural Left is too myopic to go along with such a program. The Never Trumper Republicans have no real constituency except Independents and moderate Democrats. Perhaps some kind of realignment along those lines is possible. I doubt it, but it's worth trying. We'll see. 

But in the meanwhile, if Democrats get into power in the White House and senate, they must boldly use their power to make significant positive changes responsive to real problems in a dynamic, pluralistic society, because if they don't, destructive negative changes will be inevitable. Stasis simply is no longer a possibility.

Barrett = ACA's Demise?

I doubt it--if the Dems take the Senate.

I've been arguing here since the Barrett nomination that if the Dems win the Senate, they should expand the court. If Barrett and the other conservative ideologues vote to destroy the ACA, it will all but insure that the court will be expanded as the first order of business in January. So it won't. The Republican court majority realizes that if it blows up the ACA, it will be so outrageous to a Senate Democratic majority that those senators sitting on the fence will be given the political cover they need to support expanding the court.

Roberts doesn't want that because it would be suicidal to the conservative majority he now enjoys. He won't risk giving up something so important to him for something so trivial. He'll lean on Kavanaugh or Barrett (or have them all draw lots?) to vote with him and the three liberals to uphold the ACA.

So a part of me thinks it wouldn't be such a bad thing if the court nullifies the ACA precisely because it will almost certainly insure expanding the court. Losing the ACA will be disruptive and a hardship for many in the short run. But a Dem House and Senate will be able relatively quickly (absent the filibuster) to come up with something to fix the health care problem--maybe even something superior like Medicare for All. And so there's an argument to be made that the cost in the short run of losing the ACA might justify in the long run the benefit of politically neutralizing the court and getting a better, simpler, more effective health care plan, the one we should have got in 2009 instead of this Rube Goldberg monstrosity.

Iif the GOP holds on to the Senate, I'm less certain. But it's still unlikely the court will nullify the ACA:

From everything I've read, the merits of Texas v. The United States are ridiculously weak and would have got nowhere if it weren't for Republican hacks on a Texas district court and on the southern federal 5th District court of appeals. The supreme court has its Republican hacks, but they are not all so stupid as to be so disruptive to tear down the whole ACA on such a flimsy pretext. If they do anything, it will be more surgical to deal with ambiguities that still linger concerning individual mandate, and nobody cares about the individual mandate anymore.

I think that the bigger threat that Barrett's further unbalancing the court poses is on voting rights and election law. God help us if the presidential is so close as to require the court to step in as it did in 2000. 

Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments

All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking in a groupthink? I want to set up my answer to that question by discussing first the difference between calculation and wisdom.

It doesn't require discernment to determine that 2 + 2 = 4. You just need a mind that operates in a mechanically logical way. And in our day-to-day life a lot of what passes for wisdom is really calculation in this sense--it's automatic and mechanical: "The wise person reads his Consumer Reports before making a purchase decision." Obviously some calculations are more complicated than others because more factors than price and practicality may enter into consideration, but I tend to roll my eyes when someone claims that his decision is purely data driven, as if no judgement or interpretation of the data entered into it. Having accurate data is important, but It's the judgment and interpretation of them where the wisdom lies.

So what I mean by wisdom comes into view in situations that require a weighing of alternatives for which no calculus offers an answer. It requires something else--discernment, and the discernments of the truly wise lead them to make good judgments that prove themselves correct time after time. That contrasts with the poor judgments consistently made by those whose judgments are based on the groupthink of a conventional wisdom, which more often than not goes off the tracks. The decision making that led to the invasion of Iraq comes to mind.

I would argue that not all groupthink is bad. The tribal wisdom handed down from generation to generation in vibrant traditional societies was real and lifegiving. In such societies there is an experience of the living presence of the wisdom of the ancestors. And one could say that the life of the tradition is the soul of a culture, and it's that soul or ancestral mind that thinks in the people in a living traditional culture. But a tradition that no longer conveys in a living way the mind of the ancestors is a failed tradition. The tradition no longer functions as the medium through which its members experience cognitive moments that reveal the inner content of the traditional formulations. The formulations, as a consequence, become empty and rigid.

But when we try to understand the nature of wisdom, there is a difference between sophia and phronesis. Phronesis is the practical wisdom we call prudence; sophia is a different kind of wisdom which derives from inspiration, from moments when something divine or sacred breaks into our everyday experience. Living traditional societies were 'porous' enough so that these events were more frequent. Secular materialist societies are structured to make them rare. These events are what I mean by cognitive moments, which are close to what Heidegger meant by his term 'ereignis'--an aletheia event, a moment when Being discloses itself. Forgotten Being reveals itself and one finds a way to relate to it--to align one's life with it--authentically. It's rare enough when these events occur in secular materialist societies, but even when they do, they are often misinterpreted. 

A tradition that no longer discloses the sacred and finds a way to align its collective life with it is no longer a living tradition. It's in this sense that Nietzsche was right in describing our condition as moderns by saying not just that God was dead, but that we moderns killed him.  It's not a statement so much about God as about how modern consciousness has lost its capacity to naturally and easily experience the sacred. Moderns, to use the Heideggerian phrase, have forgotten Being--they live now in a sterile world of things. We even have to fight hard to think of people as something other than things. For souls shaped by such a world, the sacred rarely discloses itself. But conservatives are wrong to think that we should pass policies in the political sphere that will align with traditional practices that no longer have life. 

Already for the literate Athenians in Socrates' time, a "Being-mediating" traditional consciousness was withering away, and with it the traditional forms were starting to rigidify into sterile groupthink. Socrates' demployment of his deconstructive 'elenchus', was his attempt to clear away the dead wood to open up a space for Being to reveal itself. Socrates pushed his interlocutors to move from naive, unconscious acceptance of conventional wisdom to aporia--a condition of 'knowing ignorance' promoted in Plato's early dialogues, a condition which clears the way for a deeper cognitive apprehension of Being.

I'd argue that Plato's 'anamnesis' or 'remembering' is a different way of talking about the same movement in consciousness to which Heidegger's 'ereignis'. (Forgetfulness, after all, is the central problem for H.) I'm also inclined to think that Plato's theory of the forms derived from an experience or intuition of Being--an aletheia moment, which he later tried to make sense of in rational terms with unsatisfactory results. I'd argue that the Christian Neoplatonists develop more satisfactorily what he began, but that's another discussion.   

So authentic appropriation of traditional wisdom requires a cognitive, "numinous" moment in which the sacred character of the traditional wisdom reveals itself, and this contrasts with modern traditionalism which accepts social norms as ends in themselves rather than as a means to something more important. Such "cognitive moments" are not impossible in our world, but they are much harder to come by in pluralistic, tradition-dead societies that shape the human soul by its crude, materialistic sensibility.

It used to be the goal of a liberal, humanistic education to help us "remember" Being. Poetry is the primary linguistic form that seeks to disclose being, but it's boring for most of us now because our capacity to have Being revealed to us has all but withered away. And as a result wisdom is in short supply. We have lots of people with good heads, but dried-out souls; many who are good calculators, but few who are sophia wise.

***

So the healthy groupthink of living tradition is rare or nonexistent in modern pluralistic, choice-centered societies in which any sense of living tradition is a distant memory. And as a result we hold on to traditional forms that have no living content, and the forms rigidify as do the souls ensnared by them. In politics and business social calculation substitutes for wisdom. When we complain that the media pundits or politicians no longer speak the truth, it's because these people are members of a courtier class possessed by the spirit of social calculation. They have become incapable of the kind of independent judgments that distinguish what is true from what is false, and when if someone actually speaks the truth, the courtiers immediately reduce it to terms of social, economic, or political calculation.

These courtiers have themselves been coopted by a calculating groupthink, so it has become impossible for them to think anything else is possible. Social calculation is the only thing they understand because it consumes them, and it's the primary skill that propelled them into the prominent positions they occupy. And the system selects and promotes only those who distinguish themselves as prodigies of social calculation. It's another way of saying that the people who set the agenda and shape the conventional wisdom or groupthink in this society are soul sick.

Now the people who subject all traditional wisdom to the Socratic test and find it completely unacceptable are called cynics. Cynics are either disappointed idealists embittered by the failure of the world to live up to their naive expectations, or they are extreme rationalists for whom everything is rational calculation. For the latter group the phrase 'cognitive moment' as I speak of it here is meaningless.

Skepticism is different from cynicism. Skepticism as aporia it is a first step toward wisdom, but it becomes cynicism when it refuses to take the next step, which requires the acknowledgment of the logic of the heart or logic of the suprarational. Heart logic is what opens us up to cognitive moments. It is our an innate capacity to think in a non-calculative way and as such a prerequisite for wisdom, but it remains dormant in many, a seed waiting to germinate. It is no longer awakened in us automatically as it was in living traditional societies.

If such moments occur in our society, they are individual experiences, not group experiences. And so, as described above, the more typical kind of groupthink that arises in tradition-dead societies is an empty, lifeless formalism, and as such an emptiness vulnerable to be filled by various seductions. Like a vacant house on a rundown city block, groupthinks often find themselves occupied by squatters that make a bad situation worse. So back to the question in the first paragraph:  Q: What thinks in a groupthink?  A: In tradition-dead societies psychic complexes fill the empty forms and perform a compulsive kind of thinking that infects the group with collective mental illness. The degree of mental illness is measured by the degree a society is alienated from Being. We see this alienation in religious cults; we see it in political movements; and we see it in the media, and in the inanity of fashion, celebrity, and consumer fads. It's everywhere, and because it's everywhere we think it's real. It's not; it's nuts. (See my pieces on Zombie Traditionalism that explore this theme further.)

A conversation is not possible between two people who are possessed by the "demons" animating tradition-dead groupthink. It's not possible even if only one of the two interlocutors is possessed. Such people only make calculations about whether what the other says meets their litmus test for orthodoxy. A real conversation is possible only between two people who have the mutual intent to have a cognitive moment with one another--when both are open for the revelation in the Other of the sacred. Everything else is chatter, and chatter has its place. But our intersubjective experience is for most of us the last place where our capacity to recognize the sacred has not completely withered. We experience Love in the presence of the sacred. And so if other people have been occasions of the disclosure of the sacred and the awakening of 'real' love, other beings can also be the occasion for such disclosures. And that's the task, to extend our capacity for experiencing the sacred by increasing our capacity for love, even ultimately for the hated Other, the enemy.   

This is a cultural and not a political, task, but it has political implications insofar as it shapes our political discourse. Because two people in the grip of opposing groupthinks cannot possibly communicate with one another. In order for such cognitive moment to occur in the political sphere, both parties have to be open to the Other's disclosing something 'real'. But if neither party has anything but groupthink truisms to parrot, no cognitive moments are possible. The culture wars, as we have experienced them in this country, at least since the time of the Scopes trial, are like two crazy people trying to have conversation. Neither is in his right mind. Neither is capable of true judgment. All they can do is shout at one another. The best one can do is create the conditions for an opening by refusing to be sucked into the left/right groupthink polarity. (Listen to this podcast interview with Douglas Johnston for an example of someone who seeks to create this kind of opening with Muslims.)

***

Now the groupthinks of the political left and the right, insofar as either is unconsciously assimilated, infect individuals as a kind of naive idealism. And insofar as it is naive, i.e., lacking the "cognitive moment' described above, it is innocent and well-intentioned, but empty. And insofar as it is empty, it is a vacuum ready to suck in anything that will enliven it. Demagogues are con men who understand how this process works, and they are masters who feed off of the naive idealism of either the left or the right. They don't care about traditional values, and they don't care about ideals; they only care about concentrating power under their control. And  they understand that their ability to consolidate power requires that they manipulate the naive groupthink of a majority of the public. If they can control the majority groupthink, they can simply dismiss the concerns of the minority. They know how to work with Resentment and Arrogance to achieve their ends.

Maintaining power by manipulating groupthink was Orwell's great theme. The demagogue drapes everything he does in idealistic or obfuscating language, and those for whom those words have no living cognitive content simply accept the new content that the demagogues fill them with. And the next thing you know, the words have no relationship to their original meanings. They are old wine skins filled with new wine, wine whose purpose is to addle the minds of the cognitively naive. What thinks in the Orwellian groupthink is the mind of Big Brother, which is the mind of the demagogue.  This is our social evolution:  From a groupthink that thinks the wisdom of the ancestors to a groupthink that thinks the nihilism of the Powermad.

The point is this: The power hungry feed off naive idealistic groupthink, which they are very skilled at manipulating. It doesn't matter if it's the utopian idealism of the left or the traditionalist idealism of the right. Demagogues care only about manipulating whichever naive groupthink will best serve their purposes. This is Orwell's insight. Left, right--it doesn't matter. But in this country, at this time, they are working the empty, naive idealism of the traditionalist right. And their basic strategy is to incite traditionalist resentment toward the secular liberal elites, who play into this strategy by disdaining traditionalist concerns as foolish.

Their concerns are not foolish, but naive traditonalists are indeed foolish to the degree they allow themselves to be manipulated by demagogues who pretend to care about those concerns. But so are the secular liberals foolish insofar as they are unable to transcend the toxicity of the left/right polarity. Both sides need some tough-love slaps upside the head to snap the spell and bring them back to what's real. So-called moderate strategies to split the difference between the polarities can't work because they accept the insanity of the system as normative.

An intervention is called for, and it will come in the form of catastrophe if we don't find another way. 9/11 was Reality's warning shot across the bow, and we took all the wrong lessons from it. But one way or the other, something from outside the system will be introduced, something that will bring us back to reality, and then it's a matter of enough people recognizing and working with it. But more important in the short run is having enough people to say No to demagogic manipulation. Its groupthink has to be seen through, deconstructed, so that a space can be cleared for something real to disclose itself.

[I thought it might be interesting in this moment to repost this entry, slightly edited to clarify some of technical philosophical terminology, from July 2007. If this interests you, the discussion in comments on the original post (when I was more active on this blog) is pretty lively.]

Adam Serwer on Robert's Civil Rights Jurisprudence

Roberts’s decision in Shelby County surprised few legal observers. As a judge, he has frequently ruled that state measures addressing racism are worse than racism. This is a deeply held philosophical perspective, one he has advanced since he was a young attorney in the Reagan Justice Department. In that role, he argued against adding a “disparate impact” provision to the Voting Rights Act. He was unsuccessful, but the provision would have barred voting restrictions that have discriminatory effects, whether intended or not. Such a standard, Roberts argued, would “provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable.” The intrusive interference he feared was not with the ability of Americans to cast a ballot, but with the ability of states to prevent Americans from casting ballots.

That southern states employed facially race-neutral methods to disenfranchise their Black populations for the express purpose of evading the Constitution didn’t matter to Roberts then, and it doesn’t matter to him now. From the perspective of the Court’s conservative wing, the avalanche of voting restrictions Republicans have adopted since Shelby County  are no crisis; the real concern is the incivility of liberals pointing out when these restrictions are discriminatory.

Under the logic of Roberts Court jurisprudence, not only would most Jim Crow voting restrictions pass constitutional muster, but even Vardaman’s boasting would be meaningless. As Roberts wrote in his opinion upholding the Trump administration’s travel ban targeting Muslim countries, Trump’s explicit declarations of discriminatory intent did not matter, because the lawyers who wrote the order didn’t mention religion. “The text says nothing about religion,” Roberts insisted, echoing McKenna’s assertion that the voting restrictions in Mississippi’s constitution were not “limited by their language or effects to one race. (Source)

And he's the "reasonable" conservative on the Supreme Court.

I object to Serwer's describing of Robert's views as philosophical; they are ideological. Philosophical means that you are willing to examine your own presuppositions; ideological means that you are captured by them. 

Being 'an ideologue does not mean that you are evil or insincere; it just means that you are more often than not naively captured by a worldview or interpretive frame that just happens to support existing power arrangements. There are plenty of people, especially kings, who sincerely believed in the divine right of kings. There are many people, especially men with an  identity stake in patriarchy, who  sincerely believe in a fundamentalistic interpretation of the bible. There are plenty of people, especially members of the Federalist Society, who sincerely believe in original intent and strict textual interpretation of the constitution.

These are people who, no matter how cleverly they bend reality to fit into their interpretive frame, are incapable of dealing sanely and maturely with complexity. Ideologues are fearful people. And there is no "reasoning" with them so long as those underlying fears require that their ideology give their lives meaning and purpose.

At the end of the day, this these forms of ideological thinking are naive, reductive nonsense, and no intellectually honest person can take them seriously. 

Pack the court. It's the only way to vitiate the influence of these Federalist Society ideologues.

Pack the Court 3

Much of the discussion about Barrett’s nomination has focused on social issues, like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage. They’re all important, obviously. But they are not the issues that animate many activists and wealthy campaign donors who have spent decades pushing for a conservative overhaul of the courts. Koch gave that speech in 1974, and in the almost five decades since, the conservative judicial project has made a lot of progress. The Supreme Court and lower courts have made it harder for labor unions to organize, harder for consumers and workers to fight corporate fraud and easier for wealthy Americans to give millions of dollars in campaign donations, often secretly. These rulings are one reason that the incomes of the very rich have risen so much faster in recent decades than incomes of the middle class and poor. “For the past half-century, the Court has been drawing up plans for a more economically unequal nation,” Adam Cohen, a former member of the Times editorial board, wrote in his recent book, “Supreme Inequality.” David Leonhardt in the NYT Daily Briefing

Liberals and Conservatives are so caught up in culture war issues that they don't understand the real dangers posed by the 1% where they share common ground. I've been preaching that for years, but liberal elites don't care because they benefit, the poor don't care because they're in despair, and cultural conservatives don't care because they'd prefer to stew in their resentments. And all the while the Koch brothers manipulate the legislative and judicial infrastructure in such a way that while all the political energies are focused on arguing about abortion and guns in the front parlor, they sneak in through the back to clean the house out. 

 

The Kochs' long game is to anticipate that their ALEC agenda in the legislatures will break down and people will finally start to push back. When they do, they'll be thwarted in the courts suffused now at every level with right-wing political hacks or constitutional fundamentalists from the Federalist Society. When there is a conflict between the interests of property and the interest of human beings, you can count on these originalist to side with property. They have "respectable" arguments not because they're interpretation of the constitution aligns with what is truly just, but because the constitution is a deeply flawed, indeed 'unjust', document that in most respects favors the interests of capital over the interests of ordinary citizens. 

 

So given that the only remedy for these constitutional flaws is within the context of the constitution, the perfectly constitutional means of increasing the size of the courts must be taken to neutralize the impact of the fundamentalists to allow for the legislatures to do the will of the people who elected them.

 

Some will argue that we should wait until we see how the court rules, but I fear that everybody is so focused on abortion, guns, and gay marriage, that no one will care when the court thwarts legislation that addresses income inequality. Liberal elites will back off court packing as a remedy if the courts punt on the cultural issues but remain aggressive on protecting the interests of  the Kochs and other one-percenters against the interests of the rest of us. 

Quote of the Day: Simone Weil

Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life (there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this true breaking of the pact between the body and the soul. . . .Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. Even comedy is almost impossible. There is only room for satire. . . . Art will never be reborn except from amidst a general anarchy--it will be epic no doubt, because affliction will have simplified a great many things. . . . Is it therefore quite useless for you to envy Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course. Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure, and without an echo . .  . (but without an echo, no art).

--From Gravity and Grace, p 151

To put it another way, the politics of the future must come into being as genuine art does. The poets must become the acknowledged legislators of the world. It must be the product of people who are inspired by the Real. It must be the work of genius in the mode of a poet/prophet like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela--people through whom the god or the inspiring muse Justice shines. I say this not because I know that it will happen but because I believe it must happen if there this to be a human future. The machines must otherwise win by default. 

Our current social order is like the dyke in the story of the Dutch boy who plugs a leak in it with his finger. The Dutch boy at this point is the liberal political/media class. Its main function now is to buy time in the hopes that true greatness of spirit, a greatness that Weil describes that "must take another course", might emerge and so come to support the boy, who by himself is incapable of holding back the flood. I believe this other kind of greatness is developing now quietly in the souls of the solitary and obscure where it is struggling to be reborn.

Greatness is not to be mistaken for the grandiose. People long for greatness but are easily seduced by the grandiose. Something is great to the degree that is disclosive of the Deep Real, which has always been mediated to us by the world's true poets and prophets. And when they do, they awaken awareness of it in the rest of us. Such a prospect in a moment like ours seems farfetched, and yet I believe it will happen because unless it or something like it does, the liberal order will break apart and we will all get washed away in the flood. 

For a more expanded articulation of what I hope will be the alternative to the flood, see this post about what I call the Nunes/Bannon Mind, the mindset that longs for the flood as a kind of eschatological baptism that will wipe the world clean so it can start anew. Needless to say, this is a delusion with deeply destructive potential. 

Quote of the Day: Richard Rorty

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

From a link in "Why They Loved Him" by Farah Stockman

The American "pragmatist" philosopher Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, wrote this in Achieving Our Country, published in 1998. 

If the goal is to help those whose lives have been disrupted by the globalization unleashed by Neoliberals like Bill Clinton, then building a wall on the Mexican border or starting a trade war with China make little practical difference. It's what such actions symbolize that matters. Former blue-collar Democrats see Mexico and China as the places where all the jobs went, and if Trump is the only one who wants to hit back at them--even if only symbolically--they understandably find him very attractive as a champion for their cause.

Joe Biden, weathervane that he is, voted for NAFTA. But it's precisely his essence as a political weathervane that will impel him to turn left on this issue. How far remains to be seen. He will, of course, be cross-pressured by Wall Street and corporate interests. But perhaps because his presidency will be his last act, he will do the right thing this time rather than the politically expedient thing. We'll see. 

On Courage and Prudence

One of Trump’s spokespeople derided the Biden event as “an episode of Mister Rodgers Neighborhood.” (In authentic Trump style, she misspelled the name.) If this was meant to suggest that the evening was all smiles and saccharine—well, it only showed that the spokesperson had never watched the classic children’s program hosted by Fred Rogers.

Rogers well understood the darkness in the world. The maker of a documentary about him explained: “What he’s doing is not just providing joy for children but really trying to allay fear.” But of course, in Trump world, allaying fear is the last thing you want to do. What you want to do in Trump world is incite fear, stoke fear, manipulate fear, and exploit fear. That can apparently work—at least with some people, and at least for a limited time. But only for some people, and only for a limited time.

David Frum

We cannot help what we feel; what matters is how we respond to it. When in the grip of fear, it can be difficult to see and think clearly. Fear makes us stupid, not in the sense of unintelligent, but rather in the sense putting us in a kind of disorienting stupor in which we have lost our capacity to understand and do what the situation calls for.

There's a difference between experiencing a threat that comes out of nowhere and needing to respond immediately--the adrenaline kicks in and with it our instinctual fight or flight response. But it's different when one lives in a situation of chronic fear or anxiety in which one has the time to understand it. When we have the time, we have also the responsibility to get to the bottom of it, to understand the cause and source of the fear so that it can be faced and overcome. The latter was Fred Rogers' approach with kids. 

Prudence, like courage, is a virtue. For a virtue to be a virtue, there has to be something counter instinctual about it. Battle rage, for instance, masquerades as a courage, but it is not the virtue of courage because it's just doing what instinct compels. If the adrenal response is fight or flight, battle rage is the fight response. Courage, on the other hand, requires feeling the fear and wanting to run away, but staying and facing the threat and doing what is called for. The greater the fear, the greater the courage called for.

Pusillanimity, on the other hand, masquerades as prudence. Pusillanimity is the instinct to run away, to procrastinate, to refuse to face the threat. Prudence is a virtue to the degree that it is counter instinctual, to the degree that it finds a way of feeling the fear but searches for a mood of detachment in the face of it. Prudence is the virtue that enables one to see clearly and assess the risks, so that one might develop a strategy to confront the threat that has the best chance of success.  

The Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an example of gross imprudence fueled by battle rage. It never had a chance of success. 

The Gospel tells us that we must be guileless as doves, but also shrewd as serpents. That's another way to understand the essence of prudence. People ruled by fear, whether in the fight or flight mode, are unbalanced in the serpent direction; people oblivious of the world's dangers and trusting in everyone's innate goodness are unbalanced in the dove direction. Neither are prudent, because prudence requires the counter-instinctual effort to live consciously in the tension between trust and fear.  

So prudence requires the courage to face the world as it is, not as we fear or wish it to be, to assess risk and to develop a practical approach in navigating in it. This is a world where we can be certain about nothing, but where we can also learn to trust that the worst is not the only or even the most likely possibility.

To compare Biden with Fred Rogers, as Frum rightly points out, is a huge compliment, and it might be exactly why Biden, despite my misgivings about his weathervane conventionality as a politician, might be the right person for this moment. He's a mediocre politician, but he's a people person in the best sense. He's something of a tool, and not the sharpest one in the shed to say the least, but he just might have that Mr. Rogers ability to help us face our fears and deal with them prudently. 

Barrett's not the Problem; McConnell Is (Updated)

“If the Court’s opinions change with its membership, public confidence in the Court as an institution might decline. Its members might be seen as partisan rather than impartial and case law as fueled by power rather than reason.” 

A justice must “think carefully about whether she is sure enough about her rationale for overruling to pay the cost of upsetting institutional investment in the prior approach. If she is not sure enough, the preference for continuity trumps.”

— Amy Coney Barrett in the Texas Law Review.

My problem is not with Amy Coney Barrett as an individual judge. I think there should be conservative judges on the court, even originalists. They should be part of the conversation, but not dominate it. The constitution is just a document born of compromise in an era that could not anticipate how the country would develop, and while the intent of the founders is always an important factor in interpreting the constitution, it should hardly be the only factor.

This is common sense, and from the quotes above, it would appear that Barrett shares in this common sense. I hope so. I believe that Judge Barrett is sincere woman who is motivated to follow the law rather than to implement some ideological agenda. I don't know her, so I could be wrong about that, and time will tell. 

My problem is with the way that Mitch McConnell has politicized the process, which is a reaction to the way that Liberals politicized the process back in the 70s. Two wrongs don't make a right. But at this point I see the only solution as increasing the size of the court and then having a random selection process for empaneling judges on a particular case. This will go a long way to de-politicizing it.

Even though court packing sounds like a radical approach, I think it's the only way to restore a more moderate judiciary. My definition of a moderate is someone who tries to find a balance between the original intent of the founders while at the same time understanding that the founders could not anticipate all the problems future generations would face. I don't want to see court fights go on into the future that are determined by culture warriors on either side. The goal would be to appoint competent, tested judges to an expanded court who represent the broad spectrum of constitutional interpretation that the legal community acknowledges as legitimate.

And I would argue that if among this exanded judiciary, there will be a randomness to who is selected for a particular case, there will be an incentive for presidents and the Senate to appoint and approve judges with moderate approaches in their interpretation of the constitution. The goal here is not for Democrats to get one up on the Republicans, but to de-politicize the appointment process as far as is practicable. The pretense that the court is above politics in this moment is ridiculous. 

Naming a new supreme court justice should be boring and not excite the political passions in the way it has done since Reagan nominated Robert Bork in '87. Bork's nomination was irresponsible and disruptive of norms, as were other Republican nominations since then, perhaps most egregiously Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers. But even if such bad nominees in a future expanded court get through the confirmation process, their negative impact will be blunted.  

Merrick Garland was a moderate. The issue should not have been in his case, or now in the case of Judge Barrett, whether a supreme court justice should be appointed in an election year. It wouldn't matter if the the process was de-politicized and if the nominated judge is a boring, non-ideological moderate. It only matters when the judge is perceived to be an ideologue. The main difference between the nominations of Garland and Barrett is that the first was a perceived to be a moderate and the second clearly is perceived not to be. McConnell's refusal to allow Garland's nomination to go forward was far more ideologically motivated than Obama's nomination. Obama was looking for compromise, while McConnell was only looking to obstruct. 

The problem is not necessarily with the judges as individuals but with the limits and flaws of the constitution, which, for all its brilliance at the time it was written, has become a document ill adapted to the exigencies of the 21st century. "So," the originalist will retort, "amend the constitution!" But when people argue that the constitution should be amended, I have to exert enormous energy to control my eyes from violently rolling up into my brain because it is either so naive or so cynical. Naive or cynical because, especially in this bitterly partisan, gridlocked moment, no such amendments are feasible, and stasis favors the entrenched interests. As Lee discovered at Gettysburg, it's much easier to win when you're dug in defensively than gaining ground on offense. 

There are thoughtful people who are committed Libertarians and Originalists who sincerely believe that their philosophy is objective and rational without at this same time understanding that these ideologies favor existing power and wealth arrangements. They would vehemently protest such an accusation. That doesn't mean they're right. I daresay judges in the court today can say in all sincerity that their judgments are not influenced by concerns about existing power and wealth arrangements. That does't mean that they are not role players in someone else's agenda to defend existing power and wealth arrangements.

These judges would argue that their job is simply to interpret the constitution. The problem lies in that the constitution has always favored the interests of property, and for that reason favors interests of the wealthy over the interests of the rest of us, especially the propertyless. So someone like Mitch McConnell, who only cares about protecting the property interests of the 1%, is naturally drawn to an originalist interpretation of the constitution because protecting property rights is such an important focus of the constitution. And so it's understandable that whether or not the Federalist Society-minted judges he appoints consciously support his agenda on behalf of the 1%, de facto they do support it. And so McConnell's goal is to appoint judges throughout the federal system who, naively or cynically, will use their constitutional hermeneutic to protect those interests. 

And so while Barrett or Gorsuch might be oblivious of how their judicial philosophies enhance McConnell's political agenda, McConnell is not. He is on a mission to pack the court with members of the Federalist society not because he cares about what the founders really thought or whether their constitutional hermeneutics is best approach, but because it helps him to achieve his ideological agenda, which is to protect the interests of the 1%.

That's why McConnell's agenda is simply to defend the status quo by obstruction. If nothing gets done, the interests of the 1% remain protected. I'm sure McConnell couldn't care less about what the founders actually thought. If what they thought supports now the interests of the 1%, he's all for it, but if they have said things that don't support those interests, he'll find a clever rationale to explain why their thinking is no longer relevant. 

For McConnell, originalists from the Federalist Society are simply useful idiots to help him to achieve his long-term, democracy-obstructing goals. And so because the greatest threat to McConnell's agenda is posed by people voting against it, he has two basic strategies to neutralize democratically-empowered people to oppose his agenda. The first is to make it as hard as possible for those who oppose his agenda to elect people who will enact laws to undermine it. The second is a backup strategy to fill the federal courts with unabashed right-wing ideologues or nerdy, useful idiots from the Federalist Society who will strike down these laws if they are passed.

The more sophisticated of these judges will often have arguments for obstructing the will of the people grounded in precedent or in their parsing some of the phrasing in the constitution. But whether sincere or cynical, the effect is to protect the entrenched interests of the 1%, and they provide cover for the ideologues who have no respect whatsoever for the constitution or the rule of law.

This is my problem with appointing someone like Judge Barrett in the current political environment. I don't doubt her sincerity, but I fear her naïveté will lead to decisions like Citizens United or Shelby vs. Holder, which in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act. Anybody with a sliver of common sense can see how both these decisions support the McConnell agenda. Whether the judges in those cases saw themselves as supporters of that agenda or not is irrelevant. What matters is that the originalist school supports him in it.

Individual judges may not see themselves as political actors, but that doesn't mean that they are not. it's up to the rest of us to support changes in the system that insure that the power is returned to the legislatures. That's the way a democracy should work, and that's what people like McConnell fear most. 

In a June post I quoted and commented on a quote from Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB:

Trump’s boast that he can do whatever he wants will have to be institutionalized, made fully operational, and imposed by state violence. Or there will be a transformative wave of change. All of this unfinished business has made the United States semidemocratic, a half-and-half world in which ideals of equality, political accountability, and the rule of law exist alongside practices that make a daily mockery of those ideals. This half-life is ending—either the outward show of democracy is finished and authoritarianism triumphs, or the long-denied substance becomes real. The unconsumed past will either be faced and dealt with, or it will consume the American republic.

This is what's at stake--whether we find a way forward as a vibrant democracy or morph into some East-European style autocracy. Business as usual isn't an option, and so the question is whether the constitution can be interpreted in a flexible enough way that it supports the efforts of those who want the "long-denied substance" of the first, or so rigidly that it plays into the hands of those who want the latter. 

MONDAY UPDATE: As if to emphasize my point, this from today's NYT, "Charles Koch's Big Bet on Barret":

Charles Koch has activated his political network to support Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, and to tip the scales on her nomination battle in the U.S. Senate. While much of the commentary about Judge Barrett’s nomination has focused on the real prospect that Roe v. Wade may be undermined or overturned, Mr. Koch has other concerns. Judge Barrett’s nomination is the latest battleground in his decades-long war to reshape American society in a way that ensures that corporations can operate with untrammeled freedom. It may be a pivotal one.

Read the whole article. People like McConnell are the lapdogs for the the one-percenters like Koch.I'm sure Koch has only a disinterested commitment to make sure that the constitution be interpreted in the way that the founders intended. In the final paragraph the article points out:

History shows that it is just as effective to legislate from the bench by striking down laws as by upholding them. The Lochner era proves that policy negation is just as powerful as creation, and it affects just as many lives. As Charles Koch has written and stated so often in the past five decades, there are many, many laws and programs that he would like to negate. With the nomination of Judge Barrett to the court, he appears to be closer than ever to achieving this goal.

Goes to what I said above about McConnell's backup strategy. Establish a court system that will negate what the democratically elected legislatures enact. 

Biden's Gettysburg Speech

I appreciate what he's trying to do in addressing the toxic divisiveness of our current politics, and I hope that a speech like this does, in fact, appeal to the nation's better angels. But it's unlikely it will have much effect on Republicans in Congress. And if he is as committed to bi-partisanship as he says he is, he will likely get nothing done. The Republicans will then ridicule him for his ineffectiveness, and then convince the country that it's time to put another, even worse, Republican into the White House.

The GOP play since Newt Gingrich is to adamantly obstruct, to prevent the Dems from getting anything done, and then put all the blame on the Dems for playing partisan politics. Obama in his first term was ridiculous in his persistence to reach out to Republicans, but he got only McConnell's commitment to do everything in his power to make sure Obama would not be re-elected. And the media accepts the narrative that neither side can get along. 

Of course, Biden should be open to the possibility that some Republicans, chastened by the insane turn that their party has taken and by, let us hope, the electoral disaster their party will suffer in November, might want to work with him. But until the GOP establishment proves itself repentant and capable of negotiating in good faith, there is no justification to compromise with them if they don't have to, and they won't if they dump the filibuster. 

The GOP has rendered itself into a mob personality cult  that, if we lived in a sane world, should play no significant role in shaping the American future. If times were saner, the only relevant negotiations should be between the right and left wings of the Democratic party, that is the part of the party that represents the top 15% of the country and the part that represents the bottom 85%. The GOP represents only the top1%, but have convinced the gullible in red states that they are on their side regarding cultural issues, which, in fact, they are not except that their faux populist, astro-turf demagoguery requires it.

So if they do, Joe, sure, offer the GOP fanatics an olive branch, make some gestures, but don't allow yourself to be hamstrung by a naive commitment to bi-partisanship. I fear that Biden will waste too much time pleading with Republicans to cooperate. He needs to play hardball or the opportunity to advance will be lost. The Republicans, given a similar opportunity, would not hesitate to be aggressive in exploiting it. 

Quote of the Day: David Brooks

As Hannah Arendt once observed, fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind. Donald Trump is the great emblem of an age of distrust—a man unable to love, unable to trust. When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do. By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.

David Brooks

Fanaticism is the response of people who refuse to live inside-out and look to the mob to reinforce their shaken sense of self.

Brooks' Essay entitled "America Is Having a Moral Convulsion" is worth reading in its entirety. He's describing a condition I call "ontological dizziness". The existentialists called it "shipwreck"; Christians like me see ontological dizziness as an opportunity like that St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Spirit.

The Dark Night is not a bad thing, but a phase in spiritual development that is necessary for growth in maturity. It happens when the foundations that support identity and one's sense of self dissolve. In the past, this happened mostly to spiritually gifted individuals and they either made it through the darkness, or they didn't. (Nietzsche, imo, was a spiritual prodigy who didn't make it.) But the point is that it's something that'a necessary for spiritual development--the external props have to be taken away so that you can discover that your life is something that must be lived inside out, not outside in. 

The only true cure for ontological dizziness is to realize that the ontological ground on which you can set your feet is not found out there in society or up there in heaven or in some ideology or cult, but in one's own interior depths. Nietzsche said that God was dead, but he was looking in the wrong place. He was right that God was no longer to be found in the cultural forms, but that doesn't mean he died. He just moved underground.

In the past, this Dark Night and its possibilities for discovery were experienced by individuals, but we're experiencing it now as an entire society. Trump represents the worst possible response to this collective crisis/opportunity of the spirit, but it's inevitable that he should be there to present the country with this destructive possibility.

The question I have is whether there are enough people who are responding to this collective spiritual crisis in such a way as to realize its constructive possibilities. In other words, are there sufficient numbers of anonymous people who are now navigating the darkness in a way that will enable them when they get through it to imagine a different kind of a positive human future? I doubt I'll live long enough to get an answer.

For years I've been writing here that I agree with the conservative diagnosis about what ails us as a society, and that a large part of it is that Liberalism and its Enlightenment rationalist assumptions were always inadequate and have finally run their course. But the problem with religious cultural conservatives is that they spend too much time lamenting what was lost rather than looking forward in hope to something new. Conservatives cling to things that have to be let go because they lack the faith and the hope to do it. Their response to the dizziness is to grab whatever is near at hand to stabilize them, and, alas, the mob and its resentments are very seductive in that regard. 

Pack the Court 2

This is not to say that a Republican-controlled Senate doesn’t have the constitutional power to confirm a nominee right now—it clearly does. But in exercising this power, Republicans would be committing themselves to an extreme form of “constitutional hardball”—a term coined by the legal scholar Mark V. Tushnet to describe the exercise of raw political might that, while legally permissible, violates the “assumptions that underpin working systems of constitutional government.” If Democrats gain the Senate and the White House in 2021, they will be faced with the choice of either engaging in reciprocal hardball—by wielding the raw political power to expand the Court, for example—or doing nothing and acquiescing to the breach. The latter strategy is what the law professors Joseph Fishkin and David E. Pozen call “asymmetric hardball”—a situation in which one party plays hardball and the other sits on its hands.

That will do little to restore the legitimacy of the Court, and risks falling victim to a kind of magical thinking—belief that legitimacy is achieved by simply pretending it exists rather than building broad public and political trust. As paradoxical as it sounds, a Democratic plan to add seats to the Supreme Court could be just what’s needed. This is what Pozen refers to as “hardball as anti-hardball”: that is, playing constitutional hardball not to win the game, but to get to a place where the cycle of retaliation and politicization can be ended.

Jurecik & Hennessy in The Atlantic

As I argued last week, if McConnell rams through Barrett's confirmation, there is no longer any real legitimacy to the idea that the Court is above politics, so politics is the only antidote. The goal now is to neutralize the court's power to obstruct the legislative process by some theory of interpreting the constitution that locks the country within the mindset of the 18th Century.

Originalism has the patina intellectual sophistication, but it's naively ideological insofar as it validates reactionary interests, as Second Amendment fetishism and Citizens United demonstrates. If people argue that Citizens United and the expansive understanding of citizens to bear arms is constitutionally justified, it only proves that the constitution is ill-adapted to the political realities of the 21st century. 

The best suggestion I've heard is to add several new justices, perhaps even to reach a complement of twenty-one justices, each with a limited term,  and then institute a system of having them draw lots to take on cases to add a degree of ideological randomness into the process. This would not take politics out of it, but it would blunt its effects.  

The bottom line is that the constitution, like any historical document, is vulnerable to a broad range of interpretations. And as with any document, some interpretations are better than others. But if the primary criteria is to stick to what the founders intended rather than to solve real problems, then the original document becomes more of a problem than a solution. 

The constitution is not holy scripture. It's time for both Liberals and Conservatives to stop fetishizing the Constitution each from their different ideological corners. Let the legislatures determine policy, not the courts. That's a conservative idea, or used to be. It's time for Liberals to embrace it.