After the Future

Miscellaneous Thoughts on Impeachment, Culture, and the Surveillance State

It's important that the U.S. have a post-Trump reckoning about how much damage has been done, not just by him but by his enablers. Will the impeachment play some role in that? I doubt it, since the whole point of it is simply to focus on what is already known about what Trump did before and after the insurrection. The people who want to believe his role was negligible and is being exaggerated by Democrats will continue to believe that. Trump's impeachment lawyers can say any nonsense they want and not be held accountable as they would in a normal court of law. The impeachment, unless something surprising happens, will not change any minds. It will be more political theater in a year when we're sick of political theater. A "trial" like this can only work if you have good-faith, objective jurors who want to get to the bottom of things, and that's just not a description of the U.S. Senate.

I think that far more impactful will be real trials or legal proceedings in real courts, which are not broken institutions like the Senate. Already we're seeing how Fox and Newsmax are responding to real consequences for their having no compunction about broadcasting and magnifying Trump's lies. Goodbye Lou Dobbs.

When Trump is indicted or sued, no matter how compelling the evidence presented, there will be some who will not be convinced because they are the type of people who believe the moon landing was faked, Obama was a Muslim non-citizen, and HRC and and her gal pal in elite perversity, Huma Abedin, are Satan worshipping drinkers of children's blood. A good third of the country is unreachable, but there is a third of the country in the mushy middle that leans toward Trump and that is persuadable. I think putting Trump on trial in real courts with real evidence and with a real jury will make a difference in setting the record straight about who Trump is and what damage he has done to the country. Hopefully, all this will play out over the spring and summer as we're coming out of this pandemic nightmare. The two things working together might convince Americans that some kind of positive future is possible with relatively sane, relatively decent technocrats running the government.

On the subject of technocrats, I've just finished Bart Gellman's Dark Mirror, his account of the role he played in the Edward Snowdon NSA whistleblowing drama. Gelllman is no friend of government secrecy or the surveillance state, but he's a fair-minded reporter that brings into focus the complexity of the issues involved, and my reading this book, along with my actually living through the Trump era, has changed my mostly negative perception of the people who compose the so-called Deep State.

Like Gellman, I have always been concerned about potential abuses of the enormous surveillance powers of the state. What came into focus for me in reading his book and listening to the testimony of so-called deep state operatives during the impeachment trial last year was that there are very strong restraint norms in place that actually work most of the time. The resistance to Trump's abuses by the likes of Alexander Vindman, Bill Taylor, Maria Yovanovich, Fiona Hill, and others was all remarkable for representing a culture of integrity and loyalty to the constitution rather than to a single "dude", to use Ben Sasse's term of art.

If these are the people running the Deep State, more power to the Deep State if that's what's required to contain crackpot autocrats like Trump. If anything, I was surprised they were so impotent to prevent Trump from doing the damage he did, and that was because they lived within the restraint norms their culture prescribed. So this was clarifying for me. What matters most is culture, norms, traditions. That culture of restraint held up pretty well against Trump's assault on it. 

Because this is what it comes down to: Whom do you trust? The other day I wrote about why I thought that elites of both political parties were responsible for the fragilizing of our democracy. I argued that it wasn't so much about the individuals but about the culture that shapes the elite ethos in the media, politics, and business. The Neoliberal ethos of much of corporate America, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, and its media in its competition with with the Cowboy white-entitlement ethos of the Republican Party and its media created a political/economic system over the last thirty years that was utterly unresponsive to the needs of most ordinary Americans. Neither party was trustworthy because both were captured by a destructive elite cultural ethos that shaped their policy agendas. It's no wonder that so many Americans have developed a pox-on-both-their-houses attitude to the two-party system. And it's no wonder that the more ontologically dizzy among them would embrace insane conspiracy theories. 

Nevertheless, the Democrats produce people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Stacy Abrams, and AOC. My argument for Bernie over Clinton in '16 was that more than anything the Democrats needed a change in culture and that's just not something Clinton was capable of effecting. (I wasn't sure Bernie could do it either, but he had a better shot at it.) But one of the things that has become clearer during the Trump years is that the Sanders/Warren wing of the party seems to have won the argument with the Neoliberal establishment wing represented by the Bidens and the Clintons--and really Obama, because he pretty much caved to it.

The ethos of the Democrats is clearly moving away from its Neoliberal assumptions shaped in the '80s and '90s toward a new ethos defined by a retrieval of a New Deal social democratic values, which is clearly what is called for in this historical moment. This is a return to its roots, roots that Democrats influenced by the Neoliberal Aspen-Institute elite mindset started to reject in the 1970s. So what we're seeing in the Democratic Party under Biden now is a much needed change in culture. 

That's a culture I can trust in the hands of someone like Biden because he is a decent enough and unoriginal enough guy that I can be assured that he will go with the flow--kinda like Obama did with the Neoliberals. In many ways he's the perfect figurehead for this change of party culture--reassuring to the mushy middle while being smart enough to know which way the wind is blowing. The question is whether he will be able to effect the way the mushy American middle perceives the Democrats' that will be significant enough to prevent Republicans from returning to power in '22--or ever, at least until they return to some level of sanity.

So far so good with Biden. A lot depends on whether events will work to support the marginalization of Trumpism in the next year or so. Those events will be primarily the success of Biden's legislative initiatives and further revelations about the extent of Trump's corruption, and perhaps even revelations about his treason. I realize that people like me might be vulnerable to our own kind of conspiracy theory, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out that Trump was a Russian asset, whether witting or unwitting.  I'm willing to concede, however, that this might be the kind of disinformation that fits my presuppositions. We'll see. The mystery of Trump's prodigious ass kissing of Putin has yet to be explained. 

So back to Gellman's Dark Mirror. The surveillance technology is there, whether or not they are going to be used. They are going to be used, so the real question is whether they will be abused. And the only real constraint is a culture of restraint within the  institutions that have access to these technologies. I was very impressed by the way the culture and its individual technocrats in the national security community pushed back against Trump and his appointees at the time of Zelensky call and in other matters. The culture held, but it would not have held had Trump won another four years in the White House. He could have effected a change of culture by purge and forced retirements. I'm persuaded that at least for now the culture of the surveillance state is basically trustworthy. 

Laws are needed to restrict abuses, but what's more important is a culture of restraint, because if the culture is permissive about abuses, the laws won't matter. The Democrats represent a culture of restraint (Obama's respect for process is exemplary if irritating in this respect) in a way that the Republicans have proved time and time again that they don't. The line from Nixon's Watergate to Reagan's Iran Contra to Cheney's Abu Ghraib to McConnell's cynical obstructionism to Trump's besotted minions storming the Capitol is all understandable because of the fundamentally delusional thinking that is at the foundation Republican Party culture. Even the saner, principled conservative, small-government Republicans are fundamentally clueless about how the world works and what is called for by central governments at this historical moment. 

Nothing is more important in the next decade than that this political culture of delusion be de-legitimated. The surveillance state and the problems of technocracy are going to continue to present serious challenges to a viable democracy, but there is no living without them--especially if we are going into an era of hard-right domestic violent terrorism. The most important thing is that we elect elites who will be stewards of the traditions, norms, and cultures of the institutions that wield these awesome powers. Clearly the Republicans are not trustworthy stewards, and while we must hope that the forces of sanity prevail in keeping them out of power in the near future, we must always be vigilant that the Democrats don't slip into the kind of delusions that shaped their policies while captured for over thirty years by the Neoliberal Washington Consensus. 

From Edsall's Column This Morning:

Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, put it this way in an email:

We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.

President Obama, Grofman wrote,

responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.

The result, according to Grofman, was that “white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”

At the same time, though, and here I will quote Grofman at length:

More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”

He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president. What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.

In the end, Grofman said,

Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.

Yes, the Republicans are to blame, but so are the Democrats. I'll say it again: The Dems losing the working class in the 90s during the Clinton administration was political malpractice that has led us to this point. Their nominating guys like Gore, Kerry, and Hillary was political malpractice. Obama's choosing guys like Rahm Emmanuel, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner and other Wall Street types as chief advisors was political malpractice, a complete misreading of the moment. 

The Republicans have crossed into an area of crazy and/or bad-faith cynicism that utterly de-legitimates them, but the Dems, who should know better, have been clueless and ideologically blinkered in their own destructive, self-serving way. That being said, the Dems seem to be in a position to learn from their mistakes and to make, finally, at this late date the necessary adjustments. It remains to be seen whether first they have the will to do it, but even if they have the will, it's an open question whether it's too late for them to use it. (Source)

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: 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. 

Stephanie Kelton, Big Gummint, Central Banks, and the American Future

An MMT view of the monetary system changes the way we think about what it means for currency-issuing nations to “live within their means.” It asks us to think in terms of real resource constraints—inflation—rather than perceived financial constraints. It teaches us to ask not “How will you pay for it?” but “How will you resource it?” It shows us that if we have the technological know-how and the available resources—the people, the factories, the equipment, and the raw materials—to put a man on the moon or embark on a Green New Deal to tackle climate change, then funding to carry out those missions can always be made available. Coming up with the money is the easy part. Managing the inflation risk is the critical challenge. More than any other economic approach, MMT places inflation at the center of the debate over spending limits. It also offers a more sophisticated array of techniques for managing inflationary pressures than what we have today.

Kelton The Deficit Myth (pp. 234-35). 

I've been reading Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth, and it's one of the best things out there to clarify why Bernie was right and why the Clinton/Obama/Biden/Pelosi wing of the party was wrong--not to mention all Republicans of the Paul Ryan ilk. The federal deficit isn't really a deficit, and anybody who uses the term "deficit spending" pejoratively to justify cutting entitlements or to resist spending on programs like Medicare for All is either ignorant or cynical.

Every time some smart-ass journalist asks a Sanders or a Warren how they are going to "pay for it", they are asking a political, not an economic question. It's political because most Americans think that the federal budget is essentially the same as a business or family budget where expenses have to be covered by revenues. It's just not how it really works. But politicians need  to justify their programs in terms that economically unsophisticated Americans can feel comfortable with. So they feel compelled to come up with some pretext to justify their program by analogy to the household budget. 

The Republicans might come up with some ridiculous pretext to justify their tax cuts by saying that they will stimulate the economy, which in turn will increase tax revenues that will pay for them. But it's been proven time and again with Reagan, Bush, and now Trump that these cuts only increase the so-called deficit. But each time the Republicans want their tax cut, they bring out their demonstrably false trickle down argument. But even so, the problem with the Republican tax cuts is not that they increase the deficit, but that they aggravate egregious concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of so relatively few.

But even Democrats buy into the 'deficit myth'. Bill Clinton did when he worked so diligently to balance the budget by cutting entitlements, and even now we see the influence of this myth when Nancy Pelosi insists on  "PAYGO". The U.S. is not in debt to the Bank of China, as Obama once said. The U.S. is not Greece or Venezuela or Bangladesh. As long as the U.S. has a vibrant productive economy and it has what Kelton calls monetary sovereignty, the government cannot run out of money or default--unless it chooses to, by for instance not raising the debt limit. Everybody--Democrats included-- who thinks that we have a defecit problem or that we are burdening future generations with debt is buying into an ideology that makes no sense after the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system in 1971.

Since then, the U.S. and other countries with fiat currencies can print as much money as they want, and the only limiting factor is inflation. That's a real limiting factor, but running "deficits" is not inflationary if managed competently. China isn't going to call in its chits, and the government isn't going to default so long as the U.S economy remains vibrant and productive. There are no economic reasons for Social Security to run out of money or for not funding universal healthcare or a robust program to renew the national infrastructure. The obstacles for achieving all these things and more are political not economic. The challenge is not lack of money, but lack of imagination and political will. 

For many Fiscal Puritans, the phrase "fiat currency" connotes an immoral profligacy. You can't just create money out of thin air, right? Money has to be grounded in something, like gold. Just letting it be whatever a government wants it to be is just wrong. This kind of Fiscal Puritanism runs strong in the American collective psyche, but it is the primary cause of the aforementioned lack of imagination that insists on focusing on delusional moralistic problems rather than real ones. Running the federal government like a business is a false analogy; it simply does not reflect how the economy works in countries with strong economies like the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, the U.K. and others that have monetary sovereignty. 

I am not going to rehearse all Kelton's arguments here, but there is no more withering, easily understood critique than hers to be found of the Neoliberalism that has dominated the elite thinking of the Washington Consensus whose destructive ideology has played a major role in creating the conditions that allowed for the rise of Donald Trump.

I have some hope that in the post-Trump reconstruction of American political institutions that we will find a way to reset to pre-Reagan when there was actually a consensus built around the legitimacy of the New Deal. We actually had a social democracy there for a while, but after 1980 the Neoliberals came to dominate elite thinking, and everything went badly wrong. It is astonishing how many smart people who should have known better--and who I think wanted to act in good faith--could be taken in by the Neoliberal con. Hopefully books like Kelton's and the emergence of the Sanders/Warren/AOC wing of the party will change that permanently. 

The challenge for them is rhetorical rather than technical: how to persuade most Americans that deficit spending is ok. That's a heavy lift because it just seems wrong. It's counter-intuitive, and it goes against everybody's common sense and experience about how money works in their personal lives. If we as individual households, businesses, and even state and local governments have to balance our expenditures with revenues, why shouldn't the federal government? If it doesn't, it should. . .  right? That's one point of resistance. The other is Americans' mistrust of big government and their discomfort with giving it too much power. This is a legitimate concern, but big gummint--bigness in general--is here to stay. The question is whether in the future ordinary Americans can make bigness work in their interests rather than in the interests of the oligarchs. 

***

Anybody who has read this blog over the years knows that I like to frame issues in loosely dialectical terms, as presenting polarities and then seeking to reconcile them. The fundamental polarity at work in the American political psyche pertaining here is Jefferson vs. Hamilton. The Jeffersonian impulse was carried mainly by Democrats through the 19th century, and the Hamiltonian impulse was carried by the Federalists, then the Whigs, and finally by the Republicans. None of us is completely Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, but we lean one way or the other with recessive traits of the other manifesting from time to time. Yankees lean toward Hamilton; Southerners toward Jefferson.

Jeffersonians define freedom primarily in terms of freedom from big government and big concentrations of wealth and power in institutions like central banks. Hamilton wanted the U.S. to be a world economic and military power, and he saw a strong central government and a central bank as playing a critical role in effecting this rise to power. Hamilton won early on, but the Jeffersonians dominated the decades in the early 19th Century running up to the Civil War--although among Southerners Hamiltonian recessive traits emerged with their support for the war with Mexico and their fantasies of imperial expansion into the rest of Latin America. The Hamiltonian legacy was developed by his Whig heirs Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

I think of Lincoln, a Whig-turned-Republican, as a Hamilton-dominant politico with recessive Jeffersonian traits. His greatness lies in his efforts to reconcile both, as so beautifully articulated at Gettysburg, but after him, the Republican Party became the vehicle for Hamilton-dominant thinking between the Civil War and WWI. Equality ideals were forgotten as Social Darwinism took hold in the North and Jim Crowe in the South.

By the second decade of the 20th Century, the heretofore Jeffersonian southern Democrats like Woodrow Wilson morphed into Hamiltonians in supporting the WWI and in bringing back the one thing truly anathema to Jeffersonians--the central bank. The Federal Reserve was created on his watch in 1913. By the time FDR took office, the only members of the Democratic party interested in invoking Jefferson were southern segregationists who looked for any pretext to stymie the federal government from interfering with their post-reconstruction apartheid system. In the late 19th Century Republican phase, the U.S. became a world economic power; in the post-Wilson Democratic phase, it became both a world economic and military power. The Party of Jefferson had become assimilated into the Party of Hamilton. 

There were, of course, the cranks like those in the John Birch society who were ok with the big business part of the Hamiltonian legacy, but were appalled that big gummint accompanied it. They were Jeffersonians of convenience like the Southern oligarchs. They hated a big government that would restrict them with regulations and anti-trust laws from doing as they please. They were the country-club Hamiltonians who saw FDR as a traitor to his class. But nobody in the power establishment took those cranks seriously until Ronald Reagan made it ok to be a Neoliberal. And we came to see that crankiness normalized through the efforts of the Koch Brothers and others who fund right-wing think tanks whose sole goal is to give a kind of intellectual legitimacy to ideas that are crudely designed to justify the dominance of the 1%.

Jefferson's vision for America was obsoletized by the Industrial Revolution and by the emergence of the U.S. as a world military power after WWI, and yet his influence lingers in positive and negative ways. We are Jeffersonians when we feel inspired by the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. We are Jeffersonians when we feel uncomfortable not just with how the central U.S. government has grown into this massive surveillance state with hundreds of military bases throughout the world, but also with the way Wall Street and huge concentrations of corporate power and wealth have come to dominate the economic sphere. And we are Jeffersonians when we are appalled at how huge concentrations of corporate power meld with political power.

But we are Jeffersonians in the negative sense when we think naively that our freedoms only thrive to the degree that big government stays out of our lives. Bigness in the private and public sectors is a real problem, but you deal with it by making it accountable, and big government is the only means to keep huge, amoral corporate powers in check. And that requires a vigilant citizenry, not the morally complacent citizenry that lets a quasi-authoritarian crackpot like Trump get elected. 

We need to keep those positive aspects of the Jeffersonian imagination of America alive, but we need to realize that we live in a world that is shaped primarily by forces that Hamilton celebrated and are now out of balance. The question before us now is how to effect a political coincidentia oppositorum, i.e., to achieve Jeffersonian ideals using Hamiltonian means. In other words bigness is here to stay, and to wish it away is delusional, and to the degree that bigness leads to greater levels of inequality and unfreedom, it must be resisted by harnessing it. For me the question is whether a new leadership can emerge from the Trump chaos that has an imagination of an American future that embodies what is best about both the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian legacies. 

The challenge is to manage bigness in such a way that the huge concentrations of wealth and political power don't accrue to the 1%--or the 20% for that matter. The challenge before us is to harness American economic power to enact policies that solve the problems of inequality and concentrations of wealth and power--not just in this country, but throughout the world. Going forward, the only real solutions are global solutions.

That might seem kind of unrealistic because it seems to require a mentality and an imagination of future possibility that is so not  who we are now. But if we live in this Hamilton-dominant imagination of America at the moment, I believe that our recessive Jeffersonianism--the most positive aspects of it articulated in the Declaration--can emerge as a balancing, integrating factor. Right now we are in chaos; we are anything but integrated and balanced. The thing to be feared is that we will embrace any kind illiberal order as an alternative to the chaos, but that just creates other imbalances that kick the basic problem down the road.  

If there is not an aggressive assertion of political will from progressives, the illiberal Right will win by default. Obama was a decent president, but he was a timid technocrat, and his timidity and his acquiescence to the Washington Consensus aggravated the conditions that promoted Trump's emergence. If Biden is another Obama, expect someone to emerge on the Right who will have learned from Trump. He willl have learned how easy it is to do egregiously illegal, unconstitutional things that can be tied up in the courts for years while he bends government institutions to his authoritarian will. If the courts finally decide against him, he will ignore them as Andrew Jackson did. It doesn't matter what the courts decide if the executive branch won't enforce it. But there's a good chance courts will support a post-Trump authoritarianism because Mitch McConnell has been stacking the federal courts with right-wing ideologues. 

For now at least I'm going to allow myself to embrace the more optimistic possibilities for an American future, and hope that Trump's absurd, chaotic presidency has created a sense of urgency that make something new possible, and that out of his chaos something new and better can be born. I believe something better is possible even if such a possibly poses an enormous challenge to our collective political imagination.

As Kelton's book points out, we have the resources, the Hamiltonian means, to do very good things. The only question is whether we will be hamstrung by, on the one hand, a tight-assed Fiscal Puritanism, the kind we see on display with Mitch McConnell and the Republicans who just hate the idea of extending unemployment benefits during a pandemic; and on the other hand, by a widespread moral lassitude and ignorance among ordinary Americans that allowed a ridiculous figure like Trump to take the White House in the first place. 

State of the Race 3

It's looking more and more like it's going to be Bernie, and it's looking more and more like the establishment types are in full freak out. I think it's fine to go after him with all guns firing between now and Super Tuesday, but I hope that the establishment types are savvy enough to get behind him if he emerges after Super Tuesday with a significant lead. 

I don't know what's going to happen if Bernie goes up against Trump. Nobody does. Whatever matrix we've had to explain how things usually work no longer has any validity. The "experts" who are predicting that Bernie will lose don't really know. It's just more prudent to say it's 50/50. Conventional wisdom is worthless in our current situation. People want a return to normalcy, but normalcy is no longer a possibility. The best antidote to Trumpism is something like Bernie-ism. It's certainly not back-to-normal-ism.

And so if there's one generalization I think it's safe to maintain, it's that the more establishment the candidate, the more clueless, and the more clueless, the less likely to win. That's the most positive thing that can be said about Bernie. He's the most anti-establishment candidate in the Dem field. And so if establishment Dems in the Hillary/Biden wing of the party hate Sanders, that's just a sign about how out of touch they are.

So that's why if after Super Tuesday Bernie has a significant lead, they better get on the Bernie train and make the best possible case for his candidacy rather than prolong the civil war. Do I think they'll do it? No. And that's what makes me most pessimistic about Bernie's candidacy. It's not about him; it's about them.

Bernie probably understands that it's a liability for him to be called a socialist, but it's worse for him if he backs away from it. Bernie's task--and the task of all Democrats--should be to define Democratic Socialism on their terms and not accept how it will be characterized by the Libertarians in the Business Class. A Democratic Socialist is for social democracy, and social democracy is what we had in this country until Libertarians in the GOP and Neoliberals (like Clinton) in the Democratic party dismantled it. Democratic Socialism is the New Deal. It's Denmark, not Cuba. 

And please, media types, stop thinking you're so smart by asking how Bernie is going to pay for it all. Nobody with any sense believes that he's going to get what he is running on, even Medicare for All. This is not an election about being practical; it's about laying out a vision for the future of the country. And that future is mostly about what young people want, and they don't want more of the same. And for good reason. 

And Bernie is right when he questions why it's ok to build huge deficits to benefit the wealthiest as Reagan, Bush, and Trump have done, but not for programs that actually benefit real people. It's not about what's practical; it's about what there's the political will to do. So it's first about getting the right people in office, and then it's about the hard work of building a consensus and the political will to solve real problems, chief among them the ridiculous inequity in our wealth distribution. This gross injustice is the responsibility of both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats who effected it by dismantling the New Deal, i.e., the social democratic, framework that kept things more equitable during our trente glorieuses.

Sorry Pete and Amy. The old people and editorial boards love you, but the old people and establishment media aren't the future. I don't know if Bernie is the answer or whether he'll succeed, but he has a better chance of it than either of you do. 

BTW--Check out this post I wrote some years ago: Socialism vs. Neoliberalism

Calvinism + Baconism = The Toxically Arrogant Technocratic State

I've been a bit rough on the Calvinists, and I haven't been giving them enough credit for the genuine idealism that motivated the best among them. It's easy to criticize what's worst and in doing so to obscure what's best. Catholics wouldn't have any reason to be taken seriously, to what extent they might be taken seriously at all, for what's best in its traditions if the way most Catholics have acted is the measure. The same can be said of the Calvinists, but as I argued in my previous post, we're all Calvinists now, even Catholics, and we need to understand how Calvinism shapes the way we experience the Real for better and worse.

I have often wondered why the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination didn't lead the Calvinists into a kind of Amish separatism. For the early Calvinists, most people are unregenerate and damned, so why should the elect not just move away and start something new that leaves the damned to the damned. Perhaps the Puritan experiment in Massachusetts came close to this kind of project. But the early Puritans saw themselves not as separatists, but as a vanguard, a light shining on a hill to be emulated by those left behind in England.

This is one of the main questions that Charles Taylor addresses in both A Secular Age and Sources of the Self. He is quite eloquent in describing how ambitious the Calvinists were not just for themselves but for transform all of European society. The English Civil War and the Thirty Years War are hard to understand without acknowledging this as a central Calvinist objective. They wanted to tear down the old thing in its entirety and to build something new. But If they truly believed that most humans were utterly, irredeemably depraved, how could the possibly believe that such a reform project could possibly succeed? 

As Taylor points out, the Calvinist logic is that good people—the regenerate—do good things. Paul says to the regenerate in Corinthians 1: 15.58—"My dear brothers and sisters be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.”

Calvinists do good not because it is efficacious for their salvation, but out of an energy that flows from their having been regenerated. There is something genuinely noble about that. There's no quid pro quo, no need to do good to earn points that can buy you a place in paradise; instead, there's just the impulse to do good because that's what's called for, because It's what conscience dictates. But not only must they do good, they must order their lives and the lives of others in such a way as to restore creation from the chaos into which it has degenerated. So, this means that they must restore order in society and in the lives of the unregenerate, even though most living in society are damned.

For the Puritans, the disorder of the world is a stink in God’s nostrils, and so the regenerated have a responsibility to mitigate God’s discomfort and the insult this stinking, disordered, chaotic world presents as an offense to his dignity. Once the “law” awakens in the heart of the regenerate, he is tasked with imposing that law on a lawless world, and by force if necessary. There is an inside-out dynamic at work here. The order is discovered within, and then it is imposed without, both in getting one’s own life in order, but also in imposing order on the world. This is a central insight if one is to understand the the new kind of reform mentality that is born in the modern period. The Thirty Years War, rather than being seen as cruel, destructive holocaust, which it was, is seen rather as a violent cleansing of the old degenerate society to make way for the new regenerated one. We know now how naive such an idea is, but it's understandable that idealists of a certain temperament could believe this. Is it so different from the mentality of Robespierre, Lenin, Mao and those who were inspired by them?

The idea of radical, top-down, humanly engineered revolution is something that only becomes possible after Calvin. And so without Geneva in the 1550s, there would be no Paris in the 1790s. Rousseau was a Genevan, but he took the idea of Calvinist human depravity and flipped it on its head. The idea of starting something new, something in defiance of the old, is very much part of the Calvinist imaginary, and plays an important shaping influence on Rousseau's imagination of the possible. Without Rousseau, there is no French Revolution. The causes of the French Revolution are more complex, of course, but it was not possible without this very different, very modern idea of reform that originated in Calvinism. And it lays a foundation for the technocratic state ruled by the best and brightest who know what's best and seek to impose their will from their positions of power.

And at the same time Calvinism lays the foundation for the Baconian revolution in science. Both Puritanism and Baconism set themselves against tradition and see themselves as involved in creating something new, from scratch. Aristotle becomes the foe for each—an authority that stands in the way of seeing things more clearly as they are. So Aristotle and the whole premodern, medieval superstructure is ripped down, and the idea that traditions and customs have any value except to impede the transformation of the world into something pleasing to God for the Calvinists morphs easily into transforming the world into something pleasing for humans by the Baconians.

Modernity is the confluence of both Calvin and Bacon, but in such a way that the first, the idea of pleasing God, becomes gradually supplanted by the latter, which in turn becomes something understood as evolution-without-grace. Hobbesian and Macchiavellian realism emerge at this time. Both accept the world as defined by evolution-without-grace, a world ruled by greed, will to power, and promiscuous sexuality. To be a realist is to understand the world as if grace does not exist. 

If the goal for the Calvinists was to restore God’s order, Baconian science provides a methodology that allows humans to come to a better understanding about what that order is. But there is a different spiritual impulse or energy at work in Baconism. It works hand in hand with Calvinism because it is impelled by a desire to understand the underlying order of God’s creation in order to make it useful and productive. This had  become a key element in the Puritan ethic—to be productive in ways that benefit humans, but it can very easily morph into the Faustian by the less pious. 

So Baconism is the Faustian side of Calvinism. Baconism is a movement driven more by evolution-without-grace than by what was the originary imputse within Calvinism, which was to do what conscience calls for. There is a similarity of motive—to improve the human condition by the establishment of a new order—but there is a fundamental difference in the nature of the orders that each seeks to realize. It’s easy for people of good will to be confused by such distinctions, but one leads eventually to a mechanomorphic, technocratic hellscape, and the other to the New Jerusalem. As I argued in my previous post, we're headed for the former if we don't find a way to restore a sense of the latter's possibility, and I see that effected only by something like a transcultural Axial awakening some time in the next century. 

But the idealism of the Puritans goes wrong almost from the start in part because of its image of God that stresses His power and freedom. God is everything all powerful and utterly free and without obligation to anyone or anything beneath him in dignity of Being. So he owes humans nothing. But this is the God of the philosophers, not the God revealed in the Bible. This idea of God as arbitrary despot depicts him as a being closer in nature to Genghis Khan than the one who reveals himself in a still, small voice to Elijah or as the one who seeks to forgive and befriend us in the New Testament.

God might indeed be all powerful, but that aspect of his nature is not how he presents himself in the Gospels. But no matter how pious the original intent--to exalt God and to insist on a radical human humility vis a vis the power of God--the Calvinist idea of God, even if unintentionally, aligns with and supports the technocratic power project of Baconism.

And there is something toxically arrogant about someone who insists that he knows God’s will and insists that you submit to it. This is the flip side of Calvinist humility--an incredible arrogance that the regenerate Calvinist knows better in ways that the unregenerate cannot. And this leads in turn to the remarkable hubris necessary to reorganize a society top-down according to a template that they alone had access to.

This mentality is secularized in modern revolutionary ideologies, which are born of the same kind of we-know-better arrogance. But so is this mentality found in the kind of technocratic mentality that reigns in Silicon Valley. It shares in the arrogance that I call Aspen Institute Liberalism, the mentality of rich elites who think they know better because they are rich and are good at navigating in the world created by consumer capitalism. Trump, Brexit, and the "democratic" embrace of illiberalism everywhere is an understandable, if even more dangerously toxic, response to this liberal, Baconian arrogance. The problem we face at this moment lies in that there are no healthy alternatives to either. 

This kind of technocratic top-downism claims to be progressive, but it's a progressivism that is shaped primarily by evolution-without-grace. It's a "liberal" mentality that seeks to be cutting edge in the development of the new, and as such is consonant with the Baconian project to use science and technology to make life better for human beings. But at a certain point the tail started wagging the dog, and as modern society lost any sense of a vital connection to a sense of a transcendent moral order, there has been no foothold for people to get traction to push back. Technological progress is not human progress unless it can become baptized in some way, which is to say subordinated to the logic of grace. Technological progress without grace, i.e., evolution without grace, is dehumanizing--slowly at first, but ultimately it leads to the complete extermination or enslavement of the human. 

Whether consciously or unconsciously acknowledged, evolution-without-grace is the metaphysics, i.e, the dominant metaphysical imaginary, of the intelligentsia in North Atlantic societies. It is running amok in consumer capitalism and in the developments in machine learning and biotechnology. As I pointed out in my last post, while in the short run evolution-without-grace might need human beings, in the long run it doesn't.  

Transhumanism and Posthumanism are the culmination of the Baconian project, a project that from my pov seems peculiarly impervious to grace. As a Christian, I must live in hope that grace will find a way, but its operation in the world right now is out of sight, and out of most people's minds. 

Zizek, McCain, Trump, and Big Daddy

I'm no expert on Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian psychotherapist and edgy philosopher from Slovenia, but I find his distinction between the Oedipal Father Figure and the Primal Father Figure an interesting frame through which to observe the events surrounding the death of John McCain in the last week. Elites in the American media and political establishments leapt at the opportunity to lionize John McCain as an exemplar of an American code of honor and service that contrasted with Donald Trump's pettiness and self-serving venality. In Zizek's frame, McCain is an exemplar of an ethos dominated by the Oedipal Father, the mythological successor figure to the Primal Father figure for which Trump is an exemplar. These archetypes work in each of us, at levels of unconsciousness most people are unaware of. They have reality-defining power.

The Primal Father in Freud's and Zizek's mythos represents self-assertion in the service of self-gratification--the Primal Father is the crude bull moose who maintains by force a monopoly of access to the females in the herd; he has no rules, no honor except the prestige of being the herd alpha and doing as he pleases without constraint. Just try to stop him. The Oedipal father, on the other hand, represents duty in the service of group cohesiveness and a strict group code--honor, service.

The problem for Zizek is that both in their different ways create constructs that Freud called the Superego, that Zizek called the Big Other, and that I'm calling Big Daddy. The Superego works at an unconscious level to shape our feelings of guilt and of self worth insofar as we we live up to the behavior and attitudes the code demands. Our feelings of self-worth as successes or failures is determined by the Code. So in McCain's case, his sense of success as a human being depended on how well he measures up to the Oedipal superego, while Trump's sense of success depends on how well he measures up to the superego as defined by the Primal Father figure. 

In McCain's case, his family was military. His grandfather and father were both admirals. His family programmed his superego with an old-fashioned code of military stoicism, honor, service, and self-sacrifice. In many ways he lived that code, and in many ways he failed to. That's the way it is for most people for whom such a code is a strong influence in their acculturation. The superego, the internal Big Daddy, creates both an image of what one's ideal self should be, but it also represses energies that Zizek describes as perversions of the code, and are a source of continuous temptation to transgress the code. Jung calls these repressed aspects of the psyche the Shadow. 

It explains a lot of our everyday experience, for instance, why "good' girls" find "bad boys" so attractive. Bad boys represent the repressed energies that living in accordance with the Oedipal code produce. The more rigid the adherence to the code, the more repressed these energies. But one way or another they seek an outlet through transgression or 'sin'. The more repressed the dark energies, the more joyously liberated one feels when he or she transgresses them--until the guilt sets in.

But here's the thing, first noted by St. Paul in Romans 4:15: If there's no code, there's no transgression. If there's no law, there's no sin. So it follows that If there's no superego, there's no guilt. Getting rid of the superego is Zizek's project. And while Zizek sees the Church as the chief reinforcer of superego--the Church must have a law or code otherwise there would be no sinners, and if there were no sinners, there would be no need for redemption or for the Church to mediate that redemption. Well, ok, but Paul, of course, was arguing that he was liberated from the law by awakening to a deeper, transcendent source of order. But I agree with Zizek that the church often operates as if that 'awakening' had little to do with its raison d'être. 

So the Big Daddy operates in our psyche like a repressive dictator who punishes us with intense feelings of guilt and self-loathing when we fail to live up to its ideals, while at the same time it creates its perverse opposite, energies within the psyche that seek to subvert its rule and transgress its code in rebellious ways. McCain is a classic example of living the tension between being the good boy and the bad boy. His "maverickness" is related to the second, and In the past week we celebrated how he was an exemplar of the first. But we didn't talk about his partying, how he dumped his devoted first wife for a woman eighteen years younger, how he got involved in bank scandal that was related to his second wife's family's business, his ambivalent record and attitudes about race, etc. 

Very Trumpy stuff there, but the American establishment at this moment needs an exemplar of the Oedipal Big Daddy to contrast with someone who almost in every way transgresses its codes. McCain is honored for the ways in which he strove to act honorably, and he is forgiven for the ways that he failed. That's fine, so far as it goes. He's like most everybody else that way, and his eulogizers do what almost all eulogizers do, which is to celebrate how the eulogized embodied the community's values and to overlook the ways he or she failed to. He tried and sometimes succeeded--at least he tried. Trump doesn't bother to try even in the least degree. It would be shameful for him to be honorable because within the Primal Father archetype honor is complete b.s. and hypocrisy. Power and enjoyment are the only thing that matter.

Zizek says that the Oedipal--strict social norms--Father figure shaped American society until the 1960s when it was supplanted by a version of the Primal Father figure that has shaped since then what we think of as the postmodern. The postmodern ethos is shaped by a mandate to gratify one's appetites unconstrained by traditional repressive norms and traditions. The superego of people shaped by the Primal Big Daddy commands them to satisfy his or her appetites. It has little regard for the common good or commitments that would constrain the pursuit of those appetites. This is the 'code' that took hold in the 1970s, and has played a huge role in shaping popular and elite culture. It is the perfect ethos for consumer capitalism, and is justified by a neoliberal ideology in the political and economic spheres. And is there anybody who embodies it more fully and unambiguously than Donald Trump?

But Zizek points out that rather being truly psychically liberating, the Primal Big Daddy  'superego' comes with its own set of commands, which boil down to something like this: “Thou shalt satisfy your appetites. Thou must thereby enjoy and fulfill thyself in whatever way you see fit." And so it follows that any kind of self-denial or sacrifice for a higher good is repressive and alienating. [I should point out that Zizek is somewhat muddled (if not completely bonkers) in this regard when contrasting this kind of thralldom to superego with his idea about "desire" and  "immoral ethics", for whom someone like Robespierre was an exemplar, but I don't want to get too far afield here.]

But the problem with this new command lies in that it doesn't bring real enjoyment. At best it's a kind of sterile enjoyment. A more robust form of enjoyment was a possibility in the old Oedipal regime in a way it is not for those living under the rule of the Primal Father. Before there was a liberating joy in the transgressive act, but if the new rule is to transgress without there being a broadly respected repressive code to transgress, there’s no fun in it. Enjoyment becomes a grind. We have to find new traditional constraints and taboos to become liberated from. That's where the fun is--in identifying and breaking whatever unbroken taboos are left. 

Someone like McCain always honored the code of the militarist, authoritarian Big Daddy, even if he failed on occasion to live up to it. The Primal Big Daddy has no respect for the old codes, sees them as impediments to the fulfillment of his appetites, sees those who are constrained by them as repressed fools, and finds its sense of identity and moral mission in flouting whatever vestiges of that code remain.

And that's the difference between John McCain and Donald Trump. Trump is an exemplar of the Primal Big Daddy code. McCain saw himself as a rebel because he believed in the code, but Trump isn't a rebel because there are no codes he believes in. He is a bull moose for whom there  is no rule except to do whatever satisfies his appetites. He only feels a sense of self-loathing when he fails to get what he wants. There is no honor except the prestige that comes with power and humiliating one's foes. There is no sense whatsoever of the validity of the old Oedipal honor code that requires the repression of one's appetites for the good of the community. 

The larger question is whether any society worth living in can do away with an Oedipal Big Daddy. But Is it a question of getting rid of Big Daddy or finding a source of order that subverts his influence? Zizek would probably say that any source of order is a Big Daddy and the ideology that justifies his rule, and every Big Daddy is necessarily a source of repression for those who live under his rule. And repression is by definition a bad thing and liberation is by definition a good thing. But is it, or is it that we need to be liberated from the whole repressive/transgressive system. Is such a thing possible?

I think it is, but it requires a level of self-awareness and maturity that is simply too rare at this point in our collective development to have much of an influence in shaping a truly free and yet ordered i.e., just, society. I believe with MLK that the arc of history bends toward justice, so it's not that what we do now does not matter. We must do what's there for us to do, but we must also realize that the human being's capacity for self-absorption and self-delusion cannot be underestimated, and that most people snap out of their delusions only when reality whacks them upside the head one way or the other. The greater the level of delusion, the more violent is the whack required. In the short run all manner of whacks upside the head seem a necessary precondition for any real movement forward in American society.

Liberation does not come from just transgressing the old repressive codes. Liberation comes only if one can in some way transcend the code, not just transgress it--no matter which Big Daddy's code it is. The post-Axial spiritual traditions, particularly Pauline Christianity and Buddhism, teach that it is possible. Zizek thinks it's possible, too, through his Lacanian brand of psychoanalysis. Seeing similarities and differences here is something I hope to get into in future posts. 

So this past week we were continuously exposed to people praising McCain as an exemplar of the code of honor, service, and self-sacrifice for the greater good, i.e, the American nation state. It's clear that the elite establishment approves of McCain and has nothing but disdain for Trump. And at the same time, all the Trump supporters have nothing but disdain for the elites who eulogized him in the National Cathedral on Saturday.

But the underlying values of the establishment and of Trump's supporters are an incoherent hodgepodge--sometimes praising a code of discipline and sacrifice, other time celebrating an anything-goes code of sating one's appetites however one sees fit. That's what it means to be postmodern--thinking or believing contradictory things, because most are in thrall to contradictory unconscious organization of reality that sometimes celebrates repression and at other times desire, sometimes superego, other times transgression. Most postmoderns are oblivious of their self contradictions or why what they approve or disapprove this or that has any rhyme or reason. They just feel what they feel, and you've no right to judge them. And if they should become aware of their contradictions, they just shrug their shoulders, because there's no center, no ground on which to stand to make such comparisons and judgments. 

Trump is unusual in that he is so unambiguously one thing, so completely, predictably, guiltlessly a man of predatory appetite who is so blithely oblivious of any sense of the old honor codes. He's not conflicted the way most are. He's pure in a most remarkable way for a public figure. He takes the post-sixties ethos of appetite to its extreme, and this is why I think that his libidinal, norm-crashing presidency is not to be feared in itself, but is rather a precursor for an authoritarian backlash that celebrates honor, country, service to the state. The Trump supporters will get behind such an authoritarian regime and its leader because they are not that particular about their violent Big Daddies. They only care about strength, not whether it's honorable or not.

Trump is not the real threat because he is not really an authoritarian. He's too disorganized, impulsive, and self-absorbed to think beyond his own appetites. A real authoritarian is a disciplined true believer and expects others to believe what he does and to submit to his prescribed discipline for the greater good. Trump believes nothing, and is really more a creature of the anarchic Cultural Left in that sense, as are most neoliberal, cosmopolitan elites. But he is someone who provides a gateway for someone who will be a real threat. The violent, appetitive Primal Father eventually loses to the violent Oedipal Authoritarian Father, so the real danger lies in the emergence and popular embrace of an authoritarian Big Daddy who will reassert a repressive code that everybody better get in line with or else.

Elites will embrace the arrival of this kind of Big Daddy because they're tired of the chaos and how nothing works anymore, and because they have lost faith in a democracy that makes possible the presidency of a sleazy con man like Donald Trump. They will embrace any new Big Daddy who will tell them they're better than that and who can free them from their tortured ambiguity and normlessness.

There's a a reason why the military is the only institution that Americans have not lost faith in. So the Big Daddy to come will likely be  ex-military, someone like John McCain or John Kelly, someone disciplined and organized, someone admirable according to the old service-and-honor code, reasonable seeming, upright. But when push comes to shove he will impose their code on the rest of us for the 'greater good', and we will go along because who doesn't want the greater good, especially when things seem so frighteningly chaotic?

See also Moral vs. Moralistic.

 

HyperNormalisation: Fake Truth and Political Reality

In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it's indefinable.— Peter Pomerantsev, in "Putin's Rasputin", London Review of Books, October 2011

But none of the liberals could possibly imagine that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination. But underneath the liberal disdain, both Donald Trump in America, and Vladislav Surkov in Russia had realised the same thing--that the version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable, that the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense. And in the face of that, you could play with reality, constantly shifting and changing, and in the process, further undermine and weaken the old forms of power. --Adam Curtis, HyperNormalisation

If you haven't seen Adam Curtis's most recent documentary, HyperNormalisation, it's available on YouTube here. It's a must if you want to understand the big picture about what's happening to us. It came out in October 2016 perfectly timed to an event that its underlying argument predicts. Take notes as you watch it because there's a lot there, and his argument can get lost in all the details. It's long (2.5 hours) and complex, but it's very well put together.

Curtis is arguing that since the 1970s developments in both the West and the Middle East have crossed a line so that things are no longer manageable by politics, if by politics we mean governments enacting policies that are in any real way responsive to and accountable to the people they govern. Instead we have is politicians who essentially know that they can only implement the policies that favor the interests of a power elite who operate mostly offstage. Politicians find that they are limited to preserving some level of stability by using various methods of "perception management". Politicians enact various political dramas that keep the media and the rest of us distracted, and the power elite do what they want out of sight.

And stability correlates with the so-called Washington Consensus, which is by and large shaped by the financial sector and its Neoliberal ideology. Neoliberal theory supports this diminution of politics by essentially telling us that there is no longer any such thing as a 'citizen'; there is only the  'consumer'. The citizen has no agency; the consumer can at least vote with his pocketbook. Freedom equals the freedom to buy a Ford or a Toyota, to get health insurance or not, and any idea of freedom as the capacity for citizens to shape a better, more equitable society through the political process is dismissed as incoherent, left-wing nonsense. Don't worry about what's going on in Iraq, folks--just go shopping. This leaves the field open to the power elites to do as they please out of sight and unaccountable.

This has been going on for years now, but it seems to be moving to a whole other level with the ascension of Trump and Bannon. It' s not clear to me yet whether they are complicit with the power elite, or whether they are being played by the power elite. For in the short run it looks like the power elite is just fine with what Trump is doing because all the chaos that he's creating just gives them a smokescreen behind which they can maneuver without anyone noticing.

Before Trump's election the attempts some "citizens" made to reassert some control through politics have failed, the most famous being the Arab Spring in the Middle East and Occupy Wall Street here in the U.S. Both failed because they were about "process" and not about actually imagining a positive future society and developing a concrete plan to realize it. Naive thinking in both camps assumed that if the process is virtuous, a virtuous society will arise spontaneously from it.

But the chaos that such "process" revolutions produce creates power vacuums that allow groups to move in who are clear about what they want. The military is stronger in Egypt than it was before the goings on in Tahrir Square, and does anyone think that Wall Street is less powerful after OWS? More powerful is more like it. Saying No to the bad guy isn't enough unless you have a Good guy who is ready to move in and consolidate power for the benefit of the broader common good. As long as there is no unifying consensus about what that broader common good is, the bad guys win by default.

Curtis argues that chaos and confusion are tools that work in entrenched power's favor. Who is benefitting from Trump's election most now? The economically stressed heartlanders who elected him? Of course not. Look at the billionaires and Wall Street types he's put in his cabinet. Where are the interests of heartland Americans represented in those appointments? The GOP establishment might have preferred someone who was less of a loose cannon, but they are nevertheless in a better position to take advantage of the disruptions that Trump/Bannon will create.

The model here is one already developed in Putin's Russia. From the Script of HyperNormalisation around the 2 hour, 17 minute mark:

But in Russia, there was a group of men who had seen how this very lack of belief in politics, and dark uncertainty about the  future could work to their advantage. What they had done was turn politics into a strange theatre where nobody knew what was true or what was fake any longer. They were called political technologists and they were the key figures behind President Putin. They had kept him in power, unchallenged, for 15 years. Some of them had been dissidents back in the 1970s and had been powerfully influenced by the science fiction writings of the Strugatsky brothers. Twenty years later, when Russia fell apart after the end of communism, they rose up and took control of the media. And they used it to manipulate the electorate on a vast scale. For them, reality was just something that could be manipulated and shaped into anything you wanted it to be.

But then a technologist emerged who went much further. And his ideas would become central to Putin's grip on power. He was called Vladislav Surkov. Surkov came originally from the theatre world and those who have studied his career say that what he did was take avant-garde ideas from the theatre and bring them into the heart of politics. Surkov's aim was not just to manipulate people but to go deeper and play with, and undermine their very perception of the world so they are never sure what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theatre. He used Kremlin money to sponsor all kinds of groups--from mass anti-fascist youth organisations, to the very opposite--neo-Nazi skinheads. And liberal human rights groups who then attacked the government. Surkov even backed whole political parties that were opposed to President Putin. But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing. Which meant that no-one was sure what was real or what was fake in modern Russia. As one journalist put it, "It's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition "constantly confused"--a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable "because it is indefinable."

Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere--hidden away behind the stage, exercised without anyone seeing it. And then the same thing seemed to start happening in the West. By now it was becoming ever more clear that the system had deep flaws. Every month there were new revelations, of most of the banks' involvement in global corruption, of massive tax avoidance by all the major corporations, of the secret surveillance of everyone's e-mails by the National Security Agency. Yet no-one was prosecuted, except for a few people at the lowest levels. And behind it all, the massive inequality kept on growing. Yet the structure of power remained the same. Nothing ever changed, because nothing could be allowed to destabilise the system. But then the shape-shifting began.

The shape shifting is a theatrical illusion. The underlying stability of the backstage Neoliberal power structure remains constant. That is, as I understand it, Curtis's argument. Whether there is a direct parallel between what's happening in Russia and what's happening in the U.S. right now, I don't know. Nobody does because confusion is the basic program. But Bannon quite possibly is playing for Trump the role that Surkov is playing for Putin.

It's something to pay attention to as we go forward. But here's the larger point. If there is no organized, motivated, clear-sighted opposition with a clear vision of a humane, realizable political future, the bad guys win. The OWS and Arab Spring models don't work; they play into the chaos narrative that benefits entrenched power.

It's too early to tell whether the kind of opposition that has arisen in response to Trump's executive orders in the last two weeks can be sustained and disciplined. I don't know what's going to happen. But my guess is that it's motivated mostly by saying No, and that motivation diminishes as soon as there's a win. But then something new will emerge to which the opposition must say No, and then something else, and on and on until the opposition becomes exhausted playing this kind of wack-a-mole. This is a losing game unless some positive alternative can be presented and around which a plurality of Americans can unite. Until it does Trump's undermining of the old politics of accountability becomes the new hyper normal.

(First posted in 2/17)

It's the Meaninglessness, Stupid

I've just finished Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging after just having read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both focus on what I've been writing about here for years, which is that the problem at the root of American societal dysfunction since the sixties is the lack of a meaning narrative that gives Americans a collective sense of future possibility. Americans suffer from Collective Meaning Deficit Syndrome. What's left of the American Dream, which more or less had performed that collective meaning function, is framed in crude careerist or consumerist terms. And those meaning-giving narratives, rather thin to begin with, frame possibilities that are available to fewer and fewer people as good jobs and opportunities for social mobility in this country shrink. The U.S. is one of the least socially mobile nations in the developed world. 

Most ordinary Americans muddle through having found more or less adequate ways to work with the rather anemic collective meaning frameworks that organize their lives. But the meaninglessness is always there looming in the background ready to show itself as soon as their rather fragile meaning frames crack and crumble in response to  a variety of stresses. So as the effectiveness of the American Dream has diminished in providing a collective sense of meaning, some people create their own individual meaning narratives, which may or not be sustainable depending on how deeply aligned with reality such narratives might be, and others join cults or cult-like groups that might provide a collective sense meaning but are fundamentally delusional. This is why kids join gangs and grown ups join the Tea Party. 

It doesn't matter that the meaning framework that these cult-like groups provide is not aligned with reality. The function of a cult is not to deliver truth, but to provide meaning and a sense of belonging. Truth and Meaning are not the same, and although they can be aligned, very often they are not. No matter how people find ways to give their lives meaning, it has become increasingly difficult for them to find it in ways that are socially grounded in healthy and sustainable frames. Careerism and Consumerism are not healthy meaning narratives. Junger in Tribes writes about how affluence in itself is not meaning giving, and in fact creates the conditions that diminish meaning insofar as it creates social buffers that promote social fragmentation and isolation. He argues that a sustainable sense of human meaning comes primarily from a deeply felt sense of belonging to a collective enterprise that counts on and values the individual's contributions to it. This can be positive or negative. Gang/cults, negative. Doctors without Borders or Missionaries of Charity, positive. 

Moderns differ from aboriginal peoples because during non-crisis moments their affluence allows them to self-isolate in everyday life, and in doing so to remove themselves from any deep sense of connection to larger collective purposes. This is particularly true in America, where there is no robust mythos of national solidarity, and where instead the emphasis is on individual achievement. The commonplace that the greater good is served by each individual pursuing his individual interests is reinforced by elite policymakers whose sense of meaning comes from a careerism narrative which has worked very well for them, and which is justified by the neoliberal mythos that has dominated elite thinking since the late 1970s.

Junger talks about how this emphasis on individual interests would be an impossible idea in aboriginal societies, which, he argues, are far happier societies than modern ones despite their relative poverty and short life expectancies. Their happiness comes from their members' belonging to a cohesive social group that values each member's contribution to its survival. He points out that the closest ordinary Americans come to experiencing something like the meaning and cohesiveness of aboriginal societies is during crises like war or natural disasters. Most moderns affected by these crises find common cause to meet the challenges that come with those crises, and after the crisis has passed often say they miss the sense of solidarity and meaning that they felt when things were "bad".  

So to generalize a bit, a healthy, meaningful life requires two things, and it's not wealth and security. There need to be (1) a robust, reality-based mythos, and (2) an identity-shaping role for every individual to play that is validated by that mythos. The problem, or course, is that often the mythos that shapes meaning for a group is completely out of alignment with the truth, and that's when dysfunction becomes normative. 

Vance in Hillbilly Elegy paints a picture of dysfunction when the meaning is out of alignment with reality. He  vividly describes the life and culture of poor whites in Appalachia and rust-belt cities like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up in the 80s and 90s where drugs, domestic violence, welfare fraud, serial monogamy, delusional thinking, reckless credit card spending, and learned helplessness are normative. Vance himself was able to realize the dream--he went into the Marines after high school, got a degree from Ohio State when he came back, and then went on to graduate from Yale Law School. The book is a sincere attempt to try to puzzle out why his story is so unusual. 

He's a conservative who is reluctant to "blame society" for the the bad choices individuals make, but he also sees that Hillbilly culture has become something that reinforces certain attitudes and behaviors that make it extraordinarily difficult for most people break free of its dysfunctionality. The Hillbilly mythos has become, in Vance's telling, a classic case of what I call in "Drove My Chevy to the Levy" a parody or zombie culture: it has a body, i.e., customary or traditional forms, but it is animated by the undead spirit of consumer capitalism. It provides collective meaning, but meaning that is fundamentally out of alignment with reality and with richer human potentialities for human flourishing. Vance's grandmother is old enough that some of the pre-zombie, healthy values of Scots Irish Hillbilly culture gave her the possibility to lead a decent, generous life. Vance's junkie mother exemplifies the Hillbilly parody. 

Junger talks at length about the problems that American soldiers have when returning home from war in recent decades. Certainly there are challenges in healing from the physical and emotional traumas experienced during battle, but more problematic is the transition to civilian life where the meaninglessness and alienation they experience so dramatically contrasts with the meaningfulness and deep human bonds that characterized their lives when in war zones. Junger points out that Israeli soldiers don't have near the proportional number of cases of prolonged PTSD that American soldiers do, and it's likely that a large part of the reason for this is that Israeli soldiers see themselves as playing a significant role in a collective mythos in which the survival of their country is at stake. This narrative has visceral meaning for everyone in Israeli society, and Israeli soldiers are integrated back into civilian roles in a way that is very different from the experiences of veterans in the U.S. 

Junger makes a strong case that the problem Americans face when returning to civilian life has less to do with the trauma of battle and more to do with the meaninglessness and purposeless of their lives as civilians. When American vets return home, the intensity of their experience in war zones has no real connection to their experience at home, and the war they put their lives on the line for is a fuzzy abstraction for the people at home for whom their service has no deeply felt meaning. "Thank you for your service," has become an automatic obligatory response people make when meeting someone from the military, even if they have no deeply felt sense of what that service was for.

The significance of the disconnect can be disorienting for vets; it makes what they went through seem meaningless and irrelevant in a new environment in which it is extremely difficult for them to find civilian roles that can be meaningful and relevant for them going forward. Junger points out that instead of thanking veterans for their service or letting them board planes before everyone else, give them a job. They don't need your appreciation for what they did, they need a role to play that can give them meaning and sense of future possibility when they return to civilian life.

But one has to wonder whether just giving veterans a job will even begin to scratch the surface of the deep alienation that both Junger and Vance describe. Both books are disturbing for the way they bring into focus how the dysfunctions associated with Collective Meaning Deficit Syndrome have become increasingly acute in the last forty years--and there is no reason to think that we have any capacity in the near term to solve the underlying problems that are its root cause.

The fundamental inadequacy of the American Dream as a meanaing framework has been something until the seventies most Americans could ignore because there was a feeling that a better life, usually framed in terms of economic prosperity, was always a possibility, if not for oneself, then for one's kids. The American Dream was always rather crudely materialistic, but it was a dream that had power to confer meaning, especially for parents who could derive a legtimate sense of meaning from the sacrifices they would make to ensure a better life for their kids. And until the seventies there was a feeling in this country that because we were expanding we could absorb all the people who wanted to come here from around the world to make a better life for themselves and their children.

The conditions to ground that sense of future possibility in reality melted away in the 1970s, and maybe it was inevitable because it was embedded in a narrative that could only work while there was room for the country to expand. The seventies was the decade when it became clear that the pie could not grow indefinitely at the same rate, and a neoliberal ideology emerged to insure that elites got more than their fair share. Lip service is still given to the old American Dream, and it took a couple of decades for ordinary Americans to catch on that there would be no realizing that dream for either themselves or their kids. 

The problem isn't simply that Americans are more economically stressed--they are, and that matters--but more importantly it is a problem of meaning. If the American Dream isn't there for them anymore, what is there to give their lives meaning?  So rather than adapt to the new realities in the 80s, they were told that it was "morning in America", they doubled down, reverted to a 19th century version of the American Dream that no longer correlated with reality, and believed that as long as kindly Grandpa Ron was in charge, all shall be well. Well that was a delusional mythos if ever there was one. The Reagan years reinforced a mode of delusional thinking that has rigidified into this zombie form of the American Dream that has paralyzed us and prevents any possibility of healthy adaptation. 

Both Vance and Junger go a long way to explain why a Donald Trump is a possibility in 2016 in way he would not have been in the 1960s or 70s. Trumpism is not driven primarily by naked racism; it's driven by a collective meaning deficit. People revert to older, more primitive purpose-giving narratives regardless of their alignment with reality because most people can't abide the alienation and the meaninglessness, and they will embrace anything that gives them some relief from that. 

So the country is essentially divided between the delusional thinking of the Right and the cluelessness of a Weimarish cultural left with a neoliberal economic ideology that just compounds the problems. The underlying problems that make Trump a possibility are not going away, and certainly HRC--or anybody who comes out of the cosmopolitan secular left--hasn't a clue about how to deal with this. This isn't just about old white guys who are going to die off; it's about a deeper problem of collective meaninglessness and alienation. The old white guys are the miners' canary. 

Political thinkers from Plato down through the centuries have asserted that democracy is inherently unstable because it's just too vulnerable to demagoguery. And so the importance of Trump is this: he has made it possible for sane people to think that if our democracy can produce someone like him, then maybe it is irretrievably broken and we need something else. Trump isn't going to be elected, but it worries me that in the same way that the failure of the Right in 1964 set up 1980, it's not unlikely that the Right's failure in 2016 will set up something worse for the 2020s. The longer we go without a narrative that gives us a healthy sense of collective purpose and future possibility, the more likely we are to accept an unhealthy one proposed by some talented demagogue not yet on the scene. He will give us a story that seems to deliver a sense of meaning and purpose that will obliterate what remains of the now rickety thing we call American democracy. It won't be that hard to do, and elites, even liberal ones, will go along because they fear disorder. 

So the deep solution to the problem does not lie on the level of policy; it lies on the level meaning and narrative. The solution doesn't lie in refusing to be careerist or consumerist or in abstaining from certain kinds of behaviors or attitudes; it requires instead alternative, positive behaviors and attitudes that can be adopted in their stead. That is our dilemma. It seems virtually impossible for any such narrative to emerge that might actually pull us together to provide that sense of collective purpose and future possibility. And it's quite possible that we will not be able to develop a positive meaning narrative that will return us to some level of human collective functionality until first we suffer through a negative one.

After HRC wins in November, there will be a collective sigh of relief, and there will be all kinds of editorializing about how Trump was an aberration and how the system still works. But it's hard to see how the fundamental conditions of deep alienation and meaningless that created the possibility for a Trump aren't still there for someone else who can more effectively exploit what Trump has so clearly shown is exploitable. Think of Trump as a kind of trial balloon. Someone is carefully taking notes. Unexpected things can happen, but it's hard to see how we get off the negative, dysfunctional trajectory we're on without some kind of catastrophe forcing it. Junger would probably agree. It's very hard for a moderns to discover their best selves except within the context of catastrophe. 

Socialism v. Neoliberalism

As I wrote in the my last post Sanders' candidacy is important for his attempt to legitimate a certain range of ideas. The word "socialism" is one that timid liberals think is radioactive, but Bernie to his credit won't back away from it. Instead he seeks to define it in terms that make sense to the ordinary American. I liked a piece Corey Robin wrote a  post a couple of years ago entitled " Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness for a Hundred Years", which seeks to do the same thing. An excerpt:

In the neoliberal utopia, all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives. That, in fact, is the openly declared goal: once we are made more cognizant of our money, where it comes from and where it goes, neoliberals believe we’ll be more responsible in spending and investing it. Of course, rich people have accountants, lawyers, personal assistants, and others to do this for them, so the argument doesn’t apply to them, but that’s another story for another day.

The dream is that we’d all have our gazillion individual accounts—one for retirement, one for sickness, one for unemployment, one for the kids, and so on, each connected to our employment, so that we understand that everything good in life depends upon our boss (and not the government)—and every day we’d check in to see how they’re doing, what needs attending to, what can be better invested elsewhere. It’s as if, in the neoliberal dream, we’re all retirees in Boca, with nothing better to do than to check in with our broker, except of course that we’re not. Indeed, if Republicans (and some Democrats) had their way, we’d never retire at all.

In real (or at least our preferred) life, we do have other, better things to do. We have books to read, children to raise, friends to meet, loved ones to care for, amusements to enjoy, drinks to drink, walks to take, webs to surf, couches to lie on, games to play, movies to see, protests to make, movements to build, marches to march, and more. Most days, we don’t have time to do any of that. We’re working way too many hours for too little pay, and in the remaining few hours (minutes) we have, after the kids are asleep, the dishes are washed, and the laundry is done, we have to haggle with insurance companies about doctor’s bills, deal with school officials needing forms signed, and more.

It took until the late 19th Century, early 20th century before even the most progressive minds in the Anglo American world figured out that poverty for most people is not a sign of their moral turpitude. The famine in Ireland? It was ordained by God, and the Irish heathens deserved it. Debtors prisons, work houses, the concept of moral hazard: these are all products of a social imagination dominated Victorian economic moralism. The old Catholic idea that the poor were closest to God gave way in the modern period in the capitalist countries to the Calvinist idea that your wealth was an indicator of your favor with God. At least in the first model for all its limitations, the rich had a sense of their moral responsibility for the poor. In the Calvinist model, the immiseration of the poor was their getting what they deserved because the poor were responsible for their own immiseration--or they were predestined for it. 

So it was something of a breakthrough when the English sociologist Seebohm Rowntree made the distinction between primary and secondary poverty in a 1901 study entitled Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Primary Poverty affected those people who simply hadn't enough money to meet the basic necessities of life. Secondary Poverty was the condition of those who had enough money, but wasted it on "non-necessities". For Rowntree a non-necessity was meat if poor families could be taught to subsist on a vegetarian diet, but secondary poverty was really just a hangover from the Victorian Calvinist idea that people are poor because they blow their money on alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes. 

But the very idea of Primary Poverty, that a huge number of people were poor because they were unemployed or paid too little for the work they could find was actually a Victorian ethos frame crasher, so to say. Of course Marxists on the continent were saying this for about a half century already, but Marxism never found a congenial home in the Anglo-American ethos dominated by the Calvinist Liberal moralistic frame. 

The fact is that the difference between conservatives and progressives even today lies in that conservatives still work within that Victorian frame. They really believe that the poor are responsible for their own plight. That government handouts make them passive and dependent. They focus on the few who abuse government programs, the welfare queens, etc., and assume that they are the rule rather than the exception. And they would deny help to those who really need it if that's the only way to prevent the few undeserving from getting what they don't deserve.

Charles Blow did a piece in the NYT about this zombie Victorian idea that poor people are passive and dependent:

We have gone from a war on poverty in this country to a war on the poor, in which poor people are routinely demonized and scapegoated and attacked, and conservatives have led the charge.

They paint the poor as takers, work averse, in need of motivation and incentive. 

Well, that is simply not my experience with poverty. I have been poor, and both my parents worked. I grew up among poor people, and almost all of them worked. The problem wasn’t lack of effort, but low pay. Folks simply couldn’t make enough to shake the specter of need....

To buy into this destructive lie about the character of the poor means you’ve either had no experience being poor, or have no capacity to empathize with their plight.

Being poor is a job unto itself. The daily juggle of supplying the most basic needs — food, shelter, medicine — and the stress of knowing that you are always just one twist of fate away from calamity.

We moderns and late moderns live in a world where money means too much. It's bizarre that it has become a signifier of moral worth. Money is important--we all need enough of it that we shouldn't be in a continuous state of anxiety about it, but there are so many other better things to do than to manage it and worry about it.

That's the difference between those who celebrate free market capitalism and those who lean toward social democracy. The former thinks that the economic sphere in our lives is the most important, and that happiness and meaning in our lives depends on being effective economic players. It's for them as if economic activity is an end in itself, the way you prove your worth as a human being. And really, how bizarre is that? It's such an impoverished concept of what it means to be human. It takes an idea that has a little bit of truth in it and makes an idol of it. 

People in the second group think that, yes, the economic sphere provides a foundation, but that it is not an end in itself. Each of us needs a stable economic foundation upon which to build a meaningful life, but that meaning is not built through economic activity, but in the sphere of culture--of friends, family, music and the arts, religious practice, learning, sports, hobbies, and other entertainments. That's where the meaning is. Happiness is not guaranteed for anyone, but the prospect of immiseration for anyone is never a worry. The focus for your moral responsibilty lies in whether you have made a life, not just in whether you have made a llving.

There is at its heart something deeply dehumanizing about the Liberal and Neoliberal ethos, and so whatever might be said about socialism and its limitations, it has a human heart, at least until the technocrats get hold of it. That's the danger of socialism--not the moral hazards associated with redistribution, but its proclivity toward a toxic top-downism dominated by another kind of moralistic elite, the Jacobin who becomes a commissar.

No solution is ideal, but this is where the Rawls's veil of ignorance thought experiment is useful. If you were told before birth that you would be born black and poor, with average intelligence and talent, would you choose to be born in Cuba or in the U.S.? 

Ed: This is a repost with some minor editing of a post that first appeared in December 2013.

Jim Sleeper on White Male Rage

White guys who succumb to ressentiment aren’t as trapped and brutalized as black guys. But unlike blacks, who’ve been denigrated, mauled and murdered forever in almost routinized ways that whites can barely imagine ever happening to themselves, the white guys are reeling now because their loss seems so recent, humiliating and, to them, inexplicable.

In ressentiment some of them find “easy” enemies on whom to wreak vengeance for frustrations borne of exploitation by powers they’re afraid or ill-prepared to confront. By making them feel big even as it diminishes them, ressentiment warps their assessments of the hardships and challenges before them. It shapes disguises they put on when they run those shell games in education, real estate and employment, pursuing vengeance, if not vindication, without risking punishment or reproach.

Wherever ressentiment has erupted throughout history — whether in medieval Catholic Inquisitions, Puritan or McCarthyite witch hunts, Chinese cultural revolutions, nihilist extremes of “people’s liberation movements,” or political correctness in academic departments — its most telling symptoms have been paranoia and routinized bursts of hysteria. Its collective passions touch raw nerves, often under the ministrations of an increasingly surreal journalism that brutalizes public discourse itself. (Cue Murdoch and Fox.)

Those “journalists” who’ve made a fine art of fomenting and feeding on overstressed people’s fears and resentments soften up the public sphere for something much worse. Movements borne of ressentiment carry legitimate grievances to a fleeting brilliance, but soon they curdle and collapse, tragicomically or catastrophically, on their own cowardice, ignorance, and scapegoating and other lies.

As they collapse, adherents spin their resentments into newer, more perverse kinds of force and fraud that emerge in racist shootings, road rage, addictions to violent video games, intensively marketed security precautions against armed home invasion, gladiatorialization in sports (including cage fighting but also hockey and football), nihilism in entertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment, and a huge prison industry that employs mostly white guys to punish mostly nonwhite, broken, violent men, even as schools in the whitest neighborhoods are imprisoned by fear of gunmen who are often the students themselves.

Staggering through this growing derangement, which Democratic and Republican policies are enabling and which Murdoch, the Koch brothers and their minions are fomenting, millions are spending billions on palliatives, medications, addictions and even surveillance designed to protect them from themselves.

No wonder that neoliberal economic and political strategists survey the public wreckage they’ve caused, cluck their tongues and tell one another at Davos that, after all, the people must be ruled. Yet these supposed leaders can barely rule themselves, and they, too, become reliant on demagogues who vow to rule everybody for everybody’s own good.

There’s certainly no harm in well-meaning whites . . . plumbing their own feelings about race. But only newly instructive leadership and organizing could turn white guys’ heads, rattle the commentators’ rationalizations, and politicize the spiritually inclined.

The civil rights movement did all that when it roused impoverished black churchgoers to walk, unarmed and trembling, into silent Southern squares ringed by armed white guys and dogs. It didn’t always deter the white guys, but it did instruct and shame some of them.

Is anything analogous possible now? 

(Source)

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. 

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. 

 

Quote of the Day: Cornell West

I think a post-Obama America is an America in post-traumatic depression. Because the levels of disillusionment are so deep. Thank God for the new wave of young and prophetic leadership, as with Rev. William Barber, Philip Agnew, and others. But look who’s around the presidential corner. Oh my God, here comes another neo-liberal opportunist par excellence. Hillary herself is coming around the corner. It’s much worse. And you say, “My God, we are an empire in decline.” A culture in decay with a political system that’s dysfunctional, youth who are yearning for something better but our system doesn’t provide them democratic venues, and so all we have are just voices in the wilderness and certain truth-tellers just trying to keep alive some memories of when we had some serious, serious movements and leaders. (Source)

Or they, the youth, have Silicon Valley "idealism".

I haven't had anything to say about events in Ferguson because I have had no desire to belabor the obvious. But I'll do a little belaboring anyway. There is, of course, the centuries-old story of racism being told there, but the bigger story is the way the country is slowly morphing into a police state.The great mistake in Ferguson from the elite perspective was that in its overreaction the Ferguson police put a spotlight on what elites would prefer to remain in dark. Editorialists throw their hands up in dismay about the militarized police, but nothing is going to change because the power elite in this country wants a police state. 

It's not about 9/11 or a post-9/11 mentality. 9/11 was just the excuse. A  largely unconscious and anxious people accepted the message that all this nonsense at airports, etc., was being done to keep them safe. Please. The post-9/11 security freak out has always been about the deep anxiety of post-Reagan Neoliberal elites to protect themselves--not the rest of us. It's the rest of us they are worried about.

The post 9/11 security freakout is about the even older-than-racism story of deeply anxious elites to protect themselves from the inevitable revolt of the resentful, deprived masses, whether they are carrying torches and pitchforks or backpack nukes. These elites are like the monkey who cannot let go of the banana in the jar. But whether they are conscious or unconscious of it, the cosmic law of What Goes Around Comes Around will inevitably seek to balance things out, and the jar will be shattered  the banana taken away. 

I thnk 2008 was a turning point. It was the point of no return. There was an opportunity to change the rules, but it wasn't taken. So this age old-farce will have to play itself out in violence. Ferguson is the future, not just because racism persists, but because greed and stupidity do.