After the Future

Mordor, the Shire, and Freedom in the Public Sphere

[This post first went up in 2012 as a further development of a post entitled "Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined", which focused on the way in which Neoliberalism has supplanted the older political idea of republican freedom with an idea of freedom as consumer choice. It relates to themes developed in "Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability".]

Maybe because The Hobbit is being released this weekend I have Tolkien on the mind, so let's take Mordor as the type of political system defined by hugeness, by domination and submission, and the Shire as the type defined by smallness, localism, face-to-face relationships, and self rule. In Mordor the people must submit to the will of the leader; in the Shire people live mostly by mores inherited from custom, but submit to laws and regulations they enact through debate and consensus. In Mordor, the space for the exercise of freedom is profoundly restricted, not in the interior sense, but certainly in the public sense. In the Shire, it is broad enough for people to exercise it both interiorly and publically. Nobody, I think it's safe to say, wants to live in Mordor.

In Mordor there is no public space for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. In the Shire, the space is there, even if most people choose to fill it with vulgar distractions. In the Shire it's possible for a community to self-correct, and reorganize its public life; in Mordor that is not a possibility. Having political and economic arrangements that provide a broad scope for the exercise of freedom does not guarantee that it will be exercised, but it's possible to talk about those arrangements as either creating or restricting the public space for its exercise. 

In contemporary America, there is still a rather broad space for the practice of deep, interior, creative freedom, even if it is rarely used. Consumerist ideas about freedom are a delusion that traps large swaths of the American population in collective patterns of compulsion, and their lives individually, and our lives together, would be healthier, more free, were not that the case. But these compulsions are reinforced by the structural requirements of the economy and the interests of the mass media, and both dominate the public sphere in ways that make it extraordinarily hard to resist. Nevertheless, there is nothing that prevents anyone from choosing a life that is resistant to or oblivious of all that.

 

***

In the early American republic, which was far more Shirelike than America is now, the ethos of economic sphere assumed that citizens were economically free, that they were self-employed farmers, small businessmen, and professionals. The franchise was limited to people with property because there was a fear then that if the vote were extended to salaried workers, their employers could compel them to vote as the employer dictated. (We saw employers using this tactic in the last election.) It was a commonplace that people could not be free in the political sphere unless they were free in the economic sphere. A similar logic applied to extending the franchise to women, since they were economically dependent on their husbands.

That simpler Jeffersonian world gave way to the economic warlordism of the Robber Baron era after the Civil War that turned much of America into Mordor. The new problem that the founders couldn't grasp was the way that the population, diversity, and economy would grow and change, and in doing so make their Jeffersonian imagination of America as a network of Tokienesque Shires obsolete. Bigness and huge concentrations of power and wealth became a problem by the turn of the century that no one could have envisaged one hundred years before. And so spirited Americans who understood how the scope of the new wage slavery was destroying freedom in the public sphere began to organize to push back.

The Progressive Movement emerged to pressure elected representatives to use the power of big government to break up monopolies, to regulate private-sector economic behaviors that negatively impacted the common good, and to provide social safety-net programs to ensure a minimum of economic security and dignity for those helpless to provide it for themselves. That balance between the public interest and free-market capitalism brought us the unprecedented prosperity of the post-WWII period.

Putting aside the question whether that prosperity and the consumerism that came with it was a positive or negative for the exercise of true freedom, the important thing was the consensus that a balance had to be struck between the interests of the market and the common good. That balance is what creates the public space for the exercise of freedom in the public sphere. It's precisely that balance that has been systematically destroyed since 1980 justified by a perverse appeals to liberty understood as negative freedom from the government so that positive freedom can be exercised in the marketplace. The laudable freedom-protecting principle of economic independence and self-reliance became perverted into celebrating the un-republican vice of unrestricted greed. The ideal was no longer the economically independent farmer or small businessman, but the plutocrat, the millionaire--and America became the place where anyone can become one. And shame on you if you haven't the ambition and drive to do so.

So that old lower-case 'r' republican imagination of America was destroyed in the late 19th century, but American conservatives still cling to it as if it were still a possibility. It's not. And the irony is that conservatives in voting for Republicans think that they are voting to retain the Shire but in fact are voting for the private-sector version of Mordor, one in which the government is dominated by plutocrats. In such a world we have the illusion of freedom so long as we have consumer choice, i.e., so long as we think of the exercise of freedom primarily in economic terms.

***

Thinking about what the space for republican freedom requires demands that we first understand how that space has collapsed in the post-war period. One strand, contributing to that collapse has been the replacement of the balance between the public and private spheres struck in the New Deal compromise with Libertarian/Neoliberal, market-centered, consumerist ideas about freedom. Freedom was no longer something we exercised in any robust way in the political sphere, it was something we came to think of almost exclusively in market terms. Freedom equals your ability to choose a Prius or a Hummer, to shop at Walmart or at Nordstroms.

Since market choices are consequential in our daily experience in ways that political choices are not, it was an easy sell. As long as we had market choices in the economic sphere, we felt free, and so why should anyone care about making positive choices in the political sphere? Politics is the domain of entrenched corrupt cronyism; the market is pure and self-correcting. Government just gets in the way, so the only political choices that have validity are the negative choices that diminish the power exercised in the political sphere and expand those exercised in the economic sphere. This is the core belief that has animated American conservatism since the 19th Century--to the degree that the public sphere grows, the private sphere diminishes. It's an naive belief, but it has extraordinary power because of the way it draws upon the 19th-century American mythos.

But the problem is not public vs. private sectors, but in keeping the two in a metaxis, a creative balance. Imbalance can lead, on the one hand, to too much government, as in the Mordor that was the Soviet Union. Or, on the other, imbalance leads to the Mordor of a weak government dominated by corporate interests that wildly exacerbate income inequality and reduce most people to serfdom or wage slavery. But in the U.S., half the country fears that any attempt to redress the balance by increasing public-sector controls leads to a Soviet Mordor. These fears have been reinforced by the dominance of an unbalancing Neoliberal market ideology that has dominated the political sphere since at least 1980. 

The effect of the post-Reagan era dominance of Neoliberal market ideology has been to destroy the popular consensus that representative government was an effective tool in the hands of the electorate to promote and preserve the public good. And the result has been to give a broad, unrestricted field for the economic warlords to emerge again and to wreak the havoc they are wont to wreak. And now we are facing a situation where the worst aspects of the economic sector--the few making serfs of the many--are merging with the worst aspects of the public sector--the security-obsessed surveillance state with Draconian police powers. (Habeas Corpus taken away in the Military Commissions Act still hasn't been restored.) We haven't seen these powers being abused on a wide scale yet, but the infrastructure for such abuse is very much in place. Both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in this surrender of the government to this ideology. 

 ***

The lesson of Tolkien’s trilogy is that republican freedom is personal and interpersonal, and it is exercised in concrete commitments that mostly happen on the local level, in the various Shires in which we all live, but we cannot be oblivious of the forces in history that seek to destroy those local and personal freedoms. 

And when humans are in such a situation in which their freedoms are so severely restricted in the public sphere, the only path to recovery is a freely chosen resistance, which often requires heroic levels of sacrifice. That is, the exercise of republican freedom requires the exercise of interior freedom by enough citizens who are willing to pay the price to keep the public sphere open. Frodo is a paradigm of the exercise of that kind of deep interior freedom.

Tolkien’s trilogy is on one level a story of great powers in violent conflict, but at a deeper level it’s the story of the suffering servant, the tzadik, the righteous man, Frodo, weak by the ordinary standards defined by power, freely accepts a burden and the stealth mission that went with it. The stakes were the preservation of a political space for ordinary people to live in freely. While so much of the story focuses on the great clash of armies, the struggle on that level was futile and nothing more than a subterfuge to keep the tyrant distracted. But the tyrant was vulnerable because it never occurred to him that anyone could do the unthinkable, that is, to 'freely' surrender the enormous power of the ring willingly.

Of course, Frodo needed a little help in the end, but that’s often the way it works. We hardly ever accomplish anything without the help of others. And no matter how good we think our intentions might be, they are never pure. Sometimes our exercise of freedom is simply the effort to put one foot in front of the other with only the faintest hope that someday we will reach our destination. But as we proceed along on our way, the exercise of our freedom is best expressed when in the service of others, in the creation of something that contributes to the common good, not just our own good. And that requires that we exercise it positively in the political and economic spheres, even if it is only to create a negative space for others to freely choose to fill it or not. 

Republics vs Democracies

Some of the earliest contrasts between “democracy” and “republic” in Lee’s sense, according to Cornell historian Lawrence Glickman, came from conservative opponents of the New Deal. At the time, President Roosevelt sold his policies — both domestic and foreign — as a means of defending and enhancing American democracy. Some of his opponents, who saw the president’s redistributive agenda as a kind of incipient authoritarianism, used the “republic versus democracy” distinction as a counter.

“There is no surer way to destroy our government than to champion legislation under the guise of democracy, which piece by piece undermines the checks and balances of our republic,” anti-New Dealer H.W. Prentis Jr. wrote in 1939.

The John Birch Society, a radical faction in the postwar conservative movement, helped popularize the “republic versus democracy” distinction in the 1950s and ’60s. According to Nicole Hemmer, a historian of the conservative movement at Columbia University, the idea really took off on the right during the conservative fight against civil rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings expanding the franchise.

Vox Explainer

If you need a little poly sci brushing up of the distinction between democracy and republics, read the entire Vox explainer by Zack Beauchamp. It puts these civics-book abstractions into much important historical context. The explainer is written to explain Senator Mike Lee's tweet last week that  “democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are.” He, as someone in the minority, fears democracy as a threat to his liberty, peace, and prosperity, and so this apparently justifies in his mind minority rule to insure that people like him remain free, peaceful, and prosperous.

That this might impinge on the liberty and prosperity of others isn't apparently a concern. That this is an ideology to legitimate oligarchy is either something at best he is unaware of or doesn't care about, or at worst is something that he actually desires, so long as he's one of the oligarchs.

Oligarchs are terrified of the power of majorities, because they assume, whether consciously or unconsciously, that those majorities envy and resent them for what they have "achieved", and would deal as cruelly with them as they have dealt with their adversaries in their climb to the top. You don't have to be much of a psychologist to appreciate how so much of what conservatives say about Liberals is flagrant projection of their own repressed fears and desires.

White supremacy is nothing more than the fear among many Whites that the way Whites have treated Blacks is exactly how Blacks would treat Whites if they lose supreme power. Black Lives Matter triggers dark memories of Nat Turner's Rebellion. This makes no rational sense, but that's the way fear works in the souls of those who haven't much self-knowledge. And from what I've seen of Mike Lee, Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, et al., self-knowledge is something that they have no interest in at all. 

There is a kind of Social Darwinist logic that undergirds the mindset of oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs. It's as primitive as the bull moose who wins by brute force exclusive access to the cows by beating off all competitors. It's a game king of the hill where the stakes are higher than bragging rights as a kid but control of the whole system and everybody in it. Putin is exemplary here, but it's a mentality that flourishes wherever brute force is the basic measure of prestige and authority.

Donald Trump is a wannabe authoritarian, but he's hasn't the competency or attention span to pull it off except in the abusive way he treats the sycophants in his immediate vicinity. He's also too lazy to do the actual work that's involved. It's much more fun to play at it, which is essentially all he has ever done and is doing now. 

Americans who see brute force as the basic measure of prestige and authority are Trump's greatest admirers. And Trump, though buffoonish in the exercise of his brutishness, has normalized behaviors that have had a profoundly fragilizing effect on our democratic republic. Mike Lee seems oblivious of that. He would appear not to have the bandwidth to understand that the difference between the republican form of government that preserves liberties by everyone's consenting to the rule of law is not the same thing as minorities protecting their liberties by use of force, blatant lying, and rigging the system in their favor. The Vox explainer goes on--

One of the most difficult questions in political philosophy, endlessly debated in academic journals, is how societies should navigate between the democratic principle that majorities rule and the liberal principle that certain rights may never be permissibly violated.

But the tradition Lee is operating out of goes further than that. It casts doubt on the most basic democratic principle: that the people who win the public’s support should rightly govern. It takes such an extreme position on what should be out of bounds that it can be used to argue that Democrats being able to implement their policy agenda is itself a form of tyranny.

In other words, if wannabe tyrants don't like it, it's tyranny. 

Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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. 

 

Burke v. Paine = Right v. Left?

In a review of Yuval Levn's book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Burke biographer Jesse Norman writes:

But one might wonder if these categories can really be mapped onto the left and right of American politics today. After all, it was Ronald Reagan, icon of American conservatives, who in declaring his candidacy for the presidency in 1979 repeated Paine’s words that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” a sentiment that taken literally should be utterly repugnant to any Burkean. Indeed, one way to read America’s own political development is as a progression from the Burkean conservatism of the Founding—which, as Michael Barone has shown, preserved so much of the British legal and constitutional settlement of 1688—steadily forward to the modern populist embrace of Paine.

Indeed, the irony is that as the federal government has grown, so has the number of self-professed Burkeans of the left seeking to preserve the status quo; while it is the Paineans of the right who seek to begin all over again. Needless to say, this misreads both Burke and Paine; indeed it makes one despair for the future of Burkeans in American politics. . . .

I am familiar with Corey Robin's mission to demythologize Edmund Burke and to paint him as little more than an apologist for free markets and oligarchic entrenched interests. But free markets were progressive in the anti-Tory, anti-landed gentry/aristocrat sense in the 1790s, and I wonder if Burke would have had the same opinion of free markets had he lived to see what was happening in Lancashire by the 1830s. His younger soul mate de Toqueville was revolted by it. Nevertheless, without getting into arguments about  who was the "real" Burke, I think we can talk about a Burkean temper of mind, and so a Burkean left and a Painean Left. As Norman points out, Burke was considered a man of the Left before 1789:

The French Revolution had been widely celebrated amongst intellectuals, radicals, and bien-pensants in Britain, and many people naturally assumed that Burke would join his protégé, the Whig leader Charles James Fox, in acclaiming it. It came as a profound shock for them to read not merely that he was bitterly opposed, but opposed in terms that combined soaring rhetoric with what was quickly recognized as a profound statement of political philosophy, including a devastating critique of revolution itself. As that critique came under fire—and the Reflections became a bestseller—Burke himself was denounced as a turncoat and traitor to the progressive cause. His reaction was to redouble his efforts, in a desperate bid to halt what he saw as the canker of Jacobinism from spreading to Britain.

To none was the shock of the Reflections greater than to Thomas Paine. He had made his name as the author of the revolutionary tract Common Sense in 1776, stiffening American popular resolve for war against the Crown. Returning to Britain, he stayed for several days in the summer of 1788 with Burke at the latter’s house near Beaconsfield. Now he saw that Burke’s book demanded a rapid and equally trenchant public response. The result was The Rights of Man, whose two parts were an even bigger popular success, if not quite as big as Paine claimed. There followed dozens of further pamphlets, as opinion divided over the issue, while the revolution in France descended—as Burke had predicted—into anarchy, terror, and war.

So before the French Revolution Burke was perceived as what might be anachronistically called a Progressive. Fox and Paine saw him as their ally and were shocked to learn that he opposed from the beginning what was happening in France. They thought that he was one of them, because on issues like slavery, the American Revolution, Ireland, and other issues he was with them, so why would he depart from them on this, the most fantastic eruption for human progress and liberaton from tyranny in the history of the world?

It is understandable from the perspective of 1789-1792 why honest thinkers alive then might embrace the Revolution in France--I'm sure I would have been among them. But can anyone on the left argue now in a post-1989 world that Burke was wrong and Paine and Fox were right? For clearly Burke was more prescient, and his fundamental insight explains also why the Jacobin principle of social change--to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch--while appealing to a certain kind of naive idealism--has proved itself over and over again to lead to even greater evils than those they were designed to eliminate. 

The essence of the French Revolution and the others inspired by it is radical discontinuity with what preceded it. The American Revolution was about continuity, about being left alone to govern themselves as they were wont to do before the encroachment of a meddling monarch (and parliament) after the French and Indian War. But the spirit of discontinuity inspired by 1789 defined for the rest of the world what it meant to be progressive, and those who were uncomfortable with the assumption that progressive social change equated with radical discontinuity were forced into the opposition and branded reactionaries.

This is, I think, the key to understanding why the temper and spirit of American progressivism is different from progressive movements inspired by the spirit of 1789--it is more evolutionary and experimental, more about continuity than discontinuity, and at its heart it is resistant to meddlesome centralizers and technocrats, be they monarchical or revolutionary. All progressives embrace freedom and equality, but in American culture freedom is primary, equality secondary. For societies inspired by the  the spirit of 1789, I'd argue that in most cases equality is primary, and freedom secondary.

For me the politics of a social social democracy is not about the dominance of one or the other, but it accepts that there is a dynamic tension between freedom and equality, and that continuous adjustments are necessary when there is too much freedom at the expense of equality or too much equality at the expense of freedom. Neither is absolute; both are defined in relation to the other. In America that means that progressives most often find themselves fighting to increase equality, because there is too little of it as the American temper is biased toward freedom.

Progressivism in the late 19th Century through the New Deal and Civil Rights, Women's Rights, and Gay Rights eras has been about fighting inequality. In the beginning it was about redressing inequalities in the economic sphere; toward the end it has been about redressing inequalities in the social sphere. And my argument here for some time has been that the American left's focus on social inequality has provided cover for economic elites to push for egregious inequalities in the economic sphere in the name of freedom.

So now we find ourselves back where we were in the early Progressive period. Elites in either party have little problem with the push for social equality, but they are very reluctant to embrace adjustments to inequality in the economic sphere. That's a much tougher adjustment, because it's one thing to fight against relatively powerless old white people who listen to FOX and quite another to fight Neoliberals in the think tanks and foundations, and on Wall Street. They are not powerless, and they pretty much own the Democratic Party. 

And so another question arises, and that is whether, especially now in a post-1989 world, the spirit 1789 provides an adequate frame for progressives now, and whether it can provide an adequate counterbalance to the Neoliberalism that has has emerged triumphant since 1989. My argument here for years is that the secular spirit of 1789 was never was indigenous to American progressivism, even though since the sixties it has become the spirit of the cultural and political left in this country. And I would argue that Main Streeters who otherwise want progressive change reject alliances with the left precisely because it is not home grown. Americans are allergic to Jacobinism in all its forms. Jacobins might win temporary victories, but if progressive change is to be framed in a way that can be embraced by the broad American public, it has to be framed in terms more consonant with 1776 than 1789. There is a difference. 

The American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution in Britain were Burkeish revolutions because they were about taking steps forward that were continuous with their pasts; the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions were Jacobin revolutions in that they emphasized discontinuity and the imposition of abstract social blueprints in ruthlessly top-down ways. It's the discontinuity that leads to anomic, social vacuums that too often lead to barbarism. Jacobin revolutions led to the Terror and to Napoleon's military dictatorship, to Stalin's purges and the holodomor in the Ukraine, to Mao's forced famine and his Cultural Revolution, and to Pol Pot's killing fields.

There are less dramatic examples, and I'd argue that technocracies everywhere run by earnest idealists, the best and the brightest, people who sincerely think they know better and have a plan to make it better. Such people are Jacobins in the temper of their minds. A toxic, elitist, puritanical paternalism shapes the Jacobin mind. Jacobins always think they are doing the right thing; they justify their atrocities because they were necessary to promote positive change, and they can do this because they have the temper of mind that characterized Tom Paine's--they see truth in a decontextualized, absolute, black and white way.  Norman quotes Paine here:

Time with respect to principles is an eternal NOW … what have we to do with a thousand years? Our lifetime is a short portion of time, and if we find the wrong in existence as soon as we begin to live, that is the point of time at which it begins to us; and our right to resist it is the same as if it had never existed before.

Is it any wonder that such a way of thinking is embraced by intelligent people of good will in every generation since. But can you also see how this temper of mind leads to and justifies  the paternalism of every technocrat from Robert McNamara to Arne Duncan and why both sincerely see themselves as progressives? Norman explains that

[Paine] is deaf to the rationality of existing arrangements and constantly prey to the idea that because humans ought to be able to decide on a given problem using abstract reason—itself an often rather questionable premise—they will do so. . . . He constantly calls for evidence, yet despises experience. His insistence on the power of reason becomes a recipe not for sober statesmanship, but for individual and generational arrogance. 

It's such rationalistic, abstracted and arrogant thinking about social change that leads to hubristic policies that lead to the deaths of millions in Russia or China or tens of thousands in Iraq or to the destruction of a localist K-12 educational system whose foundations are sound. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out some time ago:

If modern conservatism can be held to derive from Burke, it is not just because he appealed to property owners in behalf of stability but also because he appealed to an everyday interest in the preservation of the ancestral and the immemorial. And the abolition of memory, as we have come to know in our own time, is an aspect of the totalitarian that spares neither right nor left. In the cult of "now," just as in the making of Reason into an idol, the writhings of nihilism are to be detected.

There is no eternal now in which what is right must be imposed. Historical context is everything. Societies evolve, and so there are moments in every society where crises arise and present opportunities to move forward in a progressive way. And very often these moments require top-down interventions. But an intervention is not the same thing as trying to reengineer an entire society. There is a kairos for such interventions--the pregnant moments in the development of any society when adjustments are necessary.

The 1780s were deeply kairotic for the development of American society, but the kairos then was not to abolish slavery. That moment came in the 1850s. The 1930s were a moment when there was a possibility for the development of social democracy in the US, and the 1970s, alas, a moment when Neoliberals saw their opportunity to dismantle it. As I've argued before, 2008 presented a kairotic moment to push back against Neoliberalism, but the Obama administration failed to respond. But the point is this: How humans respond or fail to respond to these moments is critical, and the worst possible response follows when Jacobins or Fascists with big, radically discontinuous ideas get the upper hand. Better no response, which is essentially what we got from Obama, whose administration's mission was to return to the status quo ante. 

My argument here is that the temper of mind that promotes the best possible outcome is Burkean, not Painean. By this definition, despite Norman's discomfort with the idea, FDR was indeed a Burkean and Reagan a Painean. The social democratic system that developed in the 1930s was not Jacobin social engineering, but Rooseveltian pragmatism in responding to a massive, historical economic crisis. And, yes, I'm sure there were plenty of Jacobins in the Roosevelt administration pushing him harder to the left than it was possible or healthful to go, but FDR was no Jacobin. 

Reagan's and Thatcher's radical mission to dismantle social democracy after the crisis of the seventies was not at all conservative in the Burkean sense. But neither was it fascistic. Whatever might be repugnant in it, Reaganism/Thatcherism is not that. Its goal is free market anarchism. That anarchy eventually leads to inequalities of wealth and power is common sense, and with that too often a fascistic subjection of the weak to the powerful is the flaw that sincere, Neoliberals and Libertarians seem not to understand.

Social Democracy, if it can be developed in a subsidiarist, non-technocratic key is the only sane form of government possible in a complex, globalizing world. Robin's critique notwithstanding, I think that Burke would have been smart enough to understand how things look differently now than they did in the 1790s, but even if today he would align with the reactionary right, it's possible for others with his temper of mind to develop their own ideas about what the historical moment demands. I think of myself not as a Burkean--I concede that label to those on the right. But I do think of myself as Burkeish, especially if the alternative is the temper of mind that typifies Paine and the Jacobins. 

Rawls v. Nozick

I am by no means a Rawlsian, but I can find some common ground with those who claim to be. I cannot fathom the mind of the Nozickian when it claims as it does to be "moral", and this piece in the NYT Stone lays out why. Closing graf:

Rejecting the Nozickian worldview requires us to reflect on what justice really demands, rather than accepting the conventional wisdom that the market can take care of morality for us. If you remain a steadfast Nozickian, you have the option of biting the bullet (as philosophers like to say) and embracing the counterintuitive implications of your view. This would be at least more consistent than what we have today: an ideology that parades as moral common sense.

I think the problem in this debate is that it seems always to be posed in either/or terms--that it's either the market or the state. And it's not; it's both. The political challenge is to find the right balance between them. That's what the principle of subsidiarity is all about. 

If there is anybody out there reading here who leans libertarian, please tell me why a single-payer system in health care, like Medicare, is immoral or an abrogation of your liberty rather than the most effective way to provide for a basic human need. Do you really believe that the only motivation for talented people to go into healthcare is to get rich? Do you think most people are only extrinsically motivated by financial rewards? Or is it possible that most people who are attracted to the healthcare professions are motivated intrinsically, by the desire to help and to make a difference in people's lives, by the intellectual and creative challenges posed by sickness and disease? If you think it's the first, what does that say about the culture's moral imagination. 

I'm not interested in arguments against single payer that we can't afford it--we can if we want to. I'm interested in moral arguments. If we can come to some agreement on a moral values level, we can work out the practicalities relatively easily. 

As California Goes . . .

So goes the nation. Not always a good thing, but it would be now:

In the past month, California has been the stage for a series of celebrations of unlikely legislative success — a parade of bill signings that offered a contrast between the shutdown in Washington and an acrimony-free California Legislature that enacted laws dealing with subjects including school financing, immigration, gun control and abortion.

The turnaround from just 10 years ago — striking in tone, productivity and, at least on fiscal issues, moderation — is certainly a lesson in the power of one-party rule. Democrats hold an overwhelming majority in the Assembly and Senate and the governor, Jerry Brown, is a Democrat. The Republican Party, which just three years ago held the governor’s seat and a feisty minority in both houses, has diminished to the point of near irrelevance.

But the new atmosphere in Sacramento also offers the first evidence that three major changes in California’s governance system intended to leach some of the partisanship out of politics — championed by reform advocates — may also be having their desired effect in a state that has long offered itself as the legislative laboratory for the nation. (Yesterday's NYT)

And then there's Texas. But let us not dwell on collective delusion, but rather on sane people grappling with reality. From the philosopher prince Jerry Brown's State of the State address in January:

In the right order of things, education—the early fashioning of character and the formation of conscience—comes before legislation. Nothing is more determinative of our future than how we teach our children. If we fail at this, we will sow growing social chaos and inequality that no law can rectify. 

In California’s public schools, there are six million students, 300,000 teachers—all subject to tens of thousands of laws and regulations. In addition to the teacher in the classroom, we have a principal in every school, a superintendent and governing board for each school district. Then we have the State Superintendent and the State Board of Education, which makes rules and approves endless waivers—often of laws which you just passed. Then there is the Congress which passes laws like “No Child Left Behind,” and finally the Federal Department of Education, whose rules, audits and fines reach into every classroom in America, where sixty million children study, not six million. 

Add to this the fact that three million California school age children speak a language at home other than English and more than two million children live in poverty. And we have a funding system that is overly complex, bureaucratically driven and deeply inequitable. That is the state of affairs today. 

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child. 

We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” 

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students. 

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work – lighting fires in young minds. 

I know there are some on the left who are critical of Brown. But let's face it, in our current predicament, it's not about left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. It's about sanity, decency, and common sense on one hand and delusion and ideological rigidity on the other.

I hated Obamacare--I was sorely disappointed regarding so many of its compromises with healthcare special interests. I thought the individual mandate was going to create a lot of political blowback. I was outraged that the public option never had a chance, and that a Medicare-for-everyone-single-payer option was never a possibility. And I thought it failed to do what was necessary to get the absurd levels of healthcare inflation under control. But I will admit now what I would not admit back in 2010--it really was the only thing possible, and it is remarkable achievement that it got through. It was the best that sanity and decency could manage in a political environment where both are in short supply. 

***

Stephen Colbert famously said that Reality has a liberal bias, and it's true not because the Liberal thought framework is philosophically superior to others--it isn't--but because Liberalism is best adapted to the world we currently find ourselves in: the modern world and liberal thought go hand in hand. America is an amalgam of Enlightenment and Calvinist/Whig thinking, but both are through and through modern projects.

I've argued here for years that because we are no longer moderns reality's bias toward liberalism is loosening, and the modern mind in all its forms is anemic and moribund. But sickly though it may be, it is still the framework that provides the backstory out of which a new story better suited to the needs of a no-longer-modern world will emerge. Its decay enriches the soil out of which something new will grow.

I believe that in 500 years (or sooner) people will look back at this period--from 1650 to 2050--and see the secularist/materialist narrative that developed during that time as a bizarre aberration. But from that future perspective people will also see that there were good reasons for intelligent, decent, honest people to reject the traditional narratives and seek a better one in which Reason was the central protagonist.

The challenge now in this liminal time is not to bitch and moan and dig one's heels in, but to develop a more robust narrative--one that accepts the contemporary culture world as the frail, fallible thing that it is, but also understands that all culture worlds are plastic constructions that can be replaced (gradually) with better ones. There's a reason that Christianity emerged out of the ruins of classical antiquity as the dominant narrative of the West, and there was a reason that Reason emerged out of the ruins of post Reformation Christendom. And there will have to be a reason why whatever comes next will emerge out of the ruins of late Modernity.

We just don't know it yet, but it's astonishing to me how little faith and hope conservative Christians have. They are not defending the faith but rather something else,something inessential and as such something that draws them away from what is essential. Christianity in its essence is not at all about clinging to the past, but about looking toward the future expecting the fulfillment of impossible promises. It's the story that began with Abraham leaving Ur and the Israelites leaving Egypt. It's the story of the early Desert Fathers, and the wandering Irish monks. It's the story of loss of something lesser in order to gain something greater; it's the story of death and resurrection. 

 

 

Conservative Anti-Capitalism

The contemporary GOP has been able until recently to unite both traditional, family-values, 2nd Amendment conservatives with laissez-faire capitalists because the former don't seem to realize that the latter are the main cause of undermining everything they hold dear. The latter of course don't agree with the former on issues like abortion and gay rights, but pretending that they do costs them little if the benefit is to enlist a large, impassioned constituency in support of their economic interests. The Tom Frank thesis explains this phenomenon well, although I'd argue the emergence of the Tea Party suggests that the alliance of Wall Street with the Main-Street poobahs is fraying. As Michael Lind points out, the interests driving the Tea Party and those driving Wall Street are very different.

But before the Tea Party there were two sources of thoughtful conservative thought that understand that these two factions within the GOP are at complete odds with one another, the paleoconservatives at The American Conservative,  and the crunchy-paleocons at Front Porch Republic. The 'following essay' appeared in FPR, and lays out the argument pretty clearly:

The “individualist,” . . . is the heir of the Enlightenment, since the whole point of that movement was to “liberate” the newly-discovered “individual” from the natural bonds of the “hegemonic” institutions (as Ludwig von Mises and Michael Novak termed them) of family, community, and nation. Freed from the family, this “liberated” individual would have only contractual obligations, freely chosen and freely broken. Moreover, these contractual “communities” are deemed to be higher than the natural, “hegemonic” communities, precisely because they are “freely chosen,” an expression of the individual’s God-given liberty, the highest value—and perhaps the only one—that liberalism will admit. But this turns out to be a “negative” liberty, one that is not ordered to the goal of meeting obligations or developing one’s own personality. Rather, it merely means that one acts under no compulsion, particularly not governmental or social compulsion. One may choose to fulfill “hegemonic” obligations, but that is incidental and not essential to the notion of liberal “freedom”; it is still freedom regardless of how it is used. In reality, this is not freedom at all, but license, and such licentiousness is established within liberalism as the ground for all social relations.

Further, this individual is the possessor of a bundle of rights which are not rooted in obligations, but are rooted in, well, it’s hard to say what roots them. They just are, that’s all. Nevertheless, these individualistic and free-floating rights are supposed to form the individual’s bulwark against collectivism, but as Patrick Deneen points out, the opposite is the case:

It is only when the variety of institutions and organizations of humankind’s social life have been eviscerated – when the individual experiences himself as an individual – that collectivism as a theory becomes plausible as a politics in fact. Liberalism’s successful liberation of individuals from what had historically been “their own” and the increasing realization of the “individual” made it possible for the theory of cosmopolitanism, “globalism” and One State to arise as an actionable political program in the modern era.[1]

At this point, the capitalists—or at least some of them—are likely to raise the objection that they do indeed support something called “family values.” However, they can never explicate these alleged family values in terms of their own economic premises. They will insist that support of the “free market” is also support of the family, but what they almost always mean is support of the capitalistic markets. Aside from the dubious conflation of “free markets” with capitalism, the historical record suggests that capitalism dissolves the family rather than supports it. Nowadays, the erstwhile neoconservative is likely to blame this on an excess of welfare. Very well, but then, to what period in the history of capitalism are we to look for this support of “family values”? In the period when children worked from dark to dark in the mills to earn bare subsistence? When mothers were forced to leave the family to support the family (a period which has returned, at least for a large number of women)? This mythical support of capitalism for “family values” seems to have no historical expression whatsoever; it is a promise that must accepted sola fide and without reference to any actually existing system, now or in the past. The historical (and present) reality is that commodified labor has led only to fragmented families and unstable communities, communities and families that exist only by the will and whim of global masters. Some freedom.

It is precisely the historical question that separates the anti-capitalists and capitalists into the categories of “realist” and “romantic.” For the distributist can always point to real, operational systems, now and in the past; he can always say, “Come to (say) Mondragon, and see if you like it.” And you may love it or you may hate it, but in either case your judgment rests on actual observation of a real system. The laissez-faire or even “small-state” capitalist cannot do this. “Look at how well capitalism works!” they will exclaim, but when you point out that this “working” system is in fact crony capitalism and not the limited-state variety, they will merely bristle and promise that the limited-state variety would work even better. If you then ask the rather obvious question, “when was that true?” they are likely to go into a white-hot rage. But the plain and indisputable fact of the matter is that there is no period in human history when “capitalism” did not mean “crony capitalism.” This was certainly true in Adam Smith’s day, since the bulk of The Wealth of Nations is dedicated to documenting the extent of the cronyism in the capitalism of his day, mercantilism.

I think paleocon analysis of Liberalism is fundamentally correct. I think, though, that I am more willing to embrace a respectful pluralism in the political sphere than most paleocons, to lament less what has been lost, and to look forward in hope for the emergence of something better. I'm less interested in pointing out what's wrong with Liberalism than searching out the alternatives that point to a flourishing post-Liberal future. Mondragon is one such hope-inducing alternative.

Milbank on Politics

This is a short clip, and it reinforces themes that I've been exploring as a anti-liberal progressive. The solution doesn't lie with the market or with the state, as Milbank points out, but with society--i.e, in the cultural realm as it develops out of modernity and its desiccated imagination of reality.

Milbank's position is that modern Western secularism is a Christian heresy. Its basic presuppositions are deeply rooted in and indebted to the West's Christian heritage, but it has taken that heritage and distorted it in a way that has brought us to this desacralized, consumerist, fragmented neoliberal wasteland that shapes so profoundly the way in which we think and experience the world. The problem for politics, therefore, is framed by the problem posed by secularism.

So the thrust of Milbank's thought--and of Radical Orthodoxy in general--is to look at secularization as a mistake. He traces the mistake back to Duns Scotus and the late medieval nominalists who laid the foundation in thought for what later became the hard dualism nature and grace, which in turn led to a hard separation between the secular and the sacred, laying a foundation for what has become our experience of the separation between the public, objective, world of common experience on the one hand, and on the other, the world of personal subjective experience, the inner world of religious experience about which one cannot generalize.

He argues that the nominalist separating out the natural from the supernatural (grace) gradually replaced the older Christian Neoplatonic participatory imagination in which in which the natural and supernatural were inextricably enmeshed. Perhaps it was a mistake if one believes that the old Neoplatonic imagination is a better description about how things are, and I think it is and  that it's something we've lost and that we have to recover. But I don't look at it as a tragedy, but rather something that had to happen, even if we must pay a price for it.

I would argue that it was inevitable because it reflected a different experience of the world that could no longer be robustly explained within the Neoplatonic participatory framework. The culture's intellectuals, who still thought of themselves as faithful Christians, simply didn't experience the world as an enmeshment of nature and grace. They wanted to keep believing, so they came up with alternative way to think about the world that they felt did a better job of explaining their experience while allowing a space for for God--out there--and faith--in here, within the individual subject's experience.

That it also created a space for the secular is an inevitable consequence, and that space no doubt has been invaded by many demons, but could it, should it have happened differently. I tend to think not. It may even have been a necessary thing, if you believe, as I do, that it was necessary for the human project to disembed from primitive shamanic or animist conssciousness. A participatory ontology makes sense in societies in which a shamanic embedded consciousness still persists. But that older embedded way of experiencing the world is destroyed by literacy--this is a bedrock insight of the McLuhanites, and I am persuaded by it. And so you'd have to persuade me that literacy and its benefits are a bad thing if you want to persuade me that secularism is. 

Now I am personally very sympathetic to a Christian Neoplatonic ontology and epistemology. It makes sense to me and it solves lots of problems on a head level for me. But it does not represent my experience of the world, which is very, very austerely nominalist. A tree is simply a tree in my everyday experience of it, and its reality in my experience is not enhanced by the notion that it participates somehow in the mind of God. I like the idea that it does, but I don't expect anybody else to, at least not until there was some kind of shift in the collective consciousness. In other words we won't experience the world as participatory until our social imaginary changes in such a way that our thought resonates with our experience. How that happens is not something that can be argued for. It has to happen in a way similar to how westerners started seeing in three dimensions in the 15th century.

If McLuhan is right, we're moving into a post-literate society in which our interaction with new technologies is likely reprogram our brains in a way similar to the way the printing press and the ensuing explosion in literacy reprogrammed western brains five hundred years ago. Maybe he's not right. I don't know, but it's plausible. But one way or the other something has got to shift if there's to be any chance of a social imaginary that embraces a participatory ontology. Otherwise it's just an abstraction.

Liberal Christianity

Two pieces popped up today. One, "A Religious Legacy with a Leftward Tilt" in the NYT today, which talks about recent scholarship that is trying to show how liberal Protestant Christianity has shaped the mainstream American ethos. Key grafs:

In “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History,” published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed.

Mr. Hollinger’s argument generated much chatter among his colleagues when he first presented it at the 2011 meeting. But his sometimes pugnacious new book, he said, is just a “punctuation mark” on the recent spate of work reconsidering the left-hand side of the American religious spectrum, which includes titles like Matthew S. Hedstrom’s “Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century”; Jill K. Gill’s “Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left”; and David Burns’s “Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus.”

The surge of interest in liberal religion, many say, reflects the renewed vitality of religious history more generally, which has spread beyond its traditional redoubts in divinity schools to become one of the most popular specializations among academic historians, according to the American Historical Association.

That liberal Protestants "may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed" is IMO an indicator of the weakness of liberal Protestantism rather than of its strength. Liberal Protestantism, as one of the primary carriers of modern spirit, reached it fulfillment, in the opinion of many, in the realization of the secular society, and in doing so made its creedal assertions obsolete. And so the best one can feel about that is a certain ambivalence. Better that than an oppressive theocracy, but perhaps there were (and could be) other, better possibilities.

So if you like the modern, flat-souled, 'spirit of whatever' secular society, what's not to like about liberal Protestantism? But what's to like? There's no there there. What is it that distinguishes it from non-creedal Unitarians or Ethical Humanists? How does it stand as something that seeks to offer a robust prophetic challenge to the mainstream? From where I stand its problem lies in that it was (and is) too accommodationist in its relationship to the cultural nihilism that emerged at the end of the 19th century, and thus it became infected with it to terminal effect. And as liberal Protestantism melted into the larger secular society it was complicit in creating, it created a space for the emergence of a more passions-driven religiosity of evangelical right, because it no longer could offer a deeply grounded, robust counterbalance to it that could be called Christian. So many people who are honest believers find themselves pushed to the Right for want of an alternative that can be taken with religious seriousness on the Left. 

Nevertheless, for those of us who are Christians firmly rooted on the poltical Left, we have to work with what is there to work with. And for a while now I've thought that the Black Church in the U.S. might be in the best position to bring Americans to a more vigorous retrieval of its full-souled, prophetic Christian heritage. So I was interested today to see coincidentally this piece in Salon about 'Moral Monday" in Raleigh, NC, where a Christian-led protest against the Republican nihilists there seems to have some legs:

NC-NAACP President Rev. Dr. William Barber, who has emerged as a de facto leader of the movement, opens with what can only properly be called a sermon. Barber, who identifies as an evangelical Christian and theological conservative, is a Disciples of Christ pastor. He invokes the liberationist promises of the Old Testament prophets and Synoptic Gospels in his scathing critiques of the ALEC-beholden extremists who currently control NC government. A powerful orator, his preaching style is old-school Southern Black Pentecostal, and shouts of “Amen!” ring out through the crowd as the intensity of his delivery grows. Even those of us with differing religious convictions — or none at all — have to respect the role of religion in this movement.

I don't want to make too much of this. As the article points out, NARAL was there insisting that its positions on abortion were moral, too. I don't dispute that, but it's a morality with a different genealogy. And their presence at an event like this shows how things get mushy on the Christian political Left and make it difficult for it to get any traction with sane Christians, serious about the challenges posed by the Gospels, who have a  sensibility that makes it difficult for them to take seriously the mushy morality of what they perceive as the flaky Left.

So sure, some Christians embrace NARAL positions. But where the confusion lies is when they embrace positions that developed largely out of a tradition that is very alien to Christian personalism, namely a feminist branch of the Utilitarianism of Bentham, Mill, Singer, etc., a stream of thinking that is at the heart of most contemporary secular ethics whether pro-choice advocates think of themselves as Utilitarians or not. And I would argue that Utilitarianism creates the frame for the rationalist technocratic thinking that (as I've with regard to education issues) is, whatever its imagined humane good intentions, anti-humanistic. It may be possible to make arguments from within the Christian personalist tradition about the permissibility of legalizing abortions under certain circumstances, but such arguments should not be made on terms that accept or are in any way associated with the NARAL utilitarian technocratic frame. The NARAL ethos of abortion on demand is completely out of alignment with a Christian personalist ethos for which abortions are seen at best as a tragic necessity in certain rare circumstances. 

And so while I think that alliances need to be made between Christians and secularist Utilitarians on issues where there is common ground--particularly on issues of economic justice--I'd like to see a more vigorous emergence of a Christian Left that makes a case for its positions on its own terms rather than to simply merge with the amorphous, ontologically nihilist positions of the secular Left. 

Does it Matter What People Think or Believe? (Updated)

Or only what they do?

I think that ultimately what most matters is what they do, the choices they make, but the scope of what they can do--the scope for their freedom--is expanded or limited by what one thinks or believes. And how one thinks is shaped by the underlying story he tells himself about the sense or nonsense that the world makes.

But it is also important what the people around us think or believe, what their expectations and aspirations are for themselves and for us. What is the accepted measure by which we measure up or fail to? In other words, it matters what the culture in which we find ourselves thinks and believes. That is the 'social imaginary'--and it structures our assumptions about possibility and impossibility.

I do not believe in the power of positive thinking. I do not believe that believing it so makes it so, but I do believe that one's mental framework creates the workspace for action. This is simple in the psychological sense of self-fulfilling prophecies. People who have a positive outlook expect good things to happen, and even when bad things happen, they see it as a temporary setback and keep at it. People who expect things to go badly, are less likely to put their heart into it, because, well, what's the point? The article the other day in the NYT about a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders that found that depressed people have a higher likelihood of to repsond well to treatment when compared to those who don't.

“I think it’s a scientifically sound way of measuring things that have to do with people’s experience of spirituality,” said Torrey Creed, an assistant professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think about this as a study of cognitive styles, that there’s a pattern of thinking that helps people get better in treatment. And two examples of this pattern of thinking are ‘I believe in treatment’ and ‘I believe in God.’”

Randi McCabe, director of the Anxiety Treatment and Research Center at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Ontario, said, “People’s belief that something is going to work will make it work for a significant proportion of people,” similar to the placebo effect.

That makes sense to me on its own terms, and this kind of belief or outlook has very little to do with the deeper and more mysterious thing, which is faith. Faith, in fact, is very often accompanied by an anguish that is simply incommensurate with any discussion about having a positive outlook. I think we're all of us the richer that St. John of the Cross, Pascal, Kierkegaard and others didn't go into 'treatment'. Mother Teresa, we've learned, was often deeply anguished. William James did not identify himself among what he called the "healthy minded." Healthy mindedness has its limits. I have no patience with people who think that religious faith is some kind of opiate to dull wits incapable of confronting the world as it is.

But quite apart from the question of 'faith', the test of any social imaginaray is the degree to which it promotes sanity and decency. Sanity is the measure of human capacity to allow the world to disclose itself on its own terms. Decency is the measure of human capacity to act in the world as if one's own interests and concerns were not the only or most important consideration. One's capacity for one is reciprocal with the other. And yet if we live in a social imaginary in which one's dreams, interests, personal ambitions are celebrated as core values, whose realization is the measure of a life lived successfully or not, how is sanity or decency a possibility in our political arrangements? 

I lay those thoughts out as a prelude to what I hope to get around to talking about, which is the dialogue between Millbank and Zizek about the possibility of working for justice and peace in the political sphere. Their discussion takes these basic ideas about the relevancy of thinking and believing to a different level. Millbank argues that Zizek's Hegelian ontolgoical nihilism makes any aspirational work toward a just society unsustainable. And although I don't understand Zizek yet well enought to agree, this is an argument that I've made here frequently about secular Liberalism, and I think we're seeing its failure played out all around us. The aspiration for justice and peace is not sustainable or even remotely possible in a "flat" social imaginary, if by flatness we mean closed to transcendence. There is at best Hobbes's perpetual cold war.

More on this as we go along. 

UPDATE: In the NYT this morning there was this article entitled "On Wall Street a Culture of Greed Won't Let Go." So what else is new? But it relates to the point I'm trying to make above. Wall Strett is the reductio ad absurdum of the American individualist dream. The article states that 

Virtually every top M.B.A. program in the country now teaches ethics classes, many of them required. In 2008, a coalition of students started the MBA Oath, a voluntary pledge among students to “create value responsibly and ethically.” So far, more than 6,000 students have signed the pledge.

And yet, the report and other anecdotal evidence suggest that whatever is being done both in the classroom and on the job is not enough. According to a controversial study called “Economics Education and Greed” that was published in 2011 by professors at Harvard and Northwestern, an education in economics surprisingly may be making the problem worse.

“The results show that economics education is consistently associated with positive attitudes towards greed,” the authors wrote. “The uncontested dominance of self-interest maximization as the primary (if not sole) logic of exchange, in business schools and corporate settings alike, may lead people to be more tolerant of what other people see as morally reprehensible.”

So you get require everybody take an ethics course, which everyone dutifully does with eyes struggling not to roll upward. In my experience these ethics courses are often more about what is legal or not, rather than what is ethical or not. But let's say you get somebody in there who wants to grapple with the ethical realities these kids are going to face. What does he have to work with? Everything outside his classroom militates against whatever he's might want to teach about embracing a code of basic decency. 

The people who go into MBA programs are already predisposed to think of self-interest as the only really important motivator, and everything they see around them reinforces it. So this guy in an ethics class wants to suggest an alternative mo? Whatever. What a waste of time and effort. 

Do you think my minimalist definition of decency as the 'capacity to act in the world as if your personal interests are not the only ones or the most important ones' can get any traction in such a social world? There are no resources in the social imaginary of the larger secular culture to combat a mentality in which decency is merely an aesthetic preference. Go for it if 'being decent' floats your boat--but you have no right to judge me if what floats my boat is the thrill of winning in a high-stakes game. By what standard can you make such a judgment about better and worse? 

Our political economy is such an obscenity because the obscene people who are its primary actors think they are completely morally justified, even benefactors of humanity, in pursuing their interests because they are social Darwinists in the Gordon Gecko idiom: 

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

This is very compelling if you operate in a world in which it's not just an idea, but an accurate description of the way the most successful people around you think and behave. What works to counter it, some pre-school admonition "to share" or "be nice"? Why? Why should I share or be nice? I did it when I was younger because I'd earn the teacher's disapproval if I did not, but now I earn my peers' and superiors' disapproval if I do. Decency is for losers. Ask Rick Santelli.

 

It Is Futile to Reason with Them

From "Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Roger Berkowitz in yesterday's NYT:

That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.

I haven't seen the movie Hannah Arendt yet because it hasn't arrived in Seattle. But in watching the trailers and reading about it I was surprised to learn that Arendt was roundly excoriated for her depiction of Eichmann in her New Yorker dispatches and the book she wrote about the trial. And I was surprised to learn from Berkowitz that the consensus since then about her depiction of Eichmann is that Arendt's book on Eichmann is good philosophy but bad history. Berkowitz defends Arendt, and says that she would be wrong if she said Eichmann was simply a bureaucratic automaton, but that's now what she said. She said that Eichmanns evil lay in his surrendering to a movement and allowing his own autonomy to be obliterated by his merging with it. This is the other side of 'movement politics'. 

I think there are a lot of directions to take this, but the one that interests me at the moment is how people understand the nature of the 'autonomy' that Eichmann surrendered? If Eichmann should have resisted, what is the ground for it? When your entire horizon is filled by norms and everyone you know accepts and reinforces those norms, and those norms are broadly reinforced as noble and idealistic, what resources does an Eichmann have to think or believe otherwise? And why should he think otherwise?

People who have religious commitments have a good answer for that, but I'm curious what the arguments might be for those who don't. Doesn't it just come down to aesthetic preference? Well, you prefer an aesthetic of humaneness and respect--good for you, but I choose power and glory and noble violence. Who are you to say I'm wrong? On what basis can you reason with me? To what in me can you appeal? 

 

Sirota v. Brooks on Egypt's Mental Capacity

“No more election after today,” the crowd chanted in response.

After a night of deadly clashes at Cairo University that accompanied the takeover, some ultraconservative Islamists gathered there said their experiment in electoral politics — a deviation from God’s law to begin with — had come to a bad end.

“Didn’t we do what they asked,” asked Mahmoud Taha, 40, a merchant. “We don’t believe in democracy to begin with; it’s not part of our ideology. But we accepted it. We followed them, and then this is what they do?” [Source: Todays's NYT, "For Islamists, Dire Lessons on Politics and Power"]

More often than not I'll side with Sirota if he's in a spat with Brooks, but this time I find myself siding with Brooks. Maybe I'm missing something--is there some neocon subtext that Sirota is responding to?--but I see Sirota's position in his Salon piece today as that of a Democratic absolutist, and he is, IMO, doing a silly pc police thing in his takedown of this morning's David Brooks's column. In doing so he's painting himself in a corner in which he is forced to support anti-democratic, political religious fanaticism exemplified in the quote above. Here are the grafs in the Brooks column that Sirota finds offensive:

Right now, as Walter Russell Mead of Bard College put it, there are large populations across the Middle East who feel intense rage and comprehensive dissatisfaction with the status quo but who have no practical idea how to make things better…

It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.

Brooks also says the paragraphs that precede the above quote, but that Sirota does not quote:

Those who emphasize substance [as opposed to democratic process], on the other hand, argue that members of the Muslim Brotherhood are defined by certain beliefs. They reject pluralism, secular democracy and, to some degree, modernity. When you elect fanatics, they continue, you have not advanced democracy. You have empowered people who are going to wind up subverting democracy. The important thing is to get people like that out of power, even if it takes a coup. The goal is to weaken political Islam, by nearly any means.

World events of the past few months have vindicated those who take the substance side of the argument. It has become clear — in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere — that radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. Many have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets. They have a strange fascination with a culture of death. “Dying for the sake of God is more sublime than anything,”declared one speaker at a pro-Morsi rally in Cairo on Tuesday. . . 

Islamists might be determined enough to run effective opposition movements and committed enough to provide street-level social services. But they lack the mental equipment to govern. Once in office, they are always going to centralize power and undermine the democracy that elevated them. . . .

Once elected, the Brotherhood subverted judicial review, cracked down on civil society, arrested opposition activists, perverted the constitution-writing process, concentrated power and made democratic deliberations impossible.

What part of this does Sirota disagree with? But here's how Sirota responds: 

Yes, that’s right, according to Brooks, a country and culture of 82 million is having a difficult time transitioning to democracy not because it has been repressed for decades, and not because it has few well-established democratic institutions, but instead because the people inherently don’t possess the cognitive (“mental”) capacity for self-governance.

To know this is some hardcore bigotry, just imagine saying the same thing about another demographic subgroup. Imagine, for instance, if Brooks said cities with large minority populations in the United States were facing corruption problems and blight because those minorities “lack even the basic mental ingredients” for better governance. It would be universally — and rightly — denounced as wildly racist by everyone other than white supremacists.

But he's not saying 82 million Egyptians don't have sufficient mental capacity for democratic self-governance, but that the Egyptians who elected Islamists in the Morsi-led Islamic Brotherhood don't. It's not just an Egyptian thing. Majorities often show that they don't have the mental capacity or maturity to govern. I'd say that would be an accurate description of the white Christians in the South who supported and lived comfortably with Jim Crow laws. Doesn't mean that they aren't nice  people in many ways, but I'd argue that they don't have the mental capacity or political maturity to elect people who are partisans of sanity and decency. I have Republican friends and family members, whom I love dearly, but who lose all credibility with me for political sanity when they start defending Limbaugh, Bachman or Palin. A grown-up political conversation is simply not possible with people who take these people and what they say seriously. 

Here's a thought experiment for Sirota: What if the Christian fundamentalists in Mississippi completely dominated the state Republican Party in the next election cycle, win in a landslide, and ram through the substitution of Biblical Law for its state constitution?  Would that be ok just because a majority supported it in a democratic process? Or would it be a sign that most Mississipians lacked the mental capacity to govern in the modern world? Why is it different in Egypt, and why is it wrong to question the mental capacity of any country, state, or party that allows itself to be governed by religious fanatics? 

If Brooks and I are mischaracterizing the fundamental agenda of the Islamist political program, make that argument, and I'm convinced, I'll back down. But regardless, the basic argument stands: Democracy is not an end it itself; it is a means to an end, namely to deliver within the framework of a contemporary, pluralistic society a basic level of sanity and decency. If I live in a society in which power resides with an entrenched faction dominated by actors who are not sane and decent, even if they are democratically elected, then democracy has failed. If insanity and indecency have clotted the system with majority approval, then the decent, sane people in the minority cannot be blamed for looking for other than democratic means to fix the problem. 

If 'sane' and 'decent' seem too vague, I define them in comments to my post the other day, "Egypt and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy." I'm happy to discuss further in comments here or there.

 

 

 

Cultural Hegemony

There was a time way back when--in the seventies--when I made an attempt to grapple with the kind of neo-Marxist thought for which the Frankfurt School was typical. I didn't get far, because while parts of it interested me, particularly its critique, it didn't deliver enough value for me to justify the time and effort to hack through it. During that time I must have come across Antonio Gramsci, but I don't remember anything about him. My recent reading of David Harvey has piqued my interest. I will get around to reading Gramsci at some point, but meanwhile, here's what the Wikipedia article says about his idea of "cultural hegemony":

Orthodox Marxism had predicted that socialist revolution was inevitable in capitalist societies. By the early 20th century, no such revolution had occurred in the most advanced nations. Capitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the 'common sense' values of all. People in the working-class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.

To counter the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, the working class needed to develop a culture of its own. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci's view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests. Neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a ‘historic bloc’, taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations and ideas. In this manner, Gramsci developed a theory that emphasized the importance of the political and ideological superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the economic base.

Gramsci stated that bourgeois cultural values were tied to folklore, popular culture and religion, and therefore much of his analysis of hegemonic culture is aimed at these. He was also impressed by the influence Roman Catholicism had and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci saw Marxism as a marriage of the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism and the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to think of it as an expression of their own experience.

For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on a "consented" coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force.

Gramsci and I probably differ regarding what this alternative culture ought to look like, but maybe not. We would probably both agree that the social movements associated with Liberation Theology in Latin America in the seventies and eighties were an attempt to create precisely this alternative worker culture that met both the spiritual and social/economic needs of the immiserated. People like Joseph Ratzinger, who did everything he could to quash it, feared that the movement was driven by cynical communist agitators rather than by the Holy Spirit. Nothing is pure; I'm sure there were some who used Liberation Theology as a demagogic tool for their own political ends, but there were also plenty of people who didn't. It's too bad Ratzinger felt himself incapable of trusting that perhaps the latter was really in control and would win out in the end. 

I'm spending so much time recently on trying to understand what Neoliberalism is because it's the best name we can give to the ideology of our current cultural hegemons. It's important to understand it and how it works. But it's one thing to have a critique; it's one thing to know that almost everything you hear in the media is b.s. because it is subordinated to self-justifying Neoliberal narrative. It's another to provide a robust alternative that works because it's saturated with truth--in the satyagraha sense. Such a social-cultural movement would be irresistible if it came into being, and I believe sooner or later it will. Nothing short of it will work. Nothing short of that will have the unifying cultural legtimacy to provide the countervailing force that can take on the reigning cultural hegemenony that is saturated with bullshit and the soul-crushing alienation that comes with it. 

P.S. I've been watching House of Cards over the last week, and it's great study in legitmation and delegitimation within the very narrow limits of the cultural hegemony that dominates within the Beltway. Ideology is a means to an end, the end being power acquisition. There are sincere ideologues, in the sense that they believe their own b.s., but in that world sincerity is a weakness that makes them useful fools, putty in the hands of the people who understand how power works and could care less about anything else.