Monday, March 29, 2010

WHAT “AVATAR” SAYS

The always-interesting Daniel Mendelsohn writes (‘reviews’ is too thin a concept for it) about director James Cameron’s recent blockbuster film hit “Avatar”.

The piece is well worth a look. I’m going to riff a bit on some of Mendelsohn’s insights, since they lead Us to some mighty interesting places.

The overall plot of the film in a nutshell: sometime in the not-so-distant future Jake, a legless ex-Marine (he had lost his legs while the Marines were fighting as mercenaries for ‘The Company’ (!) in Venezuela (!))* is part of another expedition sent to get hold of a planet with some valuable resources; they run into the locals – ‘natives’ as they were known in an earlier day – who are a remarkable race of not-really humanoid creatures called the Na’vi; Jake – it’s Hollywood, after all – gets to know the Na’vi, especially a lovely princess; and he goes over to their side after he gets to know them/her better.

So far, so politically correct – Mendelsohn observes. And he notes that We’ve seen this before, mentioning 1990’s “Dances With Wolves” where Kevin Costner’s young Army officer, repelled by the dissipated and repugnant cavalry-culture and its officers that he finds at his new frontier posting, ‘goes native’ – as the Victorian era Brits would pithily put it. Perhaps you spent good money to see it way back then in those heady times. It was – to certain types – a heart-warming spectacle (and perhaps still is, possibly constituting part of the syllabus for this or that “Studies” course even unto this day).

But Mendelsohn is no hit-and-miss reviewer. Cameron, he reflects, is probably not the best guy to be making a movie about human interactions. His work has consistently and most clearly demonstrated a fascination not with weak and inconstant humanity, but rather with the superhuman powers of technologically advanced machines. He recalls the ‘Terminator’ series, where the main characters are human-appearing androids with powers “far above those of mortal men” (you remember the original TV “Superman” intro, right?).

Neatly, Mendelsohn also observes that the ‘good’ Terminator was embodied – as it were – by none other than Ahhhnuld, the fleshy (and kinda metrosexual-looking) former body-builder who quite possibly laid the foundations for a career in Our post-modern celebrity politics by demonstrating in images 20-feet high on the theater screen his superhuman powers of commitment, strength, concentration, purposeful determination and undistracted focus on his task (so un-postmodern, really).

Cameron’s fascination throughout his productive career has been on the superhuman, which – when you think of it – is really a kind of non-human (not to say anti-human).

Curiously, that also brings up memories of Lenin, who built his entire fantasy of a Soviet paradise on a Russia that didn’t exist except as an “abstraction” in his mind, and on a Russian people who equally didn’t exist ‘on the ground’. Indeed, this was the core of Solzhenitsyn’s undying antipathy to Lenin and all his pomps and all his works.**

And, as I have often said on this site, the assorted ‘revolutionaries’ whom the vote-desperate Dems ‘empowered’ in the 1960s-1970s had certainly read their Lenin. And their Mao, who conveniently (and somewhat more succinctly) provided that Little Red Book as a how-to for aspiring revolutionary cadres. Lenin and Mao were probably the only dead males that the American revolutionistas actually read (though Lenin was ‘white, and Mao was still alive in the salad days of America’s “many revolutions at the same time”). But that may be thinking too much.

And didn’t 1972’s philosophical toast of the Party – John Rawls – base his entire “original position” empowerment-friendly philosophy on a creature that didn’t exist: the abstraction of a human being old enough to think but with utterly no connections of any sort to a culture, a heritage, a tradition, or a community actually existing?

Which leads you to wonder if the Beltway didn’t make Lenin’s mistake, and base its entire revolution-friendly pandering and deconstruction programme on an ‘abstraction’ that was hell-and-gone from any America or actually existing American People? But then, how can you run a revolution if you have any respect for what’s already there? The whole idea is to wreck what’s there and replace it with … whatever ‘vision’ or ‘dream’ you have not taken the trouble to really figure out yet. Such mature leadership.

Although ‘hope’ and ‘optimism’ – replacing the somewhat more in-your-face cockiness and outright arrogance – are now expected to plaster over the monstrous fractures that have been created. Does that work when you’ve neglected the infrastructure of a huge dam and it’s now cracking and creaking ominously? Get the Fuhrer’s old house-painting ladder and bucket and figure you can climb up and slather enough plaster or play-dough to make everything better?

Anyhow, Cameron is looking for what is “stronger” and “tougher” than human being. “Humanity and human life have never held much attraction for Cameron; if anything you can say that in all his movies there is a yearning to leave the flesh of Homo sapiens behind for something stronger and tougher”.

Well, I can understand that. Don’t all of Us wish that at one point or another? But then the Reality Principle kicks in: We are here, encased in this human flesh and in these human commitments and connections and communities. And the problems and challenges thereby generated constitute the field of Our lives, and the record each shall inscribe into History, trying to become that genuine Self in an accurately-perceived Present. And while the consolations of fantasy are a handy and portable and user-friendly release from pressure, yet you can’t build a life – individually, communally, or nationally – on them. Nor can you build a Self on them – nor sustain one.

And yes, you can be ‘educated’ into making a more Correct ‘appraisal’ of things; after all, PTSD is a matter of how you later ‘appraise’ your experience (what happened to you or – though it’s not considered polite or Correct to mention this - what you did to somebody else). And so yes, you can ‘reframe’ your ‘reality’, but that only goes so far and then History shades into Fiction. And once you’ve gone over THAT line, then all the ‘hope’ in the universe isn’t going to help.

‘Dreams’, like mood-altering and psycho-active drugs, can’t ground a Self – nor sustain one.

And although I draw no inferences connecting Cameron to the late Fuhrer and his Master Race excitements, it strikes me as a tad ironic that from his Bunker in those last months when Consequences were fighting their way implacably into artillery range from the East and B-17s were flying over Berlin like angry turkeys coming home to roost, Hitler blamed the German Volk for not being up to the vision he had so nobly offered them. If you’re going to do stuff that’s going to stir up consequences, then you’d better think things through first and make sure you’re going to be able to handle the Consequences.

And didn’t the late Jesus say something much the same? If you’re a king and planning to start a war, shouldn’t you first sit down and do some calculations as to whether you can pull the thing off? But that was in a book – and a Book that was precisely pooh-poohed by the Dem-empowered cadres. They already had a book – that Little Red one. If you already have one book and you like it, why bother reading a second one? Geez.

Again, Mendelsohn turns his thoughts to Cameron’s “fascination with the seeming invincibility of sophisticated mechanical objects, and an accompanying desire to slough off human flesh for metal”. And I think that this was the whole dynamic of the frakkulous fantasy called “New Soviet Man”, that ‘perfected’ human (as Lenin defined perfection) that would populate (but not govern) the Red Utopia.

And what might We call the New American Person who will populate (but also not govern) the new American Utopia? (Although the Multiculturalisti might object to the use of ‘American’ or ‘America’ in the first place.)

Nicely, the Marines in the film have access to these reely reely great ‘suits’ that when a simple human puts them on gives superhuman enhanced powers and strength.

I can’t help but wondering if part of the Beltway’s continued indenture to de-masculinizing the military is based on the sure and certain hope that such suits will be coming along shortly, so that the question of female physical strength (leaving aside politely the huge matter of emotional make-up) will no longer be an issue on the battlefield and in combat. And – who knows? – might give American occupation forces the type of upper-hand over the terroristicals that the Krag once gave to Smedley Butler’s Marines in the Philippines and the Banana Wars? At the moment, the Pentagon seems to be getting by with simply issuing various energy-drugs to the troops, in addition to the downers that calm the unremitting stress of conducting an actively-suppressive (fill-in-the-blank: occupation, invasion, pacification, liberation).

You get the eerie echoes of Adolf’s ‘hope’ for the V-1 and the V-2. Which he unswervingly voiced in those shriveled staff-meetings in the Bunker, when he wasn’t playing with the mock-up set of architectural models for when he re-made his home city of Linz, moving around the toy-sized models of the assorted massive buildings – the library, the government offices, the SS and Gestapo headquarters complex – to his heart’s content.

And how many cohorts of American youth (and now not-so-young) pretty much go through their days walking around but mostly playing in their mind with the blocks that constitute their dream-world? Their dream-Self? While human reality – in all its interpersonal, communal, and political fracturedness and incompleteness – simply fades into a shady, insubstantial ‘back-drop’? This cannot end well.

Are there such models in the basements of any world capitals today, d’ye think?

But, acutely, Mendelsohn doesn’t allow himself to be sidetracked with the merely technological and political. There is an “ethical” problem with the film; there is an “incoherence” that is rooted in Cameron’s “ambivalence about the relationship between technology and humanity”, in his “lifelong progress toward embracing a dazzling superior Otherness”.

And you can see it clearly by comparing it to a previous Hollywood hit, “The Wizard of Oz” (in 1939 they didn’t call them ‘blockbusters’ but that what it was). Dorothy, if you recall, comes back to Kansas, to the same Kansas she left – she has changed, but she comes back – and wanted to come back – to the matrix of family, community, memory, folkways, tradition and heritage that constituted her real life.

Nor is she ‘superhuman’; she has the strength of a newfound maturity, certainly, but this is an organic human strength achieved through undergoing her Journey. And the viewer can reasonably hope that she will deploy that new strength not as ‘power over’ her real world, but rather as a contribution to her real world, and to all the humans and human stuff that constitute that world.

(Yes, perhaps like Jean Harlow she might decide to be “reckless … to go places and look life in the face”, but even if she does, she won’t be looking to pull the rug out from under her world or its people. And looking life in the face realistically isn’t the same as getting in Humanity’s face).

Jake becomes a Na’vi, and in leaving his broken human body behind he leaves humanity behind, and its world – in order to live among the Na’vi (and there’s that princess, too).

“There’s no place like home”. So says Dorothy. But to Cameron – and perhaps to far too many today – ‘humanness’ and ‘humanity’ is no longer a ‘home’, nor even a given field for the Shaping of a Self and a life, both individually and together with all other humans. (So I have to wonder what hope can remain for Lincoln’s sublime and marvelous goal of “achieving a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations”.)

It almost seems as if the take-away from the film is that being ‘human’ is really not what you should be looking forward to (and I thought it was bad enough when the Sixties pooh-poohed being a ‘mature’ human). A humanity so disinterested in itself starts to resemble what used to be said of European culture in 1900: “decadent”, no longer interested in its own genuine potentials and, instead, sunk in escapist pleasures and fantasies.

I’m not saying that Depression-era Kansas (well, the first Depression, to be specific) is a place that could be just anybody’s cup of tea. But there’s no ‘place’ that doesn’t have its not-Technicolor aspects … human nature, weak and (Un-Correct as it is to mention it) shot through with the type of Sin that adheres to all humans: putting your own desires over everybody else’s and doing whatever it takes to shape your life experience the way you want it no matter what it does to anybody or everybody else).***

So, concludes Mendelsohn, the message in this film is “that ‘reality’ is dispensable altogether; or at least whatever you care to make of it, provided you have the right gadgets”.

And just what are the consequences and Consequences of that for the Constitutional Republic and for that People which it exists to serve?

NOTES

*This not only isn’t far-fetched but actually reflects retired Marine Brigadier General Smedley Butler’s rueful reflections on his Marine assignments in South and Central America and the Caribbean: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

In case some of a jingoist bent might think him a ‘weak sister’, be it noted that Butler served robustly in the Boxer Rebellion, the Philippines, Wilson’s Veracruz expedition, the Banana Wars, interwar China, and World War 1 (not in a combat command, because he was considered – you can see why – “unreliable” by his bosses in Washington). He won two Medals of Honor. There is good ground for believing his post-retirement report that he was approached informally by a bunch of old-school Big Money types who were looking to set up a coup against FDR in the mid-1930s – in which he refused to participate. (There is, if I recall correctly, an alleged Bush-family involvement in the coup story.) He died in 1940.

**Helen Rappaport has a meaty book entitled “Conspirator” about Lenin’s thought and attitude in the years before he came to power (you may recall, he instigated the Red Revolution against … the Russian people and workers, who had already done the heavy lifting by overthrowing the Tsarist regime and had set up their own provisional government under Kerensky).

***It’s a curious and hardly coincidental development that the nation is presently obsessed with ‘sex offenders’, men (almost always) who are stigmatized for putting their own sexual urges above the rights of anybody else and who abandon their own responsibility to master their own powers and desires. Yet the entire thrust of the national culture – especially in its trajectory over the past 40 Biblical years – has been precisely to sweep away the claims of any pre-existing or ‘objective’ commitments or responsibilities in order to become the Totally Autonomous Person who is ‘free’ to fulfill by whatever means necessary the ‘desires’ and ‘values’ that such a Person has chosen to adopt. One’s Personal reality is also a Private reality (unless the government can re-shape the ‘reality’ of enough of the Citizens – and you’re back to Lenin again).

ADDENDUM

You can see how ideas, poured into your magick pot, actively blend together with each other ideas, and you really have to know what you’re doing so as not to lose control of the reaction such that the ideas blend and interact in ways that create god-knows-what.

And this is especially true if you have heated the pot through the stoking up of mass (no longer genuinely ‘public’) opinion (no longer really ‘opinion’) and emotion.

If the Multiculturalistic dogma is that there is no distinctive ‘American’ ethos – perhaps even that there doesn’t deserve to be one … and then you blend that with the feministical deconstruction of any Capital Letter Reality (that might stand in judgment upon the many baaaad or at least dubious ideas of the feministical agenda) … then you can wind up with not only a profoundly ‘anti-American’ potion, but also a profoundly anti-human one.

In this regard you can also see where Raymond Aron’s ‘democratic conservatism’ – dedicated to the idea that a truly Liberal politics seeks to conserve not only what is best but what is essential to the prudent functioning of an actually human politics – opposed what he identified in the evolving ‘modern’ liberal politics of his day (roughly 1935 to 1983 when he died) as an anti-democratic and anti-Liberal politics based on utopian and perfectionist visions that rode rough-shod over the structural needs of an actually-existing human community.

I’ll toss this in as well. I hold no brief for the sexual abuse of children, especially by those in authority over them (which includes religious and educational figures as well as – and they are statistically by government figures the greatest threat – family members, relations, and persons invited into the familial (however defined nowadays) circle).

But the latest phase of the curiously un-ending campaign against the Catholic Church (and only that Church) just happens to be targeted at what is also the largest institution left on the planet that formally and strongly holds Capital Letter Realities (God, Divine Will, Divine Providence being only the most significant) to be objective Realities that stand above and beyond the ‘world’ of human affairs and human history, and in addition stand in judgment over this dimension (and all its pomps and all its works).

This strikes me as wayyyyy too significant to be a coincidence.

It’s surely true that the Church has been rather lax in its administration and management of its ordained (and, neatly, male) agents. And that the Church itself, being extended deeply into this dimension and having a large organizational ‘footprint’, was itself wracked by the excitements of the Sixties.

And in that regard the Church must accept its place among the many major institutions of this world that have failed to live up to the best potentials of its mission.

But it remains rather stubbornly committed to its declared mission of standing up for those Capital Letter Realities – even in the face of its own weaknesses – and THAT surely is gall and wormwood to the post-modern revolutionary demand to Flatten the human dimension merely to the things of this world, declaring any Beyond to be not only irrelevant or ‘private’ but also quite probably nonexistent.

The result of the Church’s undoing (which doesn’t seem to be anywhere near complete) would be to force human beings to rely on what were once referred to as ‘the powers of this world’, especially governments. And to so collapse the levels of human reality into this one fractured dimension would Flatten humans’ sense of themselves as a species, deprive humans of any sense of transcendent Meaning and Purpose, and leave humans feeling hugely vulnerable to the vagaries of human events and the various huge forces generated by a surely imperfect humanity as it staggers selfishly through Time.

Naturally, such hugely weakened beings would have to look to ‘government’ not only for ‘protection’ but as the sole provider of whatever Meaning and Purpose humans might rely on.

And that profoundly undermines the core assumptions of the democratic ethos, and paves the way – as We are now seeing – for the Regulatory-Preventive State not only as Nanny to its squalling ‘children’ but also as – not to put too fine a point on it – humanity’s only ‘god’.

This, for all practical purposes, constitutes the essence of ‘idolatry’ – even though in the current era the whole ongoing dynamic has been cloaked in the appearance and bleated pieties that still pay official lip-service to ‘religion’ and ‘belief’.

I think that this dynamic must fail because it is so profoundly contrary to the demonstrated transcendent dimension of human being, maintained throughout the history of the species.
But surely, in its frakkulous excitements – for however long they last – and even in its death-throes, this dynamic can wreak much havoc in the world.

So there are no grounds for a too-easy consolation that the post-modern revolutionary project in its many manifestations is ‘wrong’ and ‘doomed to fail’. Even a dying dragon can maim and kill.

Rather, then, humans must ground their resistance to this post-modern revolutionary project in the confidence that so misguided and treacherous a project must surely fail, and on the basis of that confidence (Hope with a capital ‘H’) intensify the efforts to re-order and recover the genuine Sources of human Meaning, Purpose, and of Human Nature itself.

Nor is it irrelevant that it was not ever the Roman Catholic way to demand a fully achieved perfection – and Perfection Now – from human beings. Human weakness and the necessary imperfection of all things human and generated by humans has always been a key factor in the Church’s millennia of conducting its work.

Rather it was the Protestant Reformation – with its purist zeal and its emphasis on the ‘war’ element inherent in the Christian tradition (‘war’ against evil, imperfection, and against imperfect zeal for God’s word and way … however this or that sect defined those terms) that introduced not only a reforming but also the seeds of a revolutionary zeal into Western belief and also into its political praxis.

Let it also be recalled that while the Church did burn heretics from time to time during the pre-modern era, it was only Protestantism that went hunting for ‘witches’ and burned many of them; one of the difficulties of the entire Protestant programme was that in denying any overarching guidance in matters of doctrine, each sect was thus rendered vulnerable to the excitements of its particular local adherents, which unleashed many dark forces of paranoia and suspicion latent in human beings and their communities. And when those darker forces turned their attention to ‘things unseen’ – especially evils unseen – the hunt for witches (and warlocks) and their violent persecution was quick to follow.

In light of this, then the peculiar and ominous weavings of recent American cultural politics make unhappy sense.

While the surfaces of that politics seem to indicate a ‘conservative and religious’ Right versus a ‘liberal and secular’ Left, there are actually much darker and more vital unities deeper down.

For one thing, the ‘revolutionary purity’ of both the Left’s radical excitements (so darkly influenced by the 20th century’s Leninist and Maoist assumptions and processes) and the Right’s fundamentalistic ‘religious base’ combine to create a powerful undercurrent hostile to any prudent and reasonable assessment of improving society while maintaining its essential structural Shape.

For another, both the anti-Transcendent Left and the Fundamentalistic Right are eager to take over the cultural place and authority of the Church in American culture. (They would have both turned on the former ‘Protestant mainstream churches’, had those entities not already eviscerated and deracinated themselves through their ‘liberal secularizing’ in response to the this-worldly contours of a materialist, consumerist, and later a revolutionary culture as all those elements came together in the Sixties.)

Humanity, I think, will be the great loser in all of this.

Unless humans stand up for themselves … in all their multi-dimensional, un-Flattened, and transcendent potential.

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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

SAM TANENHAUS AND IDENTITY POLITICS

Things continue to get interestinger and interestinger.

No less a mainstream and Correct venue than ‘The New York Times’ has now published an article entitled “Identity Politics Leans Right”.

Well, my first fear was that this would be an attempt to run the now-typical progressive-formerly-liberal play: it was goooood when we did it, but the ‘conservatives’ are baaaaaad when they do it.

But no. They’re actually letting the writer, Sam Tanenhaus, do something more mature with it.*

His concern is that the Right is actually trying to take advantage of the weakening hold of Political Correctness and Identity Politics (the monsters summoned forth by those sorcerer’s apprentices now known as the progressives-formerly-liberals forty Biblical years ago).

I agree with him that such a move is a distinct possibility. And I more than agree with him that this would be a bad (but hardly surprising) development.

I don’t quite get there by the same route, so let me say this about that.

Prompting his thoughts is a recent move by the Texas Board of Education to tweak the History curriculum in that Great State’s elementary school system: the Board wants to make the curriculum more ‘conservative’.

The Board’s definition of ‘conservative’ – as always – is the key here. And that definition is revealed in the Board’s wish to teach students about their right to bear arms and “an individual’s protection of private property from government takings”. (Nor am I great fan of ‘government’ as that life-form has engorged over the past 40 Biblical years.)

In other words, the Board is simply trying to throw its own mud, now that the ‘other side’ has started to run out of mud or at least has started to lose the ability to get its own mud recognized as the pure revolutionary truth. Which reflects more than anything else the frakkulously unhappy fact that the Right was sucked into the Left’s mud-pie game in the 1980s and in doing so left Us with no Party speaking for civic maturity and seriousness in a mature and serious way.

And of course, the religious nature of the Founders is going to be included in the Board’s vision; the Founders were ‘Christian’. Which isn’t and is true.

They were interested in 1787 in setting up the machinery of a government that would be able to withstand the irrational and corrosive whims and schemes that affect all humans and every human endeavor. They were interested in creating a democratic process that would prevent the type of self-serving corruptions of government power that so often in history had not only resulted after the passage of time, but had also led to monstrously bloody and violent revolutionary agitations (in 1787 the French nation was on the cusp of precisely such a bloodbath).

And they were precisely not interested in ‘religion’, in several ways.

First, they did not want the government getting itself mixed up in ‘religious’ matters, since it would only entangle the government in the type of religious rockfights (and wars) that had for centuries rocked Europe.

Second, they did not want the government power to get drawn so intimately into the national life, and into the lives of its Citizens. The Founders had a very clear and limited vision of what role ‘government’ would play in ‘America’: government would be a smallish preserve, playing a vital but not directive or capital role in the nation’s and the People’s life. The limits on the government – the expectations placed upon it and the authority it possessed – would create a fenced-in zone, beyond which was a wide and deep field wherein the activities of the Citizens – mercantile, personal, communal, familial, spiritual and religious – would constitute the genuine and most essential ‘life’ of the nation and the Citizenry.

Third, they did not want government to interfere with religion. Human beings, in the Enlightenment vision, were endowed with the power of reason (indeed, the Enlightenment often saw Reason as some sort of independent force working in human affairs; sort of a ‘God’ without all the churchy accretions); Americans were capable of rationality and had the right to make their own decisions as to religious adherence.

Fourth, the government had no authority to go mucking around in anybody’s soul or mind. This newly forged America wasn’t going to be the Tsar’s Russia or any other monarchical replicant where the government would inherit the Absolute Authority of the Throne, whose Monarch simply took over the power and authority formerly ascribed to the Pope or simply exercised God’s authority as God’s Anointed Deputy.

(You can see how much the country slid backwards in the past 10 years, into the queasy absolutist slime from which the Founders had lifted it.)

But the Founders were also not anti-religious. Indeed, they lived at a time when the afterglow of late medieval Christendom and the Protestant Reformation still warmed and lit the lives and minds and souls of the Citizenry: no matter how much or how little or just how one was ‘churched’ in the young American nation, there was still a wide consensus that there was a God, and/or that one should be a ‘decent’ person. And that ‘decency’ was much defined by the old virtues, theological and practical.

And indeed, the consensus extended to the belief and the ideal that human beings were possessed of a soul, and created by a God (however defined) Whose plan gave humans purpose and meaning, and Whose help assisted them as they made their way through the soul-wracking complexities of this world.

That afterglow was something that the Founders could not only presume, but that they actually needed in their vision. Because if the government machinery they were carefully assembling (in its several Branches – Legislative, Executive, Judicial) was going to be the servant (indeed the employee) of The People, then that People had to retain such sense of confidence in their own meaning that they could sustain not only their own lives but also the government, acting as the ultimate human judge of its actions.

And, for that matter, the Founders assumed that any elected officials of that government would also be governed by their own sense of ‘virtue’ and ‘character’ as well as their sense of responsibility to The People and – as well – to the Ultimate Judge of human affairs and souls.

ALL of that was included in the Framers’ vision of the American polity, and it was only upon that dense and robust foundation that the actual government machinery was formally set up through the Constitutional instrument itself.

Today’s meaningless Rightist blather about the Framers being ‘Christian’ is a useless conversation. That word ‘Christian’ as used nowadays defines out to be the specifically fundamentalist sense of the word, and Fundamentalism is a movement that didn’t gain traction in America until a full century after the Founding. Arguing about it is equivalent to arguing that a particular Founder was a Cadillac or a Mercedes man.

Such ‘fundamentalism’ – with its (soooo highly-selective) ‘literal interpretation’ of the Bible – didn’t exist in the late 18th century, except as an un-esteemed bunch on the fringes of the Protestant fold.

Nor do I disagree with Tanenhaus when he says that “this controversy is the latest version of a debate that reaches back many decades and is perhaps essential to the heterogeneous democracy whose identity has long been in flux”.

But I am suddenly verrrry alert to where that thought might be taken.

His use of “decades” indicates to me that he is well aware of what the past four Biblical decades have wrought. And so, as with Neal Gabler in two very recent Posts, I am wary that Tanenhaus is going to try to soft-sell those forty frakkulent years as just another well-intentioned and mostly Gooooood effort to add some ‘richness’ to America’s self-concept and sense of identity.

Which lets the Beltway, the Dems, the progressive-formerly-liberals and the wild-minded revolutionistas of Identity Politics off the verrrrry big hook upon which they have willfully skewered themselves. And Us.

He starts in down that road, purring about how it occurred to decent folks that “in the 1960s and ‘70s, the concept of a single ‘race of men’ looked outmoded”. He continues: “Didn’t ‘race’ mean ‘white race’? and didn’t ‘men’ exclude women?”

I duly acknowledge that in this paragraph he also refers to the Sixties and Seventies as “convulsions”. Which, however, reminds me of Gabler’s “shocks” – as if they were merely well-intentioned jolts administered like an ER doc with the defibrillator ‘paddles’ to bring life back to a dying patient.

When of course they actually constituted – and were intended to constitute – a sustained, conceptually violent ‘deconstruction’ of not only the current concept of American ‘identity’ but of the possibility of any efficacious American identity at all (Multiculturalism) and of any possibility of any common American identity that transcended this or that difference or inequality, real or imagined (Identity Politics).

Yes, America’s ‘identity’ has always been in flux. Waves of immigrants brought their own particular contributions to it, even as they worked to assimilate themselves into the overall American commonality of belief and tradition.

BUT no wave of immigrants ever came over here intending to sustain a do-or-die assault on American identity itself, a ‘deconstruction’ (not so much a ‘re-construction’) of American identity. Except, come to think of it, the Anarchists who came over here as individuals committed to spreading European excitements of violently overthrowing established authority (they too didn’t have any replacement or reconstruction in mind; they figured that once freed from ‘authority’ then folks would do nicely enough on their own – which sounds queasily familiar, doesn’t it?).**

AND no wave of immigrants every arrived here to face an American culture and polity that had been so confoundingly weakened by 40 years' worth of sustained attack, aided and abetted by its own government.

AND no wave of immigrants ever arrived here to be told that what they precisely must not do is to assimilate to the local American culture. Since, the justification would be given, American culture was not worth their adherence anyway.

So, no, I can’t go along with the ‘moderate’ can’t-we-all-just-forget-it-and-move-on sort of revisionist history-making that is currently the rage among the suddenly-nervous Correct elites. Frankly, I think a little South American or South African or Central-European-after-the-Communists ‘reconciliation’ needs to be carried out here. And that would – I think – require something along the lines of a Truth Commission. Or at least, following the ancient Chinese wisdom, a Rectification of Names.

Because what We have been through in the past 40 Biblical years has not been a slightly bumptious, well-intentioned, liberating re-adjustment and expansion of American identity. It has been a hydra-headed (MIRV-ed, to use the old Cold War term) revolutionary assault on democratic deliberative process as well as – see above – on the very fundaments and existential possibility of any American identity at all.

AND such whackery did not ‘succeed’ on the strength of its own conceptual worth, but rather because it was espoused by the Democrats (and then later the Republicans in their way) and became in effect a government-sustained revolution. A government-sustained revolution against its own national ethos and Constitutional vision.

Oh, and against a rather sizable chunk of its own People.

Surely, somewhere along the line, this shaded into what the Framers would term “treachery”.***

A little too cutely, Tanenhaus tries to cover that base by admitting freely about these “changes” that “some were narrowing and erroneous” – he specifically mentions the black CCNY professor Leonard Jeffries’ 1980s black-studies illuminations about white European “ice people” and African “sun people” … for which higher education-level wisdom individuals or the taxpayers paid hefty tuition fees.

But he quickly tacks back: “Many of the changes were liberating”. Well, some were. To some. But the price of imposing such changes by doing an end-run around wide and deliberate consensus-building has been verrrry high – perhaps more, it may turn out, than We could afford.

He quotes “conservatives” who worried and warned at the time “that attacks on the ‘Eurocentric curriculum’ … were giving rise to ‘the notion that history and literature should be taught not as disciplines but as therapies whose function is to raise minority self-esteem’”.

Well now. So much of American activity has become ‘therapy’ since then.

And rather than ‘achievement’ it is ‘self-esteem’ that has become the pole-star of the awesome task of forming youth for the tasks of achieving maturity and sustaining an adult life and an efficacious communal and civic competence. I recall the line from a recent cartoon: ‘This isn’t a San Francisco youth league – we keep score!”. Which is a plaint for – if I may say – a ‘reality-based’ life as opposed to a ‘consolatory fantasy-based’ life.

Surely, the evidence of such fantasy-based, self-serving consolations has done nothing to improve the achievements of the Service academies. The Navy has relieved almost 20 commanding officers – many of them Academy graduates – in the past months; several hugely expensive vessels have been wrecked through accident or incompetence, including a nuclear missile cruiser and a submarine, both new. One lantern-jawed, butch-cut commanding officer called one of her subordinate officers an “idiot” in front of his enlisted subordinates and on the bridge underway she said to another officer “This is why I hate you!”; at a Royal Navy officer temporarily assigned to her command she threw a coffee cup (ceramic, not paper).

And in the matter of this 'consolatory-fantasy' gambit: things have gotten mightily and dangerously confused in the past 40 Biblical years. You recall that 'framing' has been one of the key insight in the feministical 'deconstruction' of any 'reality' that might stand in the way of their assorted excitements, emancipations, and liberating revolutions. There is no 'reality' out there - and certainly no Reality existing in some other, higher dimension.

No, there is only the outcome of however you choose to 'frame' things that might strike you as connected. So you hold your head however you choose to, see what you see by doing it, and that - for you - is 'reality'.

There is certianly an element of truth to this approach: humans never experience anything directly; like a Starship in space, everything that the captain 'sees' is mediated by the ship's sensor array, which then filters whatever feedback it gets from its scans of space and creates a picture on the view-screen on the bridge (did you think the Enterprise's viewscreen was just a windshield?). So in that sense, humans 'see' patterns that may not really be out there. OR - it has to be added - they may not see patterns that may indeed be out there.

What the feministicals did was to take this hardly-original philosophical insight and erect it into a Law of Perception: humans can never directly and fully grasp what's really 'out there'.

But then they went further and created a (falsely-derived) Law of Being: therefore there is no 'reality' out there and everything is all in your mind. (And therefore whatever the Dems wanted to 'change' in the rotten, patriarchy-filled, racist American culture couldn't be argued about since there is no 'reality' anyway on which anyone could base an objection. Neat. But frakkulously wrong.)

So, continuing to trace out the Great Mistake (or Treachery) of 'deconstruction': you don't have any 'reality' out there; all you have is your 'frame'. And you must be educated into the Correct 'framing' before your input in democratic political process is worthy of notice or even Constitutional respect. Ach!

But then human nature's stubborn reality kicks in: humans are always susceptible to the temptation to take a short-cut: if reality is too painful, the mind draws upon its powers of imagination to fabricate a fantasy that will make you feel 'better' - a consolatory fantasy. So, for example: Although I have jumped off the Empire State Building I really am flying and I will indeed start to pull up before I hit the street ... if you do that you feel a whole lot better.

But of course, as your mind accurately perceives 'reality' and realizes that you are now within 10 stories of hitting the pavement, it will send increasing alarms that will stimulate unpleasant emotions designed to get you to do something to fix this problem. So your consolatory-fantasy will have to kick into overdrive to blot out the alarm signals from your mind and emotions.

One of the skills, therefore, currently required in American politics is to be able to distinguish between a 'frame' and a 'consolatory fantasy'.

And to realize - despite whatever feministical 'theory' and 'deconstruction' insist through the mouths of Beltway and academic elite-bots - that A) there is indeed a 'reality', B) it is 'out there' for sure, and C) it may even be a Reality.

And that even if humans cannot know this r/Reality totally and completely, they damned well better be able to accurately figure out a little bit about it, or else they are going to go through life - to use a Sean Connery phrase from that 1990s Eliot Ness movie - having "brought a knife to a gunfight".****

So much for the ‘liberation of Me’ as a substitute for maturity, competence, and achievement. So much for the maturity of the Totally Free Self.

And of course, the crapulent invasion of a sovereign foreign nation was effected through the lubricating excuse of ‘therapy’ for the American people after the shock of 9-11. (Nor do I hold the late Mr. Hussein in any esteem whatsoever.)

And that same invasion – and several subsequent military misadventures – was undertaken merely upon the justification of the ‘feelings’ of the Beltway elites – with no serious deliberation or careful calculation or even the asking of that prime professional strategic question: And what then?

The foreign policy elites – like their domestic policy elites – “would be greeted as liberators”.

Which brings me back to Tanenhaus.

It’s not enough to gush about the good-intentions and desires for ‘liberation’ and ‘empowerment’. The actual results and the consequences (intended or unintended) have to be looked at clearly and carefully. And should have been from the get-go.

Tanenhaus notes that the Texas gambit may simply represent “the conservative variant of identity politics and this could invite a similar backlash”.

Well, as I’ve said before, “backlash” is just a little too simple, and shades into the simplistic. It should have been clear 40 years ago that so wide and sustained and profound a series of ‘changes’ should be passed through the purifying fire of wide and acute public deliberation.

And that would be even more essential since those ‘changes’ or ‘shocks’ or whatever you choose to call them constituted profound assaults on some of the most fundamental American beliefs and practices and even the sources of national and individual meaning and purpose.

And that these assaults would be successful precisely because they would be imposed by the government rather than achieved through the democratic processes of wide and acute deliberation.

If ANY progressive-formerly-liberal wants to say that nobody at the time (or during those 40 Biblical years) realized just how important a wide and deep programme of public debate, deliberation, and consensus-building would be … well, such an admission is a self-indictment on its face.

And if, in the alternative, any progressive-formerly-liberal wants to say that Yes, at some point that all became clear but by then they were in too deep … well, such an admission is a self-indictment on its face.

And “treachery” seems not so outré an option to describe things.

Tanenhaus nicely quotes Richard Hofstadter, whose 1948 “The American Political Tradition” opined that the tendency to “national nostalgia” constituted “an effort not to understand the past but to evade the present”.

Yes and no.

Yes, with groups as with individuals, a sentimental but uncritical search for ‘the past’ often indicates immaturity rather than maturity. And that maturity reveals itself in a comprehensive and sustained effort to engage the challenges of the present. (The Buddhist wisdom puts it very nicely: the prime goal of a person is to be a full Self in an accurately perceived Present. And both Self and Present are densely defined and capacious terms as used here.)

But no, not all concern for ‘the past’ is escapist. There is, after all, Tradition and Heritage: the never-ending effort to further refine one’s integrity as shaped by the ideals of one’s individual and communal Tradition and Heritage. These were all terms that were jettisoned – along with the dimensions of Reality to which they were portals – by the ‘deconstruction’ demanded by certain Identities that required total autonomy, free of any external commitments, in order to fashion the Totally Free Self (as lethal and frakkulent a fantasy as any era in any part of the world has ever erected).

And the government played along.

Nowadays, of course, ‘history’ is nothing more than what any particular group or interest wants it to be; to say that an assertion is right or wrong, wise or foolish, is to be ‘insensitive’ and ‘intolerant’. To say that an assertion is unsupported by any evidence is to be ‘rationalistic’. To say that an assertion holds many secondary but undesirable consequences is to be ‘un-hopeful’ and demonstrates that ‘you just don’t get it’.

For these reasons, Tanenhaus is on the mark when he acknowledges that the very existence of the Texas gambit “suggests that after so many bitter years of polarization, Americans stand on the brink of a collective identity crisis and no longer share a common set of ideas about the true character of the country and the true meaning of democracy”.

But he is being disingenuous by noting it as if by inadvertence. What influences started all those bitter years of polarization? What influences believed with the revolutionary zeal of convinced cadres that no American identity was possible or even desirable? What influences insisted that ‘truth’ and ‘character’ were “quaint” terms? What influences asserted that the Constitution itself was hopelessly tainted by its (pick one or all: white, male, patriarchal, corporatist, elitist) origins and was at best “quaint” and at worst bereft of any call upon Americans’ adherence?*****

It’s not only the America of industrial primacy that’s irretrievably gone now. It’s not only the America of economic primacy with all that gold in Fort Knox solidly backing up the currency. It’s not only the America with all those resources that made it able to sustain itself and feed and supply most of the world.

It’s the America that actually sensed itself a People with a Purpose.******

The universal solvent of ‘deconstruction’, joined to Identity Politics and its sibling Multiculturalism, has eaten so much away.

If you want to give yourself a serious workout, imagine that perhaps We are now each and all corpses shackled to a corpse. Individuals bereft of Place, Purpose, and Meaning, shackled together and to a government that has itself burst free from any shape, amorphously but omnivorously oozing out over the entire field of American life. We are no longer what We were meant to be, and neither is the government.

Is that enough of a rendezvous with destiny for ya?

NOTES

*He’s actually the Editor of ‘The New York Times Book Review’ and of the paper’s ‘Week in Review’ section (where the article is published). But it still had to get a green light from the higher ups, such as they are.

**Imagine if after that Anarchist blew up his waggon in front of the Wall Street Stock Exchange in 1920 (and then escaped back to his native Italy), the President had decided to consider all the world's Anarchists as 'terrorists' and to declare that since they were 'at war' with the United States, then the US was going to send its military to invade ... and put together a little list. And don't forget: not long after that, FDR was almost killed - and the Mayor of Chicago sitting next to him was - when Anton Czermak (another Southeast European, as they would have said back then) tried to shoot him.

***The noted commentator Leon Wieseltier, a senior Editor at ‘The New Republic’ magazine, shares his thoughts about Washington and the Beltway in the March 2th issue (p.40): “These are shabby days in the capital … for there are no heroes here now … there is almost no courage in the political class right now … everybody is transfixed only by their numbers … the instinct for self-preservation has routed all the finer instincts … there is no longer any dignity in in loss; if you lose a fight for a just cause; if you lose a fight you are merely a loser …”

****I offer this mental exercise to you: How much 'deconstruction' and its pooh-poohing of reality and Reality, and any working competence in dealing with them, has indeed hugely corroded and weakened Our individual and communal and national capacity to deal with important matters facing Us. And not only in matters of 'culture' and domestic politics and domestic policy ... consider that to cap off 30 years of the Left's 'deconstruction's' pooh-poohing of reality and Reality and consequences, the jingo Right (by then merged with the 'deconstruction-liberation' Left into 'the Beltway') went and invaded Iraq. They indeed did bring a 'gun' - most of the Army's available field force, much of the National Guard, and an even larger number of hired mercenaries from Blackwater and such - but they brought the gun to what turned out a totally different type of 'fight'. Seven years later - and with several spin-off 'wars' now raging - you can see what fools 'deconstruction' has made of Us in the eyes of the world; lethal and dangerous fools.

*****Recall Raymond Aron’s excellent conceptualization “democratic conservatism”, which he opposed both to revolutionary-utopian romanticism (from the Left) and to reactionary nostalgia and sentimentalism (from the Right). He realized in the late Sixties that he was starting to see what Tocqueville had called “literary politics” – the tendency of academics and others not responsible for effecting and sustaining actual and workable outcomes to judge societies by utopian standards (which, by their very definition, find all things wanting).

It was this garden-variety lunacy (sleazy when erected into a cottage-industry to effect and sustain professional advancement and popularity) which the vote-desperate Dems deputized as National Policy in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, gleefully joining the Boomers (in both their feckless Flower Child and arrogant Radical Cadre variants) in conceptually sweeping off the board everything that had gone before (which, nicely, included the Dems’ frakkulous expansion of the Vietnam fiasco that by 1969 Nixon had committed the Republicans to continuing on the pretext of ‘national honor’).

******And to repeat what I’ve said in prior Posts here, I would define that purpose in Lincoln’s words in his Second Inaugural: “to achieve a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations”.

ADDENDUM

Let me toss this at you. We have seen ‘humanitarian intervention’ frakkulously expand since the Clintons’ Administration, from the Left, in the name of Rescue. We have seen that expand to blend with some concept of ‘self defense’ in the Iraq War and the further ‘wars’ that it has spawned.

Now We are seeing ‘empowerment’ and ‘liberation’ of ‘women’, of entire peoples from patriarchy and oppressive traditions, folkways and – face it – from an entire culture, with all its heritage and traditions. (Nor am I here implying that all the folkways, cultures, heritages and traditions of all the peoples and sovereign nations of the world are all Goooooood.) See my Post here.

Is it at all inconceivable that as the Beltway further panders to the advocates of Big Pain and ‘empowerment’ and ‘liberation’ by trying to export the entire agenda overseas … that as this starts to speed up, then rather significant chunks of those other nations and peoples are going to resist having themselves ‘deconstructed’?

After all, even if they do ‘oppress’ – and given the elasticity of that term, which is about as much a play-clay term as ‘sex offender’ is over here nowadays – they will be sharp enough to realize (as the French did half a century and more ago) that to start playing with the Universal Corrosive of ‘deconstruction’ is to guarantee their entire cultural corrosion, a fundamental undermining of the entire Heritage, Tradition, and the fundaments - however imperfect - of such civilization as they and their ancestors have managed to achieve.

And if 'reconstruction' of such profoundly core structures is something to be undertaken only with the greatest care and prudence, the 'deconstruction' of them can only be infinitely more so. Especially since the results observable in America have been - to be more polite than those foreigners would be in their assessment - decidedly mixed if not worse.

And what will We do then? Send the Marines (or their super-drones and ‘bots) to ‘liberate’ and ‘empower’? Dead, white European males realized long ago that humans don’t like ‘armed missionaries’ – and I doubt that the fact that the US military version will come under the auspices of the secular illuminations of feministical dampdreams rather than bearing the Cross is going to make much difference to the ‘locals’.

They – to borrow the thought of Flannery O’Connor – can still tell a freakish danger when they see it. And they will resist. By whatever means necessary - to borrow the ominous phrase so favored by the Israeli State.

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Monday, March 22, 2010

MORE ON GABLER

(I've had a few more thoughts on the previous Post. I put them in an Addendum to it, but since it's been a few days, I'll put them up here as a free-standing Post. What I'm saying presumes that you've taken a look at the previous Post.)

I don’t really know what to make of the Dems at this point (and this is most certainly not a plug for the Republicans or to equate that Party and its ‘bases’ with genuine ‘conservatives’).

It seems that the vision and goal – and hardly a Liberal one, in any historical sense of the word – for the past four decades have been a) to give everybody (defined as their Identities) enough ‘space’ to be totally autonomous in their private lives, while there would be no mediating public or political common life (where ‘deliberation’ might lead to an awful lot of objections to their radical and extreme impositions).

The ‘government’ would simply attend to its assorted separated Identities, providing for them and expanding downward to fill all the empty space left by the now-gone mediating institutions and by the abandonment of any public expectations of genuine common political participation and a common public political life.

This was a recipe for the Regulatory-Preventive Nanny State – and so it is coming to pass.

The government – under the Dems but later on the Republicans as well – even expanded to somehow include in its list of things to do the provision of “happiness”. Although in Jefferson’s vision, the “pursuit of happiness” would be the task of the people themselves, and the government’s job was to provide minimal services and stay out of the way.

Yes, it became necessary for government to become more involved as the 19th and early 20th centuries saw an increasingly complicated economy, and since – though even classical Liberals didn’t like to mention it – the human capacity for Sin (which almost always involves making one’s own life ‘better’ at the expense of others or with non-bettering consequences for others) could easily take up residence in any human undertaking.

But individual adults – and citizens were expected to be adults, in the sense of conducting and sustaining a responsible self and life rather than in the more youthy point of view that adulthood merely meant you could do lots of stuff you couldn’t do before and nobody could tell you not to – were still seen as the vessels for pursuing happiness.

And for that matter, ‘happiness’ – when looked at with those pre-assumptions, when ‘framed’ like that – is still a pretty serious adult undertaking, that requires a lot of work ... mature work. Which again, is not the youthy take on the thing.

But in the late Sixties and with the 1970s erection of the Identities and their revolutions the government, claiming it was ‘liberal’, stepped in to be the great provider. And as I said before, it also had to ‘deconstruct’ the deliberative public political life of the nation, and literally assault the most profound ‘framing presumptions’ of American society – a ‘cultural’ campaign which had, though it was not Correct to notice it, hugely Political (and destructive) consequences for the American polity.

The Dems robustly and rabidly presided over the whole thing.

Now, as evidenced in Massachusetts’ recent Senate election, the Dems have seen the blowback (can you say Iraq and Af-Pak wars?).

The Party consensus seems to be that it should fall back on its bases – on black and Hispanic and women's turn-out – and keep on keeping on.

I hold no brief for keeping genuine minorities in subordinate status.

But I am rather greatly attached to a deliberative public political process as utterly essential to a democratic politics and the health of the American polity.

And if at this stage the objection were raised that an awful lot of ‘stuff’ that has gone on for the past 40 Biblical years would therefore be brought into question, well – that’s what happens when you try to impose a huge and wide and deep series of “shocks” on the nation in the interests of improving your demographics quickly and on the assumption that you can do it without adverse consequences (precisely the mistake then made in the military mis-adventures in the Middle East and the Greater Southwest Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere).

To ‘fall back on their bases’ – now characterizable as almost purely ‘minority’ and still revolutionary (in the not-so-good sense of that term) - will reduce the Dems to a Party of Minorities. (And that started when the Dems declared themselves the "Party of Women" in 1972, and then - questing for even more demographics - added in a whole bunch of other Identities to boot.)

And, as I have said, not merely in the sense that the Populist Farmers of the 1890s had less ‘power’ than the corporate industrialists. And I still take it as far more significant than has been widely discussed that ‘women’ (with all respect to the members of that numerous gender) got the vote in 1919 (or 1920 when the States finished ratifying it).

Since then – almost immediately thereafter – We got Prohibition (an unhappy mistake based on the pre-Gilligan assumptions that Mommy knows best and that what would be a good approach in a therapeutic setting can and must therefore be easily translated into a public policy setting). Which appears to be not necessarily so.

Nor can it be denied that ‘women’ (and by this I don’t mean all the females in the country, but rather the queasily amorphous sense used by certain advocacies – to whom the Dems indentured themselves in the Sixties and Seventies) had the vote for 50 full years before those late Sixties. And it had all been precisely to give them a larger voice in national political affairs and debate back in 1919.

Yet somehow in those late Sixties it became gospel – you should pardon the expression – that ‘women’ had been ‘oppressed’ so long and frakkulously that clearly democratic process was grossly insufficient – if not indeed antithetical – to their urgent demands.

And that the problem was – neatly but ominously – soooooo deeeeeeep in the American ethos that the whole thing would have to be ‘deconstructed’ in mid-air. And the government – led by the Dems at the outset, questing for useful demographics – had to get into the business of ‘deconstructing’ the fundamental ‘framing paradigms’ of the entire Citizenry, which meant a full-scale government-led campaign against the most profound constitutive elements of what makes not only a people a people (let alone a People) but also what makes people people. If you get my meaning.

This was more than "a shock" to be therapeutically administered to a patient who was not, arguably, having a heart attack; this was a blitzkrieg, shock-and-awe campaign mounted by a democratic and Constitutionally limited government not only against its own people (and People) but against the very foundations of its national ethos of a deliberative, democratic political process.

And it still seems to me that Gustav LeBon’s 1896 insight that ‘crowds’ are ‘feminine’ – in the sense of emotional, irrational, and prone to exaggerated and thus ‘violent’ swings - seems to have been borne out since the 1960s and 1970s as the burgeoning Nanny State (more formally the Regulatory-Preventive State) began to embrace what Judith Shklar called in the late 1950s and early 1960s “the liberalism of fear”: that ‘fear’ is a useful motivator to get ‘good things’ passed into law (and imposed upon the polity quickly and efficiently).

We are now a Nanny State where Mommy rules by a mixture of promises-of-happiness-provided and of fear, requiring Mommy-Nanny’s deeeeeep and ever-increasing involvement in the most intimate personal and even intrapersonal lives of the Citizenry. Let’s face it: to forcibly change how a Citizenry ‘frames’ life and life’s meaning is a pretty violent thing for a government to do – as anybody watching Mao’s Cultural Revolution with its cadres of Red Guards, essentially Brown Shirts with Little Red Books, could see.

So to run their same old game-plan, More of the Same, seems to me a non-starter for Dems (and certainly not good for the country). But that seems to be where they're headed.

But this raises an even more serious problem: if the Dems are going to shrink (in vision as well as demographics) into a ‘minority happiness’ Party, then what’s left of a broadly-based two-Party system?

Especially when the Republicans too have become infected with the ‘radical base’ approach to politics.

What happens then? What Party will speak for and represent ‘Americans’ (as opposed to Identities and ‘bases’)?

This country is beginning to remind me of France in the 1930s, in the stunningly impotent last years of the Third Republic.

That can’t be good.

We are not faced with 'invasion' by the 'Germans' - that trope so beloved of neocons and the Bush-Cheney banditti.

We are faced with the consequences of a decades-long, government-sponsored 'deconstruction' of The People, and of individuals as mature. deliberative and deliberate political agents - upon which the entire American Framing vision and its Constitution depends.

And what has usually 'protected' the country from the consequences of its less-wise decisions - that seemingly infinite strength of natural resources and industrial and productive pre-eminence - is gone now.

Which, when added to the 'deconstruction' of The People and of Americans as mature, productive, serious and responsible agents of their own lives and selves as well as of their own politics, simply undermines huge swaths of the nation's ability to face reality around it - and within itself.

Destiny is not knocking; it has the place surrounded and is waiting for an answer.

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Thursday, March 18, 2010

NEAL GABLER: WHAT ISN’T WRONG AND WHAT IS

Neal Gabler, noted author and commenter on public affairs and American culture, has an Op-Ed entitled “Politically Exhausted”.

It’s wrong, he says, to imagine that the American people are “angry” (he might have used “outraged” but that’s a dangerous word for a Correct thinker to use – but let me not get ahead of myself); it’s wrong to mistake “a group of extremists” – the Tea Party persons – for the American people.

What’s really wrong, he says, is that the American people “are not involved, energized, or even angry”.

In fact he says, they are “enervated, afflicted with an overwhelming sense of political exhaustion, dispirited over how wrong things are and uncertain that they ever can be made right. Simply put, they’ve given up.”

At this point I’m thinking that he’s on to something here.

But then – not.

These “futilists” (from ‘futility’, get it?) are, he thinks, “the real radicals”. At least the Tea Party persons are, he says, “optimists” – they still think that something can get done about “the American malaise”; whereas the futilists have pretty much given up.

You may recognize that word “malaise” – it harks back to Jimmy Carter, and a time when, especially for the Dems, everything was coming up roses. At least, compared to now. (When, I would say, all of the predictable baaad consequences – intended or unintended – have finally gotten their act together and created a Perfect Storm of frakkery … but let me not get ahead of myself here.)

He mentions Americans of the good old days: farmers angry at Eastern bankers who held the mortgages on their farms and “progressives” who attacked government corruption and the increasing power of the industrial trusts and “the various political movements of the Great Depression”, and even “the nascent conservative movement of the 1950s [that]was partly fueled by contempt for eastern intellectual elites – a Brahmin class [that] conservatives had felt transferred power from the despised bankers to the despised government”.

It’s always nice to see somebody bring in American history. Since so much of it has involved dead white males and their patriarchal oppressions, it’s refreshing to see somebody with some mainstream creds actually go rummaging around in that old attic (basement?) to see what’s useful.

But then, Gabler precisely does have those mainstream creds, and there’s a hefty conceptual fee for that membership, payable quarterly. So I’d look a little more carefully.

The late 19th century populists, the turn-of-the-century Progressives and Mugwumps, the folks in the Depression who had to live through the consequences of Wilson’s Federal Reserve a scant 15 years later … all of these folks – and even those 1950s “conservatives” who, troglodytes though they were (Gabler infers) for ‘despising government’, at least got involved.

When a writer is bunching together all of these groups – including “1950s conservatives”! – you know he’s after big game; he’s stuffing everything but the kitchen sink into his blunderbuss.

“What was common to those disparate groups”, Gabler says, was “a sense of outrage [there’s the word] that the system was working against them”. This is cheeky: he had led us to think he was going all progressive here, and yet he lets the “outrage” genie out of the bottle.

That’s a doubly dangerous thing. Yes, it might actually get folks to feeling some outrage, although perhaps – and hardly inconceivably – at his own dear ‘progressives’ (those artistes formerly known as ‘liberals’).

Second, it might get folks remembering just how much “outrage” the government (especially when the Dems really had da powah) stoked and then surfed, slathering and shoveling it liberally (as it were) over every white, male, tradition-minded, male-identified, male-enabling man or woman in the country.

Does he really want folks remembering any of that? Or is he so far gone that he can’t imagine anybody actually looking at the Dems (he carefully and shrewdly doesn’t actually use Party references in the piece) for any of Our current frakkulous and frakkulent predicament?

It was the Dems, after all, who showed the Republicans in the 1970s just how a democratic deliberative politics could be successfully undermined, ‘deconstructed’ and kicked to the curb in the name of ‘outrage’, ‘pain’, ‘emergencies’, ‘rights’, ‘liberation’, ‘empowerment’, ‘progress’ and Good Causes generally. And how anybody who had any doubts ‘just didn’t get it’ – you remember all that; you may well have been included on the target lists, as a member of one of the proscribed groups, ‘modern’ Kulaks.

Pay heed, former targets of opprobrium, members of a formerly proscribed Kulak class. You are now being addressed by one of the mainstream’s thinkers – and for the occasion you will be let out into the sunshine and actually addressed by this mainstream apparatchik from the Seat of Power as if you were ‘a person’, perhaps even a Citizen … but don’t let it go to your head.

They’ve gone too far to simply apologize and admit mistakes now. Even if Stalin were to die, my friends … they’ve gone too far now. They’ve done too many things, they’re in too deep. So listen politely. And for God's sake keep the ever-essential straight face.

Nicely, Gabler immediately addresses the very thoughts prompted above: “What was common to these disparate groups was a sense of outrage that the system was working against them, but also a sense that the system could be reformed, even if it took a shock to do so”.

Now read that over a couple of times. Pretend that you’re – oh, say – a Soviet citizen (such as the term applied in that system) reading Pravda or Izvestia. What I think you’ll find is this: a verrrrrry shrewd effort to explain away a lot of very real history. Sleazy attempt – really.

Because neither the 19th century Populists nor the Mugwumps and Progressives of the pre-World War 1 era nor the various Depression era “groups” (the Bonus Army?) ever really set out to “shock” or use “shock”. And none of them ever sought to carry on a sustained attack on the most fundamental thoughts and thought-processes and the most profound beliefs of the entire Citizenry.

No, the “shock” was part of the gleeful and premeditated game-plan of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies Identities, spear-headed by the deconstructing, man-hating, you-just-don’t-get-it, the-Constitution-is-quaint-and-oppressive radical revolutionary elements whom the Dems had decided to embrace (see my immediately previous Post) in order to improve their demographics.

And in the service of which the stifling, deliberation-strangling Political Correctness was imposed with the full force and authority of the political power of the government that the Dems – and later the Republicans – settled for: a government that would collect its votes by pandering to the Identities’ every demand while collecting cash from PACs (invented by the Dems) whereby corporations could make regular payments to pols in return for whatever ‘liberation’ they wanted: favoritism, deregulation, offshoring their jobs … you name it. Not for nothing did one Senator recently say about Capitol Hill that “the banks own this place”.

Shock upon shock upon deconstructive shock, from Left and Right. For almost 40 Biblical years.

THIS is what Gabler is trying to smuggle into your good graces as just another optimistic, can-do, good old-fashioned American political effort to make things better.

It was no such thing.

Indeed, Our present catastrophic situation is precisely the consequence of all that synergy.

And worse, the Dems must be thinking and We should too: what if all those ‘revolutions’ and the agendas and the ideas behind those agendas were just plain wrong?

What if folks start thinking about that?

This is hardly impossible. After all, ‘backlash’ was a handy phrase to cover wayyyy too much: a) there may have been those who simply didn’t like ‘change’ and wanted everything to stay the same and b) there may have been some who really wanted to deliberately keep ‘oppressing’ some folks (or, you have to imagine, most folks). But the (a) group were pretty much within their human rights to be leery of a change and a democratic government and politics can’t simply steamroll them. And the (b) group was probably kind of small, and again the whole purpose of a deliberative democracy’s politics is to persuade such folks.

But then too there were lots of other folks: i) there were those who just thought that the amount of change being demanded really needed to be handled slowly and carefully; ii) there were those who might have objected to the method of simply steamrolling over everybody else in the service of the revolutionary agendas; iii) there were those who may well have objected to the content and consequences of this or that among the many revolutionary agendas and wanted, prudently as well as ‘traditionally’, to hash everything out deliberatively among the whole People. They got steamrolled by the Dems too.

I’m thinking that the Dems in the early 1970s remembered what happened to Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 when he suddenly waved the ‘E’ word (extremism; as in ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice’) around brazenly. Americans get nervous with Extremism, and Goldwater was wrecked as a candidate forthwith.

And the Dems realized all that a decade or so later and figured (slyly) that the very real extremism of their new embrace of the revolutionary agendas – in the content and in the method – had to be hidden somehow. So Political Correctness arose almost immediately.

And as I’ve mentioned before, in this regard the Dems borrowed from the Goebbels playbook; and actually, when you think of it, Goebby and the Dems were actually trying to do the same thing: run a verrrry bad bunch of ideas by the citizens without truthfully presenting them but rather hiding them in euphemism and misdirection, or by ‘optimistic’ visions of how wonderful everything was going to be, or by stampeding folks with screams of unbridled emotion.

And of course they – like Goebby – weren’t primarily thinking of what was good for their country, but what was good for their Party (although they, like Goebby, had convinced themselves that what was good for their Party was naturally good for their country).

And you can’t really say that those revolutionary ideas have ‘worked’, all these years later. The bad news has been hidden all along, officially anyway, and it’s only now that bad consequences – intended or unintended – are now becoming too obvious to ignore.

And, really, most of these ‘ideas’ would have remained as simply curious and variously interesting ideas, if a little or a lot outré, except that the Dems grabbed them all up in a bunch and deputized them all as national policy and ‘progress’ and ‘rights’ and all the rest. And you can see where that has all led to.

In a way the Beltway elites (taking the entire country with them) now resemble somebody unhinged who jumped off the Empire State Building – sure that s/he could fly. It’s been a great blast, for a hundred stories or so, and any thought that one couldn’t really fly was pooh-poohed since, clearly, one was still airborne.

But now it’s getting to the point where the cracks in the sidewalk down on the street are close enough to see, and … how hide from the baaaad consequences now??? The vigorous flapping of many official arms doesn't seem to be gaining Us any altitude. You see the problem.

It’s also clear to me from looking at Gabler’s sly ploy that the formerly-known-as-liberals know exactly why they’re in trouble now: it’s not just the economy – that disaster is bad enough.

But worse is that it has begun to bring to the surface all the feelings of all the folks whom they have shocked for all these frakkulous decades. People, more than you’d think, have known that the Emperor has had no clothes on for quite a while. But now they’re starting to say it. And lots of others are now being to see it.

And almost 40 years of telling wayyyy too many Americans that they just don’t get it and are troglodytes … that’s a lot of pent-up frustration. There’s an awful lot of water backed up behind that dam.

Nor can they use their favorite ploy: that it’s all just 'backlash'. That’s worked for decades, but it’s too old and too much a part of the old game. And simply using the term reminds too many of too much - those baaaad old days when gleefully tarring most of the citizenry with terms of disdainful opprobrium became the height of elite wisdom.

They could hope to get the ‘conservatives’ to go along with this newest effort – both Parties have now morphed into ‘the Beltway’. But the ‘conservatives’ have been smart enough to jump ship and start going after the ‘liberals-progressives’. And it doesn’t help Gabler & Company’s cause that things pretty much started with the Dems.

And as I have said, Bush and Company merely used 9-11 as an opportunity to extend ‘deconstruction’ into American foreign policy – what was Iraq if not ‘deconstructed’? – and to extend the evisceration of the “quaint” US Constitution into even more fundamental depths.

Rumsfeld mentioned on 9-11 that this was an opportunity to “go massive”; “sweep it all up – things related and things not”.* You may also recall Robert Kagan, in a 1996 article in either ‘Harpers’ or ‘The Atlantic’ gushing manfully about how he interviewed young Majors at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, bravely and enthusiastically telling him how they were training to “go domestic”.

Lovely.

And 'shock' then blended into the game-plan of the Rightists and Big Money: 'creative destruction' was a 'shock' but it was 'creative' - wheeeeeeee!

Americans today have little confidence in Congress, Gabler notes (only 34% think most Members deserve re-election) and there’s always Obama’s ever-shifting polls.

But Gabler – courageously enough – puts all that aside in favor of the stunning CNN poll results that reveal 60% of Americans “don’t believe that democracy is working”.

He considers this to be a failure of nerve, courage, and pluck on the part of the American people.

This, despite the fact that one of the immovable presumptions of the entire panoply of ‘revolutions’ several long decades ago was that democracy and democratic deliberation toward wide consensus was “too slow” in the face of the ‘outrage’, the ‘oppression’, and the ‘emergency’ (however defined). And that anyway most of the American people ‘just didn’t get it’ so who cared what they thought anyway.

The American People “just didn’t get it” – and the only way they could earn input into their own political system was to cave in to the assorted demands and ‘get it’ – and that until then they would just be a lumpen-herd of oppressive, patriarchal, racist troglodytes who were in desperate need (whether they knew it or not) of the ministrations of the determined and cocksure cadres of ‘progress’ and ‘change’.

Thus the political Parties and the political system turned into ‘the Beltway’ as it is today, an un-diselectable nomenklatura that (Gabler dassn’t observe) bears all too much resemblance to the Soviet Party apparatchiki of the late-1970s: too far into it to back out, queasily aware that nothing was working, and unable to embrace any game-plan except More of the Same. And thus the whole huge rickety wreck shambled along portentously until the sudden end on December 1991, by way of an utterly frakkulous military misadventure in Afghanistan.** Oh, and despite the efforts of a decent guy who bought into the system but figured he could ‘reform’ it and make it work (Gorby, we hardly knew ye! Don’t vorry – be hapski!).

But Gabler is going to blame the American people for getting the idea (loudly trumpeted about and against them for decades by the Beltway and its Identities and their Advocacies) that they – the American people – weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Which in the event turns out to be true only about the money.

But the American people are indeed disenchanted; and they no longer function as The People, as The American People. And THAT, Gabler goes on to say, is a) their own lazy and uncourageous fault and b) the result of “40 years of the steady, unrelenting drumbeat that government is always the problem and that if you could just sap its strength everything would be OK”.

Well, I hold no brief for any Rightist ranting. But it can hardly be illogical that as the country in the 1970s started to ‘deconstruct’ or be deconstructed, with the full authority of the Beltway behind the process, then anybody with even a modest sense of prudence and political responsibility would want to try to put the brakes on it.

Reagan capitalized on that sense, but of course Beltway politics had already figured out its deal with the Devil (Reagan being a sister-under-the-skin to Tip O’Neill, inventor of the PACS ): the government that would be slowed down (or not) in the matters of culture (a far more politically profound matter than anyone had realized) would also be slowed down in matters of corporate and fiscal regulation.

How else to pander to both Big Pain and Big Money?

And as the industrial base was frittered away (with the acquiescence of the Identities who were looking to de-masculinize and de-white-ify everything in sight) Reagan kept everyone happy with ‘money’ – and America would no longer be a producing nation but a ‘consuming’ one. He borrowed; and by the Gulf War (you may recall) the great US government reported to the world that it would be happy to put up the troops and stuff, but that contributions to offset costs would be gratefully accepted. Toyota, you may also recall, answered the call for cash by sending shiploads of big white SUV’s from Japan to ferry the officers around the sandy highways and byways of Kuwait.

American military personnel being ferried to the front in Japanese trucks – a brave new world it was in 1990!

By the time of the Lesser Bush (to the extent that term of comparison applies among the Bush clan) borrowing was used up so ‘credit’ and ‘bubbles’ were necessary. Not just to keep Big Money happy but because by that point Big Money and Big Military were about the only two ‘industries’ the country had left.

Lovely.

AND folks who didn’t have enough ‘credit’ to keep ‘consuming’ might just start having enough time on their hands to take a deeper look and see what had happened to the country. No wonder Cheney wanted to start building big concentration camps in the middle of the country – and not for ‘aliens’.

And they might start realizing that the America of steady, well-paying jobs upon which you could build a life, a career, and a family has been 'creatively deconstructed' and is never coming back. The borrowed-money and the credit are scams that have now been played out. There's nothing left but reality. Real reality.

The party's over. And what Gabler and the gang now fear is that folks are going to start thinking that the Party's over too.

That's why the wars seem weirdly to never-end and indeed to expand. If the Beltway doesn't go out and start taking stuff from other peoples then there's really nothing left. Al Capone - from wherever he is - can watch the entire government adopt his play-book.

But Gabler snarkily blames “the conservatives”. They kept trying to hobble the government and they have succeeded. That’s it. That’s his explanation as to how government failed and how the American people have become so listless and politically “enervated”. Oh, and he blames the American People - not only troglodyte lumps that 'just don't get it' but cowards as well (though, most slyly, he says nothing about the pandered-unto Identities).

Phooey. Phooey and baloney. Phooey, baloney, and frak.

An end-run was done around the American people 40 years ago by the Dems, the Republicans got in on the act (the PAC money scheme was too much to resist) and the Beltway solidified into the solid-waste hell that it is now.

Gabler does no service by intoning FDR’s 1933 exhortation that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”. Far too many Americans no longer embrace the (macho?) robustness that characterized those generations that got themselves through the Depression and then went on to win World War 2 a few years later. The American treasure of national resources and industrial infrastructure – and that equally vital treasure of a productive ‘culture’ … all gone, deconstructed and allowed to be broken up and shipped overseas. And the rest of the world is no longer comprised of ‘natives’ or ‘old, decadent former empires’.

And the best the Dems can hope for is that if we just elect a ‘black’ or a ‘woman’ to this or that high-office, or let the lesbians run the military – then America will be ‘better’ and ‘successful’ again. Nobody who remembers that photo of Condi Rice, in pearls and high heels under a flight helmet and inflatable vest, waiting on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln (cruising unhappily just off her liberty port of San Diego in order to provide the backdrop) for ‘her man’ George Bush the Great Pretender to ‘fly’ his aircraft onto the deck, step out in a flight suit, and proclaim Mission Accomplished … nobody not on antidepressants could contemplate that image and not realize that ‘women’ aren’t gonna save anything. (Not that I’m making a plug for the manhood of G.W. Bush).

Far more than militaries famously do, American political elites are pinning their hopes on winning the ‘wars’ they proclaimed decades ago. Ask the French and the Poles how that worked for them in 1939 and 1940.

Gabler is running the latest ‘spin’ play. It’s all the “conservatives’” fault. And the fault of the American People for forming the clear and distinct impression that the Beltway isn't really working for them anymore. Perhaps even that the Beltway - Dems and Republicans bipartisanly together - has given up on democracy. (Which, if you ask me, happened decades ago.)

All I can see is Mussolini trying to evade dismissal and arrest that hot night in August of 1943 in front of the Fascist Grand Council, with the unexpected and unintended consequences of years’ worth of his policies now landing on the beaches of Southern Italy and heading north: I tedeschi sono responsabili da tutto! The Germans are responsible for the whole thing. Yah.

So the Dems want Us to ‘hope’. And they snidely opine that those who are not ‘optimistic’ are somehow existential failures and that We need to ‘man up’ (well, of course, the Dems wouldn’t say that).

We need to be ‘hopeful’ without there being any ground for Hope (there not being any God except a private one, and the government not being on real great terms with Him for reasons of political expediency). We need to be ‘hopeful’ without getting all ‘macho’ or Stoic or trying to master Our emotions so that We can concentrate on meeting the challenge(s). We need to be ‘hopeful’ without really doing any serious calculation as to what very real problems bethump Us and just how difficult Our situation is.

And no ‘let this be Our finest hour’ stuff! Too Churchill (dead white European male) for the Dems and toooo icky a context for the neocons to deploy their favorite totem of toughness.

Hope without toughness. Or character. Or serious thought.

Hope as a spin. Hope as a script device. Hope as a pose. Hope as a good line delivered in just the right light and setting.

For the ongoing soap-opera that America has reely reely become now.

Well, thanks but no thanks, Gabby.

As I’ve been saying for a while: the first challenge facing The People is not to pick the correct (and Correct) ‘elite’ to turn to for rescue. I don’t trust cadres, and haven’t since the days of Stalin and Mao.***

No, this is a crisis first and foremost of Character. Of Maturity. Of a solid and energetic respect for and treasuring of the heritage passed on by the Framers.

It is a struggle that has to waged personally by every individual Citizen, to reclaim that ground of self that enables The People to Ground the government. It is, after all, a government of Them, by Them, and for Them. And in its genuine ethos it is indeed now in danger of perishing from the earth.

Only when every Americans realize – far more profoundly than any cutesy radical feminist mantra – that the personal is indeed the political – the Political – will We ever stand a chance of genuinely “achieving a just and a lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations”.

Is that enough of a rendezvous with destiny for ya?

NOTES

*Quoted by David Bromwich in his article “Euphemism and American Violence”, ‘The New York Review of Books’, April 3, 2008, p.28.

**Nicely, just a week prior to Gabler, an article was published in the same paper about how ‘Diversity’ has become an industry, but that that it isn’t working and seems to have achieved no measurable results. And that those who make a living off of it claim that it’s unfair to judge their stock-in-trade as a failure since they’ve been working to get it right for 40 years. And that – anyway – it’s a business that works in a realm that is tooooo deeeeeeep for objective and scientific measurement of results. But, of course, was rightly made public law and policy at huge public and private expense and – because it’s so important – cannot really be ‘judged’ or evaluated as to its efficacy or even doubted.

In that regard, recall the darkly marvelous crapulence of the Chief of Staff of the Army, commenting on the recent Fort Hood shootings where a Major – and a psychiatrist! – of Middle Eastern origin went into jihad mode and killed service-members in the base medical facility. It would be a shame, opined His Generalship, if this regrettable but isolated incident were allowed to interrupt the military’s thorough commitment to ‘diversity’.

Although anyone with awareness enough to cross the street to avoid a pit-bull that’s snarling and has foam on its mouth can be forgiven for wondering if the very reason that this long-troubled individual was allowed to remain in the military and even get promoted was that to remove him would be ‘intolerant’, ‘judgmental’, and ‘insensitive’.

And perhaps – after decades of pulling all the wires of their capacity for accurate and effective and decisive ‘judgment’ out of their brains - the most senior military brass are no longer really good at making accurate and effective and decisive judgments about military operations and ‘war’ in general. Which would explain a bunch of things nowadays.

***Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, with the Little Red Book being waved around like paper flags on the Fourth of July, was really his way of getting rid of all the folks who held him responsible for killing untold millions of his countrymen in the great famine of 1957. By the time he got through – by dying and getting out of town 10 years later – he had inspired the young and the idealistic to massacre and deconstruct everyone and everything around them. Everyone who harbored doubts about the Great Helmsman’s irrefutable wisdom; everything like ‘tradition’ and ‘reason’ that could ground an opposition to his destructive policies; any Memory that could stand in witness against what he had truly caused.

ADDENDUM

I don’t really know what to make of the Dems at this point (and this is most certainly not a plug for the Republicans or to equate that Party and its ‘bases’ with genuine ‘conservatives’).

It seems that the vision and goal – and hardly a Liberal one, in any historical sense of the word – for the past four decades is a) to give everybody (defined as their Identities) enough ‘space’ to be totally autonomous in their private lives, while there would be no mediating public or political common life (where ‘deliberation’ might lead to an awful lot of objections to their radical and extreme impositions).

The ‘government’ would simply attend to its assorted separated Identities, providing for them and expanding downward to fill all the empty space left by the now-gone mediating institutions and by the abandonment of any public expectations of genuine common political participation and a common public political life.

This was a recipe for the Regulatory-Preventive Nanny State – and so it is coming to pass.

The government – under the Dems but later on the Republicans as well – even expanded to somehow include in its list of things to do the provision of “happiness”. Although in Jefferson’s vision, the “pursuit of happiness” would be the task of the people themselves, and the government’s job was to provide minimal services and stay out of the way.

Yes, it became necessary for government to become more involved as the 19th and early 20th centuries saw an increasingly complicated economy, and since – though even classical Liberals didn’t like to mention it – the human capacity for Sin (which almost always involves making one’s own life ‘better’ at the expense of others or with non-bettering consequences for others) could easily take up residence in any human undertaking.

But individual adults – and citizens were expected to be adults, in the sense of conducting and sustaining a responsible self and life rather than in the more youthy point of view that adulthood merely meant you could do lots of stuff you couldn’t do before and nobody could tell you not to – were still seen as the vessels for pursuing happiness.

And for that matter, ‘happiness’ – when looked at with those pre-assumptions, when ‘framed’ like that – is still a pretty serious adult undertaking, that requires a lot of work. Which again, is not the youthy take on the thing.

But once – in the late Sixties and with the 1970s erection of the Identities and their revolutions – the government, claiming it was ‘liberal’, stepped in to be the great provider. And as I said before, it also had to ‘deconstruct’ the deliberative public political life of the nation, and literally assault the most profound ‘framing presumptions’ of American society – a ‘cultural’ campaign which had, though it was not Correct to notice it, hugely Political (and destructive) consequences for the American polity.

The Dems robustly and rabidly presided over the whole thing.

Now, as evidenced in Massachusetts’ recent Senate election, the Dems have seen a blowback (can you say Iraq and Af-Pak wars?).

The Party consensus seems to be that should fall back on its bases – on black and Hispanic minority turn-out – and keep on keeping on.

I hold no brief for keeping minorities in subordinate status.

But I am rather greatly attached to a deliberative public political process as utterly essential to a democratic politics and the health of the American polity.

And if at this stage the objection were raised that an awful lot of ‘stuff’ that has gone on for the past 40 Biblical years would therefore be brought into question, well – that’s what happens when you try to impose a huge and wide and deep series of “shocks” on the nation in the interests of improving your demographics quickly and on the assumption that you can do it without adverse consequences (precisely the mistake then made in the military mis-adventures in the Middle East and the Greater Southwest Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere).

To ‘fall back on their bases’ – now characterizable as almost purely ‘minority’ and still revolutionary (in the not-so-good sense of that term) will reduce the Dems to a Party of Minorities.

And, as I have said, not merely in the sense that the Farmers of the 1890s had less ‘power’ than the corporate industrialists. And I still take it as far more significant than has been widely discussed that ‘women’ (with all respect to the members of that numerous gender) got the vote in 1919 (or 1920 when the States finished ratifying it).

Since then – almost immediately thereafter – We got Prohibition (an unhappy mistake based on the pre-Gilligan assumptions that Mommy knows best and that what would be a good approach in a therapeutic setting can and must therefore be easily translated into a public policy setting). Which appears to be not necessarily so.

And it still seems to me that Gustav LeBon’s 1896 insight that ‘crowds’ are ‘feminine’ – in the sense of emotional, irrational, and prone to exaggerated and thus ‘violent’ swings - seems to have been borne out since the 1960s and 1970s as the burgeoning Nanny State (more formally the Regulatory-Preventive State) began to embrace what Judith Shklar called in the late 1950s and early 1960s “the liberalism of fear”: that ‘fear’ is a useful motivator to get ‘good things’ passed into law (and imposed upon the polity quickly and efficiently).

We are now a Nanny State where Mommy rules by a mixture of promises-of-happiness-provided and fear (requiring Mommy-Nanny’s deeeeeep and ever-increasing involvement in the most intimate personal and even intrapersonal lives of the Citizenry (let’s face it: to forcibly change how a Citizenry ‘frames’ life and life’s meaning is a pretty violent thing for a government to do – as anybody watching Mao’s Cultural Revolution with its cadres of Red Guards, essentially Brown Shirts with Little Red Books, could see).

So to run their same old game-plan, More of the Same, seems to me a non-starter for Dems (and certainly not good for the country).

But this raises an even more serious problem: if the Dems are going to shrink (in vision as well as demographics) into a ‘minority happiness’ Party, then what’s left of a broadly-based two-Party system?

Especially when the Republicans too have become infected with the ‘radical base’ approach to politics.

What happens then? What Party will speak for and represent ‘Americans’ (as opposed to Identities and ‘bases’)?

This country is beginning to remind me of France in the 1930s, in the stunningly impotent last years of the Third Republic.

That can’t be good.

We are not faced with 'invasion' by the 'Germans' - that trope so beloved of neocons and the Bush-Cheney banditti.

We are faced with the consequences of a decades-long, government-sponsored 'deconstruction' of The People, and of individuals as mature. deliberative and deliberate political agents - upon which the entire American Framing vision and its Constitution depends.

And what has usually 'protected' the country from the consequences of its less-wise decisions - that seemingly infinite strength of natural resources and industrial and productive pre-eminence - is gone now.

Which, when added to the 'deconstruction' of The People and of Americans as mature, productive, serious and responsible agents of their own lives and selves as well as of their own politics, simply undermines huge swaths of the nation's ability to face reality around it - and within itself.

Destiny is not knocking; it has the place surrounded and is waiting for an answer.

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