SOME PROFOUND CONSEQUENCES

(I have just put the following text up as an Addendum to the immediately preceding Post on Catharine MacKinnon, but I am also putting it up here as a free-standing Post. My next, and final, essay on MacKinnon will follow shortly.)

I repeat here a thought I have expressed in other Posts:

The R-Feminist Project surfed the wave generated by Martin Luther King’s genuinely American efforts against Jim Crow in the South in the 1950s and early 1960s but actually hijacked that momentum for its own purposes which, stemming from the Alien political and Cultural Universe of Marx, Lenin and Gramsci, has soused the country – with the vital enabling collaboration of American elites and the several Branches of government – with the Content and Method of a fundamentally antithetical and hostile anti-democratic and anti-American and anti-Western political Stance and Vision and Agenda.

As MacKinnon demonstrates, Marx’s Vision was taken over by R-Feminism, essentially substituting ‘women’ for ‘proletariat’ and ‘sex’ for ‘labor’ and furthermore taking the whole matter even further into the abstractions of ‘ideas’ (which, neatly, many don’t even realize they hold) and ideology and igniting a still-burning ‘war of ideas’ deep in the timbers of the nation’s most basic assumptions and core beliefs and first principles.

But in a second and simultaneous take-over, MacKinnon neatly frames the R-Feminist Project as being some even larger, deeper, and more widespread version of King’s (and the government’s) campaign to stamp-out the Jim Crow regime in the American South as it existed in the pre-1965 era.

In this new scenario, the ‘white, male, dominant, oppressive, hegemonic’ (and so on and so forth) Culture is Jim Crow; the white males are the Southern racist ‘whites’, and ‘women’ are the hapless but sturdy Southern ‘Negroes’.

The government’s job now – as then – is conceived as being to root out the ‘regime’ just as the government rooted-out the Jim Crow regime half a century and more ago.

Naturally, back then, since so many Southerners had been raised in the ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ of Jim Crow, then they could not reliably be expected to abolish the regime through their own democratic action, since they were so soused in it that they didn’t even realize it (and thus, to use R-Feminism’s later phrase, they ‘just didn’t get it’).

So the government – with tenuous legitimacy – had to go in and do the job. And not only abolish the overtly racist web of State laws but also introduce and impose policies and regulatory and judicial procedures that would presume such an incompetence on the part of the Southern Citizenry and would therefore preventively terraform them and their society and culture so that Jim Crow would be thoroughly eradicated.

When now this scenario is transposed by R-Feminism, then the government is faced with an entire country and Citizenry that ‘just doesn’t get it’, and its job is – for as long as the ‘emergency’ exists – to dispense with democratic process and get on with imposing.

But the target of such impositional government action is now the entire American Cultural Universe, which has been allegedly treating ‘women’ even worse than the Southerners treated the ‘Negroes’. The terraforming thus now required is so vast and profound, and requires such essential deconstructing of institutions (family, marriage, ‘sex’ itself) and of first principles (objectivity, tradition, belief in any Beyond, jurisprudence and jurispraxis) and of the Framing Vision’s vision of democratic politics and process that the government must literally become an active, omnipresent police state-type of regime itself.

And of course, since ‘patriarchy’ has been going on since the beginning of recorded history, then this ‘emergency’ bids fair to last almost as long. (Echoed eerily in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, which is predicted by government to last for ‘generations’ if not longer.)

This has not only set the government on a verrrry dangerous course vis-à-vis its own Citizenry and polity and Framing Vision and its principles, but it also skews the government into dishonesty and illegitimate practices. Thus, for example, while all the major anti-discrimination laws of the early post-1966 era were framed in race (and later gender) neutral language, and thus clearly meant to apply to all instances of discrimination, yet in practice those laws and associated policies and regulations have actually been deployed only against the ‘dominant, hegemonic, oppressive’ targets and have not been – and some claim cannot be – deployed against certain favored but equally discriminatory targets (i.e. once you are a ‘minority’ thus ‘oppressed’, you cannot be accused of ‘discrimination’ and the anti-discriminatory laws and policies cannot be applied to you). Which further skews what is already a lethally fraught dynamic.

Thus ‘affirmative action’ laws and policies, already gravely fraught in terms of genuinely democratic process, are upheld by the most shaky justifications even by the Supreme Court (whose assorted justifying decisions on affirmative action (race, gender, or otherwise) are, when placed side by side, wildly divergent among themselves).

This can only further corrupt the government, corrode its legitimacy, and further weaken the confidence and competence of the Citizenry, especially seen collectively as The People.

It is no wonder, then, that in his recent State of the Union Address Obama (the poster-president of post-1972 American ‘liberalism’ and himself a constitutional-law professor) burbles longingly that Americans should be more like ‘the military’. This, frankly, stuns. Yet it is also hugely revelatory of the fundamental operative dynamics that have been driving this whole thing from Day One.

Reagan, of course, also valorized the military (as opposed to the ‘civilian’) mindset and culture, trying to compensate for the already-evident frak created by the combined assaults of Boomer-culture and deconstructive, ‘liberating’ anything-goes culture associated with Identity Politics’ need to create cultural ‘space’ for its many new groups and their desires and demands. While also trying to get the country back into that ‘wartime’ unity and respect for order and obedience (and commitment and productivity) that characterized the more highly militarized – or at least organized – America of the WW2 years. This was touted as ‘conservative’.

But then Bush 2 intensified that initiative, not only for the same purposes as Reagan, but also to a) unite a by-now even more deeply fractalized Citizenry b) in the service of a hugely dubious new national militarization and military-dependent foreign policy that would include generations-long ‘war’.

Yet – in what should be a shocking and highly alarming development – We are now faced with a ‘liberal’ President seeking to do precisely the same thing.

Once again, and as it has always been with Identity Politics domestically, an Enemy is all the country can reliably be expected to rally itself around: one can rally around only by being rallied against. This truly fatal gambit shrieks of a profound vacuum at the heart and core of the nation and of the Citizenry.

And who can be surprised, since the nation’s Framing Vision and Culture have been so consistently attacked and ‘deconstructed’ for half a century now? And by the government itself.

And so dishonestly spun as if it were all ‘liberal’ and ‘liberating’ and thus no Correct or ‘appropriate’ opinion could oppose it or even point out the truly awful and lethal costs to such a government and elite-managed agenda.

How ‘liberating’ can it be for The People to adopt the Stance toward their own government (of which, in the Framing Vision, they are the ultimate governors) that soldiers must perforce adopt toward their commanders and command authority? This "presidential liberalism" is no liberalism at all; it is, rather, a profound political regression to that subservience to Crown authority from which the Revolutionary and Framing generation sought to free this country. And of what use will all the liberalistic 'total autonomy' be if one is expected to be a soldier in the army of the President? And there should never ever be a time when a civilian derives more of a sense of meaning from declaring the President to be 'my commander-in-chief' rather than deriving that sense of meaning from his/her status as Citizen of this Republic. Is that news? Is it political rocket science?

Whatever this exhortation of Obama’s leads toward (nor do I expect any Republican candidate to dissent from it) it does not lead toward, nor does it bode well for, a continuation of American democracy in any recognizable sense whatsoever.

All of this flows in great part from MacKinnon (thus also from Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci) and from all her fellow/sister travelers and the noxious and toxic scenarios, framings, and visions that they have sought – with, alas, great success – to impose upon the country, with the aforementioned pandering assistance of the elites and the government itself in all its Branches and in all its burgeoning bureaucracies (and police powers).