Chez Odysseus

2012-02-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

BILL MOYERS: NOT ENOUGH

Bill Moyers very recently answered the question: Why is American society so divided?

It’s a short answer, only two paragraphs long. You can read it here.

In light of what I have been talking about, he offers an excellent example of how so much commentary – no matter how well-intentioned or no matter how notable the commentator – has fallen short of the mark in addressing the core problem and the core dynamics feeding the abyssal and multiple divisions that have fractalized American society.

“Well, I think it’s part of human nature… and it has been ever thus”, he begins.

So he is going to ascribe Our current profound (and lethal) condition to being merely the usual human dynamics of fractiousness and disagreement. And maybe a particularly strong case of it. But nothing more. This sort of thing, he implicitly burbles, has been around ever since humanity began.

It’s not quite Nothing to see here folks, go on home now – but it’s a hell of a lot less than a sufficient and clear and accurate analysis and diagnosis.

Then – and this is where he rises to PBS levels of sweet and informed reasonableness – he expounds a bit on his historical examples. First, the example of Joseph being left to die by his brothers in the Book of Genesis (“the Bible’s First Family is so contentious”). So we’re into family-dynamics therapy here: sibling rivalry and that sort of thing.

Second, the example of the American colonists being so “divided” on the matter of revolution and independence that fully a third remained loyal to the British Crown, a third fought for or supported independence, and a third “stayed on the sidelines”. But in the Revolution, the American Experiment was literally being formed – taking shape, in its birth agonies (and glories). It was precisely this struggle that gave historical shape and form to the American Vision that would then be politically stabilized in the Constitution.

And that was – I hope he doesn’t have to be told – a hell of a lot more than a ‘family squabble’: it was a world-class, world-historical struggle to establish the right of human beings to govern their own governments. And that presumed their competence to do so, through the individual having mastered the art of governing by governing his/her own self.

So in this example Moyers is actually going back beyond what is precisely at issue in Our present situation: the American Framing Vision itself. And he grossly under-describes the regime-shattering, amazing and wondrous Newness of the whole proposition.

But that plays to the pomo’s and Gramscians and their bases here among the various Correctness-sodden elites. America is, in that fever-dark dampdream, not a worthy Vision but rather a vision of Hell for the ‘marginalized’ and therefore its Culture – even more than its government – should be attacked root and branch at every opportunity using every possible pretext to agitate toward that end , especially since there is actually no objective reality and reality is whatever any individual or group (a serious incoherence here) feels it to be since there’s no use thinking because there’s no reality to think about.

But the nice PBS part is that it’s all in a good cause and no real damage is being done and rather, indeed, it’s all turning up roses and there’s no cause for alarm – let the chai and chardonnay flow! (When actually, in an eerie symmetry, We are not really so far removed from the passengers of that Italian cruise liner Costa Concordia whose command staff ran her aground by operating against all the regs, then told everybody not to worry, and then got the hell into a lifeboat themselves while the things could still be launched. Funny how the Universe moves.)

His next example is from the Civil War era: “We were so divided over slavery we went to war, turning families against families, neighbors against neighbors, and the soil red with each other’s blood”.

We were not only divided over slavery. We were also divided over the matter of the Union and of the Constitution (indeed, one of the great if no longer remembered Union mantras was ‘The Union and the Constitution forever!’). *

Lincoln, certainly, was and always had been opposed to the reality and the concept of slavery. He saw the concept as utterly incompatible with the Declaration of Independence’s axial assertion and “all men are created equal” (‘men’ in the classical sense of human beings, before we get sidetracked by the usual genderist brays and bleats).

But Lincoln also realized that if you lose the Union of States then you lose the country, and if you lose the country then the matter of American slavery becomes moot since there will no longer be an America. That is to say, if you lose the Ship itself, then arguments about how to better arrange daily life aboard become pretty much a dead issue. In that sense, then, getting rid of slavery in the country was logically and actually a secondary issue in comparison to the utterly primary and overriding issue of keeping the country in existence in the first place. Saving the Union was an objective that was and had to be, by operation of brute existential logic, prior to Emancipation.

Nor was the Civil War merely a particularly nasty form of family squabble on a national level.

Except perhaps that in a ‘family’ everybody is – or was until recently – united by an ineradicable primary bond.

I also point out that ‘we’ didn’t simply have a deep division of opinion. Americans were so deeply divided, and the problem so intractable, that ‘deliberative democratic politics’ – the utterly indispensable precondition for the Framing Vision and thus for the country – became incapable of solving the problem.

(Indeed, the Confederacy based much of its argument for a right of secession on a rejection of what would today be called ‘majoritarian politics’ precisely because they realized – as had their fathers and grandfathers 60 years before at the Constitutional Convention – that if slavery were left up to a ‘democratic’ process it would most probably have been gotten rid of then and there in 1787. Which is why they insisted in 1787 that there would only be an America (i.e. a Union of all the colonies, including the slave-holding ones) if slavery were somehow protected in the Constitution. That was their ultimatum: America with slavery or no America at all.)

And the war came.

But make no mistake about it: it was a war. To spin it as a national family dispute doesn’t even begin to reach the reality of that War and its nature – as well as its results – so “fundamental and astounding”, as Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural. (I can never resist the urge to recommend a re-reading of that profound document, and you may do so here.

So in his first paragraph Moyers has already, in my view, set himself and Us up for failure by mis-diagnosing the problem. Specifically, he has under-diagnosed the problem: what We face now is not a mere family squabble on a national level, nor is it a matter of ‘war’ being merely some intensified version of a ‘difference of opinion’. The Revolutionary generations had to consider and decide if they supported having an America at all – a country built on every individual Citizen’s primary and deliberate commitment to the Framing Vision - and the Civil War generation had to consider and decide if the country as a polity, the Union of the States, was worth keeping together at all.

(I have no doubt that if he could have saved the Union by not freeing the slaves then and there in his own day, Lincoln would have done so – just as he said. But again, from the point of view of saving the Ship being the utterly unavoidable primary concern, he can hardly be faulted. To the abolitionist mind, the country-with-slavery was not worth keeping in the first place; to the Radical Republicans slavery must be immediately eradicated without any concern for consequences being permissible But for Lincoln, the country had first to be preserved or else there would be no further American history. And, one might imagine, without a national authority, the life of the slaves would have become even worse than it was when the South at least had to pay some heed to the need for moderating its treatment of them.)**

In fact, neither of Moyers’s examples can actually address the operations of ‘deliberative democratic politics’: in the first example, there was not yet a country formally erected on the basis of the Framing Vision and the Constitution, and in the second example there had been a monstrously unique breakdown precisely because the original ‘deal’ struck at the Founding simply to get the country going was, by 1861, impossible to sustain and a decision had to be made about adherence to fundamental Framing principles one way or the other.

Either-or situations are never susceptible to real ‘politics’, where the Citizens must hammer out some workable compromise. But this would hardly have been news to the Framers. Their whole idea was that once you had everybody committed to the American and the Framing Vision, and all the Citizens were united both by Citizenship’s love for the country itself and by some basic common Culture – the combined weight of both thus comprising all of the Citizens’ first and primary commitment and ‘value’ … once you had that set up and going, then the ‘deliberative democratic politics’ would enable the Citizens of all shades of opinion or concern, however steeped in emotion, to move things along.

Perhaps not as fast as might be liked (Lincoln wanted to see slavery gone, but he wasn’t going to push the Ship so hard that it would come apart) but it was The People who were to be the best judges of just how fast and in what ways things could go. Yet the bedrock presumption was that The People, deciding on any issue, was comprised – on all sides of any issue – of Citizens whose love for the very existence of the country and the Vision would inform and govern all of their disputes and differences.

But this is precisely why today – getting to Moyers’s second paragraph – We are in such a mess and why Moyers fails so profoundly in his answer.

“Politics”, he says, “is an alternative to fratricide but it is no pacifier of our conflicts over issues that touch our deepest emotions”. [italics mine] Again, he is going for the ‘family squabble’ and pomo ‘feelings’ spin.

Or, at best, he is going for the Citizens-with-different-ideas framing of the situation, intensified by the fact that the Citizens have such deep emotions over the matter.

But that’s not at all a sufficient assessment of what has happened to Us in the past forty or so Biblical years.

What has happened in these past decades is that the Framing presumptions about the primary love and emotional investment of the Citizens being for the country no longer hold; they have been ‘deconstructed’ through sustained (and Beltway-abetted) assault.

Instead, a) individuals come to public discourse (such as it has now become) not as Citizens united in and dedicated to a commonweal and a common polity but rather as aggrieved members – first and foremost – of some Identity.

And b) that aggrievement and whatever is claimed to have caused it is considered to be their primary emotional investment; and the ‘community’ of the similarly aggrieved is considered to be their primary loyalty and care. Indeed, it is now held that they are justified in abrogating their primary emotional investment in the country and in the American Vision because they are aggrieved.

And c) that on the basis of that aggrievement they are justified in demanding – either/or – the fulfillment of their demands, without any ‘deliberative democratic politics’ entering into the matter at all.

And d) that such fulfillment must be granted them forthwith and immediately, and with no regard for possible or probable consequences and ill-consequences to the commonweal (or even to themselves, ironically).

This, as I said before, is a re-creation pure and simple of the Stance taken by the Southern States (soon to become – for a few stunning and bloody years – the Confederacy): either you give us what we want or we’re going. (In the even more insidiously lethal Gramscian version, it becomes: either you give us what we want nicely or – if you just don’t or won’t 'get it' – we will infiltrate and wreck your Culture … which is political gangsterism in the original package.)

And if they went, then the country went – because there would be no way to continue the national existence successfully if the South chopped off the entire lower half of the country.

It was the Southern Stance that pretty much sidestepped politics completely and went straight to an either-or demand, and for the most lethal of stakes.

The Southerners may have had a ‘disagreement’ with the North about the role of slavery and about the future of slavery. But they also weren’t prepared to yield to any ‘politics’ (perhaps because they realized that they weren’t going to get what they wanted that way).

And in a way they were being logical: although the Constitution had been constructed so as to take into account their demands in 1787, the Southerners realized that unless they somehow kept enough political power they weren’t going to be able to keep what to almost everybody on either side of the Mason-Dixon line was ultimately considered a dubious and suspect institution that could never find a home in the American Vision because it was utterly incompatible with the first principles of that Vision.

And the Southrons would first rather be ‘the South’ than be part of ‘America’ or the Union of the States.

So they made their either-or demand and took the matter beyond politics.

But what they demanded is not accurately characterized as ‘disagreement’. What they demanded was the continuation of a profoundly illogical, incoherent, and incompatible practice that could not be squared with the principles of the Declaration of Independence’s powerful assertion that “all men are created equal”.

When such demands –demands on such a profound level – are made, then politics – even the best deliberative and democratic kind – is brought to a tightrope over an abyss with a flame burning under the rope. There is great pressure and little time to deliberate, reflect, and come to terms – to the extent that the demands can be met without endangering the fundaments of the country as polity and society.

Nor are We merely a “querulous people” who always like to argue, as Moyers says. There are times when profound challenges or threats to first principles are presented, at which point the simplistic recourse to the 1970s happy-face insistence that everybody attend a We-Agree Workshop and then start cutting and pasting whatever they have to in order to ‘agree’ … there are times when that isn’t going to work, can’t work, shouldn’t work.

While Lincoln kept hoping to “preserve the Union without war”, the South – as he no doubt cannily sensed – had based itself in a demand that could never be met, about a reality (slavery) that sooner or later was going to have to go.

This was not a ‘disagreement’; this was a fundamental difference in Vision as to what the country was about and how it worked and it was also a fundamental difference in primary loyalty because the South saw itself as ‘the South’ first and ‘American’ second (or third).

And on top of all that, Moyers is ducking the Elephant that I insist has been in the middle of the room for forty-plus years now: Identity Politics is based in the Alien political Universe of Marx and Gramsci (introduced over here, with a few self-serving modifications, by Radical Feminism).

And that Alien Universe operates in a way completely incompatible with – and hostile to – the Framing Vision.

Because a) there is no presumed love for the country and the Framing Vision that fundamentally and primarily motivates all of the Citizens, whatever their differences or sense of grievance, but rather an insistence that the ‘grievance’ itself constitutes the primary identity and demands and deserves the primary loyalty of those who consider or claim themselves aggrieved.

And because b) the country and Framing Vision and the Culture and the Constitution are considered to be rotten and unworthy of allegiance and must be ‘deconstructed’ and replaced and that to achieve that those who are aggrieved must wage a sustained assault on all of the foregoing.

And because c) this must be done immediately because the sources of grievance constitute an ‘emergency’ of outrage and of rights and of ‘pain’.

And because d) therefore any time taken for ‘deliberative democratic politics’ will only obstruct alleviation and redress of those grievances.

And because e) the country is not worthy of allegiance in its present condition (if at all).

And because f) the Citizenry are not worthy of being allowed to ‘deliberate’ because if they love this country then they are clearly enthralled-to or in league with the whole outrageous grievance-making thing in the first place and clearly ‘just don’t get it’ and therefore don’t deserve to have a voice in the matter.

I am saying that this is the core deranging factor that is afflicting Us and has been for the past forty-plus years.

Leviathan has always been a danger to this country as to any country; but the Framers had belled that cat and thus in America Leviathan was always going to have trouble presenting itself as anything other than what it has always been.

But Leviatha (which I define as an all-consuming government based on ‘sensitivity’ and ‘liberation’ rather than outright coercive power) was able to insinuate itself precisely because nobody imagined that the species Leviathan could come from any other direction than the Right.

Identity Politics – based in the quite literally anti-American and anti-Western Content and Method of Marx and Gramsci – constitute not any ‘politics’ compatible with the ‘deliberative democratic politics’ of the Framing Vision, but rather the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ‘politics’ that actually are no politics at all, but merely the vampiric taking over the husk in order to lead a far different, diabolic existence for its own purposes.(‘Diabolic’ here in its root sense of ‘divide’.)

In terms of conceptual coherence, there can’t be any ‘disagreements’ or ‘squabbles’ because it is already taken as axiomatic by one side that the other side ‘just doesn’t’ get it’ and is in a pact with or in a thrall to some version of Hell and therefore neither deserves to be heard nor should nor can be allowed to waste the revolution’s time with what can only be pointless palaver.

Marx and Lenin and Gramsci and their ilk are, I am saying, very much parties to this problem of Ours here. And they are not ‘family’ – they are, not to put too fine a point on it, barbarians at the gate.

Well, actually, since the Beltway’s sworn defenders of the walls and the gate went and eagerly let them in, they are actually barbarians already inside the gate.

They are barbarians in the sense that they have no use for the Framing Vision to which the country is ideally dedicated.

And in the sense that their basic assumptions about human beings and human existence are grossly and lethally insufficient.

And thus I would insist that any Citizen who has refused to accept that this is just a ‘squabble’ or a ‘difference’ that a little We-Agree Workshop or some ‘reeducation’ or ‘sensitivity-training’ can solve, may well be not so much a ‘backlasher’ as simply a Citizen who senses – however inchoately – that profound principles are at stake and that no compromise is possible because somehow something very deep and vital to the American reality is being most fundamentally threatened and has to be re-asserted and defended.

No doubt Moyers, trying to remain Correct while yet continuing his appearance as a national Sage, would claim that since this is all merely a ‘disagreement’ among naturally ‘querulous’ folks, then everybody has to give a little to get along.

But when you are facing Marx and Gramsci – and even when you are facing persons and groups who have, willy or nilly, given up their Citizenship in the American Universe for citizenship in the Marxist-Gramscian Universe – then those persons and groups are in some very profound sense not ‘family’.

Like Lincoln in 1861, you can try to call them back to the fold and recall them to their old allegiance – but if they are determined to wage war (even ‘culture war’) rather than let the nation continue, and more importantly if they are willing to hold their grievances more dear than the Union itself … well, then what?

None of this has been helped by the fact that the Beltway itself – desperate for votes and deeply embarrassed by the stunning 49-1 defeat in that 1972 election – quietly abandoned the Framing Vision and the American political Universe.

Or – and this is about as far as decency and truth can be stretched without breaking – the pols really thought that they could blend the Universes – American and Marxist – without too much trouble. Although clearly anybody who thought that or thinks that should not be operating heavy machinery, let alone controlling the levers of power in a major nation’s government – and especially a nation such as Ours committed to and built upon the first principles of the Framing Vision.

And so – despite the clear warnings of Kirk and Spock that in those days was knowledge that every kid knew – the Beltway pols decided that even if most people couldn’t, yet the the pols could ... mix Matter and anti-Matter, and yet avoid a Universe-shattering explosion, and have excellent plans work out so successfully that the whole operation would wind up on the positive side of the ledger.

Or perhaps the Gramscian Radical Feminist cadres had assured the pols that this American Universe deserved to be wrecked anyway so what the hell … ?

One way or the other, here We are now.

And Moyers – carefully observing the Correct rules and boundaries – refuses to recognize the profound awfulness of what’s actually causing the whole thing. And instead offers a homey and platitudinous greeting-card of an analysis and a diagnosis.

This is like advising the captain of the Titanic as she starts to pull away from the berg: ships always leak a little, being metal they always get a little brittle in cold temperatures; and they’re almost never totally level as they sail across the surface of the ocean; but what’s a little of all that for a sturdy crew?

But it gets worse: following along with the analogy, the Beltway ‘captain’ decided to agree with that analysis and put the weight of his command authority behind it. After all, he had been advised – and desperately wanted to hear it anyway – everything was now ‘brand new’ and no prior historical experience or ‘thinking’ or principles of buoyancy applied because he was a maker of history and not a simply fetishizer of old thinking. Toss out the Book (the Framing Vision) and just do it because you ‘get it’ and it will all work out even better than anything that could be imagined.

And here We are.

Moyers, a public commentator of great stature, continues the lethal – and perhaps fatal – mistake of under-estimating the genuine awfulness of what has been done. Thus his prescriptions cannot solve anything because they are based on a grossly insufficient and inaccurate diagnosis.

We are still a very sick patient.

The ‘optimism’ of a 1970s happy-face sticker and a tut-tut-dahlings approach will not effect Our cure. Nor Our recovery – to whatever level of former functioning now remains achievable.

NOTES

*If you’re up for a meaty and conceptually gravid but immensely rewarding read, I can heartily recommend Harry V. Jaffa’s 2000 book “A New Birth of Freedom”.

**And if you’re up for it, I can also heartily recommend Barry Schwartz’s 2008 book “Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era”. Wherein he describes the decline in Lincoln’s status in American society nowadays as the result of the pomo (and, I would add, Gramscian-driven) belief that since everybody has a right to his/her own idea of what the country is or should be, then there is no longer a need for exceptional ‘heroes’ who were committed to a particular vision (or, I would add, to the Framing Vision).

And as a corollary: the very concept of an exceptionally impressive ‘hero’ implies the existence of non-exceptional persons, which is a self-esteem and ‘respect’ and ‘equality’ and ‘recognition’ No-No of the highest order. This is not the ‘equality’ envisioned and presumed by the Framers.

Curiously, Schwartz as author betrays a deep ambiguity himself throughout most of the book: he wants to somehow point out the rather substantial problem without indicting modern Correctness for causing it. But, in his Conclusion, he can’t help but reveal his ultimate distaste for what has been done, what has happened, and where it has taken Us.

And ironically, he wrote the book before the 2008 financial implosion. So when he does try to make the case for a legitimately successful ‘post-industrial society’ that is based on a robust economy of Knowledge and Service … well, We all know better now. Except the President, who seems to be still committed to the K&S economy according to his State of the Union address.

Additionally, Schwartz raises the interesting point that whereas in prior era’s, Lincoln was seen as being a ‘hero’ for being Savior of the Union, in the past forty years he is being touted as the Emancipator.

This clearly serves many interests. The Beltway pols can claim that in their whole-hog embrace of Identity Politics they are simply continuing Lincoln’s ‘great work’ of Emancipation. Thus too the media and the assorted Big Identity advocacies can deceptively spin their agendas and demands as being merely a continuation of Lincoln’s great work.

But in so doing, they all neatly skirt the huge question that has always resided at the core of the Identity Politics gambit: Does such a whole-hog and ruthlessly impositional embrace of what is essentially a political philosophy from an Alien and anti-democratic Universe not threaten the very existence of the ‘Union’ (i.e. the American Culture and sense of common-weal) itself?

Because if it does (and it would be hard to deny it) then what the country is really in danger of is a ‘deconstruction’ of the Union just as lethal as the Confederacy’s ‘secession’ from the Union.

ADDENDUM

Just to be a bit more specific, this is my listing of the various elements in the Beltway’s whole-hog embrace of the Gramscian agenda of assaulting and undermining the Framing Vision and the American Culture that’s built on it.

The first Identity was Race. But ‘race’ not as envisioned in the splendidly unitive vision of Martin Luther King (drawing richly upon the entire American tradition reaching back to Lincoln and beyond him to the Framers). Rather, the ‘Race’ of post-1966 black separatism, black power, multicultural divisiveness, and anti-‘white’ animus.

The second Identity was Youth: the voting age was lowered to 18; ‘maturity’ and ‘rationality’ and ‘prudence’ and ‘tradition’ were all ‘de-valorized’ in favor of the classic youthy characteristics: simplistic thinking, an optimism based on feeling rather than derived from substantial life experience.

The third Identity was ‘women’ – especially as defined by the Radical Feminist advocacies who quickly convinced the Beltway that they spoke for all actual females in the country (or – at least – for the best interests of all those females whether they knew it or not).

By creating the general approach of i) demanding ‘rights’ putatively hidden in the penumbras of the Constitution or asserted to be essential ‘pre-rights’ necessary to exercise the classic Constitutional rights and of ii) emphasizing in myriad ways the ‘victimization’ of women by ‘males’ who were dominant, oppressive, hegemonic, and violent (especially in a sexual way), the Radical Feminist advocacies fulfilled the Gramscian vision of undermining the target culture (i.e. traditional American Culture) along numerous simultaneous avenues of assaultive infiltration.

The fourth Identity was Immigrants. But not the immigrants of the previous era’s who came to the country anchored in some common Christian and even Catholic (the Irish in the 1840s, the Scandinavians and Germans throughout the 19^th century, the Southeastern European and Central Europeans in the 1880s) Culture and who were looking to join the commonly respected American Culture. Rather, immigrants who – even when possessed of such desires – are nowadays urged by elite thought and government policy to refuse to embrace American Culture and, instead, insist upon their own folkways and demand ‘recognition’ for them.

These immigrants, indiscriminately welcomed regardless of competence or even legal status, would serve to a) create new client populations for the increasingly impositional government; b) create yet more stumbling blocks to any continued sense of a national unity and common-weal or national common identity as Citizens; c) create the need for even more ‘professionals’ to help them and provide services, and d) keep up population numbers as Radical Feminism’s rigid insistence on ‘reproductive freedom’ made its inevitable subtractions.

The fifth Beltway-embraced Identity was Israel. Forty years ago it was the Left that benefitted from traditional Jewish thought’s sensitivity to social justice and the struggle on behalf of the ‘underdog’ and the ‘marginalized’. But as the decades went on this initial impulse was suborned and co-opted by the Israeli Realm as a sovereignty, to whose interests and defense the Beltway indentured itself even as tectonic changes in domestic American politics and international affairs caused the Israelis to see their interests better served by the neocon and Christian-fundamentalist Right during Reagan’s era.

Having embraced all of these Identities – under the general rubric and game-plan of the Gramscian assaultive undermining of a targeted culture and abetted by the very government responsible for sustaining the Framing Vision and the American Culture that grew around it – the Beltway enabled the ignition of numerous simultaneous threads aimed at ‘deconstructing’ American Culture.

Those Citizens who sensed that there was something lethally dangerous in all of this were not accurately characterized as mere ‘backlashers’ and ‘oppressors’ or ‘tools of oppression’.

As, I believe, is now becoming inescapably clear and obvious.

The consequences for, say, the Presidency and the rule of law, have been fundamental and should be extremely alarming.

Given the fractalization of Identity Politics, few in Congress wish to create alienation among any potential voters or ‘bases’ or to disrupt existing ‘deals’ or preclude potential ‘deals’ by taking a stand and have been increasingly happy to pass on their proper responsibilities to the Presidency.

But the nature of electoral process has been not merely hugely ‘changed’ but grossly degraded.

The short attention span of youth and its emphasis on enthusiasm (or the ‘high’ of it, at least) and the lack of either maturity or experience; the emphasis, consequently on celebrity and sports figures and the even more corrosive consequence that candidates must try to squeeze the vast complexities and matters of the Presidency into a sweet bite-size package that will attract the youthy attention and garner its never-grounded approval … do not create the need for candidates (or Presidents) who are mature, seasoned, and solid of character and temperament (although the ‘appearance’ of possessing those achieved qualities is as vital as the substance of those achieved qualities is a sure disqualifier).

The ever-required duplicity required to avoid naming the Elephant created by post-1966 Race and Gender policies and to continue spinning their consequences as being all ‘liberation’ with no ill-consequences or downside does not create a need for candidates (or Presidents) of integrity and character (although the ‘appearance’ of possessing those achieved qualities is as vitally useful as the substance of those achieved qualities is a sure disqualifier).

And this holds especially true for the post-1972 embrace of the profoundly corrupting and corrosive embrace of the Marxist/Gramscian Universe (and the consequent effective rejection of the American Framing Universe): it cannot be acknowledged for what it is, its consequences must continuously be spun as positive even as evidence to the contrary continues to accumulate and manifest with intensifying clarity and urgency; and its ‘advocates’ and ‘advocacies’ are now established Beltway gangsters just as the assorted ‘marginalized’, ‘victimized’, and ‘oppressed’ whom they claim to represent constitute dependent political client-bases.

The same holds for the truly shocking Beltway embrace of the Israeli Realm (which has consistently refused to become a formal ‘ally’ by signing a master treaty of alliance).

The refusal to acknowledge the Gramscian-assaultive purposes for which Immigration was embraced since 1965, and the consequent conceptual confusion caused by trying to spin it as wholly something else (an issue purely of moral sensitivity and compassion or a nativist rejection of the Other) also creates an intractable complex of problematic issues for which any classical qualities of personal and political maturity, integrity, intelligence and character are only going to get in the way. Easier to kick the can down the road, or pander to both sides under the rubric of flexibility, and in all ways keep up appearances while avoiding the substantial problems.

So while Congress (whose candidates and Members are also infected by all of the above) refuses to accept responsibility for its Constitutional responsibilities, the job-qualifications for the ever-engorging Presidency are for gentlepersons of such lack of character and maturity or of such ‘flexibility’ that they are essentially so invertebrate that it is now probable that no Lincoln or Washington or even Eisenhower could make it to the White House.

In some very real way, I am saying, the same thing dynamic is operative here in Our electoral politics as was in Germany after Weimar: “the gutter rules”. In Our case, not yet the overtly violent and lumpish mediocrity of the Third Reich’s officialdom … but We are getting there in policy and substance if not yet in appearance.

This accurate perception of this stark reality is not made any easier by the pomo insistence that there are no more ‘objective standards’ and that one shouldn’t be ‘judgmental’ (or ‘ageist’ or ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ or nativist’ or ‘anti-Semitic’ or ‘essentialist’) – slyly packaged rules of Correctness and sensitivity that by the most amazing coincidence precisely stifle the genuinely critical thinking and Tire-Kicking that the Citizens and The People must exercise if they, in light of the failure of all the Branches of the government to do so, are to somehow get the national Ship of State and Culture back on a course away from the rocks and shoals that will surely rip her open and shipwreck every soul aboard.

And thus if such human creatures as I have described are the only ones who can make it to the White House, while the Congress is happily collecting its swag while letting the Presidency amass and engorge with power, and there is no Higher Law to which government or official is answerable, and there are so many ‘outrages’ and ‘emergencies’ that require the immediate imposition of the Sovereign authority and power … well, then, the Rule of Law – utterly indispensable to maintaining and sustaining the American Experiment’s and the Framing Vision’s commitment to popular governance – has a life expectancy that diminishes with ever-intensifying rapidity as each month goes by.

We can say, with Eisenhower but now in a situation of far more advanced danger and far sharper and acute urgency: “So much remains to be done”.

2012-01-30T11:34:00.000-08:00

ANDREW BACEVICH: THE MISSING PIECE

No, I am not neglecting the closer look at Catharine MacKinnon, that noted Radical-Feminist (R-feminist).

But something rather key to the entire position I have been making in the recent series of Posts has come to my attention and it’s worth one more essay before I get back to her.

Andrew Bacevich, retired US Army colonel and now noted professor at Boston University and acute commentator on national strategic and military matters as they relate to international relations, has a new book out entitled “Washington Rules”.

(The title is a neat triple-entendre: the book a) discusses the ‘rules’ that are currently driving US foreign policy and the US government’s basic Stance toward the rest of the world, while b) the title also captures the current slang that this or that ‘rules, dude!’, while also c) capturing the US presumption that it now rules the world by some sort of non-Divine Right.)

I am not here reviewing the book in the larger sense of the term, but merely pointing out some highly-relevant aspects of his thought in relation to my own analysis of recent (the past 40 Biblical years) US history, foreign and domestic.

You might want to look at this short but effective discussion of his book.

What Bacevich has done, in regard to my own analysis (nor do I here seek to reduce him to a footnote to my own thoughts), is to identify the powerful but almost unseen source of a major gravitational pull that has been deranging this country’s politics for decades, and with increasing intensity.

As you may recall, I have been making the point that the Beltway – starting with the Dems in 1972 but soon joined the Republicans for their own purposes – hit upon the idea of solving the grossly unmanageable fractalizing effect of Identity Politics (with its lethal roots in that Alien political Universe of Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, the Eurocommunists – as adopted slyly here by the R-feminists) by pandering to the radicalized Left’s Big Identity (for votes) while also deriving political contributions by pandering to the Right’s Big Money (for shrewdly legalized PAC contributions).

But I have also been speaking of the Left’s National Nanny State or Leviatha, and the Right’s National Security State or Leviathan: they are both “sisters under the skin” in that neither of them have any use for any “deliberative democratic politics” nor for the Framing Vision nor for The People as We are conceived in the Framing Vision as not only being the governors of the government but also as grounding the legitimacy of the government.

The conceptual missing-piece is right there between ‘Big Money’ and the ‘National Security State’.

Wouldn’t ‘Big Money’ indicate a National Corporate State rather than a National Security State?

And this is where Bacevich wonderfully identifies that missing piece. A piece that exercises a powerful if still unseen gravitational pull that deranges the course and track of the US and, consequently, much of the rest of the world’s affairs.

There are un-heralded but verrrry real and rigid ‘rules’ governing the Beltway’s Stance toward the world.

First, there is a “credo” and that creedal dogmatic belief is that the US exercise “global leadership”.

Second, there is a “trinity” of methods by which that dogma is to be actualized and maintained. That trinity is a) global military presence, b) global power projection, and c) global intervention.

You cannot be part of the Beltway in-crowd – and ‘you just don’t get it’, to borrow the hoary R-feminist cackle and bray – unless you allow yourself to become completely indentured to these assumptions and presumptions.

As part of that Credo it is taken as given that the US “must lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world”. This presumption – ironically self-serving but ultimately self-destroying – sets the nation on a path that is most pithily described as Griff nach der Weltmacht, that dark and bloody vision of Grasp For World Dominance that drove Nazi Germany. But it also embodies the terraforming lunacies of Marxism-Leninism, that sought to impose Year One and the ‘workers’ paradise’ on both Russia and any other nation the USSR could get its hands (or boots) on. A truly frakkulent and whackulent two-fer.

But then it also mirrors with eerie symmetry the R-feminist insistence (also derived from Marx but requiring the police-state regime common to both the Third Reich and the USSR) that in regard to the ‘patriarchal’ oppressions of world and Western and American Culture it is only the devoted cadres who “get it” and who possess the secret but ultimate Knowledge that ‘getting it’ gives you who are fit and authorized to call the shots for everybody else (in the name of ‘liberation’, of course).

Upon the ‘justification’ and ‘emergency’ of that awful poo-pile of presumptions so much of the American polity has been ‘liberated’, ‘reformed’, ‘transgressed’, and ‘creatively destroyed’ until now there is almost nothing that does (or conceptually can, if you buy into the presumptions) unite the country as a Citizenry, a common American Culture under the Framing Vision, or even a workable polity. At this point, you could say without too much fear of exaggeration, the US is now essentially ‘a government without a country’, meaning that the Culture and the common bonds have been ‘liberated’ and terraformed away (precisely what Antonio Gramsci in the very early 1900s and the Eurocommunist thinkers in the 1970s sought to achieve).

In birthing the (and his) ‘American Century’ 70 years ago, Henry Luce baldly exhorted Americans to “accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit”. I can’t see how this ex cathedra elite exhortation differs very much from any sermon Lenin would have delivered to a Party Congress or the Central Committee.

Nor can it really be seen as differing from R-feminism’s essential self-issued Warrant for going after American Culture (‘dominant’, ‘hierarchical’, ‘oppressive’, and ‘marginalizing’ - to use the terms they filched from Gramsci) and ‘patriarchal’ (their own conceptual tweak, substituting ‘women’ for ‘the masses’). A Warrant for which the vote-desperate Dems deputized themselves with no further questions asked.

The American Century, foreign and domestic, would indeed be “red in tooth and claw” – or, perhaps: red, white and blue in tooth and claw. Such progress. Such liberation.

Ach! Oy! Oy gevalt! And phooey.

From this Credo four corollaries spew out like a pyroclastic flow.

First, “the world must be organized or chaos will surely reign”. No doubt that human nature and consequently human affairs need an order, ordo in the Latin. But it has been the genius of classical Christianity (itself ineluctably but not vitally deranged by the assorted gravitational pulls of an essential human dis-order) that any such ordo must reflect a higher Ordo, instilled by the Divine and constituting a Higher Law to which all human enterprises (governments not excluded) must conform.

This con-forming would guarantee a genuine liberation and freedom, as defined by that Divine Ordo rather than cobbled together out of scraps and for less-than-genuine purposes by this, that, or the other human agency and power as Time goes by.

But in reducing all human existence and activity and authority to merely this Mono-Plane of historical existence, Marx essentially wound up ascribing liberation and authority to whomever managed to get the power to assert and enforce their definition of it.

The R-feminists did this to sweep away moral, traditional, or cultural obstructions to their agenda domestically – but all in the name of liberation, of course, and with both the very bestest of intentions and the hyper-excited guarantee of a paradise to be delivered at some unspecified future date and on a cost-plus basis. Thus the American Leviatha was birthed (you should pardon the expression).

But of course such a gambit also served the Marxist-Leninist purpose of erecting a government power unanswerable to any Higher Law but rather granted plenary power to fulfill its own self-appointed promises by doing ‘whatever it takes’ to force the mulish lumpen-masses into doing what was best for them, as defined by that same government. Thus Leviathan was returned from the outer darkness into which the Framers had cast it.

You can make a good case that in Hebrew thought, what God ‘created’ in Genesis was not so much matter out of nothing (a rather Greek approach) but rather a social and cultural ‘order’ that enabled humans to move beyond the tooth-and-claw hell on earth to which their primal and primitive tendencies, un-Shaped by any vision of - or commitment to - their higher capacities, condemned them.

To the ancient Hebrews, such an improvement was wondrous – and in light of the abiding human tendency to wreak havoc upon themselves and each other it was utterly mysterious in its origin. Thus, they concluded, only God could have intervened to show them the way out of that tooth-and-claw labyrinth of their own primitive tendencies and urges.

Nor, I would say, were they wrong in their conclusion.

The Christian contribution was to Ground that Ordo in the dignity of each human being as created by God, in Whose Image humans could find their genuine nature and purpose – toward which they must for the sake of their own genuine fulfillment as individuals and as societies strive against their abiding lower, more violent and self-serving tendencies and predilections.

The Framers built on all of that, and while they stipulated the separation of Church and State, they could not and did not imagine their American Experiment as working without that subterranean foundation of virtue, character, and conformity to a common Beyond that was the Afterglow of the personal and cultural formation imparted by classical Christian civilization.

To Marx, of course, such concepts as ‘virtue, character, and a con-formity to a Beyond’ were all merely distracting and addictive tools, slyly imposed, to keep the masses content with their oppression – and so, for that matter, was the concept of any Beyond or God at all. Ditto for all of Marx’s latter-day adherents and descendants.

Such liberation.

So for the Framers, it was not enough to have just any old political order. Leviathan – in the shape of unbridled monarchies or parliaments (thinking of Oliver Cromwell) or any other form of government that acknowledged no limits to its authority – was the natural enemy of the American Experiment. It was not enough to just have ‘order’ – it had to be an ordo that somehow conformed to the larger Ordo and remained answerable to it.

And that larger Ordo was built upon the dignity of each individual and the capacity and natural right of individuals to come together and govern themselves through the instrumentality of a government of which they were the ultimate governors.

The ‘totally autonomous’ individual was as alien and noxious to them as the ‘totally autonomous’ government. And yet – by the most amazing coincidence – the ‘valorization’ of the ‘totally autonomous individual’ has somehow gone hand in hand with the re-vivification of the ‘totally autonomous government’.

Such progress.

Thus the second corollary: that the United States will do the organizing of that new order. But of course, having simply gotten rid of God (the secular but fundamentalistic Radical Left – which for all purposes is the Left now) or having declared itself the un-opposable Deputy of God (the neocon and Christian-fundamentalistic Right), the US now asserts that for all practical purposes the US will now be managing the world, either in the absence of God or as His sole agent. Take your pick. But do what you’re told.

While there is always plenty of room in human history for wondering just what the hell God can be thinking, the track record of Marxist governments has surely not proven itself a suitable replacement. Nor, really, has the track record of the Beltway. Ask yourself: is your country better off now than it was 50 or 60 years ago? Do you care to imagine the world and country in 50 or 60 years’ time?

At least with God you get omniscience and benevolence (as well as Accompaniment and Help and Consolation, and of course that whole Higher Plane of Existence). With the Kremlin or the Beltway you get … well, you see what you get.

The third corollary is that henceforth the US gets to define the principles of that new order. But once you have started with a grossly insufficient conception of the humans and human existence, then you aren’t going to be coming up with any marvelously complete principles governing those humans and that existence either.

And Marx’s conception of the individual and of government is fatuously and yet almost wickedly insufficient. Squashed into this base Plane of Existence, with no Higher Plane of Existence, and originating as an accidental agglomeration of substances, the human being is nothing more than solitary and alienated and existentially homeless business and cannon fodder in whose name and for whose benefit any government that ‘gets it’ can wield unanswerable power.

Nor did R-feminism effect any constructive ‘liberation’ by asserting the ‘total autonomy’ of each individual (as long as s/he conforms to Correctness and whatever laws that the all-controlling government chooses to impose).

Curiously, while it was in Luce’s time a Rightist mantra that the US must resist any ‘world government’ (such as the UN), it now seems the bipartisan Correctness of both Left and Right in the Beltway that the US is the sole worthy government in the world. And of it.

One thinks, as I so often do these days, of the Bhagwan and of half-a-thousand cult leaders and variously agenda-ed gurus proclaiming themselves and their personal illuminations the sole and ultimate fulfillment of everybody’s needs and desires.

But – in a ruthlessly marvelous Orc-variation of Gramsci’s dampdream of the ‘marginalized’ (emarginati) taking over the Center of a Culture – the Bhagwan and all the other fringe-loonies have now, along with Marx, become the spiritual and conceptual direct ancestors of the current sitting political class and its assorted strutting parasitical off-feeders. Funny how the night moves.

Thus the dearest-held agendas of both Radical Left and Radical Right will constitute the governing agenda of this New World Order. And here is the 1970s Beltway ‘strategy’ of pandering to Big Identity and Big Money come back with a vengeance in what must be the national GOALAG State (Go Out And Liberate And Grab; or – if you prefer something a tad more tasteful – Go Out And Liberate and Govern. Take your pick – you’re totally autonomous in that.)

And the fourth corollary is that all the world’s leaders are dearly seeking for the US to do this and would be simply desoleé if the US didn’t step up to the plate and take-over. This is necessary, of course, to keep up appearances: if the world’s leaders didn’t want the US, then it would become clear as a volcanic eruption that the US was roaring out of control all over the world.

It’s true, surely, of the Western European countries whose economies have followed the US economy into the poo-pile. And of such client countries who rely on the US for money – or perhaps don’t have the military means to fight back if they are selected for the honor of being intervened-upon. I doubt the Chinese and the Russians welcome it – but then, being far longer exercised in thinking in Great Power terms, this gross overextension of American might and writ clearly promises the best chance for the US doing itself in and leaving a well-furnitured penthouse suite behind at the top of the global condominium.

You get the idea that – having decades ago given up on any concern for the American commonweal – the Beltway macher are now going to reprise and improve upon the old Soviet nomenklatura’s last game-plan: use what you have to get what you can for yourself and then get out of town with your swag.

But the improvement will be something the old USSR never had the strength – or lunacy – to try: if we’ve gotten as much as we can out of our own country, let’s go out and Grab everybody else’s. Let the Game continue!

And surely there will be far more ‘governance’ and far less ‘liberation’ even as the new imperial procurators fan out from the Ultimate Rome and terra-form cultures and societies in order to conform them to Correctness even as the local resources are ‘harnessed’ or ‘more creatively employed’ or whatever.

Come to think of it, this is the old Soviet gameplan. Or at least its abiding dampdream.

Or a world-class replay of the old Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. (Which leads the strategically-minded to wonder: if there is another war in the Pacific, will the US now play the part formerly owned by the late Imperial Japanese? History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does speak in rhymes: maybe World War Two will indeed ‘come back’, except that now We will be playing the part of the Imperial Japanese. It puts a whole new spin on watching those military-history documentaries of the good old days when the foundations of Luce’s ‘American Century’ and its Empire were forged.)

All of this will be accomplished (as in ‘Mission Accomplished!’) and We will be greeted as liberators (ditto) through the Trinity of global military presence, global power projection, and global intervention.

The gambit being that the US can spend whatever’s left in the national till to GOALAG enough stuff before the cash runs out. This is a move which at this point seems eerily like Berlin’s hopes for what turned out to be the Battle of the Bulge: use the last reserves to make a Grab that will turn the whole thing around. Or (less widely publicized) to make enough of a Dent so as to improve whatever bargaining might follow. Take your pick: in this you are totally autonomous.

In all of this, the US exempts itself from the rules that it insists everybody else has to abide by. Curiously, this is another eerie and dark symmetry with the claims of the R-feminists and Identity Politics: that the ‘emergency’ is so great, and the Good sought so marvelous, that to observe law (or the Constitution or the Framing Vision) would be mere obstructionism, fetishization of the ‘quaint’ and outmoded, and indeed constitute a cooperation in ongoing oppression, hegemony, dominance, and etcetera and etcetera.

In the face of which the Beltway pols in the 1970s decided to make deals, and – hardly less important – cut themselves in on the deals and make hay while they were at it.

And being on only nodding terms with the Framing Vision, the pols simply accepted whatever ‘justifications’ (and the Marx/Gramsci-inspired cadres of R-feminism had ready-made tomes of them) were pushed their way to keep up appearances. Thus We have had forty years of ‘liberation’ that have made Us less free, and forty years of an ongoing continuation of the great Vision of King (very much a descendant of the Framers and of Lincoln) that has resulted in the creation of Leviatha and the Frankensteinian re-animation of Leviathan.

So much for The People, for ‘deliberative democratic politics’, maturity, gravitas, and any sense of the boundaries imposed either by ‘common sense’, ‘tradition’ or any Higher Law.

Oh, and the government is now God – either replacing the aforementioned or acting as His sole Deputy and agent but in any case enjoying all the authority and plenary power appertaining thereto.

Gack!

Or, as those DWEMs, the Romans put it: Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat. Those whom the divine wishes to destroy (or punish) he first drives insane. Although in this case, the insanity was voluntarily embraced in the treachery of replacing the Framing Vision with the Marxist gobbledygook from an entirely Alien political Universe forty Biblical years ago.

Nor can this New Order be judged by any standard other than its own. Again eerily echoing the R-feminist assertion – filched from Marx and Gramsci – that you don’t really ‘get it’ until you are inside of it and feel it and are in sympathy and sync with it. There’s no such thing as ‘objective’ knowledge, and anyway such ‘objectivity’ is merely a cloak for keeping the ‘bourgeois status quo of oppression, dominance, hegemony’ and etcetera and etcetera.

Oh, and there’s no objectivity because there’s no ‘reality’ ‘out there’; reality is whatever you think it is or want it to be or dream it can be. Everybody – and every Identity – has his/her/their/its own ‘reality’ which must be ‘recognized’, ‘respected’, and – with the government now in on the game – conformed to.

Thus, as the article notes: “the idea that American leadership can help bring about whatever fantasy world each member may hold in his heart” Or hers. And hasn’t this been the operative fantasy about government-imposed fantasy for the past forty Biblical years? I’m not denying the Content of some of those dreams and hopes; I am, rather, pointing out that the Method for achieving them was imported from that Alien political Universe of Marx/Lenin/Gramsi/Eurocommunism and that it is that very Method itself that has lethally – perhaps fatally – damaged the American polity and Republic.

We will achieve all this with a hefty world-wide application of boots, bombs, and drones. Although Napoleon himself – whose career should remain an example to the Beltway and whose statue should be erected forthwith on the Hill as a memento mori - had that one lucid moment in his megalomaniac madness when he observed ruefully that people don’t appreciate “missionaries with bayonets”.

To which, no doubt, the Beltway response will be a righteous rending and tearing of the ceremonial garments, followed by the further application of even more boots, bombs, and drones. It will be – one way or the other – God’s will because God Is With Us. Or, pithily put, on the German belt buckles back in the day as Gott Mit Uns. Which, however, might also imply the translation of God Help Us – except that there is no God, except that the Beltway is God. Figure your way through that and take your pick. In that you are totally autonomous.

The article continues: “As long as everyone who counts agrees to the necessity of the system, it doesn’t matter if what the system actually does is incoherent”.

So too, this is an eerie reprise in foreign policy of what has been pretty much the script for domestic policy for the past forty Biblical years: so long as you ‘get it’, then you needn’t (and had better not) take notice of the numerous incoherences within and between agendas and demands erected into law and policy. Who cares about ‘reason’, after all? Reason is simply another patriarchal tool of oppression; so instead you want to go with ‘feelings’ and you want to ‘just do it’ because you ‘get it’ and most of the lumps out there (formerly The People) ‘just don’t get it’.

But so as not to stampede the herd on the way to the pens, you can keep up the ‘appearances’ of simple and legitimate ‘change’ and ‘reform’. This was a major method by which so few Nazis (even armed) managed to get so many people to mush along to their deaths (and upon those millions be peace).

This country – certainly its government – has been morphing from an Elf to an Orc for quite some time. Did We not notice?

And precisely in that regard, Bacevich notes that the US “must be set up to project its power globally, wither that means boots on the ground, bombs from the sky, or knives in the dark”. [italics mine]

Our government has now taken to all the same dark-side operating procedures by which the Soviets used to subvert opposition in target countries, and that includes assassinating anybody who might oppose them. Since the national policy is some form of actual or replacement Divine Will, and therefore by definition undeniably and un-opposably Good, then anybody who opposes it – no matter on what grounds (patriotism, say, or principles of human freedom) – is clearly Evil. And when dealing with Evil you – being Good – have a 007 authority to ‘do whatever it takes’.

The Soviets got rid of the Polish intelligentsia – professors, politicians, priests, lawyers, and anybody with an education – in the Katyn forest, among other places: they shot them. (I recall one Soviet-inspired revolution – perhaps Pol Pot’s – where simply being able to read and write was grounds for automatic execution). It was far more efficient to be ‘pre-emptive’ than to wait around until you got set up and then encountered their principled resistance and then had to deploy the secret police and the security forces to find them, bring them in, and go through all the trouble of trying them before shooting them.

It amazes me that for all the eagerly-embraced historical attention given to the Greatest Generation, especially since Reagan’s day, yet We never connected the dots and thought to imagine that the same lethal forces or energies or demons against whom that Generation had to expend itself were still operative, and not very far away at all.

To the point where today, I think many folks look at those old or new documentaries – at best – simply to nurse the fantasy that the US is still the way it was back then, and that whatever happens now things will turn up roses the way they did in the summer of 1945. Not hardly.

Thus, as Bacevich limns, even the Clintons stayed within the bounds of that overall deep-plan for global imperium through global ‘engagement’. But neatly, they brought on the age of ‘governance feminism’, which hugely accelerated the insinuation of R-feminism into the Beltway and the national political brain and bloodstream – and it was then that the alliance was forged between the Content and Method of R-feminist elites and the neocon and dominance-minded Rightist elites. Hence, nowadays, the GOALAG Project is supported in a ‘bipartisan’ fashion by ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’.

That is to say, by R-feminists for whom American Culture and the Framing Vision and the Constitution and ‘deliberative democratic politics’ are simply tools of dominance, oppression and hegemony that must be swept away; and by ‘patriots’ and ‘realists’ for whom the boundaries on government power imposed by the American Culture of the Framing Vision and the Constitution and ‘deliberative democratic politics’ are merely pacts with weakness that must be swept away.

But, of course, all in the name of liberation and of The People. Yah.

Bacevich goes back to Woodrow Wilson, the elite professor-cum-preacher, who insisted that the US should “show mankind the way to liberty” but whose principles “are the principles of mankind and must prevail”.

So in case you aren’t willing to be ‘shown’, you will most surely ‘get it’ when the boots and bombs arrive.

And if these principles are are the principles of Correctness as defined nowadays, then a lot of countries and societies (even if not their governments) are not going to take kindly to American “missionaries with bayonets” and drones (and black-ops assassinations).

If these principles are ostensibly the principles of traditional American democracy, then they will merely be a lethal kabuki, because even though the world is much more interconnected than it was in 1787, still there is a huge difference between being a ‘model’ of democracy and being an ‘agent’ of it – as Washington and Adams saw. And there’s even more of a hellish difference between preaching democracy and practicing the very stuff of Soviet and totalitarian and police-state regimes.

Bacevich uses the term ‘semiwar’ and ‘semiwarriors’ to define the type of perpetual military activity. It began immediately after WW2 – this constant militarizing and all the derangement that supporting it required in the culture and the society and the economy and the polity. Constant undeclared warring.

Which, again, bears an eerie resemblance to the dynamics preached by Gramsci and the Eurocommunist R-feminists: a “necessary antagonism” or many of them, which could be the only fuel of politics (in the vision of noted R-feminist luminary Chantal Mouffe). It dovetailed in a mutually-rewarding synergy with the Cold-Warrior semiwarriors in the Beltway and continues even now, constantly engorging and intensifying.

JFK, I think though, is not so easily classed as a classic Cold-Warrior. He was hoping for some sort of Jamesian ‘moral equivalent of war’ in his Inaugural, and although he had no intention of yielding to the Soviets, yet he had a junior-commander’s abiding and tire-kicking attitude toward the Big Brass: in the Cuban Missile Crisis the Joint Chiefs – urging military action quick and fast and damn the consequences –were not allowed to play a serious role in the deliberations of the Ex-Com group he convened to plan the US response to that crisis.

He also wanted to “break the CIA up into a thousand pieces and scatter them” after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs. And he wrote Levi Eshkol in July of 1963 when that gentleman replaced Ben-Gurion as Israeli head of government to tell the man in no uncertain terms that the US would not countenance the Israeli’s having the Bomb. But then suddenly he got shot.

But like Ike, JFK too went along with assassination as being a more cost-efficient way of effecting change than sending in the boots and bombers (and starting, possibly, World War 3).

Bacevich raises the very interesting point that long before the Political Correctness of the “tenured radicals” of academia, there was – starting as early as 1976, the year after that final frenzied helo lift-off from the Embassy building in Saigon – a push spearheaded by Anthony Lake, to make sure that the experience of Vietnam didn’t push the US back into ‘isolation’ and isolationism.

If you wanted creds in the Beltway, you had to get on-board with that and toe the line with all the eager career-concerned caution of a Delegate applauding Stalin’s arrival on stage at a Party Congress.

Thus there was a ‘Political Correctness’ from the Right even before there was one from the radical Left.

An interesting symmetry indeed. But I would add here that given their base in the Alien political Universe of Marx/Gramsci, the radical Left – shrewdly eliminating its moderate elements to become the liberal-Left – is not and never has been reducible merely to those looney-tunes in the far end of the faculty dining room behind the plastic potted plants, sputtering their arcane politicobabble like new Bolsheviks.

The truly Alien roots and nature of the radical Left – which became the Left through the R-feminists – posed and continues to pose far more of a danger than might be imagined when contemplating in bemusement its symbolic whacked-out academic cadres down there behind the fake potted ferns.

And that Correctness on the Left was pretty much introduced as early as 1972 when the demographically-desperate Dems decided – come hell or high water – to kick the Framing Vision to the curb (although tastefully and secretly) and invite the Marxian vampire in through the front door.

So my take would be that Political Correctness was burning with increasing intensity on the Left by 1972 and on the Right by 1975, if not sooner.

The difference being that back then the Left was seeking to assault and change the entire American Culture verrrry publicly, whereas on the Right the gambit was to simply ensure that elite, Beltway-insider types got their marching orders and the public really didn’t enter into it at all.

Special attention is devoted, and nicely, to Madeleine Albright. Although as Secretary of State she cut a far more ‘normal’ figure than the truly weird Attorney General, Janet Reno, Albright by that very ‘normality’ symbolized and embodied the intensifying bond between the Left and Right as they coalesced into the foundations of a GOALAG regime that came to full blossom in the next decade.

If she was spun as yet another ‘victory’ for ‘women’, she demonstrated just how little the nation might get out of such a symbolic victory and how much actual cost such a victory might impose.

She was not going to support any Munich-type ‘appeasement’ of whatever enemy was on the list that day.

She was willing “to use force … because we are America … we are the indispensable nation”. How quickly being indispensable morphs into megalomania. But it was a shrewd cover for what I think was, even back in the Clintons’ day, a growing Beltway awareness that the productive infrastructure of the economy was in deep trouble (it had, after all, been incoherently wrecked in great part to enable the R-feminists to have a more woman-friendly Knowledge and Service economy and get rid of the macho, productive industrial culture of ‘mehhnnnn’) and that consequently, the US was going to need fresh infusions of assets in order to keep funding its dominance and hegemony (another marvelous irony lost on the fundamentalist cadres of R-feminism and neocon jingoism).

She was perfectly willing to use the military to get those assets – telling the vastly overrated Colin Powell that she couldn’t see the point of this vast military if it couldn’t be “used”. One recalls Hitler mentioning to Schuschnigg or somebody similar: you don’t think I have built this vast army for parades, do you?

And in pursuit of all that the potential deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children would be an “acceptable loss” and would be “worth it”. So much for sensitivity and ‘the children’ as being of concern to the cadres of the Left. In an Orc-like echo of Identity Politics, ‘children’ are only important when they’re yours; everybody else’s can fill, and should be prepared to embrace, the role of egg-broken-to-make-the-omlette. And of course, the truly disturbing Reno had authorized the fatal Waco assault ‘to save the children’, who were, she feared said she feared, being molested (as were the untold – and now apparently nonexistent – myriads of victims of Libya’s Viagra-crazed rape-battalions … but that last was, oops, under the Madam Secretary Hillary).

Rumsfeld wanted to institute a Revolution In Military Affairs (shades of the many ‘revolutions’ of the Left in the past forty Biblical years): wars could be won on the cheap, quickly and totally successfully and with no ill-consequences. I think of Ludendorff, histrionic and hysterical, telling his staff that he didn’t want to hear about ‘operational plans’ and ‘strategy’: he would have vast forces thrown into the meat grinder with the assertion that ‘we are going to go over there and take that position, and after that we shall see’.

Petraeus comes under well-deserved fire for coming up with the way to keep up appearances after the failure on the ground in Af-Pak: counter-insurgency operations (COIN). This would replace the clearly frakked “Shock and Awe” strategy left over from the first Gulf War and keep up the appearance that the Big Brass and their civilian Bosses and Bossettes knew what they were doing.

But it gets worse.

Petraeus solved a truly awful problem: how to keep funding for a military that clearly wasn’t able to win the wars – such as they were – it was sent to fight? The solution, through COIN and also through the frenzied embrace of drones (recalling the 1920s assurance by Douhet that ‘the bomber will always get through’ and that wars could be ‘won from the air’), “demolished the idea of the army as something that fought and won wars”.

Roll that one around in your mind for a while. We are funding a military that is not going to be there for winning ‘wars’, but that will be able to use the latest tech to win wars from the air. Although neither part of that pair of concepts has an impressive track record at all.

And in a neat two-fer, such a shift also solves a problem for the Left, where R-feminists lobbying for more women in the military, in combat, in everything a ‘male’ can do, had run up against the problem that in ground combat, especially sustained field operations, mixed-gender units are an even more resource draining proposition than all-female units.

If war is now going to be nothing more than manipulating a joystick – perhaps from the air-conditioned comfort of a strip-mall in Nevada or an air-conditioned combat ops computer-center on a warship - then there’s a huge (and verrrrry real) difficulty simply and suddenly ‘defined away’. As if the problem were merely an undigested bit of beef rather than the urgently monitory revenant of Jacob Marley.

Appearances rather than reality, shifting appearances rather than complex reality, ever-shifting definitions to define reality away, best-case scenarios to dispense with hard questions of consequences, and all with the very bestest of intentions. And above all, a slavish primary allegiance to the regime (conceptual even more than political) that rewards you with creds, status, and checks drawn on the public till … this is a) great progress and liberation and the sign of a mature, healthy, responsible and sober polity or b) an intensifying spin into a hubristic lunacy enabled by a passive Citizenry that will lead to a final charge into the valley that will wreck everything and everyone.

Take your pick. In this you are totally autonomous.

ADDENDUM

A couple of other thoughts.

Given that – in postmodern and R-feminist thought – there is no ‘real reality out there’, then of course one perennial human idealistic project is instantly rendered meaningless: “the judicious study of discernible reality” (which study has led at this point to several millennia’ worth of organized thoughts about fundamental stuff). In the pomo/R-feminst worldview all of that is useless because it is all tainted with either a) the unconscious adherence by those who ‘just don’t get it’ to a rotten and wrong matrix of hegemonic, dominant and oppressive presumptions or b) a willfull and deliberately and with malice aforethought 'patriarchal' and 'hegemonic' oppressiveness. (Although this profound mistrust of and revulsion to all prior thought and indeed to any serious thought – unless it is by Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals”, i.e. those intellectuals who ‘get it’ – does not include the dense and intricate tomes of pomo thinkers who assert that thinking does no good. Go figure.)

Thus in matters of human knowledge the pomo/R-feminist cadres officially declared Year One, on or about September 1, 1972.

But if it was Year One for ‘thinking about reality’ in literature (French literary theory is where this bunch of thoughts were first organized and declared in the 1950s and 1960s), and thus Year One for the Left and the Identities, it also became Year One for the Right and the government.

If there was no objective reality and thus no need to be ‘judiciously thinking’ about it for the ‘liberal’ Left, then wouldn’t that also be true for the government and the Right?

And though the government doesn’t write up a lot of ‘literature’ in the strict sense of the term, yet it does generate a lot of stuff in the form of written laws and policies and – as always – there was that pesky Constitution that sought to impose boundaries on the government’s range of action and – not to put too fine a point on it – on the (moral) quality of its actions.

And of course in regard to that ‘moral’: if there is no objective reality out there, then there is no ‘truth’ either. So why any need to be truthful?

All you really need at this point is to seem to respect truth just so as not to stampede the herd. Stephen Colbert has rightly belled this feral cat of a concept as “truthiness”.

And if the Constitution is not an owner’s or maintenance manual, but rather is simply a piece of ‘literature’ like a novel – a ‘text’ as the pomo’s say – then today’s reader’s ‘feelings’ are even more important in studying it (or not) as were the intentions and visions that informed the Framers who authored it.

Which the Right used for its purposes as vigorously as the Left did for its purposes. Because if any modern reader can make of a 'text' whatever s/he feels like making out of it, then why can't the President? With the Constitution.

The second point to make (and I’ve made it before in prior essays) is best exemplified in the 1990 historical novel “New York Detective” by William Marshall.

The work is set in 1880s New York City, where toil the odd team of City Detective Virgil Tillman and Patrolman Muldoon. Tillman is a shrimpy but idealistic detective, orphaned in childhood and a little distant from the hurly-burly of life, but dogged and intrepid when he’s on the case. Muldoon is a big bluff Irish veteran of the Civil War who was detailed from the police Strong-Arm Squad (comprised of the biggest and toughest bruisers on the force, for those times when you need the extra edge at a scene).

Tillman has a tough case, and he is getting pressure from above to make an arrest and close it. He can’t work out just yet who is the perp. Muldoon advises him in the accents of some homespun Nestor to this effect: You can’t always nab the real perp in a case, but that doesn’t mean you can’t come up with the right man to be pinched; there’s a million bad actors out there who are guilty of something, after all; so if you have to, you pinch a guy you know is guilty of something and you’ve solved all your problems; and someday down the road somewhere, some other decent copper will maybe pinch your actual perp for something else and it will all work out; in the Big Picture, God keeps the books and God will understand; and that, Virgil, is how it all works.

You can only imagine that in the hands of a John Ford, this homely bit of wisdom, delivered with a twinkly eye, a rich brogue, and lubricated by several snorts from a pocket flask, would be enshrined as practical wisdom in the hands of an actor like Victor McLaglen.

But, of course, Muldoon’s philosophy is hell and gone from the Framing Vision, where the Founders most precisely did not want the government conveniently leaving judgment of its action to a God who is conveniently not directly available, thus leaving the government ‘free’ to do whatever it takes to do whatever it thought best.

(And you can see here why the homely peasant wisdom of immigrants not schooled in the American Anglo-Saxon experience so frightened decent thinkers in that 1880s-1920s era of Immigration. The Southern Italian peasant approach to the whole thing was even more lethal: you can’t trust the brass-buttons and if a wrong has been done to you, then take care of it yourself or see your neighborhood godfather.)

While the Framers presumed a certain ‘Christian decency’ in all Citizens, they were still aware of the human tendency toward violent self-interest. And they most surely realized how that tendency can be amplified when a government is given great power (including a monopoly on the use of violence).

In that sense, I would say that the recent Right is actually regressive, taking the country back to a‘sturdy peasant wisdom’ that actually moves Us all back beyond the Framing Era into much more dark and bloody ground.

Of course, I will also then say that the Left – with its witless and/or treacherous embrace of postmodernism and R-feminism – is not only regressive but literally assaultive (or ‘deconstructive’) toward the entire Framing Project. And, really, if We abandon the Framing Vision and its Project, what is left to Us as a Republic or as America? We become a herd under the management of trail bosses who, whatever their nostalgic reflections at sunset or around their campfire, do not ultimately have our best interests at heart.

2012-01-21T18:54:00.000-08:00

OLD THOUGHTS VERY NEW

Before I get back to the inimitable philosophical stylings of Catharine MacKinnon I have to put this essay up.

I just finished reading for the first time the December 29, 2008 issue of ‘The Nation’ magazine.

I find that there is a tremendous value to reading ‘old’ journals of opinion ‘fresh’. As you get into the reading, you are of course absorbed into the streams of thought that were very much ‘fresh’ and usually ‘urgent’ and presumably insightful when they were written. Yet simultaneously your mind is informed by all of the actual events that you know have happened since the articles were written (now 3 full years ago and a bit).

It’s a rather stimulating and useful mental exercise on several levels.

So to a couple of the articles or columns and the thoughts they prompt.

Eric Alterman discusses the up-coming Presidency of Barack Obama in terms of whether Obama – as a welcome relief to the outgoing George W. Bush – is going to repeat the failures of a longish string of Democratic presidents who failed because of their “militant liberalism”.

First he tries to dispose of the fact that “barely one in five Americans embraces the label ‘liberal’ to describe themselves”.

“This is easily explained”, Alterman breezily asserts, “by the mountains of opprobrium that conservatives – working hand in glove with a cowed MSM [mainstream media] – have heaped on ‘liberals during the past three decades and the negative associations that have resulted”. So, it’s all been the work of a predominantly conservative and cowardly MSM and the ‘conservative’ political machines themselves.

I think not.

First, I am not at all going to get into the ‘liberal’-vs-‘conservative’, he said/she said kabuki that has come to pass for politics and political commentary over the past Biblical 40 years here. In my view, the ‘liberals’ are not really liberal, and the ‘conservatives’ are not really conservative. And they both are “sisters under the skin” insofar as neither of them have any use for any “deliberative democratic politics” or the Framing Vision which anchors the entire Constitution and the political vitality and survival of the American Experiment and the Republic on the robust fundamental of a three-point circuit consisting of The People, their elected representatives, and the Sovereign Authority of the government, all of which is underlain by a common and mature commitment to that Framing Vision.

Second, as We have been seeing since the very early 1970s – and especially after the stunning defeat of the Democrats’ New Order Party vision in the presidential election of 1972 – The People, given what may have been their last chance to kick-tire and deliver their judgment on that vision, utterly rejected it, 49 States to one (the hold-out being Massachusetts, politically controlled by Teddy Kennedy and his powerful electoral machinery in his home state).

Third, I would have wondered then – and certainly so now – if Alterman et al. aren’t trying to pull a leaf from the Israeli playbook: that if you object to anything the ‘liberals’ have done or to any consequences that have flowed therefrom, then you are a ‘conservative’ (and a ‘backlasher’ and etcetera and etcetera). After all, especially now that the aura of national ‘wealth’ has been burned away, all sorts of consequences of so much of their agenda are now suddenly appearing, as if by magic although actually they have been hiding in plain sight for decades.

So it is hardly outré to imagine that The People sensed something very wrong, perhaps even very dangerous, deep in the Democrats’ vision for the country’s New Order.

Indeed, Nixon (for whom I hold no brief) realized that some sort of ‘elitism’ – comprised as We now have seen of both homegrown Progressive elitism and the shockingly Alien Universe of Marxist-Leninist thought as shrewdly developed by Antonio Gramsci and already by 1972 embraced (without attribution) by radical-feminists here - was lurking in that Democratic New Order.

Recognizing that ‘elitism’ Nixon made a hardly-ungrounded claim that the views of a vast majority of Americans – whom We now know to have been classified in the Gramscian scheme as bourgeois, dominant oppressors of the marginalized (all of which are Gramsci's terms), and in radical-feminist thought as being a huge bunch of oppressive lumps who ‘just don’t get it’ – were being sidestepped and utterly disregarded (as per the gameplan of Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and the radical-feminists who had filched that gameplan for their own purposes).

That vast majority of Americans constituted, in Nixon’s phrase, “a silent majority”.

Apparently, by 2008, even Alterman has to admit that that group remains very much in the majority.

Rather than engage the idea and examine the whole matter, Nixon – who voiced it – was wholly discredited by the later (and in light of, say, LBJ’s machinations in regard to Vietnam and Israel’s acquiring nuclear material for their upcoming Bomb,utterly secondary) Watergate brouhaha.

But – of course – while the messenger was slyly done in, the reality of the message, to the extent that it was real, remained very much alive, despite the best efforts – widely picked up by the MSM – to spin it as merely ‘backlash’.

But the spin-stampede was kept up in a massive elite-driven and Democratic and Beltway-supported demonstration of all the primary plays in both Gramsci’s and Goebbels’s game-book. Thus unto this very day.

Of course – as We now know – “majoritarian politics” and “deliberative democratic process” had already been written off by the Dems at the behest of their newly-embraced radical-feminist clients, whose ‘philosophy’ was slyly plagiarized from Gramsci and that Alien Universe. Since most Americans ‘just didn’t get it’ then they would have to be herded, stampeded, or penned up into irrelevance. Or: if The People failed the elites in 1972, perhaps then The People need merely to be replaced: youth were given the vote and immigration increased to bolster the possibilities of destabilizing the Culture that had rejected the elite dampdreams.

While all the while, the whole thing was spun as merely a continuation of MLK’s marvelous and genuinely American vision, calling all Americans to participate in a “new birth of freedom” for the American Vision.

But, of course, what had happened by 1970 or so was that the entire American Framing Vision had been written off in favor of a) an elite-driven imposition (with the full collaboration of the Beltway) and of b) that thorough-going and multi-form assault against the ‘dominant, hegemonic, oppressive’ Culture that Gramsci had envisioned (and those descriptive terms are his, not radical feminism’s) as the best way to undermine the target Cultures of the West.

Alterman says that if you change “liberal” to “progressive” then you will double the “number of respondents” who identify themselves on that end of the spectrum.

But that is hardly a solution here. “Progressivism”, even as a natively American movement, had always relied upon ‘elites’ to help educate the unwashed masses of newly arrived immigrants. And, in a hardly irrelevant coincidence, Progressivism was contemporaneous with the burst of anarchist and socialist thought already running at high speed through Europe and Russia. As was, by amazing coincidence, Gramsci’s thought.

But to embrace and unleash this approach on the mature postwar American polity and politically mature Citizenry in 1970 and since then was a hugely dubious and dangerous gambit, even without taking into account the stunning presumptions of Gramsci that the whole targeted Culture was rotten and irredeemable and had to be undermined and attacked as often and as widely as possible, and by any means necessary.

Alterman then goes on to sniff assertively that “it’s rather a stretch to argue, following George W. Bush’s Vietnam-like Iraq misadventure, that Obama is likely to reprise [LBJ’s and Bush’s] catastrophic combination of arrogance and incompetence”. And here We are in 2012 and what do you think?

But I would agree with him, to some extent, that Obama did not “reprise” that “arrogance and incompetence” exhibited and deployed by his aforementioned presidential predecessors. Rather, I would say that Obama – a callow and youthy as well as ambitious fellow – merely found himself indentured from the get-go to the nefarious dynamics of that Alien political Universe that by 2009 was already (irretrievably?) embedded in the nation’s politics and its political discourse (greatly and intentionally corrupted and weakened by decades of dishonest and distracting spin into nothing more than a mostly immature kabuki of dueling cartoonish conceptions and assertions, into which no light of clear analysis was allowed to intrude).

Whatever his natural fall-back gifts, he wound up reverting to them in order to keep himself afloat in the treacherous riptides between the Scylla of the National Nanny State and the Charybdis of the National Security State, between the now-embedded pandering government indenture to both Big Identity and Big Money.

And here We are in the Year of Grace Two-Thousand-and-Twelve and of the independence of the United States the two-hundred-thirty-sixth.

America is, Alterman perhaps regrets, far “less liberal than Europe”. But he refers to a Europe wracked by Eurocommunism, which was the 1970s erection of Gramsci into a Plan by numerous European nations whose Socialist and Communist Parties were already trying to somehow find a new role for themselves, given the brutal postwar and post-1956 revelations of Leninist-Stalinist Communism’s treacherously violent wrecking of the very ‘masses’ in whose name that regime – in Russia and in the satellite nations – imposed its ‘visions’.

Thus in Christopher Hayes’s article “The Pragmatist”, that author seeks to explain what it might mean to say that Obama is a “pragmatist”.

He notes a then-recent George Packer essay proposing that in order to secure election, Obama’s campaign rhetoric had been neatly designed to send out ambiguous messages that would lead both “progressives” and “post-partisans” to think he was on their team.

That “post-partisan” is a clear if oblique reference to the fractalizing partisanship that is built into the Gramscian-derived Identity Politics.

In the context of Beltway dynamics, to be “pragmatic” therefore means that one is not going to remain restricted by – or committed to – the de rigeur (one could say ‘ideological’) requirements of that Identity Politics so irretrievably permeated with Gramsci’s thoughts and plans from that Alien political Universe of Marxism-Leninism and Eurocommunism.

But the restriction of having to satisfy its now decades-old Indenture to the Far, radical feminist Left constitutes one of the only ‘reliable bases’ of the Democratic Party – which had been precisely the pols’ intention to establish 40 Biblical years ago.

In the service of which they had to slyly (and treacherously, in light of what they had sworn to preserve, protect and uphold) begun a double-life: for public consumption praising the American ‘thing’, while claiming to merely demonstrate their wise and effective chops in implementing ‘reforms’ and ‘continuing’ MLK’s great civil-rights work; and yet actually betraying all of that in order to implement whatever their New Order advocacy bosses and bossettes wanted.

Thus the Beltway and almost the entire sitting political class (in 2008 as well as 2012) were already into a verrrrry baaaaad habit of duplicitous treachery, for which ‘pragmatism’ is very much too nice a term.

If even in 2008 Obama and his strategy staff realized that somehow he had to distance himself (and the Party?) from at least the appearance of its indenture to Big Identity, then the 2008 version of ‘pragmatism’ was only going to be rhetorical, because the vampires and vampiresses of that Alien political Universe had now gotten very used to being in the Beltway house (having been invited in by the gate-keepers themselves) and, indeed, with the help of a helpfully unreflective and shallow MSM had gotten wayyyy too many folks thinking that if If it’s Democrat, then it’s ‘liberal’ – and Gramsci and the Eurocommunists are nothing if not anti-liberal and anti-Liberal: for them only ‘radical democracy’ will do, and that type of ‘democracy’ doesn’t include ‘deliberative democratic process’ since so many Citizens are enthrall to Dominance, Hegemony, and Oppression (whether the poor chumps realize it or not).

And when Hayes reports that Obama “plans to govern from the center-right of his Party” then that’s not usefully insightful either. Because by 2008, both ‘left’ and ‘right’ had been long-trapped in the swamp of endless cartoonish assertions of one’s ‘position’ – accompanied by all sorts of TV-friendly sound-and-light effects. But nobody of importance on either ‘side’ wanted to look more deeply into mattes, for fear of exposing the Gramscian Elephant in the middle of the national political room.

Nor did the MSM want to risk its ‘access’ to A-list dinner parties by mentioning the Elephant either.

In that context, to be “open-minded” and not “excessively partisan” – which to all appearances seem worthy objectives – could only mean to the Far Left cadres that you were not going to consider yourself bound by any ‘fetishizing’ of the Constitution, traditions, principles, or any of the other tools of America’s fundamental Hegemonic Oppression of its “marginalized”. While to the Rightist or even centrist, such an assertion would seem fatuous and guaranteed to fail, in light of the fanatical rage of the cadres (and ‘advocates’) of the Far Left bases who would no more consider yielding their ‘revolutionary’ gains than any Scriptural demon would politely leave a possessed body if asked nicely.

And – let’s face it – ‘pragmatism’ by 2008 meant simply layering yet one more level of unprincipled plasticity over an already hugely ‘plastic’ and mushy sense of principle that had been cemented into place by the original Beltway trahison in the early 1970s.

The name of Cass Sunstein flits by in the article, a University of Chicago law professor who had a nice little run explaining how Obama was not really a “flip-flopper” and not a “doctrinaire liberal”.

But of course, by 2008, both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ had morphed together into a new Leviathan (or, in the Left’s Nanny State, Leviatha) that had no use on Left or Right for any ‘deliberative democratic politics’. Either the emergency of ‘oppression’ or the emergency of ‘national security’ required an engorged and intrusive and impositional government that knew far better than its Citizens or than The People what had to be done.

So commentary at the level of even bosky academics like Professor Sunstein and his ilk was, if more polite and polysyllabic than in-your-face radical feminist crowing or Fox News declamations and insinuations, about as useless.

Sunstein burbled that Obama was a “minimalist” who “prefers solutions that can be accepted by people with a wide variety of theoretical inclinations” – that is “his defining trait and chief virtue”.

Very nice.

But in the context of what had been going on in American politics since 1972 at least, then such competences were guaranteed to be of little use and would create even further damage. Because at the heart of American politics for the past 40 Biblical years has been a truly Either-Or Question that demanded to be recognized and Answered: would the Framing Vision of 1787 or the Gramscian vision derived from Marx and Lenin be the ‘ground’ for Beltway policy and legislation and for the ‘elite’ vision of what was needed for this country?

On that Question , I am saying, there truly could be no waffling and no middle-ground. You cannot simultaneously support the Framing Vision (shared by MLK, embodied in the Constitution) and the Culture which that Vision informs, and also the Gramscian vision that democracies are merely bourgeois tools of Dominance, Hegemony, and Oppression (adapted by radical feminism here, of course, to include Patriarchy and etcetera and et cetera) which along with their Cultures had to be attacked, weakened wherever possible, torn down, and replaced no matter what it took nor how long it took.

Like Hitler who, when initially planning the Wehrmacht’s invasion of England in the summer and fall of 1940, paid little attention to the “mere 20 miles” separating the Greater Reich and England, traditionally called the Channel. So too, the Beltway biggies apparently figured that they could paper over the genuine abyss yawning between the Framing Vision (to whose defense they were formally sworn) and the Gramscian Project (which was the price the radical-feminists were going to charge for ‘delivering’ the allegedly monolithic ‘women’s vote’). How, after all, could a simple ‘abstract’ matter of ‘principles’ and a long-past history really interfere with the big plans of major Macher in oh-so-cutting-edge modern American politics? How many divisions does the Framing Vision have (to borrow a trope)?

Thus the Beltway as it descended into the Valley of the Little Big Horn (to borrow an image).

Thus, Hayes quotes Packer quoting Sunstein, it is wrong for people to “expect Obama to be the anti-Bush” (remember him?).

After all, says Sunstein, the only problem with Bushism “is not its content but its form”. Which precisely reveals – although slyly costumed – the fact that by 2008 both ‘liberal’ Nanny State and Rightist ‘Security State’ subscribed to the same content: The People can’t be trusted to know what’s good for them nor to govern their own government. And that, I am saying – ‘justify’ it how you may – is pretty much the end of the Republic in a nutshell.

In trying to make the Great Experiment of 1787 a lot less demanding and ‘oppressive’, the Left grossly weakened it (and hardly surprisingly, considering they imported Gramsci’s methodological refinements of Marx and Lenin to do the job). And into that vacuum the ancient demon of Leviathan, traditionally seen as arising from the Right, did indeed awaken and burst back into the American polity, since the Left – out of the purportedly best of intentions – had weakened the walls built by the Framers to keep that ferocious Kong a safe distance away. And the sworn defenders and guardians of the Wall had, in 1972, happily put all the government’s resources into the Project.

What a movie! Or, to borrow the master vampire’s best line from the 1985 movie of the same name: “Welcome to fright night … for real”.

And here We are in 2012.

But back to 2008.

Obama, continues Sunstein, is really the “best kind of anti-Bush” because he is not “ideological”. But that’s bullplop. The entire Democratic agenda had become indentured to ideology the moment it invited Gramsci inside in 1972, brought to the nation’s Beltway entrance by radical-feminists insisting that such an Approach and such a Stance were simply the most ‘cutting edge’ and ‘fresh’ and ‘rich’ and ‘creative’ and ‘transgressive’ stuff and was completely their own invention and just a more efficient way of realizing MLK’s truly and genuinely American civil-rights Project. Should the Beltway pols – especially the Dems – join and support them, the radical feminists prophesied, they would make History rather than be oppressed by it, and they would all be greeted as liberators.

Not hardly.

Sunstein intones that it is a fallacy to think that “all ideology is dangerous”. Meaning by 2008 that commitment and faithfulness to an overriding (and underlying) vision is not always dangerous. It is only dangerous when it is some other vision than their Correct elite vision (which, as I have said above and in the immediately prior Posts, is actually Gramsci’s and the Eurocommunists’ and Marx’s and Lenin’s vision about how to go about wrecking a well-established Western, democratic polity and its Culture).

If even – as Hayes slyly notes – Pat Buchanan observed that Bush’s biggest failure was his “embrace of ideology” (and I don’t at all deny the accuracy of that statement) yet We have to realize that the Beltway had been indentured to an even more Alien ideology – and even more lethally dangerous for being ‘spun’ as ‘liberating’ – since 1972.

So the kabuki mudfight between ‘pragmatism’ and ‘ideology’ had been nothing but a magician’s distracting trick for decades by 2008. And still is today.

Starting to get wrapped up in the toils of his own conceptual incoherences, Hayes then tries to point out that after 9/11 “pragmatists of all stripes – Alan Dershowitz, Richard Posner – lined up to offer tips and strategies on how to best implement a practical and effective torture regime, but ideologues said no torture, no exceptions”.

But by 2008 any essential and fundamental loyalty to the Framing Vision and its ‘traditional’ virtues had long been ‘deconstructed’ by the ‘liberals’ and the Left precisely according to Gramsci’s gameplan. The objections raised against torture had to be only ‘practical’, because to claim any authority for the Framing Vision (and ‘virtues’!) was considered career-wreckingly not-Correct.

Indeed, as Rawls (and more recently Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen) had tried to assert, any commitment to any “comprehensive system” of explaining and grounding life and human action was inadmissible in American public discourse. Unless it was his and their Correct comprehensive system, which anyway was not based in ‘abstractions’ about traditions and classical Virtues, but rather in the (Gramscian and Eurocommunist) presumptions that a) you could not legitimately Ground and restrict humans’ ‘autonomy’ on the basis of such ‘abstractions’ but that b) you could ground such restrictions on merely human feelings and the insights of any particular historical moment.

Which turned out to be a ‘fence’ about as useful as an artfully constructed wall of oatmeal and corn-flakes in stopping either Leviathan or Leviatha. As We have now seen.

The Framers sought to boundary government because it would be made up of human beings and, the Framers knew, humans also needed boundaries not simply to ‘restrict their autonomy’ but to give them some reliable (and hopefully decent) Shape.

Absent such restrictions, human beings became mushy exo-skeletal insects and without the exo-skeleton to boot. And quite probably irrational and violent on top of everything else.

Humans are not ‘born free’ because, the Framers were convinced, they are born with a disturbing predilection to wreck other humans’ lives in pursuit of their own satisfactions. And the governments humans erect tended to do the same.

To give in to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bland and burbly happy-face assumption that if there were simply no ‘society’ with its laws and customs and folkways then humans would be happy and good … that struck the Framers as the height of lethal and witless imbecility.

Who can deny it?

Hayes tries to recover himself by going for the spin that it is only the Right that is ‘ideological’ and that the Left’s ‘pragmatism’ is a counter to that. But the Left is committed to an even more fundamental ideology: that there is no Ground Beyond this life that somehow authoritatively (and benevolently) sets limits to human actions and beliefs in the service of helping humans reach their most Genuine Shape.

Such a Ground and such a Beyond would obstruct and ‘oppress’ the ‘total autonomy’ demanded by the Far Left bases, spear-headed by radical-feminism and now after 40 Biblical years distributed widely like a toxin throughout the American body-politic.

Nor is Belief on so profound and vital a level really adequately describable as ‘ideology’, as Hayes then tries to assert.

Certainly in Western Culture, built willy or nilly upon the bedrock of the classically Christian (not to be confused with the ‘Christian fundamentalism’ brought to the table in the Reagan years) Vision, this ‘comprehensive Vision’ (Rawls got that part right, at least) served the Framers as an unstated but utterly reliable bedrock upon which to build their American Framing Vision.

Without that Vision, the whole American Experiment would not work, could not function. Thus neither ‘secularist’ America as sought by ‘liberals’ here nor religiously fundamentalist cultures such as Islam nor Marxist-inspired cultures, have proven themselves hospitable to a genuinely ‘deliberative democratic politics’.

And without that ‘deliberative democratic politics’ the entire Framing Vision and the Constitutional machinery and the Republic cannot stand.

Hayes then works toward his conclusion by tying in Obama’s ‘pragmatism’ to the historically American philosophy of Pragmatism espoused principally by William James in the first decade of the 20^th century.

For James, as Hayes says, Pragmatism meant a “skepticism toward certainties derived from abstractions” and that “truth is pre-eminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief”.

But surely, Gramsci channeling Marx and Lenin is based on a whole trunk-full of presumptions and ‘abstractions’ that must be taken as a given if you are to ‘get it’.

And most certainly, if We are to consider the track record of the Marxist-Leninst system, however variously re-jiggered over ensuing decades, then its “practical consequences” have been irrefutably baaaad.

And I say that if We are to consider the track record of the Gramscian-Eurocommunist Project here, especially without fear of being considered politically un-Correct and a ‘backlasher’, and especially on the profound but vital foundational level of its effect on the most essential and utterly principle of Our Republic, then I think the conclusion must inescapably be that things have worked out far less than well.

Our politics and political discourse are truly deranged, and thus seem so ineffective at addressing national problems, precisely because the problem on this profound level has not been addressed and indeed is being either ignored or spun as ‘progress’. *

It is, on this level, nothing of the sort.

Obama, Hayes says, “has no taste for culture war”. But that is precisely and unavoidably what the Gramscian and Eurocommunist gameplan call for.

Further, Hayes tries to go for the high-ground by quoting Lincoln: “We are not enemies but friends … Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection”.

But the Gramscian ‘war of positions’, the font and origin of Identity Politics, and essentially committed to an eternal war of “antagonisms” (via Chantal Mouffe’s “radical democracy” – which is no democracy at all), has already precluded any such appeal to Lincoln’s superb Vision. And to MLK’s as well.

You cannot simultaneously embrace Gramsci and appeal to Lincoln. They come from fundamentally different political Universes and the former is lethally Alien to Our own as well as lethal in and of itself.

There is an old Catholic maxim: suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. It translates roughly as: be decent and skilled in how you apply your principles, but be unshakeable in your own commitment to those principles.

It was, I would say, precisely this that both Lincoln and MLK were going for. But their unshakeable commitment was to the principles of the Framing Vision – which is precisely where the Gramscian-Identity Politics Project differs necessarily and inalterably.

Nor is it a matter of making the imposition-by-elites (those who ‘get it’) a little ‘nicer’. The entire ‘anti-majoritarian’ Gramscian Project must be abandoned and all matters and demands and ‘issues’ returned to the aegis of the Framing Vision, that is to say of a genuinely ‘deliberative democratic politics’, in which a fundamental common bond of Citizenship and commitment to the American common-weal override any other considerations.

The active and vital circuit of The People, their elected representatives, and the Sovereign Authority of the government must be re-established and nothing must be allowed to undermine it.

This is a slower and more deliberate process, but it is the only one that respects the Framing Vision (and sustains the Republic). The alternative for Lincoln – as Hayes mentions – was a terrible Civil War. In Our modern situation, it has been a Gramscian ‘war of positions’ or Culture War in which the Citizenry have been divided presumptively (and ideologically) along the axes of the Race and then – even more lethally – Gender. And, additionally, huge swaths of the Citizenry were presumptively branded as ‘hegemonic, dominant, and oppressive’ (Gramsci) and ‘patriarchal’ (radical feminism).

This has to be stopped. As Lincoln also said, quoting an ancient text Grounded in the Beyond: “A house divided against itself cannot stand”.

NOTES

*In that regard, this article helpfully exposes the happy-faced burbling by which one recent author quotes another of her sistern to the effect that a) Nietzsche’s assertion that “truth is merely an illusion that we have forgotten is an illusion” has been “central to the liberal critique of American ideals” and that b) Nietzsche’s “perspectivism” – that there is no truth except what you can see from where you are standing, thus no truth except your own point of view – is also “central” to that “critique of American ideals”.

Nor can it be denied that “perspectivism” is on its surface simply a euphemism for relativism and in its substance an even more lethal proposition than relativism: not that positions or beliefs are all ‘equal’ but that each individual (or Group or Identity) has its own ‘truth’ which must be ‘respected equally’.

I would add that the radical-feminist Gramscian Project has not been simply a “critique”. If it had been only that, then it could have been proposed within the national political discourse, deliberated upon, and The People would have engaged in ‘deliberative democratic politics’ and things would have proceeded – vigorously no doubt – from there.

But precisely because The People ‘just don’t get it’ then this ‘critique’ became a ‘war of positions’ and a Beltway policy of imposition. And a sustained assault on the Framing Vision and the Constitution, the Culture, and the common-weal which they both vitally sustain.

2012-01-15T09:51:00.000-08:00

JOHN UPDIKE: HOW WE GOT HERE

(I realize that the preceding Post was a bit long – even for me.

Yesterday I put up an Addendum to that Post but it occurs to me that many readers might already have read the original Post so I am putting up that Addendum as a free-standing (and much much shorter Post) here, with a couple of additions.

This Post presupposes a nodding familiarity with the prior Post on Jurgen Habermas and Chantal Mouffe, and if you’ve read the two Posts prior to that (on Catharine MacKinnon and Antonio Gramsci) then you are pretty well prepared. But this Post can also stand on its own without much difficulty.)

Let me add here some reflections on this article by Robert Boyers in ‘Harpers’ (July 2006, pp.89-94) reviewing the now-late John Updike’s then-new novel “Terrorist”.

I recall Stephen Pinker saying (in an interview in ‘Reason’ recently, I think) that “if the impediment to a better world is some defined group of people” (I’m working from memory here), then the defining-group is “justified in unlimited outlays of violence”.

He’s going for the idea that fundamentalisms are by nature going to start ‘defining’ this or that target group or culture as ‘evil’ and thus – at least in their own minds – justify the violence they are about to impose.

And – because America is one of those Western democracies Gramsci (and Lenin) realized could not be attacked outright – the ‘violence’ here is not physical but is rather conducted through Gramsci’s insidious ‘war of positions’ against the Culture through the derangement of its politics (which are corruptly and evilly sustaining Oppression, Dominance and Hegemony) and its Citizens’ very ability to conduct any sort of deliberative and democratic political discussion.

After all, why allow those Citizens and The People to do all of that when, of course, ‘they just don’t get it’ to begin with?

Which also leads me to think, as I have said in prior Posts, that the real historical significance of the Watergate scandal so hugely trumpeted against Nixon (for whom I hold no brief) in 1974 was primarily necessary in the view of the budding ‘liberal’ elites in order to reverse and discredit the presidential election results of 1972 – when all but one of the States in the Union rejected the Democrats’ New Order Party vision that embraced the Radical Feminist* gameplan.

and b) could not at that point in history even imagine that the federal government would actually embrace what is essentially a Marxist schematic that for all practical purposes abandoned the Framing Vision.

(Nor am I here shrilly going for a the-government-is-Communist bit. What the Beltway embraced was Marxist, and Eurocommunist, but not to all appearances Communist as that monstrous ideology was known in the USSR and all its satellites.)

Boyers observes of Updike’s anti-hero that his faith was “a rottenness of certitudes” – about the West, about the evil of Western civilization (and I would include Culture here), about the great threat that Western and American civilization posed to the world and its peoples, and about what a noxious affront such an outrageous Thing was to decent and right-thinking people.

And does that not sound rather familiar in light of everything that Gramsci, Mouffe, R-Feminists, and the whole pandemonium of fellow/sister-travelers and ‘useful idiots’ claim about the macho, patriarchal, dominant, oppressive, hegemonic American Culture and its enabling document, the Constitution?

But – I note – not Updike, not Boyers, not Pinker go there. Which omission is itself a commentary on the state of intellectual discourse in the country nowadays. And largely has been for the past 40 Biblical years.

The terrorist anti-hero of the novel notes that Westerners “brag of freedom” but it is “a freedom to no purpose”. We are instantly brought back to first principles when confronted with this observation, which is actually touted as one of the great cutting-edge aspects of postmodern, post-democratic, post-Liberal politics in the ‘liberal’ New Order: no individual has to consider him/herself bound by any preconceived notion of what the purpose of his/her life is, since s/he is ‘born free’ and is not burdened or constrained by any ‘essence’ or by any Higher Authority or Being that/Who might have imbued human beings with such a confining and restricting load.

I hold no brief whatsoever for the anarchist or terrorist idea that the only way you can impose your political vision is by gratuitous or calculated violence.

But I also hold no brief for the lethal Gramscian-Mouffian assurance that a well-established democratic polity and its Culture only serve the forces of Oppression, Dominance, and Hegemony and that on that basis that polity and that Culture deserve – and can only be dealt with by – the “antagonistic” “war of positions” which has been slyly waged – with the Beltway’s full aiding and abetting – for the past 40 Biblical years.

This is the secularist ‘space’ created by simply erasing any possibility of human purpose (except if a particular individual personally chooses to accept such a restriction – and even then s/he can change his/her mind any old time).

But it should not be too hard to see that such a neat political ploy, rhetorically (and demagogically) shrewd, is also profoundly destabilizing to any human sense of Meaning and Purpose.

(And for this reason, it becomes clear that the Church’s long-standing opposition to the Marxist form of ‘Knowledge’ is grounded in a reason far far Above and Beyond some massively brutish desire to quench genuine human freedom: Flattening humanity’s existential horizon onto the Base Board of the Mono-Plane (with no Higher levels of existence, hence no God and no ultimate grounding and justification for human dignity, meaning and purpose) is no path to genuine, full, and ultimate human freedom.)

What I fear is that the more addled the Citizens become because of so profound a lack of large and solidly-anchored Meaning and Purpose, the less able they will become to withstand the growth of Leviathan (the National Security State) and Leviatha (the National Nanny State), which two profoundly anti-American monstrosities are now revealing their essential sameness as they metastasize with impunity into some intrusive and (in a nice symmetry) monster-government unbounded and unrestricted by any Framing ‘essence’ or ‘nature’.

About the anti-hero’s terroristic ‘politics’, Boyers observes that the young terrorist is not actually interested in politics at all. And that his “political ideas” are merely a hash of “platitudes and warmed-over certainties”.

But what is the Gramscian and especially Mouffian ‘philosophy’ (embraced by R-feminism, MacKinnon, Nussbaum, Amartya Sen and – up until recently – Habermas) except precisely just such a hash of old Marxist and Leninist categories and prescriptions, re-jiggered but nothing more?

A hash of mantras, presumptions, dogmas and slogans which – if you’ve gone into hock to put your kid(s) through college any time in the past twenty-five years – now passes for ‘elite cutting edge education and Knowledge’.

And in a remarkable bit in the novel, when the character of an assistant to the Director of Homeland Security is asked by his boss why terrorists do all this bad stuff, he gives the answer: “Because they hate the light”.

Let Us pass over in silence the fact that this almost a word-for-word replication of the Israeli Realm’s single primary justification for the opposition that remains so stubbornly alive to it in the Middle East six full decades after its erection as a sovereignty.

Let Us rather recall that this assertion is also precisely the single primary ‘explanation’ George W. Bush gave for the 9/11 attacks: the terrorists hate us because of our freedom. (A freedom which, a decade later, very very few on either Left or Right deny has somehow slipped away in the choking, miasmic brouhaha raised by the unleashed dogs of war.)

And in the Correct argot that means that any Citizens who oppose or doubt the ‘Knowledge’ of those who ‘get it’ are merely backlashers and fetishizers of the Constitution, that pact with Oppression, Dominance, and Hegemony cooked up by patriarchally macho, oppressive, dominant, hegemonic dead white males.

And yet one of whose worst and most lethal philosophical systems R-Feminism slyly filched and, with the help of a demographically addled and supremely feckless mob of Beltway pols, invited in through the front door here around 1971 or so, and – further – was insidiously spun as cutting-edge, fresh, and ‘new’ thinking about reform that nobody had ever thought of before here in this country.

But it was ‘new’ to the American political and cultural Universe only because it had been avoided like the plague ever since Marx (let alone Lenin and Gramsci). And the wreckage of its monstrous failures throughout the world had become – especially after WW2 and the revelations Nikita Khrushchev made at the 20^th Party Congress in 1956, ominously accompanied by the repression of the Hungarian Revolt of that year – clear to all but the most whacked-out ‘believers’ in the Marxist approach and all its spawn. (And, it might well be added, the failures of all the excitements and visions of the Bandung era in the Third World of the 1950s as well.)

Marxism in any of its variants was not so much ‘fresh’ and ‘new’ as it was the toxic core of a fundamentally Alien political Universe, and a Universe that – like an Orc to an Elf – was comprised of precisely those elements that denied some of the most fundamental first principles on which the West’s and especially America’s polity and Culture had been built.

In relation to Western Culture and the Culture contained within the Framing Vision, Marxism constituted not an alternative Universe but rather an anti-Universe.

Boyers sees Updike trying to demonstrate that to be encased in such an ideological shell simply cuts the ‘believing terrorist’ off from reality. But let Us not be distracted by the red-herring of ‘belief’ here: the secularist Gramscian-Mouffian cadres of the vanguard elite Elect are just as much ‘believers’ as the – in this case, Islamic – terrorist. The elite cadres are secular believers – meaning that they do not base their beliefs in any other Plane of Existence – but they are believers just the same and just as single-mindedly and ruthlessly (and, thus, just as whackulently).

Because if you have the magic ‘Knowledge’ (shades of ancient Gnosticism) then an almost irresistible need is experienced by the well-intentioned yet slack-minded: to immediately get rid of whatever interferes with your oh-so-marvelous Knowledge and its dampdream fever-swamp ‘visions’. And not let those who ‘just don’t get it’ interfere with your plans. After all, you are, just as sure as any religious fundamentalist terrorist, ‘on a mission from God’. Although in the Marxist case, you are a secular fundamentalist and don’t believe in a God; instead, you believe utterly in the Marxian ‘Knowledge’ that – as improved by R-feminist bright-bulb Catharine MacKinnon over here – has been hidden since the beginning of recorded human history and has only now been ‘revealed’ to and by the cadres of the vanguard elite Elect who are the only ones who really do ‘get it’.

Cue the Bhagwan.

Boyers goes on to observe that “the new Islamic fundamentalists are frightening principally because they have so little attachment to the things of this world”, a world that is “ugly and deceitful, a world filled with defilement and shame”. And a world that is “the devil’s playground”.

And, one could only add, the Western and American world is nothing more than a blivet filled with the truly Evil devilry of Oppression, Dominance, and Hegemony. (You can consult your search engine for it if it isn’t a familiar term.)

(Why weren’t Americans frightened of all that sooner? As I said above, perhaps because they simply couldn’t grasp or imagine that the Dems (and before long the Republicans for their own purposes) were going to smooth their way forward in the early 1970s by inviting the shades of Marx and Gramsci – dressed perhaps in a Mouffian wig – into the very heart of the American polity and Culture. And yet The People sensed something back there in the presidential election of 1972.)

In fact the only difference I can make out between Updike’s terrorist anti-hero and the Gramscian-Mouffian pandemonium is that whereas the anti-hero entertains a “sour view of the world”, the pandemonium – cadres, fellow/sister-travelers, and useful idiots – entertain a gleefully sour view of the world: it’s so rotten that they can happily take axe to it root and branch, sawing and hacking in the sure and certain Knowledge that anything they hit deserves such a mighty deconstructive and transgressive whack.

You can kiss the American common-weal goodbye. In fact, it’s probably been left too far behind to embrace now, even for a farewell smooch. Hasta la vista, bayyy-beeeeee – to quote a phrase.

Goodbye to all that. It’s not ‘your grandfather’s America any more’, to recall a gleeful Radical Feminist slogan.

Boyers draws a connection between the fundamentalist anti-hero and Hannah Arendt’s characterization of “the banality of evil”, embodied in Adolf Eichmann, a man she described as possessing “a quite authentic inability to think”.

With all due respect to Boyers and Arendt, I don’t think that’s what We see in the Gramscian-Mouffian cadres of the vanguard elite Elect. What We have here is a deliberate and calculated refusal to think. Instead, they embrace their presumptions, mantras, dogmas, fever-swamp excitements and visions, and slogans.

And then do their very best (with the resources of the Beltway pols and bureaucracies at their disposal and the collusion of so much of the mainstream media and educational ‘elites’) to ensure that We don’t and indeed can’t think either.

Can it really be any wonder that nothing vital around here seems to work anymore?

There is no longer in Our politics – as there is no longer in the politics of Updike’s terrorist anti-hero – “the drama of contending ideas”. Instead there is nothing but a kabuki of dueling adolescent cartoons masquerading (and being accepted) as ‘political thoughts’ and ‘political positions’. And all so verrry ‘fresh’, ‘rich’, ‘creative’, ‘transgressive’, ‘deconstructive’, ‘liberating’ and – but of course – cutting-edge.

‘Creative’ as in ‘make it up as you go along’ and don’t worry about what the whole thing will look like once you’ve gotten it rolling and don’t worry about such fuddy-duddy things as ‘consequences’ or ‘un-intended consequences’ because – it is ferociously believed – somehow Everything Will Be Better when you’re finished all your fresh and rich creating, transgressing, deconstructing, and cutting up and down.

Yah.

And is that working for Us?

But then, in the fatal anti-politics of Mouffe’s “radical democracy”, there is no ‘Us’, nor even an ‘us’. Rather instead, there is simply a scorpion-pile of writhing creatures seeking what they want and demanding it right now, stinging and whacking their own kind in an eternal and fatal scrum of self-interest. Is this not a form of Social Darwinism?

Is it then any wonder that somehow – none of the elite cared to imagine how it might or would happen – the same philosophy that accompanied the first Gilded Age and its grossly deranged social and political relations has now – and from the Left – been introduced here and, by amazing coincidence, We are now afflicted with a second Gilded Age even worse than the first?

Gordon Gekko managed to make his repugnant comeback in the 1980s (his direct ancestor Gekko from the 1880s had been caged, finally, in the 1930s) as a selfish, aggressive (and quite possibly sociopathic) Macher precisely in response to what had by 1980 been a decade’s worth of the intense and rabidly-infused Marxist class-war ‘narrative’, grotesquely jiggered to now include (by 1980) Race and – far more virulently – Gender (as those words are used as code for all the demands of basic Identity Politics).

Identity Politics thus conceived had a) made insistent and obsessive and aggressive self-centeredness ‘respectable’ again, and indeed made it absolutely cutting-edge; and

b) had, through its assorted deconstructions and destructive manipulations in the service of maximizing Mouffe’s permanently necessary “antagonisms” among the hugely-expanded ranks of the variously ‘oppressed’, created ‘space’ merely by destroying whatever it set its sights upon (with the full collusion of the addled Beltway pols) and thereby actually created a vacuum – into which, as I said, Gekko’s spirit returned with a vengeance. A vengeance driven by that robust vitality that always appeals to the lower human urges and fueled by the huge quantities of ‘paper’ wealth created in the Reagan years in the effort to restore the appearance of a healthy and Productive American economy that even in 1980 was a thing of a rapidly-fading Past.

Nor did the Clintons help by embracing the worst of Gekko while also whole-heartedly opening the corridors of government to the R-feminists and their agendas and cocksure (so to speak) certainties and adolescent self-assurance that they ‘got it’ and possessed – for the first time in recorded human history – the secret ‘Knowledge’ that would bring their ilk’s dampdreams (and precisely not the common-weal) into marvelous flowering perfection.

Such feminism. Such governance.

Oy.

Big Identity and Big Money. Such a two-fer.

Boyers makes reference to Dostoevsky trying to wrap his capacious and sensitive mind around the reality of that actual historical figure, the bloody-minded Russian anarchist Nechaev, who sought nothing less than the extermination of – in an eerie classification – “gentlemen and Liberals and all defenders of every status quo”.**

Which – and feel free to consult any ‘consciousness-raising sessions’ – is pretty much the agenda of the R-feminist Gramscian-Mouffian cadres of the vanguard elite Elect.

But even if only considered from a purely conceptual point of view, the constant instability of deliberately smashing any reliable predictability and ‘solidity’ that has formed or is forming in one’s Culture is profoundly deranging to human development.

Yes, the cadres will insist that this human developmental need for ‘stability’ is merely a ‘compensatory illusion’ created by weak-willed and weak-spirited humans who for millennia ‘just didn’t get it’ and were ‘oppressed’ by hegemonies to which they were seduced to give their consent.

But both human developmental psychology and what used to be called ‘religious anthropology’ are acutely alive to the deranging potentials of an essential unreliability in one’s surround: Shaping becomes impossible for the human personality (which, alas, has mulishly not yet evolved into some Star Trekky level of ‘pure energy’, utterly vital yet immaterial and unconstricted by any need for a Shape). Humans exposed to a culture built on fluid unreliability do not – pace Gene Roddenberry – evolve into ‘pure (and Correct) energy’ but rather become mushy and gelatinous, an exo-skeletal insect without the exo-skeleton.

And if you are still able to conceive of the human situation un-deformed by the Secret Knowledge of those who ‘get it’, you might also imagine that to then also Flatten the already gelatinized human species into a purely materialistic, Mono-Planar, this-dimensional existence (with no Beyond and no Higher Entity or – if you wish – God) is thus and thereby doubly lethal and most surely fatal to any genuine (or Genuine) human fulfillment and freedom.

My take on all this in regard to Our own present situation is this: while studying the Islamic terrorist anti-hero and the dynamics that drive him to his frightful assumptions, Updike is somehow – and perhaps unintentionally – reflecting an even more lethal and insidious dynamic that has been going on right here for decades.

In other words, somehow – whether he intended to or not – Updike here is talking not only about the psychological dynamics and deformities of the Islamic terrorist anti-hero of his novel, but also – lurking not far beneath the surface of that writerly discussion – are the psychological dynamics and deformities of American society as it has been contorted – first from the Left and then from the Right – over the past 40 Biblical years.***

So his novel, whatever its weaknesses, is indeed a ‘rich’ source of insight into vital and urgent matters more specifically American.

I know that Updike is now dead and I am not trying to stuff words into his mouth. But the similarities between the psychology and presumptions of Updike’s anti-hero and the long-espoused presumptions of the Gramscian-Mouffian cadres are simply too compelling to ignore.

And I wonder if somehow, in that now distant year of 1972, The People somehow sensed the abyss that lay at the heart of the New Order and instinctively acted to reject it and – they thought – ward it off.

But instead, the cadres of the vanguard elite Elect simply became enraged and – with the feckless ‘barons’ of the Beltway as their political enablers – simply decided that a People that “just doesn’t get it” doesn’t deserve to be heard and their ‘deliberative democratic politics’ are merely a rotten husk and ditto the Constitution that guarantees that politics and ditto the Framing Vision that undergirds that politics.

And the band played on from there.

And still plays on.

Even though now what was billed as the marquis crowning victory of American ‘liberalism’ – a young black multicultural man as President (as JFK was a young white Catholic man as President) – turns out to be as dedicated an enabler of a profoundly anti-democratic vision as the monstrous tag-team that preceded him and the queasily greasy-glowing tag-team of husband and wife that preceded them.

Asked what should be done in the matter of the Warren Commission, half a century ago next year, homely up-by-the-bootstraps Philadelphia guy John J. McCloy – major D.C. player in the WW2 era and Member of that Warren Commission – insisted that whatever was decided, the US simply could not be allowed to be seen as “a banana republic”.

But here We are: a declining republic with – yes – no bananas and just some really big bombs.

God save Us all.

NOTES

*Let me repeat here a few introductory points about my use of ‘feminism’ and ‘radical feminism: As noted in the MacKinnon Post, I use this term (R-feminist) to denote radical-feminism. A couple of points to clarify at the outset: A) R-feminism is different from moderate and liberal feminism, which MacKinnon and her cadres helped kick to the curb in American politics in the 1970s; B) when I refer to R-feminism I am referring to it as a political phenomenon; thus C) I am not ‘against women’ (who, in my book, are human beings made in the Image of God and you really can’t get a higher encomium than that); which foregoing presumes D) that I don’t think R-feminism is demonstrably the representative spokesthing for all women.

**In the process, Boyers recommends – and I agree – some excellent literary works: Henry James’s “The Princess Casamassima”; Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent”; Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed” and – more recently – J.M.Coetzee’s “The Master of Petersburg”.

If you are of a literary bent, and want to give yourself a short but acute course in the psychology of ‘true believers’ who will, and most urgently and sincerely feel compelled to, do ‘whatever it takes’ and to do it right now, then this is a great little list to start with.

As I have been saying, you will learn a great deal not only about the psychological wiring of ‘religious’ fundamentalists but also of secular fundamentalists. Thus – alas – getting a much clearer picture of what has happened to American politics, political discourse, and public political competence – individual and communal – in the past 40 Biblical years.

***And of course, staring everyone right in the face for the past 40 Biblical years is this ominous and lethal symmetry: Just as conceptually there are no ‘innocent victims’ for terrorists, so too there are no ‘innocent bourgeois’ for Marx, Lenin, Gramsci or Mouffe. And for MacKinnon and her ilk, the new working definition of ‘bourgeois’ is that ‘you just don’t get it’.

So for all of the viewing audience who let so much go on for so long without much of a thought, because it didn’t really have anything to do with themselves … well, if you weren’t part of the solution then you were part of the problem (remember that bit from the long-ago?).

ADDENDUM

In a recent exchange of communications the idea was proposed to me that MacKinnon’s R-feminist version of ‘modern feminism’ “has nothing whatever to do with Marxism”. This is so, the idea goes on, because “Marxism-Leninism is distinguished by a single party directing all the affairs of society and by government ownership of the means of production” and “neither of those has arisen in the US since 1970 or at any other time”. And that whatever has happened since 1970 is and must be considered as prompted solely by “the ample precedents throughout American history” itself.

But it was precisely Gramsci’s point that one could not repeat the Russian Method of establishing ‘the revolution’ in the West and that a new Method was necessary because a) the Citizenries of the established democracies were too competent politically and b) democracy was so deeply entwined in those Western democracies. But they had both realized that ‘democracy’ could only serve “the bourgeoisie” and – to put it in Gramsci’s terms – the dominant hegemonic Culture.

It was to specifically tailor such a new and needed Method that Gramsci constructed his own approach, that ‘war of positions’ by which vanguard cadres of the Party would not govern through a single-Party State but would rather conduct a sustained offensive assault against the fixed positions, the ‘castle’ to use his imagery, of an established democracy and its Culture.

Rather, vanguard-elites would – in the full ideal of Gramsci’s vision – educate the “marginalized” and then nurse those “marginalized” along as those now ‘educated’ and ‘consciousness-raised’ “marginalized” made the revolution.

As I have indicated in my series of Posts, the danger lurking in this was that – given the nature of human psychology and the dynamics of power, especially in revolutionary projects – the guiding element of the vanguard elites would become impatient with this ideal approach and seek both to a) ‘speed up the revolution’ on their own and b) retain power rather than giving it over to the “marginalized” while also c) give themselves over to Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ scenario and retain the power for themselves (for the sake of the still and variously oppressed, of course, and always in the name of those oppressed masses).

Just about all of this has happened here since 1970. Even in regard to (c) where the IVth level of advanced ‘Advocacy’ constitutes a bloc (a Gramscian term and a concept he strongly urged upon the cadres) of powerful influence in the Beltway. Our politics is now envisioned (in Mouffe's feverswamp justifications) as an ongoing, permanent, and necessary clash ('war' wouldn't be a mischaracterization) of "antagonisms" between 'Identities' among the "marginalized" and variously "oppressed" and – as always – waged ultimately against the dominant, oppressive, hegemonic target Culture, i.e. America’s Culture built on and anchored in its Framing Vision.

And Our political discourse is reduced to the dynamics inherent to the Marxist, Leninst, Gramscian assault strategy of continuously and variously assaulting and undermining and "de-legitimizing" (a Gramscian term, not feminism's) the "hegemonic" (ditto) Culture such that whatever mud or claim serves the Cause is tossed forth as 'reason' and any effort to support the Culture - no matter how rational, reasonable, and compelling - is and must be hooted off the stage of public discourse. Shades of Mussolini's well-dressed thugs hooting down Haile Selassie as he tried to make his case against their invasion of his country before the League of Nations; a newsreel clip whose grainy black and white message should always be before Us. Rather than that witlessly lethal burble of Mao's: "Let a hundred flowers bloom!", which soon led China not into a Garden but a Jungle.

Indeed, what has been most uniquely ‘American’ about the whole process has been that the sworn defenders of America’s democratic, deliberative political Culture was that the Beltway, led by the demographically-desperate Dems in that era of the very late 1960s and especially the very early 1970s, actually threw open the gates of the Culture in a desperate (and, in my opinion, witlessly treacherous) bid for ‘the female demographic’ (which the cadres-advocates claimed to fully and uniquely represent and control sufficiently to ‘deliver the votes’).

Thus was born the Beltway pandering to Big Identity (spear-headed by Gender). It was shortly thereafter that the Dems came up with PACs, which the Supreme Court upheld in 1976; a neat idea which systematized and legalized the delivery of cash to pols for their services and indenture. A development, by the by, which the corporations and Big Money did nothing to prevent, since it also played right into their hands as well – a development, thus, which while it seemed in the short term remarkably shrewd and ‘strategic’, actually – and hardly unforeseeably – opened the door to the old politics of the first Gilded Age.

Nor do I assert that the entire Gramscian subversive strategy – that ‘war of positions’ – ignored the terrain on which it was operating, i.e. America’s own particular history and historical themes and dynamics. Rather, it built upon them, using them for its own purposes. That was part of the ‘genius’ and adaptability of Gramsci’s approach.

And in regard to the assertion that ‘modern feminism’ (which fails to appreciate my distinction among moderate and ‘liberal’ feminism and R-feminism), "has nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism", I can only point out the following:

Surely MacKinnon’s “Towards a Feminist Theory of Politics” (1989, though she says she had been working on the ideas of the relationship of feminism and Marxism since 1970 or so) establishes that: she crows that while Marx was good, his ‘economic’ definition was insufficient and she proceeds to substitute Gender for economics and for ‘proletariat’ and, like Julia Child in kitchen on camera, discusses it with us as she does it.

Ditto Mouffe whose theory of “radical democracy” has no need whatsoever for a “deliberative democratic politics” (her 1985 summa “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Feminist Politics” rather clearly lays it out). Further, her concept of necessary and permanent “antagonisms” between groups in the service of their own agendas (as opposed to any balancing sense of the commonweal) as absolutely essential to her “radical democracy” goes quite some way toward a) explaining the lethally fractalizing effect of Identity Politics as it has evolved here and b) demonstrating the use of Gramsci’s ‘war of positions’ as he outlines the way to undermine a “hegemonic” and “oppressive” (his terms, not feminism’s) Culture in service of the “marginalized” (ditto).

The connection of which dots leads me to reaffirm my thought that what has fundamentally deranged American politics has been this lethal (perhaps fatal) synergy of Gramsci’s original approach and R-feminism’s adoption of it in the American setting since 1970 or so – and vitally infused with seeming ‘success’ by the immediate and rather thorough embrace of the whole toxic shebang by the Dems (in the beginning) and then Republicans (as Big Money in the immediately ensuing years was given a place in the game).

While all along the whole thing was ‘spun’ as merely a continuation of MLK’s far more capacious and genuinely American Vision and thus as the further expansion of ever-expanding visions of ‘civil rights’ and (the key Gramscian giveaway) ‘liberation from oppression’. And as being utterly fresh, new, creative, and native to the American soil (and, in my terms, to the American political and legal Universe).

Which was and remains fundamentally not so.

And constitutes, I would say, the core derangement from which so many of Our current political debaucheries and lunacies and derangements and malfunctions continue to erupt like so much lava from a threatening but still (stunningly) unacknowledged volcano.

2012-01-09T21:37:00.000-08:00

CHANTAL MOUFFE AND JURGEN HABERMAS: HOW WE GOT HERE

I want to follow-up on my immediately previous two Posts (the first on Catharine MacKinnon, the second on Antonio Gramsci).*

If by any chance, say, you may have voiced any of the thoughts from those two Posts to a local cadre of the vanguard elite Elect, you may well have been brushed off with the blithe assertion that none of my concerns or historical points apply since there’s much more ‘fresh thinking’ now that actually drives things.

If you have encountered such toss-offs, the cadre’s reference could very well be to the thinking of the French thinker Chantal Mouffe, who has been chief totem-thinker of the vanguard elites since the 1970s-1980s’ heyday of Eurocommunism.

So I’d like to continue with this thread for one more Post before getting back to the truly stunning ‘philosophical stylings’ of Catharine MacKinnon.

Mouffe was a key player in the ‘Eurocommunism’ craze of the 1970s-1980s. The Eurocommunist conceit was that you can have a ‘Westernized’ Marxism – recalling Gramsci’s idea that you cannot conduct an open revolution against the much more developed and integrated ‘hegemonic Cultures’ of the West the way Lenin could impose (through Political Correctness backed up by Terror) the revolution in and on the benighted masses of the Russian East; so instead you had to combine siege and infiltration strategies to get at the castle of Western Culture.

Although even on his best days, he never imagined that any Western government’s sworn defenders manning the walls and gates of that ‘castle’ would simply quietly throw them open to the Elect cadres and then put the entire resources of the armory and the treasure-box at their disposal – but Gramsci had never imagined a beast as treacherously addled as the demographically-terrified Dems of the very early 1970s over here.

Mouffe bought all of Gramsci’s major bits:

a) the Circle-without-a-Circumference image whereby the hoped-for result was a culture that would have no ‘marginalized’ people but rather all people would be at the Center of the new Culture that their efforts have somehow created, run in a marvelous new hegemony by the formerly marginalized (who apparently wouldn’t repeat the “Animal Farm” scenario once they got themselves set up);

b) the fundamental image of the oppressive (and ‘bourgeois’) ‘hegemonic Culture’ that was defended by a government and by laws that somehow induced even the most oppressed of its subjects to consent to it;

c) the consequent fundamental objective of deconstructing and destroying that Culture (either before, during, after, as a result of or by the action of either the previously marginalized or by the cadres of the vanguard elite Elect – nobody is quite sure as to which way it’s going to work, but they are all agreed that it will work and then things will be great) – although nobody has given any thought as to just what sort of polity will be constituted as a government but they are also pleased as punch and sure as sure can be that something great in the Culture and Government line will ‘creatively’ occur;

d) the nurture of as many ‘identities’ and ‘marginalized groups’ as possible whose ‘outrage’ and ‘grievances’ would fuel numerous simultaneous demands and agitations along numerous axes of attack against the Culture (which would befuddle and wear down the Culture and its defenders, who by definition of course, just don’t get it).

Just what sort of a polity would be created to govern this new Culture is left achingly unclear in all these dampdreams. Except that somehow it would be ‘inclusive’ and nobody would be ‘excluded’ and ‘difference’ would be ‘respected’ along with ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ (all of which, on top of everything else, have to be considered as quite possibly sly code words for very particular and special meanings known only to the cadres of the vanguard elites, those Elect who ‘get it’).

I can’t see how this is much of an improvement over Marx or Gramsci (or Lenin, for that matter). Or, really, the Bhagwan.

All of Gramsci’s basic vision is here in Mouffe and her ilk. They’ve simply expanded him.

Nor do I accept the now-trendy follow-on slyness of claiming to be “socialist” when, in reality, you have really just bought into some variant of the Eurocommunist gambit and would rather not use the M-word (Marx) or the C-word (Communist). Ditto the variant expressed in such sources as Timothy Ferris’s recent book “The Science of Liberty” that ‘liberalism’ – like ‘science’ – is not an “ideology” but merely a “method of inquiry”. This is akin to a John Rawls argument I will discuss further on, and yet it is grossly untrue. Because to the extent that contemporary American ‘liberalism’ has given itself over to Gramsci and Mouffe, which thus also instantly encompasses R-Feminism as well, then it is, and cannot in any way avoid being, a tool and instrument of the most rabidly-failed ideology in the history of the species, i.e. that Mother of All Ideologies stemming from Marxism. Trying to paint over the tiger’s stripes will not change the nature of the beast nor dull its teeth nor alter its lethal predatory instincts.

And although they claim that they do not agree with the Marxist idea of revolution so they are an ‘improvement’, then I simply point out that they pretty much endorse – for all practical purposes – Gramsci’s ‘revolution from below’ and his ‘war of positions’ and so their whole approach is still lethal and fundamentally and in principle hostile to a deliberative democracy.

Because if the vanguard elite Elect actually do gain MacKinnon’s ‘Knowledge-with-a-capital-K’ (i.e., the ultimate secret and Elect Knowledge that all life is primarily politics and men – through sexual oppression, ‘dominance’ and ‘patriarchy’ – have ingeniously and ruthlessly kept women willingly oppressed since either just before or just after the day when recorded history began), then why would they not consider themselves almost morally bound to impose that putatively marvelous Secret Knowledge forthwith by whatever means necessary?

Could it rationally be imagined that if you have gone to the trouble and raised up such consciousness-raised vanguard elite Elect cadres, and they now have ‘the Knowledge’, they are then going to have the patience to submit their grand revelations about stuff to the time-consuming (and possibly skeptical) democratic deliberations of a lumpen-mass (comprised of the by-definition lumpen-males but also the false-consciousness females who – alas – are still enthralled to ‘patriarchy’) that just doesn’t get it in the first place?

After all, if you have the Secret Knowledge and the rest of the Citizenry doesn’t, then why waste the time – why betray and delay the rescue of the oppressed – by talking with those who don’t have the grand secret Knowledge and who aren’t of the Elect and therefore don’t deserve to play a role in things anyway?

I’ll say more about this later in the Post in regard to recent musings of Indian economist Amartya Sen.

If you were to recognize in these dynamics any similarities to the dynamics of the whacked out end of the spectrum of religious fundamentalisms and even cults, then I’d say that you could hardly be considered altogether wrong.

And it strikes me as hugely significant that the terrorist-anarchist view of the West (i.e. it’s nothing but an evil, rotten sinkhole of corrupt oppression and must be engaged not by genuine politics or political discussion but only by violence) resembles so closely the Gramscian-Mouffian view that the whole American reality is nothing more than a dominant, oppressive, hegemonic pact with evil and therefore must be assaulted in any way possible and by any means necessary in order to destroy and deconstruct it. And generations of Citizens have been subjected to the steady drumbeat of this ‘framing narrative’ of things, and generations of students at all levels have now been taught that this and only this is what politics is really all about and what it is for. Assault politics for the purpose of deconstruction – and somehow when the smoke clears Everything will Be Better and whatever ‘collateral damage’ or consequences can be ‘creatively’ dealt with at that time. Yah.

You can also see how this approach is going to run rather clearly and robustly afoul of the Framing Vision and the entire concept of a deliberative democracy based on the competence of its Citizenry to deliberate (and – not to put too fine a point on it – functioning collectively as The People, to govern their government).

And you can also see how any Constitution that enshrined that Framing Vision would be, to such robustly certain Elect, nothing more than a totally erroneous and deliberately oppressive pact with Hell (except that the Marxist-derived Elect don’t believe in Hell, or Heaven, or God – but you get the idea).

Not so – the vanguard elite Elect would insist: Mouffe is very much for ‘democracy’ and in fact has invented her own kind, which she calls “radical democracy”.

Except that when you look at it, ‘radical democracy’ has no use for Liberal or democratic democracy or “deliberative democracy”. Rather it imagines a democracy where “freedom, equality, and difference” are all given equal weight. Just how that might be erected into a workable plan for a polity she, like Gramsci, doesn’t bother to say – but as Gramsci rather slyly insisted, just because a great architect only has plans and hasn’t actually built anything doesn’t mean he isn’t a great architect. And would you buy a used building from these people?

Because – make no mistake about it – the Beltway has used trillions of your tax dollars to buy the vision from such ‘thinkers’ as Mouffe and MacKinnon (who, as I have been saying, slyly lifted it from those indisputable DWEMs Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci) and for the purposes of constructing it over here. (It collapsed – you may recall – over there, with huge loss of life and treasure. But ‘optimism of will’ is the one thing the vanguard elite Elect are not short of.)

‘Radical democracy’ presumes that there are “unjust power relations” that “oppress and marginalize”, and therefore such a ‘democracy’ “thrives on antagonisms”. So much for any sense that there is any sense of common unity or commonweal among the Citizenry - in case you were wondering where it all seems to have gone to in the past few decades. Nor is it dissimilar to the Leninist experience that enroute to the paradise of the masses, a grossly engorged and powerfully intrusive government is necessary (as if those monsters, once allowed to grow, ever yield their power). In this regard the ‘liberal’ National Nanny State will demonstrate its true origins and already has begun to do so.

One need only think of the unspoken underlying vision of Victimism: that one-half of the Citizenry is nothing but prey for the other half. An outrageous state of affairs to which the only logical response are the tactics, structures, and laws of a police-state regime … but a Correct one that is working for ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’ (and whose controlling vanguard elite Elect should, to borrow a phrase, ‘be greeted as liberators’).

So also, it is grossly insufficient to assert that Identity Politics as it has evolved here in the past forty Biblical years is ‘merely’ the same old American interest-politics of yore. Identity Politics is not interest-politics of yore: the old interest politics was simply the gathering together of Citizens or groups of Citizens with similar interests who would then seek to get their views adopted by their political representatives.

Let me refine that a bit. In my view, there are four levels of such ‘advocacy’ for your group’s interests. Level I is simply talking it up yourself and presenting your view to other Citizens. Level II is garnering together other Citizens who have the same interest, or ‘allies’ who have a similar interest, and bringing your views and desires to the attention of your brother and sister Citizens for their consideration and deliberation.

So far, so good. This is deliberative democracy, with the type of competing or varying interests that the Framers envisioned and which the Constitutional machinery was designed to handle and protect.

BUT THEN there is Level III: where the objective is not to inform other Citizens of the facts and the truth, but rather to make sure they only get your facts and your version of the truth – so that they can be steered (or stampeded, perhaps) into agreeing with you or at least not objecting to what you are going to do.

AND THEN in Level IV advocacy you and your allies/accomplices simply bypass the Citizens altogether (although perhaps tossing out a handy smokescreen of your own self-serving press releases) and quietly go straight to the politicians and start making backroom deals. Along the lines of: you recognize us and give us what we want, and with that status you give us we will sing your praises to the public – otherwise we will hold an outraged victim-vigil outside your office.

Which is an offer few pols can refuse, no? (In a delicious but ominously ironic coincidence, Don Corleone’s ‘offer he can’t refuse’ burst onto the American scene in the first “Godfather” movie in 1972, the year that the Dems decided to put all this before the public and got thumped in that year’s presidential election 49 States to one.)

But in all these levels of ‘interest group’ politics, the background presumption is still that deliberative democracy works – even if that maxim is, in Level III and Level IV, honored more in the breach than in the observance. Nobody is looking to deconstruct or overthrow the American Culture or the polity that governs it.

BUT in Gramscian-inspired “radical politics” there is no such context of acceptance of the Framing Vision nor the Constitution nor of the American Culture nor even of the valid role of the Citizenry and The People in either deliberating or in the role of governing the government. After all, since “they just don’t get it” they have nothing worthwhile to say and by virtue of that same alleged ignorance they have no right to say anything in the first place ... which is a vision that comes from some alien political Universe hell and gone from anything you could call American.

And thus Identity Politics (especially as spear-headed by R-feminism here) is based upon the assumption that the entire American Culture and the American polity are rotten and have to be overthrown, and that the vanguard elite Elect cadres are justified in doing ‘whatever it takes’ (to borrow the Israeli phrase) to get what they want.

And what they want is the overthrow of the whole shebang in order to erect something reeely reeely great that they will think about later after they’ve wrecked what’s been standing here already. Shades of Lenin and the Central Committee, sitting in Moscow amid the wreckage of all that went before, trying to figure out what might come next. But in the meanwhile ruthlessly eliminating all opposition on principle while they were holding their endless secret meetings, chattering and braying their various theories at each other in their arcane politicobabble and happily calling it a day’s work on behalf of ‘the masses’.

This is no form of American politics no way. Not hardly.

Or at least, it wasn’t.

And she admits herself deeply influenced by the late Carl Schmitt (a German political and legal thinker informally known as the “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich” for his support of and usefulness to that particular government back in the day). Specifically, she espouses his theory of “the political” which basically holds that politics is not merely one among many dimensions of civic life and existence, but rather is the primary core and source of identity and activity for a human being residing in any polity.**

And, Schmitt adds, political concepts are “secularized theological concepts”, raising instantly the idea that Secularism is basically just a rival (if non-metaphysical) religion trying to capture the aura and authority of Theological Belief (and, I will say, of the Beyond) by eliminating what it insists is ‘the middleman’: organized religion.

Which, by amazing coincidence, is precisely what Gramsci had envisioned: that the Party would have to be the ‘church’ for the elite cadres and would even have to function as the ‘church’ for the masses while they were having their consciousness raised to the point where they would wreck the hegemonic Culture and then come up (he blithely but sincerely imagined) with one of their own. I will deal with this further on in the Post; but you can see where this sort of thing is going with ‘radical democracy’. Equally so, that the Party must ‘educate’ the masses: yet even as the Correct educational content and method has been increasingly imposed, the capacity to critically think and analyze (not to be equated with attacking like a robot everything on the Correct target list using Correct mantras) has been grossly reduced – which is lethal for any hope of sustaining the deliberative democratic polity of the Framing Vision.

I would also add that it is precisely for this reason that one cannot claim that the expanded (and still expanding) post-1968 agitations and impositions of the 'revolutions of the Identities' have been and are nothing more than a glorious ‘extension’ of the truly and genuinely embraced civil-rights Vision of Martin Luther King. (Read, for example, this 1967 speech of his, and see if you can sense how utterly different is his Stance from that of R-feminist and Identity Politics today; and let your mind range over that reality.)

King sought to unite the entire country and The People around a call to the founding American Vision, to a ‘new birth’ of the freedom that that Vision embraced.

But everything after the initiation of the R-feminist agenda was and is solidly (if slyly) based in something from a far more lethally alien political Universe: the Marxist Universe.

Which, I say, is precisely why even as they seem to be hugely dedicated to the expansion of King’s splendid take on the American Framing Vision, yet the country, the society, the polity, and the Culture all seem to be suddenly wracked and weakened and not working properly or robustly at all.

Because they have all been progressively poisoned for the past forty Biblical years by massive if slyly-administered doses of the alien toxin of – and I don’t use the term lightly or rhetorically – Marxist-Leninist political Content and Method, mediated by Gramsci and the likes of Mouffe and MacKinnon and the rest of that Correct and putatively ‘liberal’ pandemonium of ‘cutting-edge’, ‘secular-progressive’ ‘radical democratic’ ‘thinkers’.

With the Framing Vision and its ‘deliberative democratic process’ undermined and the Culture continuously attacked and undermined and un-grounded, the Citizenry – especially the younger generations – are left helpless in the face of an engorged intrusive government which cannot rationally be presumed to ever yield its ‘temporary’ power (think of Caesar and of the cynical and farcical ‘restoration of the Republic’ under Augustus). If you ask me, in the question of whether Leviathan will yield to the Gramscian-Mouffian cadres, or whether in the end Leviathan will consume them after they have played their role as “useful idiots”, my money is on Leviathan. As the Framers always saw, Leviathan and not any other danger or ‘outrage’ is the Prime Enemy of the polity.

And, worse, aided and abetted by what now must be considered to be the entire sitting political class.

To quote one of Stephen Spielberg’s characters: “Boy, are we in trouble now”.***

Which brings me to Jurgen Habermas, noted if now elderly European political and religious thinker.****

Habermas started out his career as a “left-Hegelian”, Marxist-friendly type, pretty certain that such a thing as a ‘secular democracy’ – that would still be recognizable as a democracy in any Western or American sense – was sufficiently workable and possible as a structure and ground for a ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ future. For which he was lionized by the vanguard elite Elect.

But now in his 80s, he is changing his tune (or, I would suggest, sobering up and getting serious). Consequently he has fallen under the gimlet-eyed opprobrium of the Elect (including among others Mouffe).

The trouble, as Habermas now sees it, is that Marx and any approach based on him (which as I have been saying includes all of the various types of secularisms espoused by the assorted vanguard elite Elect over here) focuses only on “human history” and not on “human nature”.

In my terminology, that would be to say that Marx’s first and most profoundly lethal error was to define humans as merely creatures of this-dimension, with no element of themselves somehow participating in – and grounded or Grounded in – any Beyond (which, Marx insisted, didn’t exist in the first place). Marx is thus making the Mono-Planar Mistake: that all of humans’ interior and exterior reality, and all of their history, can be accurately Flattened into this single dimension of existence conventionally appearing as ‘life’ and ‘history’ and ‘reality’.

And thereby denying the Multi-Planar Reality (i.e. comprised of several Planes of Existence stacked vertically, with what we conventionally call ‘reality’ being the Base Plane): that human beings participate in, and were created to participate in, a Multi-Planar Reality that encompasses both their own selves and the ‘world’ around them; and that on its upper Planes that Reality constitutes a Higher Ground for, and a Higher Law over, all human beings and all of the ‘reality’ of this-dimensional existence in all of its manifestations and aspects and elements.

Marx insisted that human beings have no ‘essence’. To admit an essence might be to open the philosophical door to some Beyond that created or instilled or imprinted that essence, and that illusory gambit was nothing more than “the opium of the people”, embodied first in organized religion and second in the ‘bourgeois’ governments that those religions supported.

Marx was working backwards: ‘organized religion’ as he observed it was primarily a tool of the overall capitalist and bourgeois oppression of the masses; hence it had to be wrong. And since whatever power it derived seemed to come from its claim to represent the Beyond, then there could be no Beyond. If religion were to be ‘delegitimized’ for being a tool of oppression, then the core basis of its claim to authority had to be erased completely. So Marx denied what I would call the Multi-Plane and reduced all of human existence (present and future) to the Mono-Plane, i.e. this Base Plane of Existence.

But if all you had was the Mono-Plane, then so much the greater was the ruthless urgency and necessity of grasping political power so as to ensure that you got whatever you felt you deserved in this life. Because there was no other life and surely no ‘next life’, so it all came down to getting control of politics and political power. Thus Marx. And Lenin. And Gramsci. And all the rest.

To try to put lipstick on this feral pig by claiming that ‘secularism’ is not the shallow and wheezy precipitate remaining after you have filtered out ‘religion’ (and, more importantly, the Beyond) but rather is a robust and competent alternative comprehension and knowledge of human existence and the human situation … that was what Habermas – agreeing with many Marxist Eurocommunists – initially espoused in his earlier years.

Like Shylock, they all figured they could have their ‘pound of flesh’ without any untoward consequences.

Humans, they presume to insist, are ‘born free’ (and instantly the awful saccharine whine of that 1966 nature flick’s theme song about baby lions comes back: “Borrrrnnnn frEEEEEEEEEEEEE, as free as the WINNNNND BLOWWWWWWWS“, that self-serving, self-flattering Boomer anthem – for those Boomers not already whacked-out on the just-arriving hard drugs and hard rock). And that it is humans themselves who “constitute society” and make their own history (shades of the Bushistas, going into Iraq: we are the ones who make history, not the ones who follow it). There is no Beyond involved at all.

For the Boomers and – in a nice dove-tail – for the vanguard elite Elect, to be ‘free’ meant to have no boundaries whatsoever, no externally imposed laws. And, it was presumed, since you were ‘born free’ you would have no interior laws – or ‘essence’ – to hinder your desires and urges either. You would not be ‘oppressed’ by boundaries or limitations or laws from without, and of course you would not be ‘oppressed’ by any (illusory) laws stemming from your ‘essence’ (or, say, from the illusion of any Image of any God that you might be told you were created by).

Of course, Marx had called religion “the opium of the people”. But what he was going for, as the Gordon article nicely points out, was that religion appeared to him to be an “addiction” – and an addiction to an opiate is a mighty hard thing to kick. Naturally, the alternative explanation for the stubbornness of human attraction to the Beyond – that the perennial and pervasive human attraction to the Beyond was simply the manifestation of the human being’s and humanity’s essential reaching for what is deeply sensed to actually be there – was not something Marx would even consider.

For him, and for all of his followers – declared or disguised – the human being is simply the sum of his/her willed actions and urges in this dimension. There is no essence, no human nature, and surely no Being somewhere out there or up there in the Beyond assisting humans – especially benevolently.

Marx saw the primary axis of human suffering as economic; many of his current devotees have expanded those axes to include ‘marginalization’ of any and all sorts, with Gender and sex being right up at the top of the new list.

But since there was no Beyond or God, then there was no use going after It or Him. Rather, Marx went after the human activity that – since there was no God – was clearly helping to oppress the masses, in the service of the bourgeois-capitalist oppressors, by drugging and distracting the masses with the opium of the God-illusion: organized religion. The alternative explanation – that organized religion was a natural human response, evolved precisely to help keep alive and to give tangible shape to humanity’s very real innate and essential sense of God or the Beyond – was not something Marx would even consider.

Currently, there are two major threats to the human religious sensibility: from the Right a rejuvenated Social Darwinism that insists the ‘fit’ are most worthy to lead and direct the human endeavor; from the Left a vanguard elitism that insists that only those who “get it” are worthy to lead and direct the human endeavor.

What they both have in common is that somehow or other they don’t accept the basic Framing Vision premise that Citizenship would confer a certain political equality. The Social Darwinist position is that only those who have ‘survived’ and succeeded in the material world have proven themselves truly ‘fit’; the vanguard elite approach (of Lenin and Gramsci and all their descendant ‘thinkers’) holds that only those who ‘get it’ have demonstrated themselves fit to be heard in public discourse and to direct society’s affairs.

The Framers sought – though their effort was not initially as sweeping as Christianity’s – to endow political equality through Citizenship. Which was a clear echo of the Christian and Catholic position that the ultimate human equality is spiritually grounded: all human beings are created in the Image of God and thereby derive an immutable dignity beyond any dignity this world can bestow and beyond the authority of any earthly government to disregard, deface or deny.

On the basis of that endowment conferred by Citizenship, the Framers could envision a deliberative democracy and a government governed by The People.

If that Vision is the Elf, then Marx’s vision is the Orc: ‘the masses’ cannot capably function as Citizens or as The People and therefore the cadres of the Party must govern on their behalf. And not as their elected representatives answerable to the Citizens, but as elites who ‘get it’ and who are answerable only to the Party and the illuminations of that Secret Knowledge.

And while the more recent Marxist derivatives have merely broadened the definition of that ‘it’ that one must get in order to prove his/her Elect status, the dynamic is just the same.

As is the dynamic that flows from it in the matter of shaping the government: it must be composed of an elite that rules on behalf of the incapable and helpless masses, much as a mental-incompetent’s affairs might be managed by a court-appointed legal guardian. (Precisely the nightmare abyss lurking in so much of Victimist agitation for ever-intensifying police-state laws to ‘help’ the huge numbers of Citizens putatively incompetent to manage their own personal lives.)

A country largely inhabited by political and maturational incompetents who stagger in unsleeping need of elite guidance and governance (and – as is the mantra in these Victimist times – protection) is hell and gone from the Framing Vision.

Within the logic of his system, Marx did not so much want to eradicate religion as he wanted to eradicate the conditions which made people turn to the opiate illusions of religion. And even if religions occasionally evinced the right sensibility – seeking to alleviate suffering, for example – their solutions were worthless since they involved a “metaphysical” realm that didn’t (in Marx’s sure and certain Knowledge) exist.

For Marx these life-crushing conditions were primarily economic.

For his more recent roadies, the life-crushing conditions have been expanded hugely, to include, as I have said, all manner of ‘oppression’, ‘dominance’, and ‘marginalization’, perhaps economic, perhaps sexual, directly or indirectly maintained, whether the harm (however defined) is physical or psychological, accessible to third-party observers or merely an un-testable assertion made by the self-declared sufferer. But always grounded in the principle that the ‘dominant hegemonic’ Culture must always be whacked wherever and whenever and however you can manage to do it.

But for the Marx roadies the envisioned solutions remain – as they did for Marx – thoroughly this-worldly and Mono-Planar. Or, to use Habermas’s terms, “secular” and “profane” (as opposed to “sacred”).

Habermas’s own formation was influenced by the Frankfurt School of postwar Marxist thinkers who had backed away from Leninist-Stalinist communism and the goal of ‘revolution’ after the world had clear evidence of the brutal violence – deployed against the very masses for whom Marxism and communism had claimed to provide a “profane redemption”.

Instead, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School had embraced Marxian analysis as a “critical theory” by which one might examine any society and culture for indications (invariably present) of “irrationality and imperfection”. Or, to use more current terms, ‘oppression’ and ‘dominance’ and ‘marginalization’.

Of course, if you keep expanding your definition of those terms (claiming that you’ve just made ‘great progress’ in ‘understanding the problem’), then you can stay in business pretty much until the end of Time.

That wouldn’t be a bad thing in itself – within the parameters of a deliberative democracy: it would always be a worthwhile thing to have dedicated critical appraisers who brought their insights to the attention of the Citizenry.

But it hasn’t worked out that way in the West and certainly not in this country in the past 40 Biblical years. The “critical theory” bit blended instead with the Gramscian vanguard elite Elect stream of thought, and - more repellently - an almost gleefully sour and rotten hostility on the part of the cadres, creating the grossly alien reality of a ‘deconstructive’ campaign of slow-motion revolution by sustained elite assault on the Culture precisely for the purpose of de-legitimizing and fracturing it, the better to erect some marvelously more acceptable Thing in its place.

And, as I put it at the beginning of the Post, the cadres of the vanguard elite Elect have unsurprisingly proven utterly impatient in getting their marvelous and secret Knowledge imposed from above, even to the point of bypassing the Citizenry’s role in a deliberative democracy and claiming that they are justified in doing that since a Citizenry that ‘just doesn’t get it’ has no right to participate in governance or public deliberation in the first place.

And as I have said, not even Lenin could have imagined a Western government simply handing its power and purse over to the ‘revolution’. The very very best you could say about the Dems and the Beltway 40 Biblical years ago was that they tried the 19^th century Italian government’s tactic of trasformismo: neutralizing a potential political threat by bringing it in closer to the Center by this or that deal.

But even if you wanted to say that the Beltway wasn’t primarily looking desperately for fresh demographics (to replace the Southern voters lost as a result of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts), you would have to say that the pols went wayyyyy overboard: it’s one thing to bring a group closer to the Center and give them some part to play, and very much another thing to simply appease and pander wholesale to an organized Gramscian strategy to use the government to attack and destroy the nation’s putatively ‘hegemonic, dominant, and oppressive’ Culture (and its Constitution, since that document was nothing more than a pact with Hegemony, Dominance, and Oppression).

A Constitution which, by the by, the pols and the various Branches were sworn to protect, preserve, defend and uphold.

Throughout his life, Habermas had been concerned with the persistence and the legitimacy of religion in human affairs.

That is to say: a) How and why does religion continue to exercise the attraction for humans that it does? And b) is there actually some Reality to which religion does really provide access, thus justifying its value even in the face of whatever drawbacks it also brings to the table?

Marxism and secularism would explain (a) by claiming that religion is merely a self-sustaining illusion, proffered to humans as a drug to help keep them docile in the face of oppressions that religion itself helps to uphold.

Marxism and secularism would answer (b) by saying No, religion has no legitimacy because there is no Beyond and the whole thing is merely a sleazy and treacherous magic show done with smoke and mirrors, and so religion is worse than useless – it is ‘part of the problem’, as used to be said back in the ‘60s.

Habermas in his younger years mostly went along with that.

But not anymore.

Not quite, anyway.

It was, he says, in the very process of learning how to rationally align their originally awe-driven mystery-religions with more sustained observations about the human being and the human situation that humanity first learned to see itself as somehow exercising a role of judgment and participation in what were originally thought to be super-human ‘mysteries’ that must simply be accepted and placated. (If this is true, and I think it is, then surely the Catholic Church’s substantial body of theological and philosophical reflections, amassed over two millennia, would have to count as a rather ‘rational’ achievement of the highest order.)

But from a sort of Enlightenment-friendly process of combining human Reason with human Belief by using the former to help shape the latter to a full-blown Secularism where human Reason is simply declared as the sole and only useful human faculty for explaining life … this is something that Habermas cannot accept (at least not any longer).

To apply a perhaps musty and simple image: the human stands on two legs much better than s/he does on one.

And thus human societies, like the humans who comprise and develop them, cannot be accurately said to rely purely on Reason without any influence from Faith. “The idea of a sharp break [between the Age of Christendom and the Enlightenment] is historical fantasy.” As is, it has to be added, the assertion by such regimes as the Nazis that human Will, lubricated by human Passions and Emotions, could reliably create a New Order better than anything that had gone before.

So Habermas – to the fury and consternation of his onetime Correct admirers – now opposes the concept of a thoroughgoing laicite or secularization in the French mode (imported here in Mouffe’s work by R-feminism and adopted by the Beltway illuminati and deal-makers).

Religion, he concedes readily, and particularly monotheism (as opposed, say, to nature worship or Druidism or polytheism in its assorted variants) “may furnish important moral insights that can be useful to secularist democracies”, however repugnant that might sound to “radical secularists”.

But then he gets even more interesting.

To quote Gordon, Habermas asserts that “it is therefore important for historical sociologists and philosophers to recognize the religious genealogy of ostensibly secular precepts such as equal respect”.

And this is, in a word, huge – especially when taken in the context of so much Correct, secular conventional wisdom today.

There is – to use my own term – an Afterglow effect that has existed throughout the past half millennium or so of Western civilization: even when the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment broke (so to speak) with the post-medieval culture grounded in the synthesis achieved by the centuries of ‘Christendom’, yet the new movements were themselves shaped by and reliant upon many of the conceptualizations and conceptual contents of the now-rejected Christendom.

So, for example, I would say that the Framers could so easily urge a separation of Church and State because they could reliably presume that the profound ‘civil-izing’ of the population had already been accomplished through those generations’ common grounding and education and formation in principles that stemmed from a common Christian heritage (although somewhat fractured by the Reformation). The Framers, that is to say, could reliably but quietly count on the Afterglow of the age of Christendom to provide a common but profound cultural unity independent of any government regulation or intrusion.*****

In saying this I am not arguing for any sort of ‘Christian theocracy’ in this country; I am simply pointing out the vital reality of the role of ‘religion’ and ‘the Beyond’ or the Multi-Plane and – it has to be said – the Christian heritage, in both the formation of the Citizens of the Revolutionary and Framing generations and also in the Framers’ own conception of what sort of Citizen-competencies they could presume when they formulated their Vision and then constructed the Constitutional machinery to preserve it.

AND you will notice that as soon as secularism and Gramscian strategy disconnected that ‘Afterglow’ by de-legitimizing it, the entire cultural and political apparatus has ceased to function properly and Our great Vessel is now both losing steam and careening out of control, steering wildly and erratically through the crowded channel of human events and crashing into things.

“In fact”, Gordon goes on discussing and quoting Habermas’s early position, “the very emergence of the modern West has been shaped by the way that ‘philosophy continually appropriates semantic contents from the Judeo-Christian tradition’”. (See Note ***** below.)

But you notice that the early Habermas carefully limited that appropriation to a matter of semantics. Thus he had hoped and asserted that as human reason came to inform more and more of “our collective discourse” then “the authority of the holy could be gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus”.

This is the Holy Grail of contemporary American secularism: that somehow the efforts of the vanguard elite Elect and their Beltway enablers would result in some sort of Least Common Denominator common discourse (not to say a complete and healthy and robust common American Culture). (This is discussed further in my Post on Peter Sallins’s thoughts on contemporary Multiculturalism here.)

But what’s left on which to build once you have factored out everything that could offend anybody or ‘oppress’ anybody but that could still have the chops to somehow put limits or boundaries on the total autonomy of their totally plastic and malleable individual and communal lives?

Nor, really, is any Mono-Planar ‘consensus’ a sufficient and reliable Ground for first principles, no matter how deeply felt at this or that Moment in Our (or any society’s) history. ‘Feelings’, change, and the behavior of an individual or a culture and society (and government) shaped and held to account only by ‘felt’ ‘principles’ is clearly not reliably predictable over any stretch of time.

In this matter he principles of physics have great relevance to the metaphysics at issue here: in order to anchor a weighty object you have to extend its anchoring beyond the surface of the plane on which the object is sited. Thus in this case, you have to reach Above this Plane of Existence in order to anchor vital first principles of behavior and action (or, of course, Below this Plane of Existence, if you are a Satanist).

Otherwise the early Habermas’s “nondestructive secularization” is a pipedream, and a lethal one at that. Yet it is that precise pipedream, with variations here and there, that the Eurocommunists, ‘socialists’, ‘radical democrats’ and other Marxist-derived vanguard elites are advocating – are indeed insisting upon as if they knew its actualization will follow their deconstruction as surely as dawn follows darkness.

But the new and older Habermas is now not so sure. It is only by somehow “translating” – i.e. more consciously incorporating and recognizing” meta-physical first principles – “whereby modern society might salvage the moral feelings that ‘only religious language has as yet been able to give a sufficiently differentiated expression’”.

I would go even further and assert that it is not merely a matter of ‘religious language’, but of the experience of Reality and – not to put too fine a point on it – the relationship with the Divine … which fuels the world-historically ineradicable human quest for the Divine as a Source and Ground of Meaning and Purpose. Compared to these elves – if I may – all the assorted materialist and secularist Mono-Planar schemes and substitutes and alternative and improved ‘realities’ have given history are nothing but Orcs.

Equally so, Habermas is now much more cautious (sober?) in his assessment of the great secularist Task: to come up with purely this-dimensional grounds and content to constitute a discourse and culture that do not “presuppose that everyone shares allegiance to the very same metaphysical vision of reality”.

This is by its very nature, as I have opined, impossible: you can’t anchor something by merely remaining on the same Plane on which it is sited AND if you are merely going to root it lightly in the surface of that same Plane then you have built a ‘common’ or ‘shared’ reality on sand and nothing more.

Further, you wind up pulling some very sleazy intellectual scams to try to avoid or get around the problem. Thus John Rawls – indentured to American ‘liberalism’ as it became deranged by R-feminism and its Marxist-Gramscian fundamentals – insists that public discourse cannot permit the intrusion of Citizen input based on “comprehensive doctrines” (i.e. religious doctrines) that not everybody shares.

BUT he then goes on to claim that his own and the ‘liberal’ agenda is not based on any such oppressive ‘doctrine’ but merely on the obvious assumptions that “any reasonable person” would make. Rawls, of course, gets to define what a “reasonable person” might presume, which – by amazing coincidence – consists in precisely his own and the ‘liberal’ agenda. This is a scam.

Habermas, tortuously, tried to present the challenge as one in which both sincere believers and sincere secularists simply have to accept equally the burden of giving some ground on the first principles.

It has that nice 1970s group-session flavor to it: if everybody gives, then consensus will be reached. If you don’t want to give then clearly you are either blocked or obstructionist, because the agreement is all. Whatever is lost in the strength of the first principles is simply an acceptable loss to ‘get to Yes’ and to get to ‘we agree’ (what American of a certain age hasn't had to sit like a bobble-headed Stalin-era Party Congress delegate through a We-Agree Workshop?). This was the poisoned fruit of the multicultural and pluralist tidal wave that, under the aegis of Political Correctness, resulted in the undermining of any solid foundations for any first principles at all and reduced American politics and belief to merely a thing of the surfaces and of the appearances: those who believed in anything were fuddy-duddies bound for the dustbin of history – those who were ‘flexible’ were the cutting-edge of history … oh, and reeely reeeely ‘with it’ and ‘cool’.

And here We are.

And is that working for Us, d’ye think?

But that was the ‘70s. Now Habermas “surrenders” “the premise of a fully secularized endpoint”. Which has enraged the cadres of the vanguard elite Elect.

As does his opining that “the modern commitment to justice seems to draw nourishment from non-rational sources and many of these sources are religious”. For the cadres of the vanguard elite Elect, as indeed for the Marxist and Gramscian programmes themselves or in any of their many newish variants, the only source for any ‘justice’ must be the particular this-worldly outrage of some particular grouped individuals against a particular (hegemonic, dominant, oppressive) situation or Culture.

There can be no Justice because there is no Beyond to anchor or impose it.

There is only ‘justice’ as it happens to work out in any particular situation, AND the way you will know it is indeed ‘justice’ is that it will work against hegemony, dominance, and oppression.

In other words, so long as you’re working against hegemony, dominance, and oppression, then anything goes because your success will itself constitute ‘justice’. And can you see the immediate blood-relationship between such thoughts as these and the assertions of the Bush-Cheney administration that if you’re fighting ‘evil’ then you automatically must be ‘good’ and by definition whatever the ‘good’ do cannot be evil or wrong … ?

And then, just to nail it all down, Habermas now asserts that “when profane reason is set free to act on its own, it ‘loses its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole – of the Kingdom of God on earth – as collectively binding ideals’”.

But of course, that was and remains the whole object of the ‘liberating’ assault on the hegemonic Culture that dared to ‘oppress’ by imposing ‘boundaries’ or shape on each born-free, plastic person’s ‘total autonomy’. Plastic persons, indeed, are what have resulted.

Such progress. Such enlightenment. Such liberation.

After all the decades of deconstruction of hegemonic Culture, Habermas finds himself agreeing with the plaint voiced in the Brecht-Weill opera ‘Mahagonny’: “Aber etwas fehlt”. ‘But something is missing’.

And it’s not a little something either, but rather a Something which – in the experience of the species over the course of its recorded history – is essential to the Grounding and Sustaining of a Culture.

Sure, you can have ‘pluralism’ – so long as the different groups have their own little territorial patch they know they can reliably go back to. Thus the great trading cities of yore were able to accommodate many different groups of merchants and others from distant lands and different cultures. But each group had its own ‘Quarter’ or neighborhood where the local authorities allowed them – with the most minimum necessary restriction – to pursue their own cultural lifeways.

OR, as in late Imperial Rome, that Culture’s own boundaries and fundamental Grounds – the endo-skeleton of the Culture, you could say – were simply shorn away and ignored and transgressed (to use a contemporary and giddily Correct concept) by decadent elites who had the money to do whatever the hell they felt they wanted to do. Orgy, anyone?

But if you are going to insist that secularists and believers share the same turf on any real basis of equality then you are going to have to reduce the content of acceptable common culture to an impossible minimum.

OR you can insist that one side simply give up its position.

And if you have control of the government you can make it a national policy.

The Framers did not have to face this awful conundrum because they had the best of both worlds: the common grounding in Christianity – which had so deeply shaped Western Culture – was already there, so the Framers could dispense with any government intrusion or imposition of a common Culture while simultaneously secure in the knowledge that such a vital and indispensable civic reality as a common Culture would always under-gird all the Citizens.

But the sorcerer’s apprentices of the Beltway during the last 40 Biblical years threw all of that out the window when they embraced precisely the deconstruction of the common Culture as part of the Gramscian agenda that was the price for getting some access to the putatively huge ‘female’ demographic.

And now we have what really reduces to a Keystone Cops or Mack Sennett farce where the cadres of the vanguard elite Elect and their solemn or ‘engaged’ academic scribes are forever trying to square the circle and put back together – Correctly, of course – the Humpty-Dumpty which they had thrown over the wall when they first came into power and influence in the Beltway.

And the Humpty-Dumpty which, even by the strategic requirements of their own Agenda, must ultimately be tossed over the wall and be destroyed.

This reminds me of nothing so much as the hefty zebra that accepts the small scorpion as a passenger when crossing a raging river: the scorpion, perched on the zebra’s head, will keep an eye out for crocodiles. Halfway through the crossing, the scorpion stings the zebra, and as the zebra dies it asks the scorpion: Why did you sting me when I am your only path to the other side and safety? To which the scorpion responds with a shrug: I’m a scorpion – stinging is what I do.

The Gramscian programme, in any of its new guises, is precisely a scorpion and it will sting to death whatever culture or wannabe culture-makers seek to carry it along for their own purposes.

Which in Our case is the American Culture, harnessed to this scorpion courtesy of the deal-desperate Beltway pols 40 Biblical years ago (and counting).

Habermas lets off another limpid broadside: “Simply put, profane reason may not retain the requisite strength of motive or aspiration to fulfill its own mission”. [italics mine]

With so acutely aimed a shpritz of holy water, you can hear the assembled vanguard elite Elect vampires wailing and gnashing them nasty choppers.

So “wass fehlt”? Gordon answers the question: in Habermas’s estimation now “… for secular reason what is missing is God”. Zang. Biff. Bam. Pow. And Kaboom.

But Habermas ultimately cannot bring himself down on the side of ‘religion’. Too much of a history of how those operating in the name of religion have created and are still creating all manner of death and destruction. But at the same he acknowledges that “a secularism dogmatically sure of its independence from religion” has done no better (and at greater cost to the culture and human lives, I would add).

So at this point Habermas will simply say his say and refuse to take sides.

I would go further and say that as organized religion – certainly in terms of the Church – has over the past few centuries become increasingly and constructively mature (try reading some of the papal encyclicals when you get a chance) in its thoughts and guidance, the Western ‘democracies’ have become (who can be surprised?) increasingly deranged, strident, simplistic, irrational, and violent.

So – I would say – the Church is not the most dangerous of the world’s, and certainly not the West’s, problems these days. (Although the persistence of attacks on it indicates that the secularized elites of the now addled West are trying to keep negative public attention focused on it to distract those various national publics from the dying zebras of cultures upon which they are still perched, as the waters rise.)

Lastly, I want to consider briefly some equally related thoughts put forward by the noted Indian economist Amartya Sen.******

Sen is of interest here for several reasons.

First, he has done a great deal of work in India – helping to bring that economy and culture into some sort of modern development. In this sense, his India bears some resemblance to Gramsci’s late 19^th century Italy.

But second, he has struck up some sort of intellectual alliance with R-feminism here – especially in its more genteel incarnations such as the noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum. And as a result, he is now plumping for some variant of the Gramscian Project and Agenda here, in an interesting flow-back of Gramsci’s thought from a culture and economy that actually does bear some resemblance to the world Gramsci faced but that now washes back toward the world of modern America which hardly bears such resemblance at all. (Which, of course, didn’t stop the R-feminist spear-heading of the Gramscian or Mouffian Project and Agenda here over the past 40 Biblical years.)

Specifically, Sen gives the game away here.

He is thinking about how you can effect change in a Culture that needs change but also has a Constitution.

He can think of several avenues of approach.

First, you can formally doubt that “natural rights” arise from any ‘nature’ or ‘Nature’ at all, but rather stem from a consensus that comes ‘naturally’ – so to speak – to Correctly thinking persons. Which is a bit of the old Rawls play, now being run by someone with not only hefty intellectual creds (he won the Nobel Prize a while back, for his economic work) and possesses the additional cachet of being from a non-hegemonic ethnic background (shall we say), but also has a Professorship at – waittttt forrrr itttt! – Hahvahd (which was Rawls’s old stomping ground before he shuffled off this mortal coil to … whatevvvverrrrr).

Second, you can go for ‘legislation’. Although, he coyly wonders, “If the case for new laws arises from moral or political priorities to which legislation should cater, should not those same values be pursued, if feasible, also by means other than legislation?”. Which is a polite, tastefully-gloved way of insinuating the alternatives espoused by Gramsci via Mouffe and others. And the methods of the Identity Politics which I discussed above (so long ago, it might seem, I know).

But – and here he actually veers delicately close to what might appear to be un-Correctness – perhaps even with the “far-reaching ethical and political relevance of human rights” yet it might “not be sensible to make this human right into a ‘coercive legal rule’ in one form or another”. Which kinda pulls the rug out from under the regime of Beltway imposition that has proven quite useful to the Gramscian-Mouffian Project and Agenda here, especially since the inception of ‘governance feminism’ under the Clintons’ two administrations.

But he recovers the Correct theme quickly enough.

“The reach of law”, he innocently opines, “also depends on the interpretation of existing laws”. Thus “The legal route of incorporating considerations of human rights that have come to carry political conviction may not invariably involve new legislation”. [italics mine]

Of course, that they “have come to carry political conviction” is a nice euphemism for describing the organized outrage, demands, and deal-bought political clout and pressure I described in the advanced levels of ‘advocacy’ at the beginning of this Post.

But that conviction-pressure opens useful avenues of approach (or – to use Gramsci’s imagery - assault).

He looks, thus and thirdly, to the courts and the judiciary. This is where a noisy battle has been going on between the ‘originalists’ who want to stick to the text of the Constitution and – ummmmm – those who seek to “bring about changes in the application of existing laws through the legal interpretations reflected in their judgments”. These latter folks would just sorta like to “make more room for the here-and-now” in judicial interpretations of the Constitution.

In other words, the Gramsian-Mouffians wish to have it known that ‘we’re here, we’ve got the pols and the elites in our pocket, so get used to it’ and, of course, give us what we want. Which, of course, is merely an immediate ending of any oppression, dominance, and hegemony as it may be enshrined in laws or, of course, in that Ur-pact with Oppression, Dominance, and Hegemony mulishly known by its fetishizers as the Constitution.

Slyly, Sen professes that he ‘cawn’t think why’ any decent person would see anything wrong with any of this. After all, he shrewdly points out, what would have happened if the country waited for majority approval of the Citizenry to give women the vote?

But of course, he has selected a right that was given to women in 1920 when the XIX Amendment was ratified. Which bestowed a right that was in a conceptual sense genuinely native to the Framing Vision: the political equality of ‘the vote’ was one of that Vision’s keypoints. (As opposed to the vast and burgeoning menu of pre-vote rights – espoused especially by such public intellectuals as Sen and Martha Nussbaum – which, it is claimed, must be provided by the government before any of the marginalized can use their voting power. The satisfaction of which claims and accompanying demands has turned out to be an endlessly receding horizon, with the government expending treasure, common sense, and legitimacy as it continues to stumble drunkenly ever deeper into the swamp in pursuit of this will o’ the wisp.)

But Gramsci had long before come up with this idea of pre-vote rights necessary for the marginalized to use their vote power well; Sen simply applied it to India, and not without cause. But it was slyly adopted here to fuel the erection since 1971 or so of a Gramscian-Mouffian assault Agenda on the entire national Culture (and on all world-patriarchy) – whose Citizens were precisely not in the condition of Southern Italian peasants of the 19^th century or Indian peasants of the mid-20^th – in order to achieve what apparently the women from 1920 to 1970 or so didn’t achieve -or perhaps ever seek to achieve: the overthrow by deconstructive assault of American and Western Culture through a Marxist-grounded derangement and perversion of national politics and any ‘deliberative democratic process’.

Perhaps then there are other sources of “resourceful departure in the interpretation of the law”. How tastefully burbled.

Perhaps “the moral and religious beliefs of judges” might do the trick. Whatever those “moral and religious beliefs” might or might not be.

Or perhaps “contemporary public reasoning and the understanding generated by it” would do the trick. But this is just the old Rawlsian scam: the ‘contemporary’ bit means that only ‘public reasoning’ as it has been manipulated in the past 40 Biblical years by the vanguard elite Elect qualifies as genuinely reliable and valid ‘reasoning’.

And, of course, in terms of that ‘public’ then ‘reasoning’ doesn’t enter into it. The past 40 Biblical years have seen the public misinformed, stampeded into ‘outrage’ or lulled by soothing coos of ‘it’s only a little reform’, and finally bypassed completely through secret advanced-level advocacy ‘deals’ struck with the now-indentured pols in the non-smoking smoke-filled rooms in the Beltway.

‘Public reasoning’ is now degenerated to the point where it is mostly cartoonish repetition of mantras and almost adolescent posturing, while the academic arm of the vanguard elite Elect churns out tastefully bland and abstruse or – less frequently now – stridently hard-hitting books making the deconstructive-assaultive case.

Which the pols, having already done the deals, don’t read.

Nor do the mainstream media, who simply lap up the elite press releases along with the choicest wine or chai at A-list Beltway dinner parties to which the former scribblers are pleased as punch to be given ‘access’.

Why, asks Sen plaintively, shouldn’t “a new public recognition of the appropriateness of some putatively legal rights” thus “be reflected in contemporary legal judgments”?

I dealt with this in an earlier Post on Justice William Brennan, who – among his many other services to the Project and the Agenda – helped develop the neatly distracting kabuki where ‘conservative-originalist’ Justices and judges would do battle with the noble ‘liberal, living-constitutional’ Justices and judges over what to do with the ‘text’ of the Constitution.

Whereas in reality, as in any vaudeville magician’s act, the real trickery was going on elsewhere: neither side was really interested in the core dynamics of the Framing Vision: i.e. that The People had to be accurately informed, forthrightly consulted, allowed to deliberate, and to deliver their opinion (which should carry the greatest of weight and is not to be lightly brushed aside).

Naturally, of course, the Gramscian-Mouffian R-feminist Project and Agenda had utterly no need for such dynamics (nor did the neocon Right). After all, why consult a bunch of lumps who ‘just don’t get it’ or who can’t qualify for a security clearance or who can’t pony up 100 large for the right candidate?

You see where 40 years of that treacherous kabuki-cum-magic show has gotten Us.

And anyway, Sen piously declaims, “Something more than just the words and phrases of the Constitution must surely be involved in understanding the motivation behind a democratic and participatory constitution that tries to tries to create a legitimate space for different types of people with varying preoccupations and circumstances in a diverse society”. [italics mine]

The italicized clauses contain a steady string of euphemistic code phrases.

A “democratic and participatory constitution” clearly indicates some constitution other than the Constitution We already have. And this new one will be “democratic and participatory” in the old Gramscian sense that all of the ‘oppressed and marginalized’ will now be the power-wielders at the Center (having been magically transported in from the Periphery of the national Culture).

That “tries to create” hides the Method of the Gramscian subversion by means of siege and assorted sly and secret assaults, sustained with gimlet-eyed determination over time, assisted by whatever alliances might be struck and bargains made with whatever traitors inside the gates can be induced to smooth the attackers’ path.

That “legitimate space” means ‘legitimate’ only in the Correct sense, and implies – as Gramsci said – that in any attack on a Western Culture and political system you have to always maintain the veil of ‘legitimacy’, burnishing it just as soon as your planted agents can start a drumbeat of approval for your actions going. (I wonder: when Hitler decided that the only way to gain power against Weimar was to get himself legitimately elected or appointed to power … had he read Gramsci?)

And that “space” means empty voids that were once occupied by the structures, institutions, principles and morals of the (hegemonic, dominant, oppressive) targeted Culture.+

And that “different types of people with varying preoccupations” means the entire pandemonium of Identity Politics, each with a well-watered trademark 'outrage' and consequent menu of demands, as it has been erected and sustained and allowed to metastasize here in the past 40 Biblical years.

And that “circumstances” means the entire pandemonic panoply of newly erected (or ‘recognized’) ‘oppressions’ – political, economic, sexual, biological, ethnic, racial, physiological, cultural, orientational, emotional or what have you.

And that “diverse society” means the Secularist-Multicultural dampdream that you can have all sorts of people living in the same territorial space who – however – do not share any first principles and many of whom are quite ready to deploy Gramscian-Mouffian assault strategies the minute they don’t get what they want and feel they have to have right now.

My God.

Well, that’s my take on Habermas, Mouffe, and a bit of Sen.

Overall, I’d say that Mouffe and the more recent variants on Marx and Gramsci – whether styled as ‘socialists’ or ‘radical democrats’ – are still merely trying to run the same old Gramscian gameplan (to which, alas, the Beltway has now indentured itself and thus enmeshed – and I would say betrayed – the entire American Culture and polity).

Thus there is nothing here that is ‘progressive’ as much as it is regressive. The Framing Vision, which relies upon the Citizens coming together to speak as The People and thus act as the ultimate arbiters of American life and policy, and as the final protectors of the Great American Experiment in free Citizens governing their government and themselves, has been hugely undone.

And undone precisely by the dynamics of the lunacies of the French Revolution, imported here in the form of Marxist-Leninist thought as re-jiggered by Gramsci and further re-jiggered by Mouffe and her ilk, and supported by such publicly recognized luminaries as Sen. Which lunacies the Framing Vision of 1787 was perfectly suited to preventing from infecting this nation and its Culture.

Nor can anyone forget Solzhenitsyn’s famous observation that Shakespeare’s baddies pretty much amassed no more than a dozen or so corpses in the process of their various malefactions because they didn’t have an ideology. But contrary to all the burbly, happy-faced spin that Gramscian-Mouffian ‘critical theory’ is not an ideology but only a ‘critical method’, Gramsci and Mouffe and all the rest of that pandemonium have indeed embraced and erected an ‘ideology’ to the extent that they require a) the dogmatic presumptions that Western (and American) Culture are fundamentally and primarily nothing but a ‘dominant, oppressive, hegemonic’ engine of those three evils and b) all the corollary and consequent axioms in regard to what must then be done to combat and indeed ‘crush the infamous thing’.

Sen joins Gramsci in trying to make a vision conceived in a hugely different place, culture (and in Gramsci’s case, time) applicable to a matured Western democracy with a capable if not perfect Citizenry.

Only Habermas has had the wit or decency and integrity to reconsider his earlier enthusiasms and dial them back, returning thereby to a more proven and long-practiced stance toward the very fundaments of human-being and human existence, in contrast to the superheated pipedreams of these many wannabe makers and shapers of the Future who, like unripe but ambitious architects, have truckloads of blueprints but not a successful construction to their credit. Although their blueprints have generated a file-case full of world-class catastrophic failures.

There is much to be done.

You could do much worse than to watch that segment of the 1970 film ‘Tora, Tora, Tora’, putting yourself in the position of, say, Admiral Kimmel, looking out at the smoking catastrophe of Pearl Harbor that morning of December 7, 1941 and realizing to himself: My God, it has happened here, we've let it happen to ourselves, and now what do we do?

But don’t get too cocky. It’s not 1941 now. And now We have much more to fear than fear itself.

NOTES

**All of which brings back to mind the curious historical reality of the many ex-Communists who suddenly became the most dedicated members of the Nazi Party, which on the surface would appear to have been clearly their worst enemy. But a hegemony-seeking Party is a hegemony-seeking Party whether of the Left or of the Right. Thus Roland Freisler, Hitler’s favorite judge, who simply traded in his hammer-and-sickle armband for a swastika armband early enough and rose to become the most monstrously rabid Nazi judge in a Reich full of rabid monsters. There was almost no psychological difference between the radicalism of Communism and the radicalism of Nazism – and the willing secular fundamentalist could embrace the one as easily as the other if push came to shove or if the winds began to blow differently.

***The character of Captain Loomis Birkhead, U.S. Army, played by Tim Matheson, in the 1979 WW2 comedy “1941”. Which I recommend to everyone. Along with the Marx Brothers in 1933’s “Duck Soup”.

****His books tend toward the complex, but for openers I can especially recommend the article entitled “What Hope Remains?”, by Peter E. Gordon, that appeared in the print version of ‘The New Republic’, issue of December 29, 2011, pp.35-9. The link brings you to a paywall on the TNR site.

*****Just to expand a bit on the role of the Church in the formation of Western culture, let me add the following.

The Greeks and Romans made their own contributions (greatly different from each other) to Western Civilization. But it was the Church that found itself the only authority in the West after the Fall of the Roman Empire. And it was in the centuries following that Fall that Western Civilization as we know it was actually formed, using the materials from Greek and Roman civilization but then adding and (in the case of Aquinas especially) synthesizing those insights with the specific contributions of the Judeo and Christian heritages.

So the Church not only preserved in the monastic libraries much of the extant writings of the Greeks and Romans but also then (again especially through Aquinas) made use of the rediscovery of Aristotle through interactions (fractious as they were) with Islamic civilization where those works had survived the Fall and assorted barbarian sackings that destroyed so much of the tangible and written heritage of the Greeks and Romans.

But also: its philosophy provided a broad and comprehensive Vision that added tremendously to the Greek and Roman heritage (which had little use for the ‘supernatural’ or for any dimension or Plane of Existence except this earthly one). A short list of concepts would include a) the dignity of the individual based not on participation in the city-state (Greek) nor mere Citizenship in the Empire (Roman) but rather in the dignity of the individual as made in the Image of God; b) the Higher Law to which all earthly governments are answerable (grounding the Framing Vision of the US); c) the synthesis that saw the value of the civil, societal realm as being of equal or greater standing as the governmental realm; d) and the grounding of all human activity under the guidance (‘judgment’ if you want to use the term carefully) of the Purpose that was automatically included in the fact of humans being created in the Image of God … these are all insights that came to the West only through the Church.

And for that reason Enlightenment ‘secularism’ or the fragmented assortment of illuminations that the various Reformation thinkers considered as sufficient substitutes (or improvements upon) the Great Vision have proved themselves over recent centuries to be precisely just that: partial and fragmented illuminations incapable of either grounding human culture and society or of satisfying constructively and comprehensively the abiding human need for greater Meaning than anything on this Plane of Existence is able to provide.

Any sort of fundamentalism skews the human in one way or another, and radically so – this includes both religious fundamentalism and the secular fundamentalism of Communism; and secularism – meaning the insistence that this-dimensional existence can provide sufficient Meaning and Ground for human beings as individuals or societies or communities or polities – is utterly insufficient to the task.

Indeed, my thought is that while the Framers were able to declare a separation of Church and State, they could do so only because they presumed the benefits – I would call it the Afterglow – of Christendom’s contributions: they could reliably presume that all Citizens were somehow already grounded in the Great Vision of human-being even before they came to the role of Citizenship in the Great American Experiment in democracy. (A ‘democracy’ which to the Greeks merely meant a this-dimensional participation in the politics of this or that city-state.)

It was the Church that synthesized the barbarian tribes’ insistence on freedom, the Roman genius for order, and the Greek insistence on reason and political participation.

I can’t see how any of that can legitimately be ignored.

Food for serious thought, I submit, during the season of Christmas and New Year, especially when the Framing Vision is in such dire straits due to the combined assaults of fundamentalisms and secularism (especially as it was skewed so monstrously by the French and Soviet Revolutions).

******Again, I make reference to a TNR article that is behind an online paywall. The article is entitled “Rights, Words, and Laws”, by Sen. It appeared in the TNR print edition of October 28, 2010, pp. 24-9.

+Sen’s espousal of Gramscian (and modern French) secularism as both a weapon against the religion that Marx saw as an opiate drug embraced by the masses and as the major source of cultural unity in the New Order constitutes a double risk of stunning proportions: a) the Culture in its religious aspect must be attacked in order to Flatten it into the Mono-Plane (and the masses must be ‘educated’ out of their stubborn addiction to religion – which seems to me equally an ‘attack’) that justifies itself merely by the secularist expectation that b) secularism will be able to provide a sufficient cohesive (and Mono-Planar) bond to keep the culture united.

I can only wonder how this will ultimately work in India, whose Culture has evolved since its ancient beginnings not under the aegis of a common government but rather on the deep embrace of ‘religion’ (albeit not the Judeo-Christian tradition which nurtured the West). Even if Sen’s urging of such secularism in India might initially succeed merely because of its novelty and such ‘changes’ as it would bring, will it in the long run avoid destabilizing the religiously-bereft population?

As has been seen here, the attack on the Afterglow of religion, as a consequence of the secularist need to Flatten the citizenry and the Culture into the Mono-Plane, has somehow resulted in a massive expansion of the government whose seemingly endless intrusive legislating and regulating has turned out to be the only ‘bond’.

Nor am I optimistic that this ominous and Constitutionally-deranging development is merely ‘transitional’; in Gramsci’s well-intentioned pipedream, there would be some other ‘bond’ that would develop once the masses were weaned off their addiction to ‘religion’ and came into the full use of the human powers (conceived Flatly by Gramsci); in Schmitt’s pipedream it was precisely “the political”, presided over by the Sovereign Authority of the government, that controls all and binds all from the get-go. Neither of which pipedreams, nor Mouffe’s perpetual and multiple “antagonisms”, offer much hope for a robustly and richly Grounded life-experience for the Citizens (or ‘masses’) as individuals, as a society and Culture, or as a democratic and deliberative polity such as envisioned by the Framers.

As just one – though a serious – example of why all of this will not merely be ‘transitional’, but rather cannot but have profoundly lethal effects on the Framing Vision, I refer to this new Study that has discovered that the majority of high-school students either don’t know enough to have an opinion on the value of the First Amendment OR ELSE are of the opinion that it goes too far.

The Study falls far short with its conclusion that this indicates a “lack of education”.

To me the attitudes of the students do not indicate a lack of education. Indeed, just the opposite: why bother to learn about an outdated and doomed Constitution that is nothing more than a pact with Hegemony, Dominance, and Oppression (which, by the time they are just a little bit older the vanguard elite Elect will have Correctly done away with)?

Or why bother to allow free speech to those ‘who just don’t get it’ and are actively collaborating – through ignorant enthrallment or near-demonic desire for dominance – with Hegemony, Dominance, and Oppression? It was the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse (insisting that the US in the mid-1960s and Hitler’s Germany of the mid-1930s were substantively similar) who claimed that a “liberal intolerance” of un-Correct ideas was not only necessary but desirable.

The students, I am saying, have indeed picked up exactly the ‘knowledge’ that underlies the worldview of the educational and cultural vanguard elites.

The Study is right to fear for the future of the polity when so many soon-to-be-voters are now enthralled to the idea that the founding and Framing form of their government and their Culture is rotten and needs to be done away with as soon as it can be managed.

But the Study fears to name precisely the source of this potentially fatal prospect: a Correct elite ‘liberalism’ that is actually and deliberately nothing more than a rehash of Marx and Lenin, modulated by Gramsci and Mouffe and her well-placed ilk, thus distributed to cohort after cohort of youth approaching voting-age through both the educational milieu and the general tenor of what is fatuously and fatally taken to be a ‘liberal’ cultural ideal.

ADDENDUM

Let me add here some reflections on this article by Robert Boyers in ‘Harpers’ (July 2006, pp.89-94) reviewing the now-late John Updike’s then-new novel “Terrorist”.

But this strikes me as precisely the dynamic involved in the Gramscian-Mouffian assault on Western and American Culture (because most of those Citizens can be primarily defined as ‘just not getting it’). And – because America is one of those Western democracies Gramsci (and Lenin) realized could not be attacked outright – the ‘violence’ here is not physical but is rather conducted through Gramsci’s insidious ‘war of positions’ against the Culture through the derangement of its politics (which are corruptly and evilly sustaining Oppression, Dominance and Hegemony) and its Citizens’ very ability to conduct any sort of deliberative and democratic political discussion. After all, why allow those Citizens and The People to do all of that when, of course, ‘they just don’t get it’ to begin with?

Which also leads me to think, as I have said in prior Posts, that the real historical significance of the Watergate scandal so hugely trumpeted against Nixon (for whom I hold no brief) in 1974 was primarily necessary in the view of the budding ‘liberal’ elites in order to reverse and discredit the presidential election results of 1972 – when all but one of the States in the Union rejected the Democrats’ New Order Party vision that embraced the R-feminist gameplan.

In fact, I wonder if on some intuitive level a large number of Citizens sensed even back then that there was something fundamentally Alien in the whole vision, although they did not at that time a) have the vocabulary or full conceptual awareness of what was being busily spun as merely a continuation of MLK’s profoundly impressive unitive Vision and b) could not at that point in history even imagine that the federal government would actually embrace what is essentially a Marxist schematic that for all practical purposes abandoned the Framing Vision.

And does that not sound rather familiar in light of everything that Gramsci, Mouffe, R-feminists, and the whole pandemonium of fellow/sister-travelers and ‘useful idiots’ claim about the macho, patriarchal, dominant, oppressive, hegemonic American Culture and its enabling document, the Constitution?

I hold no brief whatsoever for the anarchist or terrorist idea that the only way you can impose your political vision is by gratuitous or calculated violence.

But it should not be too hard to see that such a neat political ploy, rhetorically (and demagogically) shrewd, is also profoundly destabilizing to any human sense of Meaning and Purpose.

But what is the Gramscian and especially Mouffian ‘philosophy’ (embraced by R-feminism, MacKinnon, Nussbaum, Sen and – up until recently – Habermas) except precisely just such a hash of old Marxist and Leninist categories and prescriptions, re-jiggered but nothing more?

And in the Correct argot that means that any Citizens who oppose or doubt the ‘Knowledge’ of those who ‘get it’ are merely backlashers and fetishizers of the Constitution (that pact with Oppression, Dominance, and Hegemony cooked up by patriarchally macho, oppressive, dominant, hegemonic dead white males).

Boyers notes that Updike tries to demonstrate that to be encased in such an ideological shell simply cuts the ‘believing terrorist’ off from reality. But let Us not be distracted by the red-herring of ‘belief’ here: the secularist Gramscian-Mouffian cadres of the vanguard elite Elect are just as much ‘believers’ as the – in this case, Islamic – terrorist. The elite cadres are secular believers – meaning that they do not base their beliefs in any other Plane of Existence – but they are believers just the same and just as ruthlessly (and, thus, just as whackulently).

(Why weren’t Americans frightened of all that sooner? As I said above, perhaps because they simply couldn’t grasp or imagine that the Dems (and before long the Republicans for their own purposes) were going to smooth their way forward by inviting the shades of Marx and Gramsci – dressed perhaps in a Mouffian wig – into the very heart of the American polity and Culture. And yet The People sensed something back there in the presidential election of 1972.)

In fact the only difference I can make out between Updike’s terrorist anti-hero and the Gramscian-Mouffian pandemonium is that whereas the anti-hero entertains a “sour view of the world”, the pandemonium – cadres, fellow/sister-travelers, and useful idiots – entertain a gleefully sour view of the world: it’s so rotten that they can happily take axe to it root and branch, sawing and hacking in the sure and certain Knowledge that anything they hit deserves such a mighty transgressive and deconstructive whack.

You can kiss the American common-weal goodbye. In fact, it’s probably been left too far behind to embrace now, even for a farewell smooch. Hasta la vista, bayyy-beeeeee – to quote a phrase.

Goodbye to all that. It’s not ‘your grandfather’s America any more’, to recall a gleeful R-feminist slogan.

And then do their very best (with the resources of the Beltway pols and bureaucracies at their disposal and the collusion of so much of the mainstream media) to ensure that We don’t and indeed can’t think either.

Can it really be any wonder that nothing vital around here seems to work anymore?

Which – and feel free to consult any ‘consciousness-raising sessions’ – is pretty much the agenda of the R-feminist Gramscian-Mouffian cadres of the vanguard elite Elect.

And the band played on from there.

And still plays on.

Even though what was billed as the marquis crowning victory of American ‘liberalsim’ – a young black man as President (as JFK was a young white man as President) – turns out to be as dedicated an enabler of a profoundly anti-democratic vision as the monstrous tag-team that preceded him and the queasily greasy-glowing tag-team of husband and wife that preceded them.

But here We are: a declining republic with – yes – no bananas and just some really big bombs.

God save Us all.