AMERICAN PROSPECTS

I’ve just finished reading the September issue of ‘The American Prospect’ (http://www.prospect.org/).

I’m noticing a trend among the Democratic-friendly (or ‘progressive’ or – much less frequently – ‘liberal’) elements of the media: as the election gets nearer, two distinct trends are revealing themselves. One is to unify as many disparate voter-groups as possible by emphasizing themes more broadly based than the usual ‘visions’ and ‘demands’ of the Identities. But the second is for those very same Identities to double-down and claim that this is their ‘moment’ to finally establish everything they’ve ever wanted and demanded. Thus on the one hand there are outreaching emphases on ‘economic’ concerns, say, while on the other there are glory-eyed prophesies of an ‘America’ where this or that Identity’s vision is and/or can be wholly fulfilled, put forth with – you should pardon the expression – a confident intensity usually only seen in history (or ‘herstory’) when in the company of that mother of all slogans: ‘God wills it!’

So on page 6 there is a discussion of the ‘entertainment’ that will be provided at the Democratic convention. Rattling off a list that includes the latest hip-hop hero, much pleasure is derived from pointing out that this truly indicates the “scope of generational change in the Democratic Party”. Oy. Kids are great, but since they can’t even be trusted with a beer in the backyard, I’m not so clear on how it’s good that great attention is being paid to their ‘feelings’ about this or that candidate or just how those feelings are wholly relevant to the grave issues currently bethumping Us. You don’t have to spend more than a few minutes in a theater-full of the blessed young as they watch their favorite new blockbuster to realize that next week or next month their feelings will have moved on and their memories will have ‘deleted’ this present totality of cool awesomeness just as totally as if it had taken place in some distant and irrelevant and useless ‘past’. It’s what kids do.

It’s more disturbing to ponder this and realize that the Dems have yet one more reason for fearing that they are perceived as ‘unmanly’ and ‘weak’. They are not only in thrall to the still-biting mastodons (mastodettes?) of Second-Wave feminist radical agitprop, but they are also desperately seeking the approval of children. And – thanks to that Amendment back in 1972 – these children can – you should again pardon the expression – ‘vote’. Gawd.

Of course, the level of pre-mature cognitive and emotional functioning proper to youth may well be the level of ‘citizen participation’ that the Dems are looking for. Elect in a wave of happy frenzy, and then forget ‘politics’ and go party or Facebook themselves or text-message about their favorite celebrity.

And just how long will We retain the Republic with a citizenry thus limited in its abilities and concerns? And surely both of those tyrannosaurs – the National Security State and the National Nanny State – seek precisely that level of participation. It is the moist-dream of any Beltway pol nowadays, is it not? Get elected by the voters and then have the voters depart for gooey realms of enjoyment while you are left in charge of the checkbook and the arms-locker, free to party and preventively invade, to pander and to pull in the PAC money – although never neglecting to display ‘sensitivity’. It’s the fateful tragedy of “Animal Farm” debauched by liberal doses of bathos.

But the election is an “emergency”, isn’t it? Yet again. No time to think or to get serious; no, just enough time to do what you’re told, say Yes or just keep your mouth shut, and leave the rest to Those Who Know. Ach, ja. That’s worked so well for societies in the past.

Those deep, groaning screams and roars from deep down within? Those aren’t the ‘traditional’ sounds of the hull starting to break up; that’s an ‘old’ story. No, they are the ‘fresh’, ‘unconventional’ sounds of ‘creative destruction’ – and if everybody would just please calm down and accept that, then before long this ship will enter a whole brave new world. Oh, yeah – no doubt about that.

On page 9 Mark Schmitt gushes about “Big-Picture Power”. In doing so, he reveals what a lot of Us didn’t know about Beltway thinking these past couple-four decades. Political power is not just about “who wins a fight” (referring, by the by, to an ‘election’ – who says the Dems aren’t good at ‘war’?) No, it’s also about “Who decides which issues are up for decision and which are not” and “deeper questions about ideology, the definition of problems, and shared assumptions about what is possible”. Ah.

But I gather that none of these matters have been considered with too much reference to relatively indispensable and unavoidable ‘realities’ that are ‘out there’ beyond the Beltway cocktail parties and conference rooms. Funny, that sounds like the same sort of approach that resulted in the current military debacle(s) in the East. Or it that thinking too much?

What Schmitt calls the Big-Picture approach is of itself not at all a bad thing. There has been wayyyyy too much short-term, short-sighted analysis inside the Beltway. Too much one-step-ahead tactical shrewdness and desperately not enough long-term strategic deliberation, replete with consequences, dynamic flow of act-and-response-to-the-act, and means available to initiate and sustain a proposed act.

But the Big-Picture approach hasn’t really been tried. It’s still too small as currently practiced. Thus, while the Republicans and neocons and the rest of the menagerie responsible for the wars in the East only looked at ‘Big’ results and precisely did not try to get a comprehensively ‘big picture’, so for decades the Dems have indulged their Identities in their obsession with the ‘Big’ results of a nation and a society utterly changed in their very fundaments in the twinkling of an eye by politically violent and rapid change unceasingly imposed, and with no thought as to consequences further on down the line, or to the interaction of large and constitutive factors in societal dynamics, or even to the impact of the whole thing on societal and cultural and even national stability.

The Bushist Imperium invaded Iraq. They were so sure of the ‘value’ of their plans and also of their quick success: Was there truth in the reasons for ‘war’? Not necessary because it’s all in a good cause. Was it established – as considered even in the time of Washington and Adams – whether ‘democracy’ is exportable? Not necessary, because we know so much more nowadays. Were there enough troops to get the job done? Not necessary, because the people there will do all the work once we’ve gotten rid of the bad government. Has it been considered what we will do if things don’t go as planned after the government has fallen? Nope. It will all work out because America has been sent there by God, and America is on a mission from God. The Blues Brothers as channeled by the Mayberry Machiavellis.

The Democrats embraced every dream and vision of the Advocacies: They were sure of the ‘value’ of ‘change’ and of the historical inevitability of what the Advocacies wanted to jump-start (thus not only making History but getting one-step ahead of It). Is it certain that gender and identity are more fundamental to societal and national stability than economic well-being for all the citizens? It’s oppressive even to ask the question. Is it certain that ‘female’ characteristics specifically exclusive to that gender exist? And is it certain that if they do exist, those characteristics are better for society and that the so-called male characteristics have been bad for the country? And is it wise to sidestep wide public deliberation and simply impose these initiatives under the not-quite-truthful guise of ‘emergencies’ and ‘crises’? And what happens if – even after all your coercion through legislation and media amplification of not-altogether-accurately reported ‘outrages’ – your many deep changes do not result in a quick and comprehensive societal acceptance of your visions; will you keep society and the citizenry in a state of distracted agitation for decades?

Alas, in Our modern American reality all of these questions merely prove that You just don’t get it, but once we have succeeded you will see that our new world is so much better, and richer.

So now the Republicans are trying to back away from what they have done even as they also try to double-down to recover some or any success from the intensifying situation in the Middle East – and now in the Central Asian region as well. (Even as the Israeli government threatens nuclear war “to send a diplomatic message”.)

And so now the Democrats are trying to ‘look beyond’ what they have been doing for decades in the hopes of lulling enough voters into accepting them as a Party competent to rule and capable of repairing the damage, while simultaneously indulging their ‘base’ in its now frenzied desire to double-down and take this last chance to sweep all opposition from the political table, even as all of those all-too-real realities that were not part of the Identity-story – overwhelming military competence, incomparable manufacturing and financial expertise, unbreakable economic dominance and an unshakeable currency, and ever-expanding national wealth and resources – start to come apart in mid-air. And as those even more immaterial but utterly indispensable realities reveal the extent of their decay : a citizenry individually and communally Grounded in its own maturity and in the rock-like foundations of Ideals worthy of virtuous (though never complete) adherence and free of the terrible distractions of economic insecurity , and united in the confidence of a common achievement and dedicated to a common Project.

And what can it mean that each Party has a ‘base’ that is actually a radical fringe? Try to imagine the figure geometrically: not a triangular pyramid with a wide base at its bottom, not a rectangle or a square resting on a side large enough to support the weight of the rest of the structure above it, but rather … what? An inverted triangle, resting on its point – hugely unstable. A structure suspended in mid-air, with its largest element at one end of it? Impossible, for how does it support itself up there in the air? But perhaps ‘geometric’ thoughts were considered too ‘masculine’ or too ‘male’ for elite Beltway planning. Sure as hell, the pyramid on the dollar-bill (now worth some few cents) with that symbolic but hardly un-real ‘eye’ seeing all at its tip … sure as hell that might have given them pause. But elites don’t carry such small denominations. And radicals don’t care for economic realities. But there We are again.

So, Schmitt continues, politics is all about “how to put new issues on the agenda and then how to challenge prevailing ideologies and assumptions”. Ummmmmm – not primarily, no. You go to sea in a ship and your first responsibility as captain isn’t to “challenge” prevailing assumptions about navigation, buoyancy and the operational characteristics and dynamics of large vessels afloat in a storm, and to tie up the entire crew and command staff in such activity. Maybe if you’re in an experimental vessel specifically designed to ‘push the envelope’, but not a liner with – oh say - a couple-three hundred million passengers. And in crowded shipping lanes where equally large or larger vessels are also making their way according to their own illuminations.

You’ve got to work your best to keep this baby on a steady keel and on her way. Maybe a little time when things are quiet you can pull everybody into your sea cabin and push some thoughts around, but beyond that – well, if you can’t live with that maybe you really shouldn’t be in the command-at-sea business and ought to pursue some other path to personal excellence. Maybe become a faculty member at Hahvahd or Duke, or run a large newspaper or TV station. Some line where the quality of life of hundreds of millions isn’t going to go down the tubes if your excited illuminations aren’t quite on the mark. Or the physical lives of untold numbers aren’t literally snuffed if you start running into stuff – or, like – you start invading other ships. Geez, this isn’t rocket science. Or is that image too ‘male’?

Schmitt rises (descends?) almost to the level of self-parody: referring to the achievements and exertions of the “progressive” (he never uses the word ‘liberal’) world in the past ten years “has involved understanding the limits of the old approach”. By this he means that “instead of hoping to win elections and lobbying for good bills and against bad ones, progressive organizations are finally becoming more conscious about [sic] setting the agenda and fighting for a worldview”. Oy. Oy gevalt. Oy and frakking frak.

Does it carry you back – to talk about legislators “lobbying for good bills and against bad ones”? I mean, it still doesn’t refer to deliberating about whether a bill really is ‘good’ for the common weal or not, but at least “the old approach” had legislators actually trying to think things through and do the job they were dadblasted elected for. And “fighting for a worldview”?!! Fighting against whom, pray? Other Americans? Turning the entire American societal and constitutional stage into the bar scene from “Star Wars”? Or – worse and ironically so - into a bar brawl scene from one of those disreputable and quintessentially ‘male’ Western movies (oppressive, offensive, macho) against which the Revolutions have deployed themselves for forty long and biblical years?

Well, while everybody has been fighting or trying to avoid the fighting down on the saloon deck – captain and command staff included – the good ship of state seems to have headed into an ice-field, run out of fuel, and placed itself on a collision course with half-a-hundred other vessels. Though perhaps at the Naval Academy these days such a situation would not be allowed to reflect on the ‘competence’ of an aspiring admiral-to-be? It makes the denizens of an ‘American Pie’ movie look like characters out of ancient Greek theatre. Such enlightenment. Such progress. Thus We stagger on.

And for a “worldview”. We’d better get Ourselves a clear-eyed assessment of the ‘world’ pretty damned quick. “Worldviews” are phantasmagorical creatures, on the order of a unicorn. We are facing very real horses, here – and they kick very real kicks. And We have lost the reins. And it’s a mountainous, twisty road. And let me not repeat myself.

And on page 24 Rick Perlstein does his level best to twist and squash the corpse of FDR-era history into the casket currently (and ‘progressively’) fashioned for it. His take is that “presidents have to move quickly to enact progressive reforms before the windows of opportunity close forever.” He uses the examples of FDR and LBJ. His logic leads him sorta to this: if Presidents who have enacted great societal changes have only been able to do so under the pressure of great events, then agitating up enough great pressure will be necessary to get one’s own ‘great event’ enacted.

Such logic. And from a college-man. FDR was faced with the pressure of great events and a great crisis – but he didn’t make the crisis himself. Nobody purposely made it. Yes, Wall Street greed and government hesitation certainly led to the Great Depression, but that isn’t to say that the best way to ensure ‘change’ – progressive or otherwise – is to go and purposely create such huge pressures. As one of the alien characters, Quark, on ‘Deep Space Nine’ incredulously exclaimed of humans when he traveled back in time to America of 1947 and found out about the atomic bomb: “they irradiated their own planet??!!” Fire departments shouldn’t set off huge chemical explosions downtown just to demonstrate that they need a new budget to include chemical-explosion equipment. (We pass over as not completely relevant to the present subject the Israeli government ‘s threatening to start a nuclear war in the Middle East in order to let folks know that they’re unhappy with present arrangements, and as an earnest of their willingness to have their demands met in a conference of some sort.)

Ditto LBJ, who as the article acknowledges, in that Glorious '65 was able to surf a wave created by the assassination of JFK, and successfully rammed through the final success-elements of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. Surely it borders on the essence of imbecility to purposely recreate such a wave of “national emergency”. And haven’t We been through enough nation-wide “emergencies” and “crises” in the past decades? The drug ‘war’, abduction crises, assorted sexual ‘emergencies’, and then suddenly, while all the passengers and crew and command staff were busy with those, somehow nobody was on the bridge to notice 9-11 coming straight at Us, although there was clear notice well in advance. This script is getting repetitive; this ‘story’ needs to be reworked. Even the most empty suit in Hollywood could tell Us that. At this rate, “America” is going to become a movie with no ‘hero’. And that never sells.

But also: Perlstein says out loud what hasn’t really been allowed to see the light of day for decades. “During the span of just a few weeks in the summer of 1965, Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri [home of Harry Truman, HST] to sign Medicare – the reform JFK had run on in 1960 – and to Washington to sign the Voting Rights Act.” It was a Glorious summer indeed, the culmination of a struggle that not only extended back into and beyond the Civil War, but also in then-recent American experience to the awesome vision and exertions of Martin Luther King and his associates – white as well as black, male and female together – grounded both in scripture and the best ideals of a common American history.

And then, suddenly: “Five days later, on Aug. 11, the Watts Riots brought down the curtain on the liberal hour. After that he couldn’t even get Congress to approve $60 million for rodent control in the slums.”

It has not been sufficiently appreciated, how much that ‘liberal hour’ (that classic Democratic liberalism, to great extent) was cut short, undercut, by the riots in Watts, brought into every American home in color and often live. This is not to say that ‘the negoes’ themselves were responsible for the riots; nor is it the purpose here to ascribe blame. But the fact remains: before ‘racism’ ever had a chance to rear its head in response to the Glorious ’65, the actions in Watts so awesomely destroyed a Moment in American history, and through the riots a great event’s ‘wave’ of pressure, naturally generated, dissolved into a ripple.

In response to which, as can be seen just beneath the surface of this article, the Democrats were profoundly baffled as a political force, and in their weakness, allowed themselves to be seduced by radical elements that felt it only right and proper to ‘create’ such pressures again by any means necessary. And the Dems let themselves be drawn along by it. And as the shock of Watts was soon joined by the shock of increasing failure in Vietnam, the Democrats embraced a ‘liberalism’ that was now actually a radicalism in content but even more so in method, a radicalism impatient and even dismissive of a democratic politics and of the capacity of The People to deliberate and choose well for the country. And then other groups – that Second Wave of feminism first among them – quickly sought to grasp its opportunity, to make its own Moment, and enforce its own huge and untested visions onto the country and The People, by whatever means necessary. And other groups followed.

And here We are. If the champagne flutes are starting to tip in the first-class saloon, then you can be sure that the water is rising in the bunkrooms of third-class and steerage. Are issues of race or of gender more important, asks the ship’s newspaper?

I think that such questions aren’t really in touch with a certain monstrous reality. They ‘just don’t get it’.

Perhaps they never will.

DEMS DO LIBERAL VIRTUES

Just to show how far behind you can get, I just caught up with an article by a college professor, Kevin Mattson, entitled “The Book of Liberal Virtues”, an article in the February 2006 issue of “The American Prospect” (http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10829).

He has news for us: “… conservatives are winning the culture wars”. And with good reason, he goes on: “The right has done a superb job at exploiting certain weaknesses on the left; liberals in the meantime have become gun shy”.

Yes and kinda no. The ‘culture’ is being so ripped apart that it’s anybody’s guess what there’ll be left of it by the time the ‘war’ is won by one side or the other. The thing will have been destroyed in order to save it. Because at the same time that a decades-long ‘war’ has been waged, generations are now grown up who have no way to remember or imagine the ‘culture’ as it was before the war started.

It will be for us as Lincoln observed in 1865: “Each side hoped for a result less fundamental and astounding”. But where that war brought about some good, however imperfectly realized, the present decades-long culture war won’t yield any such ‘good’ result because the very trellis of maturity and citizenship is being pulled apart as the two extremes – left and right – gyrate with increasing violence, preventing the Vessel from returning to any semblance of an even keel.

When a culture wages a war against some ‘other’ it retains its own identity; but when the culture is itself being warred over, then when it’s all over there will not be any ‘there’ there. There will be versions of societal and individual immaturity – ala the right and ala the left – and assorted permutations and devolutions of the same, but that will be all.

Professor Mattson has fears and dark visions, but his nightmare alarm is brightened by one shining clarity: it’s the “right’s” fault; it’s the fault of “conservative postmodernism”. Amazingly, having broached this strikingly dissonant phrase, he says utterly nothing about its unspoken but densely present progenitor: the notorious ‘liberal postmodernism’ that carried the bacillus of Theory’s content and Revolution’s process into the heart of American culture some 4 decades ago.

Comprising the self-sustaining synergy of this conservative postmodernism, the Prof names “anti-intellectualism”, a “popular distrust of professionalism and higher education”, and a popular distrust of “objectivity”. There’s a psychological term for the phenomenon of selectively seeing the best in your own position and the worst in the other guy’s. The Prof seems unaware (or too young to personally recall) the anti-intellectualism of Theory as it was wielded by the early advocates of that early – feminist - revolution, which was all about “men” just “not getting it” and about how objectivity was simply an oppressive tool of the patriarchy and we should all be into our own intuitions and feelings and – flying the pot-whacked inanities of the Summer of Love into the stratospheric heights of Constitutional (not to say God-given) rights – our bodies.

Stunningly (he’s a Contemporary History professor) he proclaims that “for the conservative mind of today everything is political; there is no set of competences that rises about the struggle for political power”. Does he not recall that “the personal is political” was the battle-cry of those early fill-in-the-blank-Wave feminists 30 and 40 years ago? That it was that formally revolutionary conceptualization which destroyed the concept of and respect for ‘private space’ (i.e. personal space the government has no business being in) and, in consequence, a robust and vital appreciation of individual interiority? And can any of all that ever be brought back, do you think? And if not … ?

And he quickly adds (contra the conservatives, of course) that “Following from this there is no real truth”. Let’s assume that the American Pragmatism of such as William James is not ‘contemporary’ enough to be included in his professional purview; but the Theory embraced by the revolutionaries of 40 years ago was pretty hard on ‘objective truth’ even before the x-Wave started flaunting the superior sensitivity of the female as opposed to the brutish, loutish male.

He goes on (again contra the conservatives) that “there are only clashing viewpoints relative to one another”. Apparently he wasn’t around when you either got-it or you just-didn’t-get-it, and if you didn’t then you weren’t worth being listened to.

But he’s either very uninformed or sinisterly shrewd. Cutely he says “A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st-century. The looniest aspects of the far left during the 1960s morphed into the looniest aspects of the far right today”. The far left’s ideas in the 1960s weren’t “looney”; they were destructive in the manner of adolescent simplisticism mixed with utopian impatience and eagerness to impose a revolutionary sidestepping of ‘slow’ and ‘rotten’ democratic process through violence both physical and – against Truth, Objectivity, Virtue – conceptual.

Worse, once the war in Vietnam started to wind down (and the mid-‘60s college freshmen and sophomores graduated) the stereotypical ‘hippie’ and ‘yippie’ antiwar crowds dissolved. But their commitment to revolution-now was there for the taking, hanging in the very supercharged air of a society thick with late adolescents. The Black Power groups and the really fringe groups like the Weathermen deployed actual physical violence. Democracy had failed, in their view – and only revolution would serve to wipe out the infamous thing, if not to bring about a perfect society.

But the Identities – courted by the desperate Democrats – took a far more professional (almost “K Street”, we might say today) approach to matters: their ‘revolutions’ would be effected not by physical violence, but (even more dangerously) by doing an end-run around the slow-witted, insufficiently ‘concerned’ People and its democratic process – talk, deal, betray ideals – in order to bring about if not utopia then the glorious sunlit uplands of correcting historic and outrageous injustices.

So if there has always been an anti-intellectual streak in American politics – as Hofstadter says and as the Prof quotes him – yet that point is greatly insufficient to understand matters today. Prior to the 1960s and early 1970s anti-intellectualism had been embodied by uneducated and under-educated folks who were as much distrustful of mind-and-money allied in the Eastern urban ‘Establishment’, as they were simply uninterested in learning. Indeed, schoolhouses and ‘schoolmarms’ were one of the first concerns of new communities in the frontier era; it was not so much ‘education’ that agitated ‘farmers’ and ‘industrial workers’ as it was so-called ‘professionals’ who allied (for a price) their intelligence and knowledge with shrewd and unsavory corporate interests. Few Hahvuhd law school grads are recalled for their vigorous efforts in favor of the ‘little guy’, and few Hahvuhd business school grads deployed their talents on his behalf. And ‘he’ knew it; all of them.

But in the 1960s anti-intellectualism – embedded in the ‘Theory’ imported from Europe as a convenient tool to help crack open ‘space’ for the newly conceived and hatching Identities – was actually espoused by the universities themselves, and by many of the ‘professional’ truth-nurturers and truth-seekers such as the professoriate and the journalists. It was this awefull turn of events that wreaked so much profound damage to American culture and society. Fortified with the active support of so many of the ‘professions’, the advocates of the Identities – already committed to a non-democratic (hence revolutionary) method – for achieving their visions, went to work substituting their increasingly diverse if not also incompatible visions for any overarching ‘American Vision’, while simultaneously seeking to disable Reason, Tradition, Objectivity, God (as well as religion), and other capital-letter-concepts that might otherwise be deployed to impede their progress.

So there are two variants of ‘anti-intellectualism’: there is the version Hofstader described and discussed so well. Then there is the anti-intellectualism of the Left’s Political Correctness starting in the 1970s: this is not formally anti-intellectual, but rather functionally anti-intellectual: it never disparages thought and intelligence and education, but instead it requires you not to direct skeptical or even inquiring thought to an analysis or evaluation of certain ‘correct’ agendas and programs. Education is a wonderful thing and a mind is a terrible thing to waste; just don’t use it on subjects that we don’t want you to – not if you know what’s good for you.

This duplicity generated a pervasive agitation and a profound if inchoate sense of unease – and not only among the uneducated but among the middle-classes. And with whole swaths of the nation’s and the citzenry’s experiences off-limits to ‘thought’ or expression, then rational and logical evaluation and exchange – the very stuff of democratic deliberation – became derailed. And so the duplicity also dragged the tone and quality of public discourse down, back into the less advanced, more primitive modalities of childish, ad-hominem, visceral venting of unprocessed anger.

The level of public discourse that had been achieved theretofore was lost, and has yet to be found. The ‘center’ that is indispensable for democratic process – a sufficiently matured and socially competent citizenry, respectful of each other and of the deliberation which was their birthright, the alternative to which was dictatorship (‘tyranny’ in the classical usage) – was not only lost but branded as insufficient to the purposes of a ‘sensitive’ and ‘responsive’ society and its increasingly numerous ‘victims’.

The signature ‘emergencies’ and ‘outrages’ by which each successive Identity and advocacy jump-started itself up the ladder of national attention and priority required not deliberation but passion and action (a thoroughly classic revolutionary strategy); everything was ‘political’ and your politics had to be the ‘correct’ politics or you would be deemed – at the very least – insensitive and hateful. And so when the agitated finally organized themselves in later 1970s they did not formulate a ‘response’; they mounted a ‘pushback’. The time, as Jefferson Davis once put it, for compromise had passed.

Not that the righteous herders of the right have been any less proficient than the revolutionary trail-bosses of the left. Indeed, they are even better at it: they watched how the left did it and then improved upon the performance when they set up their own ‘emergencies’ and shaped public ‘outrage’ like explosive charges to blast more holes in Constitutional praxis and then went after international law and treaties.

So ‘intellectuality’ – the simple love (or at least respect) for the power of mind and of ideas – has been hugely compromised in this country. Concomitantly, the respect for and the competence in personal and public deliberation, discussion, and decision has also been degraded.

Mattson’s exhortation to the effect that “liberals need to show that the virtues of education and thoughtfulness are virtues open to all” is betrayed by the performance of ‘liberals’ over the course of decades. And it belies his own insufficient analysis.

And profoundly so. It isn’t that education and ‘thoughtfulness’ (a poorly chosen word: does it have to do with sending Hallmark cards? Perhaps ‘mindfulness’ or ‘concentration’ would be better) have been kept from certain ‘classes’ or ‘groups’. Much worse and a double-whammy: ‘Education’ and ‘mindfulness’ have been doubly derided and gutted in order to prevent their obstructing the agendas of the assorted revolutions of the assorted Identities:1) ‘education’ and ‘mindfulness’ are said to have no basis in the Great Scheme of Things and are merely mental tools of oppression and 2) We are given to understand sharply that they can’t be used on serious matters if they’re the ‘wrong’ matters – and anyone trying to think and discuss ‘incorrectly’ will wind up being labeled ‘insensitive’ (or – once the Republicans took over the game: ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘treasonous’).

And what is a ‘virtue’? Is it simply a nice or a desirable characteristic? What grounds the virtue such that you can rely on it as a shaper of your life and as a reliable guide to a self and a life that – when you get to the end of the road – you can feel ‘good’ about? What makes a ‘virtue’ a ‘Virtue’?

And here’s where Mattson demonstrates – no doubt unwittingly – the plight of the ‘left’ or the ‘liberals’: there’s nothing in their ideal ‘world’ or in their ‘world-view’ that can turn a virtue into a Virtue and thereby make it worth living for (or dying for). To the great human thirst for participation in meaning and Life, they can only offer spectatorship of esoteric public melodramas played out regardless of consequences.

As ‘election’ ‘news’ starts to fill the media now, a lot more is going to be said about What the Democrats Have To Do or can do or some such. And how the mess our civic life is in is the fault of the Republicans (who can remember life 12 years and more ago?) and we only have to put the Dems back in because – during it all – they have stayed ‘normal’ and ‘good’ (but still ‘patriotic’ and ‘strong’). Yah. None of them Dem thinkers have watched ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’, I think. It’s 1946 and the Dems are like Germans who want to blame it all on the now-self-destructed Nazis and just ‘move on’.

Well the Republicans of this age can certainly play the bad-guys role for this scenario; but the Dems are in no position to play any role but that of The Rest of the German People. They helped this monstrosity develop and continue, and the fact that the Party of the Twelve Years is over and gone doesn’t make everybody else ‘good’ by default so that the country can just pick right up where it left off twelve long years ago and proceed happily (and normally and goodily) on.

What can the Democrats do? First, I think, they can recommit to democratic process: too much change has been rammed down American throats with no questions asked or allowed, but merely on the ‘authority’ of the fact that ‘it’s a good thing and we should do it’– and ‘it’s an emergency and an outrage and anything less would be ‘insensitive’’. The process of genuine democracy has been sidestepped and sidetracked, by revolutions masquerading as consumed by a laudable (and un-opposable) zeal for righteousness.

And consequently, the People have been sidestepped and sidetracked. Did Bush tell everyone not to worry after 9/11 and that he’d take care of everything and We should all just go shopping? Well, that’s pretty much what the Democrats told us for decades as this and that huge change became Democratic dogma overnight. We let them get away with it because they were doing it in a ‘good’ cause and who wanted to wind up on the evening news labeled as ‘insensitive’ or ‘hateful’? Did we think that the Twelve Years just sorta materialized out of nowhere? That’s like thinking the 9/11 gang simply materialized out of nowhere. We are too old for fairy tales, if not too grown up for them.

Revolutions have no respect for The People, as individuals or as an entity of Constitutional standing. That was the monstrous danger within the Dems’ “New Politics” that came a cropper as early as McGovern’s shockingly compleat defeat. And yet the Dems couldn’t stop their own stampede by then, and probably couldn’t see any other options. Much like a cavalry charge: after a certain point, you really don’t mind that the horses no longer respond to the reins and just gallop en masse toward the enemy – after all, the closer you get to the shock of armed contact, the less you need your troops having any philosophical thoughts, let alone transmitting them to the horses.

That was the Dems’ undoing: they forsook The People and the democratic process for the sake of votes. Well, to be fair, it was a matter of survival: no votes to replace the Southrons and the fading blue-collar industrial workers and there might well be no Democratic Party after a while. So, since it was a matter of survival (an ‘existential threat’ as might be said today) then steps had to be taken ‘by any means necessary’.

But the Dems have an even bigger problem that they brought on themselves: in a country that is hugely ‘religious’ in some form or other (and in which a large fraction of the citizenry believe the world is less than 10,000 years old) and among a species – the human – where Meaning and Presence anchored Beyond this ‘world’ constitute the abiding and ceaseless hunger of all … in a country like this the Dems – to ease the rise of their new voter-blocs – not only had to impose massive social change, but had to Flatten the ‘world’ of human experience in order to disable those Beyond-things that might be used to ‘judge’ that change.

This is where the Dems abandoned the High Ground, which was thus left undefended when the whackjob Fundamentalists were mustered into Republican service and told to take and fortify the heights in order to cover the low-ground advance of their new allies, the better-dressed but equally whacked-out Neocons. In a country and among a species hungry for Meaning and the Presence of something Beyond, for the Substance and intimation of Things Beyond, the Dems committed themselves to perceptions and appearances and spin.

And yet the Dems also committed themselves to a version of the Straussian ‘Noble Lie’: it’s not true, but it should be, and if we can get them all to believe it, then maybe over time the fact that they believe it’s true will actually help make it come true. Interesting theory – although a tad manipulative for a democracy, but hey – it’s an emergency and these be existential times.

Now we hear and will continue to hear the Dems trying to recover the High Ground – or at least the appearance of it … - without actually admitting that they’ve ever left it in the first place. Sort of a version of the Pentagoon play: Nothing is wrong and we’re fixing it – nothing to see here, folks. As Ward Bond's Irish beat-cop might have said: G'wan home, the whole a'yez!

But although the monstrous failure of the Republicans to decently govern affairs domestic and foreign is undeniable, there is no guarantee that the Dems will be able to make themselves anything more than the default Party. How the Dems will be able to lead without holding the actual High Ground is a mystery to me. And how the Dems will be able to reclaim it without indicting their performance over the past several decades and alienating some of their most implacable new Identities … that’s their biggest problem.

So it’s not to my mind a matter of the Dems reclaiming the authority to ‘lead’. First they have to restore the democratic process based on a respect for all of Us as The People. And maybe they can gin up the courage to do that by relying on strength and wisdom from Beyond. God knows, the ‘wisdom’ of French literary Theory has helped them not at all. And it has helped so weaken this Republic that the Rove-ian myrmidons and this unspeakably awful Unitarium got into power as easily as the Unitarium then let the 9/11 hijackers get to the planes.

Waves washing back upon each other, echoes resounding back against each other, illusions feeding appearances serving lies that can’t clearly be labeled because the Truth they betray can no longer be discerned … “so much remains to be done”.