IDENTITY POLITICS MIGRATES AND BOOMERANGS

In my recent Post “America’s Deficits: Then and Now” I discussed Andrew Bacevich’s article about how prior American efforts – self-interested, at that – in the Eisenhower years had failed, providing in the process numerous warnings for any future (now ‘present’) American government dabbling in that region.

I’d also like to follow up on another point of interest contained in his article.

Let me quote one of his paragraphs, in which he discusses the assumptions underlying (you don’t want to say ‘justifying’) the present American misadventures there:

“The central assumptions are these: a) that the Pashtun way of life is defective; b) that the Pashtuns know this and yearn for something better; c) that United States officials understand where the problems lie and by mobilizing American resources and skill can repair them; d) that in doing so, the United States will both improve the lives of ordinary people and enhance America’s standing in their eyes and in the eyes of many others.” [italics mine]

There was something familiar about them, though at the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

But it’s come to me now: these four assumptions undergirded the Revolution of the Identities’ assault on American culture, society, and the Constitution for the past forty Biblical years. (I am going to shorten ‘Revolution of the Identities’ to ‘RevIdents’.)

Assumption (a) mirrors the RevIdent assumption that American life, culutre, society and the Constitutional ethos are and always have been fundamentally defective in one way or another, and that they are therefore outmoded, oppressive, and “quaint”.

Assumption (b) also mirrors that, though with a twist: not all Americans were presumed to realize this and desire change. Indeed, only the cadres of the RevIdent and their supporters (those who ‘got it’) were the ones with wits enough to see all that; but since their view was Correct and also promised the Right and Only Path to Perfection, and since there was such an ‘emergency’ of ‘oppression’, then theirs were the only ideas – “voices”, they like to say – that counted.

Assumption (c) – happily embraced by the Dems and then the Republicans as both Parties merged into the treacherous blob now known as the Beltway – presumed that not only the cadres but their willing government enablers (officially ‘hailed’ as those who did indeed ‘get it’) were in possession of that mysterious 'Wisdom'.

And further that they all knew just how to conduct a fundamental ‘deconstruction’ of American culture and the Constitution’s ethos without seriously deranging the functioning of a society and culture that had always (and accurately) held itself to be inseparably rooted in the Constitution and its ethos. (A callow and arrogant assumption that is proving as frakkulously wrong as its application in economics: that you can kill the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs without disrupting the Egg supply … a chunk of fatuous frakkulence that only revolutionary cadres, Boomers, and the Beltway Best and Brightest could possibly embrace.)

Assumption (d) mirrors the Kool-Aid claptrap that those who did ‘get it’ used as a substitute for ‘belief’ in any Larger Being that might stand in judgment (and in the way) of their programme: IF ONLY everybody went along with them, then after a while everything would work out just great. (Again, I recall Wimpy’s sempiternal promise: I shall gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today … which – the hellhot ironies! – is precisely the promise the US government is now having to make with reckless abandon to any sucker on the planet who looks capable of forking over cash for T-bills on the ‘promise’ of payback ‘one fine day’ in the not-too-near future.)

And furthermore, (d) mirrors the RevIdent assumption that the (oh-so-rare) best-case outcome would be the only possible outcome; that therefore, less ‘good’ outcomes, including partial or complete failure and the engendering of awful and perhaps irreversible damage and consequences were not only improbable but were almost mystically guaranteed not to happen.

(And in this, the cadres – otherwise so in-your-face ‘secular’ – were rendered into mushbrains far more destructively credulous than any ‘religious’ folk except the whackjob fundamentalists. Somehow, the Value-of-the-Revolution, like the Fundoozie ‘God’, would guarantee the utter ‘triumph’ of whatever its self-proclaimed Deputies tried to pull off. As best I can see, that ‘God’ – though not the Genuine Article – really does appear to be either dead or asleep at the switch.)

We have not only been sold a bill of goods, but the Beltway is now trying to forcibly unload those same defective goods on other peoples around the planet.

Nor is this ‘imperialism’ merely - or even primarily - of the Rightists and Jingoists. As Bacevich politely intimates in his article, you will now find yourself in the crosshairs of the American military urge to ‘partner’ and ‘liberate’ you if you are either (i) perceived to be ‘oppressive of women’ in the eyes of the Beltway feministicals (and just about every male and every tradition on the planet is already listed on their Axis of Oppression) or (ii) you are sitting on top of some resource-rich lode or located along the routes to same, or (iii) both.

The fact that the American soon to be cash-starved military now considers itself far ‘better’ (not to say 'more effective') for having moon-faced lesbian generals and lantern-jawed lesbian admirals simply adds that touch of through-the-looking-glass, costume-epic boffo to the whole repulsive, destructive, doomed enterprise of ‘humanitarian imperialism’.*

God, this generation has a rendezvous with being laughed-at by Destiny and by Posterity.

By Posterity, that is, until those yet-to-be Tire Kickers realize exactly how much We blew, and how much of that Much was theirs.

I suspect that when the Last Trumpet sounds, and everybody winds up at the great graduation-cum-class-reunion in the Sky, there are many of Us who will be well advised not to wear a ‘Hello, my adult years on earth in America included 1970-2020’ sticky badge. Definitely, you don’t want to have one on if you find yourself peeping over the rim of your plastic wine glass looking Washington or Lincoln in the face.

Or any Roman from the late Republic who had consoled him/herself with the thought that even if it was all going to imperial hell now, at least the wreck of your national life would provide an everlasting warning to those who came after and read the Histories and took careful note.

Boomers, I most clearly recall, didn’t take careful notes.

And it shows.

NOTES

*As an example of feministically-inspired ‘humanitarian imperialism’ you can read Samantha Power’s recent book (“A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”, 2003) in which she complains about multilateralism and international law and (may I say it? – “quaint”) concepts of sovereignty that get in the way of the US stretching forth its mighty (this was 2003) and oh-so-Correct arm to save ‘victims’ everywhere.

Not only does this mirror the feministical approach to the “quaint” constraints of the Constitution domestically. Which is to say: when victims are in pain or danger and when you are trying not only to save them but prevent further pain, then concern over the engorgement of government’s intrusive powers and such quibbling concerns as “evidence” and “due process” are horrible proof that you ‘just don’t get it’; in fact, steps taken to ensure that the guilty are punished and not let off should govern ‘procedural’ trials that are more concerned for (fuddy-duddy) due process than for ensuring that the (already-assumed) ‘guilty’ get what’s coming to them.

But also kindly recall that this is not stuff coming from the Law-and-Order Right and the old Nixonian ‘silent majority’ and ‘hardhats’ (those were the days!) but rather from the cutting edge of the putatively ‘liberal’ Left.

And of course, it screams to be noticed that just as happened here domestically, the ‘victim’ easily becomes the telegenic front for the engorgement of government power. Now it is not the domestic police power, but rather the overseas military power.

THIS is progress? THIS is a good idea? Do we actually have two Parties with substantially different but worthwhile approaches to national and international affairs?

AND AS ALWAYS, the ‘progressive’ Best and Brightest give no thought to ‘the big C’, i.e. Consequences. What about all the extra blood that is shed when you invade a country, even for ‘good’ reasons and with ‘good intentions’? What about the example you’re setting for other nations who might also like to have a ‘justification’ for stretching forth their military arms? What about the fact that before long We are going to run out of real money and Our benjamins are going to enjoy the status of Monopoly money? (Google that last if you have to.)

CAT’S PAW

I had been talking about the ‘migration of concepts’ in recent Posts: that a concept or idea or technique from one area of activity could be picked up and applied in a completely different area of activity, with more or less (or much less) applicability or with entirely different results and – a word that We should start carving in stone – consequences.

In a recent article, the military writer William S. Lind discusses an axiom of military affairs: the illegitimacy of power. This is a concept, he notes, noted by another significant modern military affairs thinker, Martin van Creveld, who calls it “the power of weakness”.

Both thinkers discuss this concept in its relation to Fourth Generation War (4GW): the type of asymmetric conflict where large conventional armies, deploying great quantities of advanced military force in all its manifestations, are opposed by small, dedicated groups – not ‘military forces’ as such. This is the type of military challenge We face in Iraq and Afghanistan now (and which the Israeli military faces in Gaza, not irrelevantly).

He observes, rightly, that “in a Fourth Generation world, legitimacy is the coin of the realm”. The overwhelming power of advanced military force is perceived to be ‘illegitimate’ and that perception then assigns ‘legitimacy’ to those ‘unorganized’ and ‘non-military’ forces that arise to oppose it. This happened in France under the German occupation, where the Resistance had the triple advantage of first, opposing a national invader and occupier, that was (second) cruel and oppressive, and thirdly, assumed the proportions of a Goliath in relation to the Resistance agents who arose to combat the occupiers. The population, even if not adventurous enough to actively participate in ‘resistance’ held the resisters in relatively high-esteem.

This created a significant problem for the German occupation forces, one that only got worse as time went on. Indeed, every ‘success’ they achieved against the Resistance served, perversely, to increase the people’s esteem for the Resistance (and it also increased the Resistance’s dedication and intensified their activity).

This principle also worked wonders in Mao’s struggle against the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai Shek (or however it’s spelled nowadays). Even though the Nationalists were also Chinese, they were seen by the people as allies of foreign meddling as well as representatives, somehow, of an old, imperial order.

Whenever resisters stand up against an overwhelming military power, they become ‘heroes’ in the eyes of the majority of the people. There’s something almost primal, certainly fundamental, in this: a human respect for the plucky underdog. It is “the power of weakness”. There is no advanced technology or amount of boots-on-the-ground that can beat it; the more advanced and powerful the aggressive occupier, the higher the burnish of the stalwart resister.

Certainly, the Israelis got along for decades passing themselves off as just such plucky (and righteous) underdogs, defending themselves against the Goliath of the assorted Arab national forces around them. It hasn’t worked so well of late, and the Israelis have found themselves starting to lose that ‘legitimacy’ in the eyes of the world’s peoples and governments (with one well-remunerated exception being the officialdom and elites residing in the Beltway neighborhood of Washington City).

When this dynamic takes hold, the occupier determined to remain becomes mired in a downward spiral that cannot be broken. For the occupier, things will not turn out well. For the resister, secure in the inevitability of this military and strategic principle (as well as in the rightness of the Resistance cause), need only keep on keeping on.

In terms of ‘migration of the concept’, it occurs to me that this principle (not ‘new’, although newly empowered) had been adopted by the government here in domestic affairs.

And the manner of it is on this wise.

After the stunning newsreel footage of Southern police beating up on Civil Rights demonstrators in the mid-‘50s to mid-‘60s, the country largely shifted its attitude to police authority. The World War Two generations, used to a certain amount of regimentation and recognizing their own peers among the returned vets who joined police forces, generally accepted and trusted the use of police power. But for them, and for their Boomer children, watching that footage shifted attitudes.

Granted, when the Southern Civil Rights movement entered its ‘second’ phase, the revolution-minded agitations that arose in the non-Southern cities, a significant fraction of the populace became more concerned for law-and-order against urban crimes feeding synergistically off of the agitation-spirit. But the overall sympathy of the public shifted away from the ‘police’, and the police power; it had become ‘delegitimized’.

This explains, I believe, what happened next – over the course of a decade or two. The government became frustrated and perhaps alarmed by the popular predisposition to see any persons caught up in the criminal justice system as ‘victims’, if not also as ‘good’, or even ‘heroes’. The aura of ‘liberal’ concern for the individual, clearly and rightly deployed in the service of protecting the Civil Rights marchers in that watershed Southern phase, now had extended to ‘cover’ all manner of other activity, even as the Civil Rights activity shifted in the mid-‘60s from the South to the urbanized cultures of the cities.

But ‘liberal’ policy – under the Democrats – also then extended to ‘women’, especially as ‘women’ were defined in the ‘vision’ of gender-feminism: helpless victims of an abiding, primitive, inbred ‘male’ aggressiveness and violence. In this vision, the police and the police power of the government were cast as ‘good’, riding in like the cavalry to rescue the settlers in their wagon-trains and homesteads. (Although, in yet more complication, this image would never have been used, since it was – under the aegis of multicultural ‘respect’ – insensitive and, marvelously, itself too ‘John Wayne’ and too ‘masculine’.)

The fire of a genuine conservative concern for law-and-order and the fire of a gender-feminist near-hysteria for ‘protection’ and ‘vengeance’ and ‘justice’ began to burn toward each other in the national forest.

The fires linked up in the later-1980s in ‘victimism’: the assumption that the police power of the government (and I say this with all respect for hard-working individual police officers) was the ‘good’ and that those persons caught in the toils of the police-power were the ‘bad’. Now it was ‘decent’ folks against ‘criminals’. Although again, since the gender-feminists sought to delegitimize ‘decency’ as an instrument of social stasis and ‘oppression’, the actual term ‘decent’ was rarely used; ‘victims’ were simply that, and their status seemed to exist independent of any characterizing descriptors or any other dynamics. A victim was a victim, thus good and the ‘victimizer’ evil, and that was all that needed to be said.

Let the games begin.

All of this exploded into a firestorm as the Democrats took the White House in the very early 1990s. Almost immediately there was an explosion of laws, changes to long-standing legal principles, and entire new categories of ‘offenders’. Within short order there were divorce-law changes and special courts, ‘domestic violence’ laws and registries, quickly followed by ‘sex offenders’ and the still-burgeoning laws and registries.

Government police-power began to expand, with elite support and an initially high level of popular acceptance; it expanded to levels not seen in a modern democracy. The civil-liberties and jurisprudential consequences of such hastily-enacted initiatives were unremarked and – in the popular media – mostly ignored, though the professional literature was rife with alarms and deep concerns.

With its whole-hog embrace of ‘the victim’, the government police-power had found a way to ‘legitimize’ itself. Although it had expanded hugely and ominously, that power gained ‘legitimacy’ by its almost total ‘dedication’ to helping the ‘little guy’ (although that ‘guy’ was now almost always a female).

With both Democrats and Republicans ‘on board’, the entire process swept the country, its institutions, its laws, its ethos.

And when the Soviet Union collapsed, also in those early 1990s, it did not take long for this concept to ‘migrate’ from domestic to foreign affairs. Foreign policy, especially as defined by the larger and more developed nations, began to speak of a ‘humanitarian responsibility’ to over-ride other nations’ national sovereignty in the interests of bringing ‘justice’ and ‘reform’ to backward, 'oppressed', 'victimized peoples.

This was, clearly, an utter reversal of the Wilsonian principle of ‘national self-determination’; if a government did ‘bad’ things – and what government doesn’t? – in the eyes of a larger and more powerful nation, then its sovereign rights were forfeit and the larger nations, if they chose, would invade or assault, in order to essentially rescue the ‘victims. By 1995 the US was in Bosnia, where – ominously – it still remains, with the UK under the personally sincere and totally convinced Tony Blair bringing up the rear.

The possibilities for grave mischief were rife. Especially in a world where essential resources – oil, grains, even fresh water – are dwindling, the larger and more developed nations have given themselves carte blanche to invade wherever they choose to perceive ‘victimization’ that needs redress, 'oppression' that needs 'liberating'.

And then came 9-11, and then Afghanistan, which was ‘won’ and yet was then ‘lost’ as the government's schemes shifted to Iraq.

‘Victimization’ – and there is enough of it in this Vale of Tears, as God knoweth full well – became a perfect ‘cover’ of ‘legitimacy’ for foreign interventions, invasions and occupations, wherever and whenever the US chose.

Nor, certainly under Bush, did the US choose well.

And here We are.

Nor is Obama going to be able to easily reverse this entire national mind-set and heart-set. ‘Victimism’ and all that supports it, including the manipulative stoking of fear and anxiety and mistrust and vengeance; and the disrespect for established principles of Western and Constitutional justice; and the even more deeply buried disrespect for national sovereignty, is now a well-anchored dynamic in both US domestic affairs (and politics) and in US foreign affairs.

But especially in foreign affairs this game is becoming harder and harder to sustain. Those invaded and occupied do not see themselves as receiving ‘rescue’, and though they most certainly see themselves as being victimized (if not as helpless victims) they ‘see’ clearly that their victimizer is the US.

Nor can their opposition to such a gambit be easily written off as ‘backlash’, as had happened in US domestic affairs.

They are getting shafted, they know it, and they aren’t going to stand still for it.

And the principle of ‘the power of weakness’ will serve to wear down whatever aggressive and advanced military force the US chooses to deploy in the quintessentially American delusion that enough know-how and well-funded weapons research will yield a quick ‘victory’ with minimal (American) casualties and no lasting negative consequences.

It was a lot easier (though hardly more justifiable) for the US government and elites to corrode America’s own Constitutional ethos domestically.

So History is not dead. Although the Constitution is not at all well, and the hostility of both Leftist (not liberal) and Rightist (not conservative) factions in American politics and government does not make for a bright prognosis. Dr. Obama faces a ‘patient’ rapidly enroute to becoming an ER ‘trainwreck’, wounded and injured so complexly and profoundly that any effort to ‘fix’ any one serious problem is going to aggravate several others.

We are cursed with “interesting times” indeed. This is Our rendezvous with destiny. Let Us rise up to meet it.

NOTE

Lind also notes that "Americans, driven by sensation-seeking media, will panic". Yes. Having somehow lost any working sense of Divine Providence or any help from Beyond that helps put up with the slings and arrows of outrageous Life and Fortune, Americans are far more easily spooked, stampeding toward any 'reform' that promises to eradicate pain and suffering in any form from human life.

And having been told for decades (and taught, at 50K a year for college) that 'maturity' and self-mastery and 'seriousness' are all 'male', 'patriarchal', 'oppressive' modes of 'vertical' thinking and must be eradicated ... I can't really see how that has helped.

Additionally, it's not just the sensationalist media. The government and legislators themselves find it a quick and reliable way to garner 'legitimacy', pushing through all sorts of 'reforms' to stop 'pain'. And the national government uses its purse-strings to induce police agencies and cash-strapped State governments to go along.

We are increasingly becoming helpless and panicky - and I don't mean as a nation here, but as a 'people'. And that bodes very ill for The People. And for democracy. And for the Constitution.

Obama has stated that the citizenry needs to start putting more responsibility on itself. One of the primary ways that good advice must be given shape and form is for individual adults to get a grip and not simply panic on cue like the crowds in some mass-disaster movie.