THE AMERICAN PROSPECT AND OLD PLAYS

In ‘The American Prospect’ for October, p.13, Dana Goldstein talks about fair housing in the toney New York burbs around Westchester.

A movement is underway to force the County to enforce the 1968 Fair Housing Act requirements for affordable housing, which so far the various bosky towns have managed to avoid.

A couple of thoughts.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed at a moment when the ‘poor’ or ‘minorities’ were much differently composed. For the majority of Americans the visions of the Civil Rights Marchers of the 1950s and early 1960s, so widely publicized on TV news and photojournalism (google it), still held great moral and political power: great gatherings of decently dressed (yes, a value judgment) blacks of all ages risking much to support their inclusion in the wider national life beyond the confines of genuine racism, especially under the aura of Martin Luther King.

By 1968 the urban riots (Watts had occurred less than a week after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and the general explosion of screw-conformity and the ‘away-with-the-bourgeois’ excitements of the later 1960s and the supplanting of King (well before he was assassinated) by Black Power advocacies (some advocating ‘revolution’ rather vocally) … had effected a profound if not widely voiced change in mainstream attitudes.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the mainstream was baffled and for some rather understandable reasons anxiously concerned. After all, if ‘minority’ housing would now include revolutionaries bent on destroying that precise ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle that the earlier era’s Civil Rights marchers and advocates had struggled to join, then having such housing in the neighborhood was suddenly a rather different proposition from what had been envisioned in the earlier era (a scant few years before – that’s how fast The Sixties moved).

This is not at all to say that genuine racism did not exist, perhaps even in the best mainstream folks. After all, as I have noted in earlier Posts, there seems to be a natural caution in the species – certainly reinforced by the history of American society – when encountering ‘different’ groups, and that was especially true when it was not simply a matter of culture and folkways but actual ‘color’. This was a characteristic of human as well as American society that promised to require great work and effort even in the Civil Rights era pre-dating Watts and certainly 1968. Rational persons of good heart could have expected in 1965 that the work of the phase following the 1965 signing would be large and require the full and deliberate effort of the mainstream to include those already-ready black marchers who were the iconic face of American Blacks.

But then suddenly, there were the urban riots and the so-called “Northern Phase” of Civil Rights – post Watts – that actually introduced huge new and negative elements into the already challenging equation and the tasks facing the mainstream: Black Power, the revolution, the revolutionary mindset that everything 'old' has to be swept away and it has to happen RIGHT NOW. This added so many new and complex and also genuinely disturbing factors that much if not most of the original thrust of the pre-1965 Civil Rights movement was altered.

Unfortunately, the advocates of immediate change pushed hard against their supporters in the Democratic Party that now had no choice but to keep on the genuinely bright, shining though challenging path that it had courageously chosen (with no small political calculation as well, but that’s democracy for you) but which was now promising to lead into very broken and dangerous country indeed.

But both advocates and politicians and the federal bureaucracy and the media kept trying to run the same and now-outdistanced pre-1965 gameplan. But the ‘black Americans’ – the key factor in the equation – had somehow in large or at least significant part ‘changed’: those long lines of well-deported and maturely determined blacks – mainstream in all but their color – had changed (or morphed or mutated – take your pick) into the angry in-your-face face of Black Power.

And as the Sixties went into the Seventies, and the effects of all sorts of other ‘liberations’ began to destabilize – indeed delegitimize – the very ‘mainstream’ structures of society that the Civil Rights-era American Blacks had desired to more fully ‘join’ and which mainstream Americans of good heart were glad to support. All of the essential building blocks of that mainstream society came under sustained and vigorous attack (supported by a Democratic Party that clearly had ‘lost control of the reaction’, as the atomic scientists might say): religion, the family, parental authority and then the idea of parenthood and parental responsibility, sobriety (drugs were ‘liberating’, you may recall), and even maturity itself. All that, on top of the pre-existing challenges of urban life for the poor, worked to viciously undercut the possibilities for the majority of Black Americans.

And then with the dawn of Multiculturalism the entire Civil Rights-era paradigm was officially abandoned: the idea was now not that Black Americans had every right – morally and historically – to join the American mainstream, but rather that there was no American mainstream, no real American culture or society, and that Black folk could do what they damned well pleased and you’d better get used to it. Which among other things undercut the effort of huge numbers of Black Americans and Black American parents to raise their young into any sort of workable socialization at all.

My God, is about all you can say – and I am not blaming Black Americans here. Although, as Michael Lind noted in his 1995 book ‘the Next American Nation’*, those Blacks who were happily and willingly raised up as ‘elites’ and ‘leaders’ had greatly insufficient effect when it came to addressing these core problems.

Of course, that is not to put the blame entirely on them. Many of these problems posed to Black Americans were the results of the demands of other Identities or officially identified ‘minorities’ whose demanded agendas actually worked against the successful development for American Blacks envisioned in the pre-1965 era.

The Democrats – by the Seventies joined by the Republicans and well on the way to coagulating into the Beltway nomenklatura of today – were unable to manage any sort of rational overall policy and simply settled for pandering to whatever ‘demands’ from whatever Identity that seemed to promise a good sound-bite and some reliable votes. It’s as if the Navy were to allow the design of a warship by simply allowing everybody with an idea an equal say in the design and equipping of the vessel: with no oversight to maintain some rational plan and purpose, you would get a warship far too heavily burdened with the equipment for far too many simultaneous purposes – which, by the by, is what has lethally plagued the newest class of amphibious ships even now in the present day.

But the Beltway was (and is) still shackled to Multiculturalism’s fatal assumptions: that a hundred Identities should bloom and that they all had equal value and that the only problem would be the ‘white mainstream’ which, happily, should be diluted or prosecuted or laid-off until it was unable to ‘oppress’ anybody anymore.**

Such a fine national policy. And here We are.

So you can’t simply attribute mainstream hesitation about having ‘black’ or ‘minority’ folk moving in down the block in this Year of Grace 2009 to the ‘racism’ against the aspiring Black Americans of almost 50 years ago. They, alas, do not exist in great herds – if I may –any longer, and it wasn’t ‘racism’ that did them in.

And it isn’t ‘racism’ that is the only reason for mainstream concerns about housing for the ‘poor’ today. While I hold no brief for the idle rich in their mansions or the faux-rich in their McMansions, nor all their pomps and all their works, I understand anybody’s concern about having the greatly damaged society of urban poverty as it has now evolved (or devolved or mutated, take your pick) set up shop not far away. Nor am I blaming the urban poor and American Blacks themselves for this.

I look to Congress and to the ‘elites’ of various types – of the Left as well as the Right – who were simply piling on demands for their own agendas and their own status and their own Identities, with nary a thought to the consequences and impact that their ‘reforms’ would have on the larger commonweal. (And can you say Iraq War?)

Such is the danger of the unholy fusion of Identity Politics and Multiculturalism.

Equally, ‘immigrants’ are included in Goldstein’s plaint.

But again, the ‘immigrant’ of the Multicultural Age is not, by and large, identical to the ‘immigrant’ of the 19th and very early 20th centuries. Those folk came over (a third of the Italians, at least, then went back after finding out what it was really like over here) with not only the hope but the prospect of decent employment and a readiness to continue a steady climb. And they expected to join a society that was solidly certain of its own values and able to make good – over time – on its promises of decent employment and a decent life.

Such is not the case at all now. Congress long ago (the mid-Sixties) rejected LBJ’s criterion of ‘skills and training’ for new immigrants and replaced it with the hugely mushy ‘family reunification’. And closer to the present time, immigrants are soused with the world-distributed visions of American Culture as a huge Disneyland, where you can do what you want and nobody can make you do anything and they will pay you for it if you want. Not every human being can resist believing – or at least assuming – such tantalizing dreams, though to do so sets up many new immigrants for a nasty shock when they arrive.

Especially when they arrive in the neo-liberal and now post-2008 America, where leaf-blowing and coffee-pouring are about the best that can be hoped for in an economy that is gravely compromised and in a society that is rapidly stratifying into a ‘knowledge elite’ that will come up with ‘ideas’ and a ‘serfdom’ that will do the chores. And in a Multicultural America where they need not – indeed MUST not – assimilate to the American culture (there isn’t one, Correctness teaches) but rather cling to their own, language and all.

So ‘minority housing’ – with every respect to individuals and with burning concern for the mess that has enveloped them – is no longer comprised of the same variables as it was in that other galaxy long-ago and far-away in the still-touted but thoroughly undermined Civil Rights Era.

And it is no longer thus simply ‘racism’ that creates hesitation about some of the iconic ‘initiatives’ still being run out of the old Golden Playbook of the Democrats of a vanished era.

In no way do I intend these comments as a veiled coded approval of a return to segregation or blaming-the-poor for their truly awful situation.

Rather, I think that the Congress – such as it now is – and all of Us must start to do some serious thinking and re-thinking.

Because if We leave it up to the ‘elites’ who have managed things for the past 50 years or so, We are only going to get more of the same, and that – I am saying – ain’t a good thing at all.

NOTES

*See my Post of September 29th on this site.

**Don't forget, there are different levels and sites of Multiculturalism. Educational multiculturalism in its most decent form simply seeks to introduce students to other cultures and folkways and inculcate a certain respect and even conceptual humility in approaching 'strange' or 'different' cultures, so that the student can a) see the assorted bits of value in that culture and b) learn to approach new things with an open mind. Well and good.

The more dangerous form of Multiculturalism in the academic world is that American culture is so 'evil', 'oppressive' and 'baaaaad' that just about any other culture would be an improvement. And that therefore American culture should have no moral claim over American youth or on any Americans at all. Which is something else altogether.

AND then if you look at political Multiculturalism, then you have the assertion that there is no American culture and that each government-identified 'race' and its 'culture' should be allowed to do its own thing and folks will just have to learn to live with it. Which is hugely toxic and even lethal to any hope of sustaining a common (and Constitutional) culture and national ethos. And THAT is a recipe for national suicide, culturally, societally, and probably even in terms of the cohesion of this Union.

WHEN DID IT GO WRONG?

Clay Risen has a new book out, “A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination”; it is reviewed in ‘The Boston Globe’ by Daniel Akst on January 18th, 2009.

It’s an interesting take on things, dealing with “the pernicious long-lasting consequences of the riots that followed MLK’s murder”.

Well, certainly yes and yet no.

Dr. King’s murder was an abomination. I still can’t stop thinking that J. Edgar Hoover had something to do with it; if nothing else, there would be no thorough investigation. (If so, that same dynamic would have been in play two months later when RFK, Hoover’s nemesis, was assassinated.)

It’s courageous to start talking about the consequences of the riots of that era. For quite some time the shrewdly camouflaged and highly effective ‘blaming the victim’ ploy suppressed all discussion along such lines. But if there’s any good news at all these days, perhaps it’s that some of the old Political Correctness (that insidious, monstrous Leninist invention) has started to wear away.

And by placing the MLK riots at the core of things, Risen nicely pre-empts any ‘hurtfulness’ that might stem from any inference that the black riots were gratuitous or even irrational, without any immediate cause, and in view of long-term black interests, horribly counter-productive, and doing the cause of American blacks great harm. And doing the American polity great harm as well, but let me not get ahead of myself.

In the Post ‘Sweet Land of Liberty’ from last November 26th, I had commented on Thomas J. Sugrue’s book “Uncommon Ground”. Sugrue’s thesis is that there was a first and Southern phase of the Civil Rights movement and then a second and Northern phase. The latter has received almost no consideration, Sugrue says, and he is right.

But it’s even more complicated than that. Whenever We think of the ‘Civil Rights Struggle’ We imagine the long lines of those nicely-dressed Southern black youths (and the even more numerous black adults), facing, along with an impressive number of white ‘Freedom Riders’ the assorted slings and arrows of the assorted Southern law enforcement agencies, such as they were at that time. It was very much the film and photograph images of those brave souls, and as contrasted to the chimpery of the Southern police and a disconcerting number of Southern citizens, that – I strongly sense – convinced Americans that this sort of thing had to stop or be stopped right now.

But that was the Southern phase. After the signing of the Voting Rights Act in July ’65, and mostly unimagined by the electorate, the ‘struggle’ moved North (into what Sugrue calls its second phase). This was the world of the Northern urban black population (I think it would be condescending to call it a ‘community’, nice as that sounds). And Sugrue points out that it was a whole different kettle of fish.

This, in Risen’s approach, is the vision that exploded onto the nation’s screens and into its consciousness in April of 1968 when the city of Washington, D.C. was pretty much attacked from within. Nobody who had reached the age of reason by ’68, recalling manned, sand-bagged machine gun emplacements on the steps of the Capitol and armed patrols of combat vehicles on Pennsylvania Avenue, can forget that; more recent breezy assertions of Unitary Executive powers and ‘sweeping powers of detention’ and ‘Northern Command’ can’t but stir up awareness of what a country looks like when the military starts driving around the streets. What this country looked like when that happened.

It was a shock to the majority of non-black Americans, who had been carrying about in their heads images of the Freedom Marches and sit-ins of the early part of the decade, and that marvelous moment on the Mall in August of 1963, to see what appeared to be a different black population altogether, and in many ways, as Sugrue enumerates, it was.

Risen does some enumerating of his own. “It disrupted the momentum of the civil rights movement and undermined white support for it; it hollowed out cities and accelerated the flight of urban whites to the suburbs; and it enabled the coalescence of a powerful new political force opposed to government initiatives on behalf of society’s less fortunate”.

He’s right. Although it also indicates that ‘racism’ as the all-purpose cause of those phenomena was never sufficient or wholly accurate. Fear of having a city explode like that around you; concern that any further “initiatives” (nicely and so vaguely put) would actually spark more such explosions; perhaps even a lingering suspicion now that the Southerners, so vigorously and soundly trounced by the Federal Government, a Federalized National Guard, and the US Army itself, might have had a very prudent reason for ‘keeping the lid on’ all those years … these are not the thoughts of visceral, hate-besotted racists. They may themselves be incomplete, but there was a great deal of legitimate concern.

And there is the darker fact that the riots in the black urban settings did not start with the MLK assassination riots of April 1968. They had been going on for three years by then. The first of the Sixties’ ‘black riots’ or, if you prefer, ‘inner city riots’ was – stunningly – just a few days after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Bill into law, in July 1965. Following that catastrophe, LBJ was unable to get even a paltry $60 million for housing assistance out of Congress. It marked the end of his ability to achieve anything more for ‘civil rights’ through the standard political processes. It was surely the end of the ‘classic’, first, Southern phase of ‘civil rights’.

That, no doubt, helped fuel the ‘Northern’ black infatuation with ‘revolution’ and ‘Black Power’, with ‘rage’ and the gun and the bomb and the riot, although MLK was starting to see his leadership and his nonviolent, American-ideal-regeneration model of civil-rights be nibbled away by the ‘urban’ and ‘revolutionary’ approaches even at that early date.

It was a terrible synergy: the sense that somehow – after the riots – ‘democratic process’ wasn’t going to be able to accomplish much more for blacks in quick, large, easy steps; the infatuation with ‘revolution’ and revolutionary methods that by definition was hostile to and wholly incompatible with, democratic process; and the concomitant urge away from ‘integration’ (ah, that takes me back) and toward ‘separatism’ – which later went to college and emerged as ‘identity’, and spread like toxic kudzu throughout the American polity.

The Democratic Party, as noted, was desperate for reliable voter constituencies. Whatever its constituencies ‘came up with’ became the ‘policy’, but prettified and rendered almost ‘inevitable’ by the combined dynamics of Political Correctness and advocacy ‘packaging’, assisted by supportive ‘scholarship’ and friendly media looking, increasingly, for reliable ‘consumers’ of media product that makes them ‘feel good about themselves’.

It’s not hard to imagine why Risen preferred to focus on the MLK riots: that choice provided at least an implicit semblance of ‘justification’ for the violence, although not quite for the jaw-dropping orgy of urban black violence that destroyed its own home turf, a sort of comprehensive infrastructure-suicide.

From watching those earlier riots of ‘65-‘67 on TV – and in color by the mid-Sixties – it can hardly be surprising that many Americans wondered just what the frak was wrong that at the moment of such a stunning success, and hardly ‘symbolic’ but rather quite palpable, the response would be so self-destructive and self-defeating. There can be little doubt that Political Correctness had as one of its first tasks the suppression of any discussion of this profound dissonance, this utterly disconcerting fact and whatever connection it might have to ‘civil rights’ and ‘black rights’ and the general capacity for stability among urban blacks, if not – though an inappropriately arrived-at conclusion - American blacks in general.

Probably, the hyper-emphasis on black ‘rage’, generalized, so often backward-looking, and apparently unappeasable, was part of this technique and strategy of the distraction and suppression of public discourse. (And this gambit would become a tool for all of the follow-on Identities, the Second Wave of Feminism not least among them.)

The Democrats, alas, having written off the white vote of the South, couldn’t afford any such public discussion. Their urgent need to maintain electoral viability required them to simply apply more pressure to ‘nurture’ what they had decided would be their replacement constituency. That decision was to have powerfully negative (and hardly unpredictable) consequences for democratic process and the democratic ethos: what came to be known as Political Correctness was applied here, and for the same reasons that it was applied in Russia after Lenin took power: to prevent the ignorant but still uncontrolled masses from wasting time discussing (and disagreeing with) what the vanguard elite of the Party had already determined was to be the national policy.

To their dismay, when applying this beyond the South in that second, Northern phase, the Dems began to alienate white Northern voters as well (the Republicans watching the whole thing, taking copious notes). This resulted in the Party swinging wildly in search of yet more replacement constituencies, and adopting ‘women’ – not in the sense of all American females, but ‘women’ as represented by the cadres of Second Wave Feminism, not a few who aped the Soviet – or at least East German – approach themselves. So that by 1972, when the Democrats gushed and brayed – almost incomprehensibly – that they were “the Party of women”, on top of being clearly perceived as the Party that somehow was still trying to enforce its ‘visions’ and ‘dreams’ in regard to matters racial … well, that just layered a new Political Correctness on top of the older, 1965-8 version.

For while the Southern, first phase was cast – and not simply through the efforts of Dr. King but by its many participants – as a hearkening back to the American ideal, the second, Northern phase was tinged with the elitist assertions of European experience: revolution and overthrow, ‘A-power vs. B-power’, elites and vanguards, those who ‘get it’ and those who are the lumps who ‘just don’t get it’.

The Second Wave Feminists, of course, never had an equivalent to the Southern Civil Rights first phase, the call to the great American ideal; they went straight to ‘the revolution’, much as their now-horrified political enablers tried though with no small success to put a happy-face on it: it was justice, it was rights, it was equality, it was something you just had to ‘get’, it was progress, it was good, it was what it was, it was here so get used to it, it was not to be looked at critically because that would simply be re-victimizing the ‘victims’.

And so, huge and wrenching changes were force-pumped into society, with no thought as to consequences – intended or unintended, easily forseeable or subtly veiled – small or large. Kinda like the Iraq war and all its pomps and all its works. So this baaad methodology ‘migrates’ from one area of national affairs to others.

And in addition now to the matter of race itself, there entered the concerns of those who were made greatly uneasy by the ‘revolutionary’ consequences of this or that ‘initiative’; that even without considering the ‘content’ of this or that individual government ‘initiative’, the simple fact of so many ‘initiatives’, all at once, interacting in positive or negative ways without serious oversight or critical assessment, was enough cause for grave concern. Gerald Ford burbled in 1976 that one of the ‘great’ things about America was that it could entertain many revolutions all at once. Not hardly. It’s like having committees of self-serving doctors assigning what amounts to be dozens of drugs to the same patient, with no thought as to the individual drug’s effects or to the cumulative effects of all of the drugs interacting and acting upon the same patient.

Congress, which might have been presumed to provide some sort of comprehensive overall assessment and supervision, turned itself into Santa Claus to the interests groups, corporate or advocate. Until it became so addicted to PAC money and so fearful of examining the consequences of its pandering binge that it refused to do any serious and responsible work at all.

Lots of ‘symbolism’, photo-ops, and spin though. After all, you can't afford to actually let The People examine your changes, because it could quickly become obvious that those changes aren't really working so well at all. So you have to show that they look like they are working, and hope that after a while folks will get used to them like old furniture - the Israelis call it 'establishing facts on the ground'. It's shrewd, intelligent, and manipulative - thus hell-and-gone from open, honest, democratic process. It's a plague bacillus to the polity.

What a frakking hash. Congress wasn’t ‘duped’ or ‘blind-sided’ by 9-11 and the Bush push for ‘sweeping powers’; by that time Congress was so used to giving in to whatever pressure was brought upon it that pols voted for the Patriot Act without even bothering to read it. Nor, when Bush insisted upon ‘immediate’ passage of the massive Bill, did they demand at least a few days to do so. Let somebody else take the hit for slowing things down. The buck no longer stopped at Congress – and there went the core of the Constitutional vision of how the government would operate. Hasta la vista.

Generations of kids are grown up now, unaware of such complexities, and far too many of them now insufficiently schooled in the vital citizen skills of deliberation and critical thought to really understand.

Let me be clear: I am not speaking here in the accents of Nestor, about ‘times’ that have ‘changed’, pure and simple. Something, some things, went very very wrong back then, and as an indicator that ‘things’ are still not working right in Our polity I offer the two terms of the Bush Administration whereby a sleazy witless unripe not only was considered acceptable Presidential material but was elected (as the term is understood now), and was then elected (ditto) again.

And add the plight of the urban blacks, made so much worse by the Second Wave Feminists’ ‘deconstruction’ of family and fatherhood as part of their strategy for supplanting the ‘male’ with the ‘female’ as a source of societal and cultural identity. The two ‘revolutions’ – the Black Power and the Feminist – began to interact, in ways not only harmful to each other’s purported constituencies, but to American society and polity as well. A situation that has not ‘receded into history’ in the ensuing three or four decades. Not hardly.

We are sinking. As a Republic, We hit a rock on the starboard side in 1948 when the National Security State decided it had to instill enough fear in Us to power the Cold War; but then the Left simultaneously thrust the Ship of State against even more jagged rocks on the port side, and began to undermine democratic process in the service of ‘revolution’ (revolutions-plural).

And nobody could stop this vicious feedback loop because, according to Political Correctness, it didn’t exist. Everything the Democrats were doing was for ‘liberation’ and everything the Republicans were doing was for law, order, and enrichment, so nobody was doing anything wrong. Except the other Party. And the ‘necessary enemies’ raised up to fuel the next ‘initiative’ … ‘men’ and so forth.

Nor can it be realistically imagined that the ensconced elites of the Left are going to let go of the power that has, in great part because of their forty years of effort, been drained from The People and hoarded (and then squandered) in the dark, marbled alcoves of the Beltway.

We need to become The People. Again, I’m not implying that there was some ‘wonderful’ time in American experience when the citizenry functioned perfectly in that task. The ‘destiny’ of Our present generations is to write an entirely new chapter to the history of the American concept of The People. This hugely expanded government, this greatly unbalanced constitutional contraption, requires not less of The People but far more. It requires more Peopling, not less.

And President Obama is going to need that help, if he is ever to avoid the fate of becoming just another one of the Beltway banditti or the first black Jimmy Carter (whose services to the country since he left the Presidency have been exemplary, it has to be noted).

And if We are to avoid the fate of looking like those peoples of Europe of a century or 70 years ago, in those old newsreels, staring blankly into the camera.

Or, worse, cheering madly as the Leader’s motorcade goes by.

JUSTICE IS JUST …

Raymond Geuss of Princeton has a written a smallish book that’s both peppery and meaty, entitled “Philosophy and Real Politics”. Who can argue that it’s not necessary these days?

I think that, especially in light of the last forty years around here, his introductory observations are hugely necessary. He recounts a scene from Plato’s “Republic” (Yes, the dead white one from looong ago; although I don’t know if the Greeks would have thought of themselves as ‘white’; they would have thought of themselves as ‘civilized’, but that’s a category of thought that was tossed into the wastebasket in these parts some decades ago; and I’m not sure that the Greek immigrant of the late 1800s or early 1900s would have been thought of as ‘white’ at Ellis Island; Americans of the day thought of themselves as ‘Americans’, greater than which there could be no other, and Greeks – coming from southeastern Europe – would have been assumed to be part of the wave of not-really-white folks flooding in.)

Socrates observes – nicely – that “justice is the proper virtue of man”; it’s what distinguishes a human being, and a civilized one (and yes, he wouldn’t have been thinking of ‘women’ or ‘slaves’ when he said it, or – for that matter – of ‘the children’ or even ‘the young’). At which point the virile (Socrates was not seen as ‘virile’ by a lot of Greeks back then – he was not a ‘warrior’; that he spent most of his time and energies in the company of students who were all bright young guys did not raise any eyebrows) Thrasymachus breaks in and bawls the Greek equivalent of ‘Baaaloney!’. “I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” Or as Geuss draws the thought out: “When one looks at justice clearly … he finds that it’s nothing but the disguise worn by power.”

Now that in a very useful nutshell is the problem. And it bethumps Us still. What is ‘justice’? Or ‘Justice’?

Answers – and policies based on those answers – have been many. Some of them more fully covered all the necessary ground, connecting all the relevant dots, and some of them less, and many much less.

It’s relevant to Us these days not simply as a good example of how to ‘do’ philosophy – how to pose a question that is comprehensive enough to shed light on all of the points on the circuit. It’s also relevant because a gentleman whose ‘answer’ largely followed Thrasymachus was himself the intellectual progenitor of the French deconstructionists of the immediate post-World War 2 era.

It was Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov – otherwise known as Lenin – whose simple question, a deceptively equation-like bit of ‘scientific’ dogma – set spinning the postmodern world in which We live. “Who whom?” Lenin asked; who is doing what to whom? That’s the first question of politics. Because politics is really just a matter of power; those with it do whatever they want to and with those without it.

And thus, Lenin figured, if you want to do ‘good’ and help those without power, then in order to do that ‘good’, you have to get and keep power yourself – by – in the charmingly ominous Israeli phrasing – whatever means necessary. The ‘good’ must do ‘whatever it takes’ to get and keep power, so that they can wield it on behalf of those without power. And the ‘good’ are good precisely because they want to use that power in a good cause – the relief of the oppressed.

‘The oppressed’, of course, may start to ring bells; America these past forty years has been discovered to be full of ‘oppressed’. And – depending on who is defining and reporting their oppression – then half of all Americans are ‘oppressors’, perhaps more. Of course, all Americans - every last one - are sinners, but this insight was politically obstructive to the creds of any aspiring 'victim' and tended to undermine any pretensions to 'outrage'; and in the course of events, such insights - though woven into the warp and woof of Western civilization - were shunted aside by one means or another.

The French deconstructionists were of their time: the oppression they saw all around them was the colonial control and manipulation of dozens of millions of human beings in the still-lingering imperial colonies of the great European powers. Human beings who had no safety or security in their homes, who often had no ‘home’ but only a hut or a hovel or a cave; human beings whose only adult activity could be trying to find enough to eat for the day ahead of them, whose family experience consisted in trying to bring in enough to feed the children – often by getting the children themselves to work or steal, and whose parenting experience consisted in consoling children going to bed hungry and watching the too-hungry die.

The deconstructionist solution was to wield Lenin’s insight like an axe against the roots of whatever established power and authority was doing the ‘oppressing’. There is no ‘justice’; justice is merely an abstraction used by the powerful to plunder and stifle those without power. Get power, ye oppressed, and be free thereby. It worked remarkably efficiently in undercutting the aura of legitimacy that surrounded and encased imperial colonial authority. And taken in conjunction with the economic exhaustion of the European nations after the war, it hastened their departure from their former colonies, and created in the 1950s dozens of ‘new’ nations.

Back at home, however, European governments – the French foremost – realized that the deconstructionist elixir worked just as lethally – threatening to undercut any government at all. Just as in many newly liberated colonies, the first order of the day for many new leaders was to stamp out any further ‘deconstructionist’ thought, lest they too be undercut and toppled.

Unfortunately, that got many of them into the bad habit of equating ‘deconstructionist’ thought with dissenting thought – which, they soon found, they also didn’t like. And which – oy – they became all too adept as squashing as thoughtlessly as they did the ‘deconstructionist’ ideas.

None of which was of too much concern to the great financiers of the ‘civilized’ world, who by the nature of their work and the experience of their time thoughtlessly assumed that countries would run much more reliably and efficiently if they were run like corporations, and the citizens an obedient and docile workforce. It’s not necessary to think too much when you’re very rich and very powerful. And those who cast their lot by serving them find that it isn’t necessary for them to think too much either. In fact, very much the opposite.

Unlike Lenin, the French deconstructionists were ‘theorists’ and academics, ‘intellectuals’ in some form, and were not – unlike Comrade Lenin – rabidly interested in actually taking power themselves. Which was nice. And to that large fraction of human beings who only understand danger in the immediate form of an actual loaded gun or ticking bomb in their immediate vicinity, their ‘ideas’ were just butterflies flapping in the breeze; the Commies, after all, had the Bomb – and that’s what the real problem was.

But the deconstructionists’ hugely potent elixir was capable of causing enough ‘change’ on its own, and in the hands of an organized vanguard elite it could bring down monarchies and massacre millions –even of those it was supposedly deployed to liberate. It was – in a conceptual way – a tool capable of massive destruction; nor – is this familiar? – had any thought been given by its intellectual creators to the necessary follow-on phase of ‘reconstruction’.

The French showed many of the leading deconstructionists the door. They came here.

God knoweth full well that there was enough oppression in the South. But Martin Luther King, with his roots deep in the spiritual power of the Bible and the highest ideals of the American Vision, did not seek to ‘divide’, but to unite, and not ‘in opposition’ to other Americans but in a common re-affirmation of the highest ideals of American tradition. He opposed Southern ‘ways’, but did not preach against Southerners. He was a remarkable prophet. Hoover hated him, along with many in power in the South.

In King’s struggle, there would be no room for ‘deconstructionism’. He had a cause and that cause had a long and very real presence in American history from almost the beginning of the American settlements. A Civil War had been fought, Amendments to the Constitution passed, a President assassinated, great promises broken for political convenience, and much blood shed in dark and bloody times. He needed no ‘boost’ from deconstructionist agitation. And who knows what the crafty spider Hoover would have done, had he even a scintilla of linkage between King, black civil rights, and the arch-Communist Lenin, even Lenin poof-poofed by French intellectuals?

But King was a uniter. That was his huge and abiding strength.

Not so with others who in those ‘revolution’ and ‘liberation’ addled times sought to get a larger slice of the pie. The ‘deconstructionist’ vision – limited though it was – offered a conceptual underpinning; not so much as to ground and justify new ‘revolutions’ here – ones whose ‘claims’ were not at all as grounded in the actual historical struggles that this nation went through in its past, but to generate and sustain a ground wave that would simply sweep the vanguards and their ‘claims’ into political power. They saw themselves as the Leninist ‘whom’ and there were many in power doing unto them, and they were going to change that.

It’s a shame in a way. Because there were indeed many in power who were in the process of ‘doing to’ the American people. The National Security State, increasingly enmeshed with the mega-corporate networks of the military-industrial complex, was pouring the nation’s wealth into weaponry. Seymour Melman had pointed out that a dollar spent on a bomb was not simply one dollar not spent on projects to increase or preserve the quality of life of the nation’s citizens; rather, it was many dollars lost in unrealized opportunities and un-capitalized businesses and projects and programs that themselves would have generated many dollars.

There was a Moment back there forty years ago when the 1930s’ spirit of the People and their Government versus the Malefactors of Great Wealth could have made a much-needed comeback. The National Security State and the military-industrial corporations were – without too much thought – following their own bovine illuminations, turning the citizenry toward a life of obedient indenture even as – with almost equally bovine stolidity but a thoroughly human cockiness – the government elites managed the military power of the nation into failure after failure, and the economy into increasingly queasy gyrations.

In a way, the Malefactors could not have asked for anything better. The ‘revolutions’ that would only be named ‘culture wars’ decades later distracted Us from what was going on in the greatest of the ‘doings’: Our livelihoods, the treasure piled up by Our labor to be passed on to Our children, and that most American of gifts – a government responsive to the People and interested only in serving their common interest – all slimed away, but tastefully, in the greasy, goldy-yellow buttery glow of the ‘80s and the ‘90s, abetted by Democrats and Republicans together; ‘bipartisan’.

We have indeed become Lenin’s Whoms. Nor will Our children nor their children escape now.
Geuss recommends that the West actually heed – and he admits this may sound a bit odd at first – Lenin’s advice: find out who is doing to whom.

But he does so in the context of his concerns that philosophers – he specifically goes after Robert Nozick and John Rawls – have failed to ‘stay real’ – in my words – and thus have failed Us. Rawls, especially, seeking to imagine an imaginary “original position” from which one might imagine philosophy under a “veil of ignorance” by which they can forget all preconceptions and imagine (or ‘hope’ or ‘dream’) matters afresh.

Geuss urges that We get back to the realities: those preconceptions are entwined with needs and feelings, interests and prejudices, grievances and benevolences – and that’s what ‘people’ are, what they are made of. And that’s where politics has to begin. Within the framework of citizens deliberating together, and then making their wishes known to the elected public servants who must then also deliberate (and not simply shop their vote to the highest bidder) … this is the great gift of the American Constitutional vision to Us and to the world.

The puck must be played off the ice; the ball must be played off the ground.

Deploying in this commonwealth the Leninist methods of grabbing-power-first-by-whatever-means- necessary must take its place as one of the many great failed ‘plans’ of the postwar years. There was a People here in 1968; there was a seasoned and decently matured People schooled in democracy and in ‘politics’; America of 1968 was not Russia of 1918.There was no need, there was no legitimate place, for the stratagems of a ‘vanguard’ elite of a ‘revolution’ – or several ‘revolutions’ – that would bypass the People and debauch their representatives with a combination of threats and visions of electoral love.

What Lenin devised to meet the necessities of his time had no real place in a mature and working democracy half a century later and half a world away. Nor does the challenge of his time exonerate him for what he devised and deployed.

But his initial instinct – that what matters in the life of societies is who with power does what to whom is without power – is very ‘real’.

And now, watching what had been going on and distracting the attention of The People, the government – now indentured to great wealth – began to bypass The People. And building on the fearfulness that has been insinuated into Our common spirit over the course of decades, it began to stampede The People as it itself has been stampeded by the onslaught of Leninist methodology that has not restored balance to American politics but rather has completely unhinged American politics.

A Leninist realism anchoring a Constitutional politics. No ‘hopes’, no ‘dreams’, no ‘boogeymen’ – whether hiding in the bushes or running a country halfway around the world – no ‘nightmares’, no ‘heavenmares’ of angelic hosts with swords whacking their way across the planet and hovering for recreation over aircraft carriers. No hypothetical imaginary ‘perfect citizens’.

Just Us.

Just Us and a careful, sustained, sober, acute, careful assessment of what faces Us and what We think should be done about it. And getting to that is going to be a job of political work. But that’s what the Constitution was designed for. And it’s clear that the country’s affairs are too important to be left to the experts, especially in their present debauched condition.

But it was never meant to be left to them.

That’s the genuine American realism.

And it’s the last best hope to build “a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations”.

"HOW THE REPUBLICANS WIN"

ONCE IT WAS

Robert Parry has a piece on Truthout (originally on Consortium News) entitled “How the Republicans Win”.

It struck me very hard because of a by-the-by historical vignette. In order to ensure that he would not be ‘cheated’ out of the Presidency in ’68 as he thought he had been in ’60, in the autumn of ’68 Nixon actually sent secret messages to the South Vietnamese delegates to the Paris Peace Talks, wheedling and threatening so that they would not come to an accord with the North Vietnamese before the elections in November. And they didn’t, pulling out precipitously and thus depriving LBJ and the Democrats of a desperately-needed platinum opportunity to bring the war to some sort of respectable conclusion in time for the elections.

But what hit me was LBJ’s and the Democrats’ response to Nixon’s treachery (which itself rises, possibly, to the treasonous): quoting from Anthony Summers’s book ‘The Arrogance of Power’, Parry reports that “Both Johnson and Humphrey believed the information – if released to the public – could assure Nixon’s defeat”. Quite possibly so.

He goes on: “In the end though, Johnson’s advisers decided that it was too late and too potentially damaging to U.S. interests to uncover what had been going on” and that “If Nixon should emerge as the victor [of the ’68 election] what would [this secret messaging] do to his viability as an incoming president?”

To all of the citizenry who have joined Us somewhat after ’68, this may come as a shock – and understandably so. That it was once part of the major priorities of a senior elected official in these United States to give serious thought as to the national common weal and to the integrity of the office that he holds, regardless of who wins in an upcoming election. Say what you will of LBJ, and I am not seeking to canonize him here, but they don’t do things like that anymore; they don’t make’em like that anymore.

Well – no. We do still make’em like that – but those folks don’t get very far up the ladder in the Beltway as it operates nowadays.

And to top it all off, “Johnson and Humphrey went into retirement – and to their graves – keeping silent about Nixon’s treachery”. Nah – things have reely reely changed around here.

And not for the better.

I’ve been toying with this in previous Posts but let me say it here: We have lost ground in the last 40 years, in a most fundamental and essential and vital way; in fact, along an entire spectrum of characteristics and capacities indispensable to the sustaining of a democratic politics and of a democratic polity and so of the Republic.

Cognitively, We no longer process information in a reasonable and adult fashion. Simplistic thinking, slogans and clichés, substitute for patience and insight and a true engagement with the substance of the challenges that face Us.

Emotionally, We no longer possess Ourselves in dignity and patience, conserving Our energies until We are more or less arrived at a conclusion of substantive analysis and deliberation. A quick ‘decision’ is considered a day’s work.

Societally, We no longer respect each other and trust each other. I’m not just talking here about the overriding acrimonies that have blotted out any effective sense of a common identity as ‘American’; I’m also talking about the dynamic downward spiral into fear and mistrust that must flow naturally from an increasingly wide descent into cognitive and emotional regression and immaturity.

Morally, there is no longer a common basis for mutual trust and respect. Postmodern and deconstructionist thought, in the service of vigorously destructive and destabilizing agendas has – willy or nilly – blotted out any over-arching or underlying mutuality of dignity that would call for a primary and undeniable respect for each other and for Ourselves.

And spiritually – well , there is not even a common official sense that there is any Beyond, any Meta (the Greek word) dimension, that exists ‘for real’. It may exist as a personal choice, but such a choice is considered purely idiosyncratic – if not indicative of psychopathy – and cannot be introduced into or allowed to have any effect upon public deliberation of large issues. Nor are individuals thereby Grounded in some larger, enfolding, sustaining reality that would balance them in this chancy voyage through Time.

And given that set of absolutely fundamental regressions, We can see secondary regressions in areas vital to Our common weal.

Politically, We have lost the ability to reason together and come to an arrangements respectful of human dignity and acceptable to all parties concerned. Indeed, few politicians now sitting have any experience of such a way of fulfilling their duties, so long ago were these priorities and guideposts deconstructed.

Legally, We have lost the ability to pass reasonable laws proportionate to the issues they are designed to address and simultaneously respectful of both human dignity and the most fundamental operating requirements of the Constitution and the Republic with which We have all, as The People, been entrusted for the duration of our respective ‘tours’ on this earth.

Internationally, We have wound up embracing and thus continuing some of the worst practices of Our former Cold War foe and rival, the USSR. In fact, rather than being a ‘foe’, it almost could be imagined that the USSR was a rival doppelganger, and that such a conception is evidenced by the fact that as soon as it disappeared, We instantly began to expand (and regress) to take its place, dreaming its dark dreams and stealing pages and entire chapters from its dark playbook.

The Hobbesian state of life – danger leading to vulnerability leading to insecurity leading to fear leading to self-destroying paranoia – has been replicated in the Victimist vision of life – danger leading to vulnerability leading to insecurity leading to fear leading to self-destroying paranoia. In an effort to meet this and that outraging emergency of each Identity, We have wound up making the same mistake by which the New York City Fire Department sank the powerful, modern, and majestic liner ‘Normandie’: in the frenzied efforts to put out the fire aboard her, they filled her with water (precisely not the way ships conceptually exist) and cut holes here there and everywhere in her to get at the flames and vent the smoke. And they sank her one day at a pier in Manhattan.

But they meant well. And they had been warned. But – hey – it was an emergency.

That ship never sailed again.

DESTROYING MONSTERS

Ira Chernus is a Professor of Religious Studies at U/Colorado in Boulder.

He’s got a book out entitled “Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin”.

Chernus’s schematic vision is that the neocons are steeped in a change-averse, independence-averse, weak minded ‘conservative moralism’ characteristic of the pre-‘counterculture’ days of the Sixties, and that the ideology that they have developed to console themselves and insulate themselves from the pain and challenge of newness, freshness, change, and creative personal and societal thinking and mores … that ideology (and one would almost have to say ‘pathology’, in Chernus’s schematic) requires neocons to live in a world where Good and Evil exist, where an individual and a society must constantly struggle in that battle, and where self-definition and identity as well as an overarching purpose in life are achieved by having “monsters to destroy” against whom they can constantly wage war and thus simultaneously prove themselves, reaffirm their weak identity, and repress their abiding fear of ‘change’. And, Chernus feels, the present American situation is the result of the neocons’ – since they sorta lost the culture wars here – having to go abroad in search of fresh ‘monsters’ against whom to struggle and get their pathological and addictive ‘fix’; hence their demonization and invasion of this and that people in this and that country.

Neat. Many birds with the one theoretical stone: decrying the objective moralism against which the ‘counterculture’ and ‘radicalism’ (he often uses the terms interchangeably) of the Sixties struggled and still struggle; showing how all of those who believe in objective Morality are essentially weak and pathological unripes, and all their ‘ideas’ and ‘beliefs’ are fit only for psychotherapeutic intervention; explaining how the current wars in the East are all the Republicans’ fault through that Party’s embrace of the neocons (thereby absolving from war-guilt the Democratic Party, original embracer, enabler, and daddy-warbucks for the counterculture’s and the radicals’ Long March and the toxic brew of ideology that underlies the whole radical project).

And working in some of the Sixties’ trademark themes and thought-patterns: that ‘morality’ is whatever an individual chooses to believe, and does not exist outside the individual and cannot be forced upon an individual from the outside; that therefore no individual can be ‘judged’ or forced from the outside; that so much of what seems ‘real’ is actually just a matter of what you choose to believe and assume, so that if the neocons assume ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ and obsess over objective ‘morality’ then if only they would change their attitude then the world would be a better place; that there is no justification for presuming that human beings are prone to great evil, and so therefore any sustained concerns for ‘morality’ and ‘defense’ are merely symptoms of deep but self-serving pathology; and that any amount of disagreement with any of the foregoing constitutes the pathologically significant symptom of ‘denial’ and fuels what is merely ‘backlash’.

I think that there is great fruit to be gleaned from considering Chernus’s book.

First, to get a clear picture of (what Chernus sees as) the neocon development.

But to do that, a couple of definitions and clarifications:

A) I distinguish between i) the ‘countercultural’ movement of the Sixties and ii) the ‘radical’ movement. The counterculture were the Flower Children, making love – not war, usually high on pot, but beyond having ‘free love’ in or out of long-unwashed dungarees in shabby VW buses, they really did feel (it never got to the ‘thinking’ stage) that the world could work by everybody just groovin’, being nice to each other, and getting in touch with their ‘feelings’, and that – smaller being better - communes were the best form of social organization and ‘family’, preferably away from cities and structure and conformity and industry; it was a youthy, idealistic, golden sorta thing, strongly influenced by Romanticism. But hell and gone from that, the ‘radicals’ here were the youthful heirs of late 19th and early 20th century labor agitation (not a bad thing in itself, certainly), socialist and anarchist streams of thought and of the methods of revolutionary change that by the late 1960s flowed in a strong stream comprised of old Anarchism, Leninist and Maoist revolutionary praxis, and also a strain of shrewd propagandistic self-presentation and the manipulation of public opinion that derived in great part from the propaganda praxis of the Third Reich (which itself – wheeeee! – had gotten some great pointers from the early-20th century American advertising ‘genius’, Edward Bernays). Given all of this, Chernus’s failure to distinguish between ‘the counterculture’ and ‘the radicals’, is conceptually weak and improper; his subsequent lumping the two much-different phenomena together, and then declaring them ‘good’ as opposed to the ‘evil’ of the ‘conservative moralism’ of the ‘neocons’, is duplicitous.

B) When seeking to define or understand ‘liberalism’ I would divide the Sixties into two distinct halves: up to 1965 we have a ‘traditional’, and a genuine American liberalism, seeking through a democratic politics and a sustained civic engagement to fulfill Justice and Liberty for a segment of the population – the ‘Negro’ – generally acknowledged (except by Southerners) to be greatly wronged by the national social arrangements that had been in place for centuries; this ‘struggle’ not only united the bonds between black and white Americans (again, those intractable Southerners much excepted) but strengthened the essential public faith in American goals and the American vision as enunciated by Martin Luther King (with his indispensable grounding in scripture and religious faith) as well as such figures as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln. After 1966 and certainly as a result of 1968, we have a ‘liberalism’ that is really a radical politics of agitprop and ruthless pressure in the service of alleviating problems about which there existed no such seasoned national consensus and which prompted vast amounts of public skepticism and hesitation and opposition – to such wide and sudden change, if not to the actual proposed goals themselves; and in response to which the radicals declared everything not fully supportive of their agendas to be benighted backlash, and proceeded to deploy every stratagem to manipulate, stampede or sidestep altogether public deliberation and discourse, choosing instead to ‘force’ government and courts to accept and then impose their agendas. And by this point, ‘liberalism’ has also undermined independent, robust reporting and coverage by ‘the press’ or the ‘media’, seducing with telegenic melodrama a mainstream ‘press’ already frightened by the declining reading capacities and habits of the American public – whence ‘political correctness’, which could never have existed without the press and the media. Consequently, as he once again performs his trademark lumping-together, Chernus confuses a genuine and traditionally American and ‘classic’ liberalism of pre-1965 with the radical and profoundly undemocratic (even anti-democratic) ‘liberalism’ of 1968 and in doing that he fails to inform and he actually veers toward purposeful manipulation.

Those ‘definitions’ being clarified, getting on with the first observation, I’d say that the ‘neocons’ went through several distinct periods. The first period, during the Sixties, was a period of often acute insight into the conceptual weaknesses and societal consequences of the counterculture and the radicals’ assorted agendas.

Chernus’s extensive quoting from Irving Kristol’s work written during this period reveals Kristol's as a literate and informed concern for the un-grounding and disconnection from the humanizing and maturing structures of objective ‘right and wrong’ and of ‘good and evil’; and from the constructive limitations that can shape a growing ‘self’, a developing individual, into a competent, responsible citizen and parent whose work contributes to the general welfare, to the common weal as well as to familial and personal enhancement.

Kristol in this phase mounts a reasonable critique of the eminently critique-able countercultural nostrums and half-truths and incomplete visions which threatened to literally fragment not American society (that would come in the Age of the Identities starting in the ‘70s) but a national societal consensus about the legitimacy and authority of moral standards, virtues, sin, and the moral and existential projects in general. This is the first phase of the ‘neocon’ presence on the American scene, and it is far from evil in its intent or its content.

Even Kristol’s reinforcement of the values of the traditional ‘religious’ and Judeo-Christian worldview, with their schematics and dynamics of envisioning oneself and one’s world as being imperfect, to some degree capable of a potential evil is well within bounds. And the resulting necessity of being watchful and cautious as to one’s own passions and thoughts as well as those of one’s neighbors and of strangers is equally valid, within the vision of that world-view.

Overall, in this first phase of neoconservatism, an intelligent and vigorous defense (more than was mounted by the churches at the time, certainly) of a matrix of beliefs that shaped and grounded and even fueled American society, was not only within bounds but – in light of Our current situation – as prescient as Solzhenitsyn’s.

In neoconservatism’s second phase, during the later ‘70s and into the ‘80s, a darker note is sounded. Reflecting the growing and intensifying public unease over the societal and ethical and moral consequences of the Democrats’ Identities and their Advocates, who preemptively sought to disable social and political opposition by claiming that there was no ‘objective’ or ‘greater’ or ‘higher’ reality that could stand in judgment upon their numerous and counter-intuitive demands and agendas, a raw political energy of great strength was now loose in the country, generated in response/reaction to the concentrated and bumptious political force honed and deployed by the Advocacies and their Democratic godparents; the Advocacies called it ‘backlash’ in order to try to cage it within a narrative advantageous to themselves, but this political energy was not so much reactionary as it was skeptical, concerned, and – ominously – tremendously anxious and disappointed: Did the Democrats really know what they were doing? Did all these new ‘ideas’ really work? Could the fundamental structures and grounds of American society and culture sustain so much ‘change’ all at once?

Neoconservatism began to trim its sails to take advantage of this tide, and one starts to sense the toxic and noxious infusions from sources such as Falwell and assorted fundamentalists, with whom the neoconservatives were now prepared to join in a political alliance as well as a conceptual affinity. From sagacious, prudent and acute comment on the moral, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual state of affairs in the country, the neocons were going to ‘take to the field’, doing what needed to be done to reach out, form alliances, and wage a public and political counter-struggle against the radical Advocacies.

Here we start to see the neocons making some far less universally acceptable assertions, and engaging in tactics that sacrifice wise sensitivity to the complexity and nuance of the human predicament in favor of unthinking ‘support’ of simplistic, least-common-denominator slogans, caricatures and by-words.

And in neoconservatism’s third phase we see a movement that now seeks to reach beyond American domestic affairs, to form alliances with the national-security Rightists and Nationalists, the imperially-minded defense contractors and industry, the equally though for a different reason ‘energy resources’ imperialists, the socially conservative and patriotic pro-military folk, and with the abiding interest of the Israeli state and its American supporters in pumping up the American protector into an aggressive, indeed preventive warrior, ready to intervene anywhere (but most especially in the Middle East) in the name of freedom and liberty (or at least under cover of same). And this is a monstrously dark – even reprehensible and corrupt - incarnation of neoconservatism indeed.

But my point is that there are different phases of neoconservatism. And that – even more to the point – that first phase was characterized by perceptive and acute and substantive critique of vast and almost wild forces loose in American society in the late 1960s, post-1968.

And it has to be remembered that a huge operative factor, not fully grasped at the time, was the Democratic Party, which in the later-60s threw its still-considerable weight and influence behind the Identities.

And therefore – willy nilly – behind the profoundly and potentially corrosive, though on its surfaces and in its intent inchoately ‘positive’, ‘deconstructionist’ theory that was purposely and deliberately devised (in France a decade and more before) precisely to undermine established structures of thought and practice in order to create conceptual confusion and thus ‘space’ for different (‘new’, ‘fresh’, creative’) combinations of social and political power among emerging post-colonial ‘minorities’ among the postwar post-empires of Europe.

That ‘deconstuctionism’ had quickly been tossed out of France as intellectuals and politicians realized that it was a ‘universal solvent’: a substance capable of eating its way through any material, so that no container could hold it, and any container that did try to hold it would be eaten away. Thus, that any society and government that embraced deconstructionism and thus tried to wield it and deploy it, would find itself societally and politically corroded, to the point of lethal weakness and even of collapse.

This was the vampire the Dems invited into Our national house, by not checking the intellectual baggage of their newly-adopted Identities. Its very essence and purpose is to confuse, to weaken, to delegitimize any established order or structure, with which it comes into contact. That’s why it was devised, by men who wanted to help the oppressed by giving them a conceptual tool to weaken the legitimacy of the ‘structures’ theoretically oppressing them.

The huge danger lay in consequences a couple-three steps down the road (and does this sound familiar, in the light of the Iraq War?): the deconstructionism that destroyed an established matrix of power so that some ‘oppressed’ group could make its way into power, would then start to undermine the legitimacy of whatever that ‘oppressed’ group tried to establish in its own favor. And therefore, either the newly-former ‘oppressed’ group would have to permit itself to be delegitimized in its own turn or else it would have to – in an act of brute political force and repression – simply declare an end to the process of ‘change’ and declare itself ‘the establishment’, the incontestable and unopposable ‘power’.

Thus, as the French sorta sensed (and the Dems didn’t), ‘deconstructionist theory’ led sooner rather than later to an anti-democratic politics, to a repressive authoritarianism and elitism. That the new authoritarian and elitist establishment is ‘saved’ by being composed of the formerly ‘oppressed’ … this point is not only irrelevant but from the point of view of democracy treacherously stupid. And – We shall soon find out – perhaps fatally so.

So Chernus’s gambit here is to bundle the ‘flower children’ of the mid-60s counterculture together with the radical and deconstructionist Identities of the late-‘60s and early-‘70s, and call the whole thing ‘liberalism’, and then oppose to that a monolithic lump of ‘neoconservatism’ that a) denies the ‘freedom’ of the individual and on the basis of deep psychopathology and moral deformity opposes positive social change and b) leads in a straight line from repressing innocent young free love and sex to perpetrating the invasive assaults of the Iraq War.

It’s too too neat. And, it seems, completely erases the Democratic Party as the source of any of the problems currently bethumping Us. Could any sober observer agree to so sweeping and convenient an analysis?

Chernus also understates the objectives of ‘the counterculture’, and leaves the reader to wonder whether he is actually so simple-minded as to believe what he is writing. “All the Sixties wanted to do was trade in traditional values for new ones – peace, love, sensuality, diversity, ecological harmony”. Once again, he’s not distinguishing between the ‘flower children’ and the ‘radicals’, conveniently (so I have to think shrewdly, too) mushing them together as “the Sixties”. The cutesy, barefoot wish-hopes of the Flower kids – which did not even rise to the status of ‘ideals’ (that would have required a serious, and therefore a limiting, commitment) – are blended with the radical, deadly earnest (however incoherent or shortsighted) revolutionary agenda of those radicals who formed the nub of the ‘70s Revolutions of the Identities and their accompanying Advocacies.

Then he minimizes the Sixties, making them cuddly and innocent: “All (they) wanted to do …” But then the mean, old neocons entered stage right and began beating on the Sixties kids to make them put their clothes on and not trust one another as if they were all just kewpie dolls on a carnival rack and to stay sober and – gack – take a shower a couple-three times a week.

Now I didn’t support the war, I didn’t appreciate being lied to every time a Pentagoon gave a briefing on the evening news, and I don’t much like conformity; and I have never ever liked to drink anybody’s Kool-Aid. But I sensed even back then that if you’re going to sail outside the normal shipping lanes, then you are not therefore free of the responsibility of being a competent navigator and sailor, but instead you have to accept responsibility for being an even better one.

Because life – like the battlefield, but also like apples hanging on trees in country gardens – is to some extent shaped by forces that both cannot be changed and that cannot prudently be imagined to not-exist. Tell yourself any ‘narrative’ you want: but if you stand under a tree then you’re going to get hit with a falling apple because apples fall because Gravity exists. The wise sailor doesn’t presume to make or choose a ‘different’ ‘narrative’ of what reality exists out there on the open ocean; rather, he/she masters him/herself and concentrates on learning what those forces are. And doing so not for the purpose of surrendering one’s humanity, liberty, freedom, uniqueness and individuality, but rather for the purposes of most efficaciously shaping and wielding one’s humanity in the service of some goal that will serve, in a large or small way, humanity. You get out there on Life’s ocean and you want to be able to understand those forces so as to use them to your advantage as best you might. And thus get to your voyage’s destination.

Which brings us to Chernus’s “traditional values”: given the tremendous presence of Judeo-Christian and classical ‘values’ in Western civilization, and thus in the America of 1968, the only way to be ‘fresh’ and ‘creative’ was to call all those values ‘old-fashioned’ (Chernus does) and come up with whatever ‘values’ you can find that are not-traditional.

So: ‘sensuality’(Chernus proposes it) … as a value? Yeah, maybe, but only after you’ve built the firm foundation of a self and a life using some rather more essential building-blocks. Don’t pick out the paint-scheme for the first-class saloon until you’ve got the hull really really figured out. ‘Sensuality’ is nice (and they do say now that masturbation can help prevent prostate cancer in males) but mostly just ‘feeling’ (in any sense of the word) does not a mature adult make.

And ‘love’ is now so confused a word that we have to distinguish between “a groovy kind of” it and the fierce burning faithful love of the Old Testament God and the unblinking and courageous respect-love of the New Testament and the almost superhuman love that stems – as the theory has it – from a love of Christ Who Himself loves all humans and then even the all-weather loving-kindness sustained throughout.

“How should we acquire our moral values,” – he asks – “through independent inquiry or by accepting some external authority?” Ah, the plaintive voice of the Sixties in the accents of grammatical precision and a certain wise authority. But the question indicates a throw-back, a regression back beyond the hard-won state-of-the-question that had already been achieved in Western culture long before the Sixties pop-eyed ‘searchers’ learned how to toddle. A human being can exercise independent inquiry in order to personally arrive at the deeply perceived and deeply felt realization that there is a Beyond, perhaps even a personal, ethical God, and with the conclusiveness of that sense of personally achieved ‘independent inquiry’ thus Ground him/herself in a Beyond that would become as a rock, thereby building the human self – and the community of human selfs – not on ever-shifting, ever-changeable ‘sand’ but on solid, sustaining ‘rock’ – as a certain image famously puts it.

To regress the question back to the either-or that was primitive even in the Sixties, to embrace a level of posing a question that was childish and immature even then … that was one of the great sleights of hand of the Sixties and its Advocates. And a double-sleight: they not only made it seem ‘fresh’ and ‘creative’; they made it seem like it was accurate. And a triple-sleight: they made it seem like a wondrously workable basis on which to ‘change’ and ‘govern’ an entire society and culture. Yah. That sure worked. Have We noticed how frakked up things have gotten since the Sixties? Since the ‘kids’ of the Sixties made their mark on national policy and government?

And can there be any doubt that this cognitively primitive ‘either-or’ is precisely the same infection that regressed the neocons and Republicans to bloody-minded chimpery after 9-11: either they’re with us or they’re against us. Oy.

Nor is it enough to say that it’s ‘creative’ for any individual to pick out whatever ‘values’ s/he thinks would be good for him/her. The sea isn’t quite that flexible.

Of course, maybe we aren’t ships, and there is no need to master any skills because life is not a sea and we aren’t captains of anything and maybe there isn’t or we don’t choose for there to be in our lives any destination and so the days and hours of our lives are not part of any ‘voyage’, let alone a ‘mission’, nor do we necessarily need to feel responsible for any cargo or for any smaller ships in company or even for how we handle our own ship.

Yeah. And thus you see the corrosiveness of deconstruction when it’s taken to the very heart of human be-ing. Even when it’s taken there for a ‘good’ purpose, for a ‘liberal’ purpose, for a ‘creative’ purpose, for a ‘liberating’ purpose. How do you shape a Self if there’s nothing ‘out there’? How do you shape a community of un-Shaped selfs? Or of selfs shaped according to no commonality beyond – say – eating and having sex?

How do you Shape a ‘self’? How can you Shape a ‘self’ if there is no acknowledged ‘shape’? If there is no acknowledgement that there are certain parameters and characteristics to which the ‘self’ has to be conformed – like a ship to the sea – in order to work at all?

How do a gaggle of un-Shaped selfs or largely under-Shaped selfs form and sustain a common weal?

For that matter, how does any group of humans so conceived and so dedicated maintain and sustain a society and a culture if any ‘commonality’ is instantly and loudly deconstructed as ‘oppressive’?

Chernus repeats the Sixties mantra that there are many rich, fresh new values ‘around’ us, waiting to be chosen or found or whatever. This is Flatness, no matter how groovy. How can mere mortals sustain their lives without some connection to an Above, a Beyond, (or in my use of the Greek term here) a Meta? How can any adult continually and faithfully haul oneself out of bed in the morning if there is no Ultimate Sustainment? And when the litheness and un-responsible day-glo days of teen-hood are gone, and when children and society and the common weal depend on one, how be ‘faithful’ if one be not Sustained?

How handle the pressures generated by Incompleteness and Imperfection and even Sin and Sinfulness if one be not Sustained? By simply living one’s life in permanent and utter ignorance and denial of what is happening to Us? By simply living in permanent and utter ‘outrage’ at whatever hyped ‘crisis’ is tossed to Us? By getting in touch with the Inner Chimp, the Inner Berserker? (That indeed is the awefull challenge facing so many of Our troops now, sent by Our inadvertence or ignorance into the maw of Fourth Generation War, saved from the inappropriate caresses of Dionysus only to be delivered proudly to the bloody, claw-like, death-grasping gauntlets of Ares Ferox et Atrox).

And “peace” wasn’t a ‘value’ in ‘traditional’ Western history? And “love”? Forget the Flower Children: does Chernus actually think this? Does he seriously think that ‘the Sixties’ were right to imagine that they were creating something totally new under the sun?

The Revolutions and the entire acid-action of ‘deconstruction’ were precisely in need of ‘change’ – lots of it, all deconstruction all the time, because the objective was to ‘deconstruct’ just about any structure of ‘power’ and ‘authority’; in effect, decapitating the target culture and society in order to take it over with one’s own head-full of visions and rules, laws and authority.

Nor did it occur to too many of the radicals that their ideas weren’t so much ‘fresh’ and ‘new’ as they were previously-rejected, by societies and cultures who saw how uncontrollable this deconstructive reaction, once initiated, could and would become. But it occurred to some; they overruled prudence. Prudence, after all, doesn’t make for successful revolutions. Ask Lenin, ask Mao. Don’t – it’s ‘unhelpful’ and ‘negative’ – ask their victims.

And ‘boundaries’ and ‘limits’ – well, they aren’t friends of any revolution, and they aren’t friends of kids – from the kids’ point of view. And the very word ‘shape’ pretty much implies limits. So it was necessary to have a limitless society; one with no boundaries (except for certain newly-hatched classes who can fully be abused); that Our society has started to lose Shape, to tend toward Shapelessness, psychologically, ethically, morally, spiritually … well, who knew? The very observation – harrumph – is ‘negative’ and probably ‘oppressive’ and definitely ‘offensive’ to … somebody. Thus We stagger on.

But of course, the Sixties (the later years, anyway) coincided with a moment in History when the Democratic Party was smarting from its failures in Vietnam, terrified that the wondrously uplifted “negroes’ of 1965 were not going to remember the Party that risked so much to pass the Civil rights and Voting Acts, and desperate to raise up new voting blocs to replace the Southern whites (male and female) who – as Southerners seem inclined from time to time to do – renounced their old allegiance and set up shop on t’other side of the river.

And as the deconstructing Identities began to multiply in the ‘70s, and the Dems found themselves trapped by the pressures of groups they themselves had raised up, and more and more sober-minded folk began to doubt the Dems’ ability to govern in the interests of the common weal, or even to stand up for any traditions or any national centrifugal forces at all, and as each Identity identified its own “monster to destroy” and the Dems set out after those thus-identified with the full force and power of the government … the Democratic Party in its deepest counsels came to figure that the only course left was to keep trying to go forward with its old plan. Sorta like Vietnam, actually.

It hadn’t worked: the new Identities didn’t simply open their newly-hatched eyes and gently select a spot on the grounds wherein to set up their tents and hearths and make sure to vote for their creators; they each had more and more demands; and when they didn’t get what they wanted then they threatened their Democratic creators with the loss of votes, even as those creators began finally to tally up the number of possible votes lost by their embracing this or that Identity in the first place. Doing the math simply agitated the addled Democrats even more.
Finally they gave up everything – honor, integrity, responsibility, the common weal – and simply tried to keep getting themselves elected, holding on – they told themselves – until that day when through the workings of time and death there would be no more to recall how it used to be, and fresh generations would have no memory nor education to realize how it used to be, and new arrivals would have no conception of whatever it was that used to be, and they could all start from scratch.

Interesting, if unimpressive, plan.

But now the Republicans, equally if differently debauched, have created such a disastrous mess that the Dems cannot but scent the possibility of a massive victory by default. And a massive victory – to a professional pol – is a great victory, nor is there any shame than being the default-party nor in being elected ‘on the rebound’, as it were.

But it’s worse even than that. Whatever the country may be in 2012, there may not be enough to keep things going until death and time and new arrivals so dilute ‘old’ visions as to make them mere phantasms. The Dems may wind up presiding, but over a nation so diminished that there will be precious little to offer as rewards to faithful voting blocs.

We are in dire straits indeed. A house divided by the Democrats and their radical and very demanding creations, a house put down as collateral by war-drunk Republicans in what looks to be a losing hand – and a doubling-down on a series of losing hands.

And far too many citizens with nothing to fall back on but the breezy wishful daydreams of the teens of a now vanished age – that Sixties when they not only had their youth in all its shallow but effervescent and perky confidence, but a country still cohesive and strong and able to provide a future for them – try to keep afloat, day by day.

This is not the spirit that built the West. This is not the spirit that sustains the West.

We have been seduced as a People, thanks to elites who knew less than they ever let on, into trading in a sturdy ocean-worthy vessel for a cutesy water-park duckie-float.

Yet still We face the sea. No elites and no fresh, new, creative ‘narrative’ can change that.

We must go down to Life’s sea – and in worthy ships. And We must do it quickly. The sea is rising.

**
AND ALSO:

I neglected to include one other very significant point in Chernus’s treatment: he accuses the neocons and the ‘conservative moralists’ of being the unique perpetrators of what the Advocates of the Identities have been doing to Us for decades now. In psychiatric terms he ‘projects’ onto the neocons and ‘conservative moralists’ precisely what his favored Dems and Identities pretty much invented as standard political tactics.

As example, on page 5 he goes after that truly jaw-dropping assertion reported by Ron Suskind and popularly presumed to be from the pudgy lips of Karl Rove himself: “We create our own reality”. But isn’t this exactly the type of thing Chernus is plumping for when he urges that humans can “choose their own values”? Aren’t – in the ‘liberal’ or the ‘progressive’ story – all humans simply browsers at a massive buffet, filling their personal plates with a scoop of this ‘value’ and a forkful of that ‘value’? Just as now – the hot ironies! – the Bushist Imperium sees the entire planet as a large buffet, with the agents of the US government simply browsing around the room, ladling this and forking that? Yoooo-hooooooo ….

Chernus continues: “Living within the safe shelter of their story, they see only the parts of reality that already fit into their story. They don’t test the truth of their stories by testing them against facts. The story comes first. … Instead of seeking out the facts, they create their own version of the facts.” No peeking now: tell me if this refers to A) the neocon imperialists or B) to the ‘liberals’ of the Sixties and their Advocacies. Or, worse by sooo far: C) both. Chernus would insist that the only answer can be (A). But I think that precisely the key point is that the answer is irrefutably (C). And that We are now in so much trouble because simply letting Bush leave office or dis-electing the Republicans is not going to put out the fire. We are at sea, on fire, and We don’t quite know just where the fire is or what kind of fire it is (Will water put it out or intensify it? Do we need sand? Chemicals? And if We need water, then We face the next problem of fire-fighting at sea: the whole idea of a ship is that you most certainly do NOT want to be putting water into it, because if you do, then … no matter what ‘story’ you have chosen, the ship is going to sink and you are going to have sunk it.

As may thus be clearly inferred: command at sea is not for the immature nor the faint of mind or heart, nor for the groovy nor for the perpetually outraged. And lest this seems like a sneaky commercial for the Republicans as that lost breed is presently and repugnantly construed: command at sea is not for those who would take a half-sinking ship and go and start unnecessary shooting-action just to prove that they can still do it.

But I’ll also say this in the interests of full disclosure: John Wayne, even on his worst day, would never have done it either. Nor Clark Gable nor Gregory Peck … well, Peck did take the Pequod on her fateful journey … so forget Peck.

START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT IT

I don’t surf so-called feminist websites. The discourse is now so predictable as to equal and even surpass the chicanery of Socialist Realism, scripted in the same old way.

But this piece I’m discussing now was on the Alternet site, which presents mostly useful and reasonable stuff. I imagine that a certain number of certain types of subjects has to be covered, though, and maybe that’s how come we’re having this discussion here now.
The article is by one Heidi Schnakenberg, “Think ‘70s Feminists Are Out of Touch? Not So Fast.” Kewl. Hip.

But I think it provides so thorough an example of the script as to be called ‘classic’ in its way.
You really can’t tell your players without a program in matters feminist these days; if the original assertions and concepts were a bit hard to connect and didn’t always cohere even back in the day, the situation – for all the time and treasure expended – has gotten even more … ummmm … complex.

Of course there’s all the numbered Waves, first, second, third – at least. And I think the Waves themselves are subdivided. I was a little perplexed to notice that she doesn’t mention Waves at all. But then I realized that the revolution’s moved into even more finely-diced distinctions.
Terminology to describe the various schools has become florid. “Intersectionalism” is now a working term, and “feminist intersectionalist” is thrown around as both concept and epithet; one cannot avoid thinking of ‘right deviationism’, ‘left deviationism’, Menshevik, Trotskyite, and half-a-hundred other terms that, whatever their conceptual weight, were arrows of death pointed at the unlucky targets of revolutionary justice.

Our author, in best feminist faux-academic style, however, sounds the proper key in which we are to play the music: she is a “unity feminist”. But, she assures us, she was not always so enlightened, and humbly (yet with a queasy prideful confidence) declares herself as one who has struggled with the complexities; she is a “reformed intersectionalist feminist”. (At this point in the article I really began to wonder if she weren’t simply satirizing the whole feminist revolutionary panoplium, but … no; although it’s really impossible to tell whether you are reading an earnest relating of the latest version of ‘truth’ or a satirical put-down of the whole thing ; the stuff satirizes itself.)

In a particularly incoherent sentence she manages to get some of the primary code words in, but in such a way that they don’t seem to make sense: “Sexism is still far behind the curve in beating the oppression game …” ‘Sexism’ of course is what ‘men’ do when they only consider women as sexual objects (or have I not gotten more recent memos?). ‘Oppression’ is what ‘men’ do to women frequently, if not always, by attacking them, hating-on them, not talking to them, talking to them, or just being men. That much, I think, is clear.

‘The game’ is a phrase to describe the core dynamics, in the feminist view, of ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ as it has existed in the United States throughout its history, although – come to think of it – in all cultures going back to the ancient Greeks and perhaps throughout recorded history. There is some doubt as to whether one may retain one’s union card if espousing the possibility that at some point before recorded history men and women lived together in sexless harmony or even – more preferably – women ruled men (unsure about whether sexlessly or not). This of course would create the possibility of analyzing the period before recorded history, perhaps as imperial mandarins spent time and treasure studying the unicorn to learn about the horse. For this purpose, Hahvahd – its newly installed woman president having just recently assured one and all that in this complicated and darkling modern world her first priority would be ‘diversity and gender issues’ – might be able to set up an Institute. Perhaps there’s some cash left over from the delegation they sent over to the just-liberated ‘Russia’ to help that great and haunted land achieve free-market, democratic capitalism.

There is also a second complexity: a truly multicultural view must needs espouse the position that different cultures do things differently but that no other culture may judge because all ways of doing things are equal, and ‘good’ for that culture. Except for not-implementing feminist objectives, which is a universal – we’d best not say Original – sin. And perhaps we’d best not say ‘sin’ either.

As best can be discerned, the ‘intersectionalists’ are dissing the “old feminist guard” – to the extent of calling them (the horror!) “white women” – by asserting that “women have a wide variety of problems to worry about, such as class, race, and economics, and feminism must adopt many causes and facets to improve women’s lives”. As so often happens in revolutions, such a simple and common-sense observation has generated a sharp backlash … although there is some question as to whether a feminist, the vanguard of the ultimate oppressed minority (though numerically a majority) in all of human history (recorded history, anyway) can ‘backlash’ at all, since the oppressed – it has been handed down – can never oppress nor ‘backlash’. Only ‘men’ can backlash. QED, somehow.

In an impressively candid revelation, she notes that “women of color have responded more specifically by saying that, frankly, they feel white women don’t experience a fraction of the pain and suffering that women of color go through and it’s difficult for them to relate”. Dahlings, how dare they? Worse, the aforesaid women of color say “Hey you privileged white feminists, you don’t get it. Move out of the way with your old-fashioned white feminism”. To the mothers who invented the revolution this is gall and wormwood.

And the author – hiply but heroically – establishes her position: “I say, not so fast.” Take that, ungrateful puppies. Stalin, of course, when confronted by old Bolsheviks who told him that he was betraying the revolution, resolved the conceptual complexities with a gun. Many guns. Although Mao, no feminist himself, was the one who actually encapsulated that bit of solutionary wisdom for the ages: Political power flows from the barrel of a gun. Yet perhaps we do him – Mao – a disservice, and Stalin too, since women were known to serve in both the Soviet and Chinese armies and with distinction, and with far less complaining about harassment. But then again, complaints in either of the great Red Armies would perhaps not have been as receptively handled as they are in more sensitive eras and societies.

No doubt by merest coincidence, they also won a lot, and Stalin’s Red Army actually achieved some of the most stupendous military victories in all of human history – the recorded kind, anyway. Which does not of course preclude the possibility that just before the recording began the world was run by totally victorious all-female armies (although, they chose not to record their achievement) that were suddenly and treacherously undone by those assorted packs of chimpish cavemen with their clubs and crummy caves with the cheap cooking fire and the mastodon cutlets and all. But we digress.

As is required the author then produces not an argument but a ‘story’: there once was a bright young thing with no problems and a great future. Then suddenly she is “approaching retirement with permanent, debilitating brain damage from domestic violence”. It’s a weirdly unspecific statement: you’d expect that so significant a story would call forth something more than the generic “domestic violence”; it’s like saying that a loved one was killed by ‘motor vehicle violence’ instead of saying ‘by a car’ or ‘by an SUV on a rainy night’ or by ‘a drunk driver’ (preferably a man, no doubt). Worse, now that it has gotten out that ‘battering’, say, can now legally encompass anything from being physically assaulted to not-being-spoken-to-on-the-phone (yes, a man could be hauled in for battering even if he were 3,000 miles distant when he was doing the ‘battering’), one would feel comfortable with a few more facts. Although, of course, ‘facts don’t matter’, as is famously known.

Then the classic ‘trump’: “This woman happens to be my mother.” Sort of the thing one would get from a sibling as a final put-down in an argument over who deserves the last cupcake. But this has passed into the general culture as a form of reasoning, or rather a replacement for it, as has the whole ‘story’ gambit.

This report – and we can only assume it’s true, although it’s hard to forget that in her milieu ‘facts don’t matter’ – she considers proof positive and refutatious in the matter of this charge that “white women are too privileged and classist to understand the plight of less fortunate women”. So there. Harrrrumph.

But she doesn’t want her victory here to separate her from the sistern universal. “Like many women, I too have an eclectic and complex history of experiences”. And men, we are to presume, do not? But then she quickly goes on: she is “ethnically Caucasian, and my family is from a small rural town in Western Europe”, which should put her in the feminst Lubyanka with no further ado. But wait: “but I strongly identify with my Latino family by marriage, and my child is considered a person of color.” Ah. On the revolutionary checklist she starts to rack up some points. Further, “I’ve lived in extremely varied environments “, rattling off: a small town in West Africa, a rural farm in the Midwest, the projects in Manhattan, next to crack houses in Brooklyn, in a posh, gay neighborhood in Southern California, and “even a temporary stint on the obscure island of Malta”. Apparently she was trying to milk Malta for all it was worth as a hardship post, but unless she was there during the Luftwaffe raids, I don’t think it works. Or is accurate. But then, facts don’t matter. For the rest of it, well, the only other persons I can think of who get around like that are formally ‘homeless’. But who’s to say?

She immediately wields the authority she has accorded herself by the foregoing recitation: “I tell you this: Women have as much, if not more, in common with each other than they do with the men in their respective communities, countries and demographics.” So there it is. The rarely-spoken assumption of feminist thought is that gender is the trumping identity. How can any national society cohere if half (more than half) of its citizens are exhorted to see themselves as members of a wider society, and that the other half (less than half) of the society’s citizens are their oppressors and – how can it be avoided? – enemies?

Did the Democrats actually read any of their stuff 40 years ago before throwing the institutional weight of their Party behind this philosophy? In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that what they did was not only to support a revolution against democratic politics, but a weird but real civil war, weird because it was one-sided, but a war nonetheless, in their own eyes. There’s nothing of Martin Luther King’s vision – so fully and vividly limned in his speech on the Mall in August of 1963 – around which all Americans of good will could unite. Nor can JFK’s assasination that November be burdened with any sort of responsibility for having ‘changed everything’, as if it dissolved in a stroke the ideal of a spiritually grounded national unity for a wider and deeper common weal. It didn’t. Something else did that.

She’s also a victim herself, having “come under fire" from “intersectionalist feminists” for making such statements as she has just made. But she’s nailed her flag to the mast: “I say no, all those other problems [that women of varied backgrounds face] diminish the unique plight of women, who all exist under male power and oppression”. In case we didn’t know where she stands. Or where feminism stands. Or where the rest of us stand.

She then introduces another story: Her sister-in-law, a Puerto Rican woman, who has experienced violence and crime in New York and Puerto Rico, feels that “while racism is always a peripheral concern, her most depressing problems continue to be with men”. Specically, she fears her husband philanders, and she “doesn’t like the misogyny and disrespect she sees in her teenage boys”. Whether these problems can be attributed to ‘men’ or to their ‘oppression’ in whole or in part, we can’t but wonder – incorrect as it is – whether the sister-in-law herself has a part in it. And who isn’t worried about boys in teenage years? Or teenaged girls, if they have them?

But no. And we are then informed that the author is a screenwriter. And has “rubbed shoulders with some of the most famous people in the entertainment industry and hung out in glamorous parties with glamourous white people”. Why is it that this sounds so … unliberated? Woman-ish? But she presses on without ado to the revolutionary point: “And wouldn’t you know it – even rich, famous white women in Hollywood are consistently degraded, humiliated, and abused by the men in their lives.” The referenced women don’t ‘report’ they are thus treated; they simply “are”. Who isn’t treated like bad yogurt by the ‘suits’ in Hollywood? And the advent of female ‘suits’ doesn’t seem to have made things kinder and gentler. Or is it that ‘women’ aren’t going to bring us to a better society, as we had sort of hoped to believe would be the justification for all the brouhaha, but that they just wanted a bigger piece of the pie, which is understandable, but not quite so luminous a reason to have one half of the citizenry warring on the other half.

She notes, by way of being scientific, that “there were only three confirmed hate-related homicides nationwide in 2004”. But immediately: “Gender-based crime – not included in the U.S. description of hate crimes – continues to plague women in the United States and all over the world at alarming levels.” No statistics or numbers. And of course, there’s the domestic violence registry and all the special courts and automatic restraining Orders, and then there’s the sex-offender registry and all the rest of that panoply, each with its own still-burgeoning legislation, each with its suspiciously elastic definitions and vague figures and insistent sensationalism.

It is, as I said, a ‘classic’ exemplar of the state of affairs. One can hope that the newer feminist cadres are growing beyond the really whacky stuff, but still, no matter how the conceptual ‘development’ of feminism plays out, it was that earlier ‘Wave’s’ loonier and societally lethal ideology that formed the basis of the movement and Identity that the Democrats first embraced, and upon which wave after wave of laws were passed, many in defiance of the best available scientific knowledge and method, and in ignorance (we have to hope) of the consequences of such assumptions, and in stunning disregard for the truth. But of course, in any good revolution, truth doesn’t matter.