LIBERAL FASCISM 1

 

I want to put some further relevant supporting material under my thoughts in the immediately prior Stiglitz Post.

I will do this with a mini-series on Jonah Goldberg’s 2007 book Liberal Fascism.* (In these Posts, Jonah Goldberg will be shortened to ‘JG’.)

Let’s clear up one point immediately: JG here is not making some easy, rabble-rousing rhetorical connection between ‘Hitler’ and the American government. He is not suggesting that the Democrats or the Republicans or the Beltway denizens of today are ‘Nazis’ or any such thing. This is not a replay of 1960’s hyper-excited Boomer imagery, deployed – as was the accepted practice of the times – against ‘the Establishment’. The Boomers were a youthy (my only public thank-you here, to George W. Bush) bunch, and took full advantage of all the disadvantages of that age in the human life cycle.

That’s not what JG is doing here.

Rather, he is running an x-ray scan to see beneath the surfaces of current – and historical, going back to the American Progressives of the early 1900s – American political philosophy and praxis in order to see if the same dynamics that fueled Progressivism were also the dynamics that fueled Fascism as it is properly defined (a totalitarian or totalizing approach to government towards its citizenry).

Let’s not forget that the same era that saw Progressivism take root here was the era that saw Europe wrestling with how to some control the rapidly modernized, industrialized, and corporatized polities of Western Europe and Russia. It was an era of intense political-philosophical speculation and imagining – so characteristic of Western and European civilization – driven by a robust and heady sense of the ‘new’ and a burning desire to somehow keep human beings from being trampled by the newly-engorged corporate and capitalist behemoths that seemed to be connected to shocking amounts of urban and rural poverty throughout Western Europe and Russia.

It was the European Left that sought to alleviate this shocking state of affairs; if ‘business’ and ‘commerce’ had somehow morphed into ‘corporatism’ then shouldn’t ‘government’ and ‘governance’ somehow counter-morph into some legitimate coercive power that could alleviate or even eradicate the effects of corporatism’s monstrous engorgement? Shouldn’t government speak-for and work-for ‘the little people’ and those whose lives seemed rather vividly to be merely sources of lubricant to make the great Machine grind on?

It will be JG’s point to insist that Marx and Mussolini and Hitler were all seeking to achieve this, from the Left. (Yes, the easy equation has long been that since Hitler opposed the Communists of the Left then Nazism had to be a movement of the Right; but JG (very thoroughly) makes the case that the Communist and Fascist and Nazi movements were equally rival offspring of the European Left.)

And further, that while it had roots in some deep currents in American politics, Progressivism here was working toward those same goals, and – willy or nilly – by seeking to establish and harness some of the same dynamics and ‘solutions’.

Which, as I have often said and as JG reveals (I believe he makes and supports his case clearly and substantively), would and did put American Progressivism on a collision course with the Framing Vision and its utterly indispensable first-principles and with the entire unique philosophical Grounding of what the Framers themselves realized was the Great American Experiment in human self-governance.

Perhaps since it was all spun for popular consumption as simply a pragmatic adaptation responding to the huge challenges of the new and the modern, and since it was all designed to somehow liberate; and since Progressivism spun itself as a form of ‘liberalism’; and since  it all turned out (until the latter part of the century, after 1970 and increasingly so since then) so ‘abundantly’ for Americans … perhaps in light of all that the actual dynamics and principles inherent-in and constitutive-of the American Progressive thrust remained unconsidered for so long.

But that was then and now is Now.

So to this first installment about Goldberg and his vital work.

He notes (p.9) that until 1941 Italian Fascism was seen “as a progressive social movement”.  Many were the elite intellectual admirers in Europe and the U.S. who watched Mussolini throughout the 1920s and 1930s as he became the Great Leader and the strong Man of Action who both whipped the mushy Italian polity into shape and stood up for the little-people and for (to use Gramsci’s term) the ‘marginalized’.

Of course, once the war got started for the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, then that admiration had to be finessed-away. (The equally long-standing general and elite admiration for the Soviet variant of Strong-Government-On-Behalf-of-the-Masses lasted somewhat longer – until the later 1940s, and in many cases was resurrected in the later 1960s here.)

To achieve that finessing, emphasis was shifted away from Fascist social programs and objectives and onto the militaristic and imperialist and nationalist elements of the Fascist program. (Although when he gets to the early – first-wave, if you wish – American Progressives of the early 1900s, JG will amply demonstrate through acute and numerous quotations just how exuberantly imperialist and militarist and nationalist American Progressivism also was, from its inception.)

And, of course, once the Holocaust (a Nazi rather than Italian Fascist production) was revealed, then politically it was utterly essential for a thoroughly Progressive American politics and its intellectual elites to distance themselves from the whole shebang: Hitler and Mussolini both. (Again oddly, when the revelations of the monstrous Soviet Gulag came out – partially through Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956 and much more vigorously and vividly through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s books – not widely available here until the early 1970s – there was not so much of an outcry; and Solzhenitsyn was not warmly received when he spoke at Harvard in June of 1978 – perhaps because he was not only indicting the Left’s favored alternative to ‘capitalism’ but also because he was sternly and forthrightly urging a return to spirituality upon American elites who by then were thoroughly committed to secularizing government and culture . Solzhenitsyn could be soooo judgmental.)

Thus Nazism (self-proclaimed from the get-go as not only a national but also a social “revolution”) and Italian Fascism were quickly and neatly pigeon-holed as ‘right-wing’ (JG doesn’t get into the ‘social’ elements of Japanese militarism, which were much more muted despite the eager and frenzied support of the young and lower-class officers of the Army).

But both Fascism and Nazism had from the beginning shared  between themselves – and with some of the basic themes of American Progressivism – strong tendencies toward elitist governance, statist government, and centralized government that would reach ‘totally’ into all aspects of the nation’s life and re-fashion the very citizens themselves into some ‘new’ form. (Allow me here to suggest today’s New Feminist Man as a direct conceptual descendant of New Soviet Man and New Fascist Man and New German Man.)

JG reaches back – quite appropriately – to the French Revolution, that beacon to all 19^th and early-20^th century European leftist thought: that enterprise also demanded a thorough secularization and laicization of government. You can say that this was merely a necessary requirement in order to liberate society and culture from a Church which – in its abiding desire for ‘order’ as opposed to civil war – had allied itself with (or at least reconciled itself to) the dominant governmental regime of the day.

But I will say that this secularization was also inherently necessary since the Revolutionary state was seeking to replace the Church as the primary object of the citizens’ beliefs and hopes. The Revolution was setting itself up as the this-worldly and very ‘demonstrable’ ‘god’ to replace that ‘abstract’ and other-worldly entity served by organized religion. The Church and all organized religion and any other-worldly religious impulses were, in other words, viewed by the Revolution as its rival – and thus had to be erased and swept away forthwith if any lasting ‘progress’ was to be effected.

Thus JG will say that “American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion”. (p.14) But nowadays it’s a “nice” one – “nannying, but not bullying”. (p.14) Although I think that the more it becomes entrenched (and it has, even since the end of the G.W. Bush administration) there is the inevitable and ineluctable increase in the bullying – both foreign and domestic.

Because after all, everything is political now (it started its most recent surge, you may recall, with the now-familiar mantra that ‘the personal is political’). What you eat, smoke, read, or in any other way ‘prefer’ – it’s all political now (and therefore open to the ‘compelling interest’ of the state). Oy.

As a newbie ‘religion’, “Liberals place their faith in priestly [I would say ‘priest-like’] experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of [any rival] religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend ‘non-traditional’ beliefs.” (p.14) As any newbie must, if it’s going to shove open space for itself.

And like the classical fascists, the current American mutation speaks of “a Third Way between right and left, where all good things go together and all hard choices are ‘false choices’”. (p.14)

And here JG raises a solid point: all good things have to somehow mysteriously and mystically ‘go together’ (through some secular liberal version of the old Invisible Hand or God’s Providence or whatever magical mystery dynamic) because the Beltway – Progressive since the early 1900s in both the Democratic and Republican variants – was committed to pandering to every Identity-group’s demands without any serious thought as to either a) how each of those demands would work out and individually impact the common-weal or b) how they would or would-not fit together into a coherent whole among themselves as national-policy.

Ditto that the Beltway couldn’t then allow wide public deliberation about the possible or probable or inevitable consequences or trade-offs of all these demands, because once the Citizenry thought it had a role in making serious choices as to the nature and operating dynamics of their culture and polity, then quite possibly a number of those Identity-groups’ demands would be rejected. How can you have a ‘revolution’ – or a lot of them all at once – if you let ‘the masses’ (who by definition ‘just don’t get it’) have a say in what is or isn’t going to happen? And what is or isn’t going to be imposed upon them?

And so thus, any framing of a new imposition as being a ‘hard choice’ to make has to be nipped in the bud. All of this – the Beltway needed Us to believe – was going to work out and come up roses with no major costs or consequences. You just have to believe (as religious-types had been saying for millennia).

You were to take it as an article of faith and dogma that “with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of ‘creating a better world’”. (p.15) And, as We shall see, creating better ‘people’ in the process as well. I would only add that in order to market and sell these new impositions in such a way as to lull the herd they had to be spun as having no downsides or trade-offs, much as used-car salespersons will assure you about the car whose tires they very much would not like you to speculatively kick.

And to demand to look under the hood would be the very height of mulish un-believing and back-lashing. And who needs a lesson in what happens to ‘un-believers’? And back-lashers?

JG raises here – and will get into much greater detail with meaty quotations from major players later in the book – the point that first-wave Progressivism was very much a religious and thus in its context a Christian undertaking. While “today’s liberal fascism eschews talk of Christianity for the most part” (p.15) yet it wasn’t always that way. The spirit of the domestic and foreign benevolent but robustly masculine “religious crusader” was interwoven into the warp and woof of Progressivism from Day One. (Nor was such a ‘crusading’ mentality limited to males; you can look up a long list of that era’s female crusaders, and don’t forget Carry Nation – the hatchet-wielding saloon-smasher from the frontier towns of Kansas).

To first-wave Progressivism, religion and politics very much worked hand in hand. But – I would say – that was all before they met Marx and Gramsci and Mussolini and got a different religion entirely. (And then, a while later, along came Mao and Ho and Che … and the band jazzed up and played on.)

In a tantalizing aside, JG notes that the “postmodern left” does “speak a language that Nazis would understand”: such keys words as ‘deconstruction’ and ‘logocentrism’ first saw the light “in anti-science tracts written by Nazi and protofascist writers like Ernst Krieck and Ludwig Klages”; with the first-ever reference to Dekonstrucktion being made in a psychiatry journal edited by a cousin of Hermann Goering. (p.16) The more things change … ach!

Even more acutely (and ominously) current talk around here of destroying “whiteness” “is more than superficially reminiscent of the National Socialist effort to ‘de-Judaize’ German society”. (p.16) [italics mine]

All in all, JG says, “the fact remains that “Progressives did many things that we would today call objectively fascist, and fascists did many things that we would today call objectively Progressive”. (Are you pouring a stiff drink yet? I’m smoking my favorite comfort-pipe just to keep my hands steady. And fasten your seat-belt because the intellectual history just gets more revealing as it goes on here.)

And pre-emptively, but perfectly logically and it’s a point worth making, JG notes that it is inaccurate to “assume that fascism was simply the ideology of Jewish genocide”, (p.16) for which, he suggests, the more apt label would be ‘Hitlerism’. Fascism, properly speaking, was a socio-cultural and socio-political programme with its own presumptions and agenda and objectives and methods, all designed to make life better for the little-people against the awesome and awful weight of a corporate metastasis that was somehow crushing the lives of hundreds of millions. Fascism, I would put it, sought to combat ‘oppression’, ‘hegemony’, ‘dominance’ and ‘marginalization’. That it wound up somewhere else altogether is a point worthy of much contemporary deliberation and reflection.**

The crimes of Hitlerism and Nazism “erased” (p.17) awareness of the similarities between the fascist and later socio-political and socio-cultural approaches to harnessing government power and coercive authority in the service of liberating or de-marginalizing and improving the lot of ‘the little-people’. And of improving – through that same government coercion – the little-people themselves, root and branch.

Thus Progressivism’s similarities to the programmes, objectives, agendas and methods of fascism need to receive far more examination than has heretofore been the case around here. Good for JG.

He notes the Nazi anti-smoking and public health drives (and Hitler himself was both a non-smoker and a vegetarian, although with an artery-wrecking addiction to cream-cakes). Where does this quote come from? “Nutrition is not a private matter!” … It comes from a Hitler Youth manual. (p.19)

The Reich’s concern was that Christianity – with its emphasis on humans being intended to conquer nature (the ‘Judeo’ part of course was ignored) – and capitalism – with its alienation of humans from their natural state – worked conspiratorially “to undermine German health”. (p.19) If you tossed in ‘patriarchy’ and perhaps ‘whiteness’ …

But what is always admirable about JG is that he never settles for the oh-so-modern (or postmodern) quickie rhetorical trump. Being concerned for “health” doesn’t make you a fascist. Rather, “what is fascist is the notion that in an organic national community, the individual has no right not to be healthy and that therefore the state has the obligation [and therefore the right] to force us to be healthy for our own good”. (p.19) [italics mine] Which rather neatly limns one of the major operational axes of what I have always called the National Nanny State.

Acutely, JG immediately goes on to note that this “sort of moral bullying intrusion [by the state] … were it couched in terms of traditional morality, liberals would immediately denounce as fascist”. (p.19) Both marvelous in capturing the complexity of conceptual historical development and also utterly true.

We are seeing here substantively good intentions and concerns that have yet been infected with “the Marxist hope that we could create a perfect world by rearranging the means of production” (p.21) or by any other ‘clear and simple’ recipe of re-arrangement (of the culture, the society, and/or the people themselves).

“The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it”. (p.19) Yes. Although I would add here that any such effort to a) reduce human fulfillment to the Mono-plane of this-worldly existence and b) place the entire burden and efficacy for perfecting the this-worldly dimension on the power of the (elite-enlightened) human will is bound to come up short on its best days, and to fail rather substantially on the other days, and to mutate into a monstrous Leviathan (or Leviatha) on any day.

Fascism – similar to Communism and Progressivism – is expansionist because it sees no natural boundary to its ambitions”. (p.19) Meaning that it acknowledges no Grounds or Boundaries (German: Grunde und Grenze) that come from Beyond itself and to which and by which it can be judged and held accountable – another reason why one must stop being ‘judgmental’). Hence, to draw a current example, this country – having already imposed upon its own masses the putatively enlightened perturbations of its elites – now seeks to go forth and bring the Good News to any other country on the planet where – in the government’s opinion – the masses (especially of favored and ‘valorized’ Identity-groups) are being in any way ‘oppressed’.

JG quotes H.G. Wells who told a meeting of the Young Liberals at Oxford in 1932 that “Progressives must become ‘liberal fascists’ and ‘enlightened Nazis’”; the term “liberal fascism” is his. (p.19) It was a pleasant and uplifting idea, if you think about it just a little. Beyond that however …

Progressivism – let there be no mistake about it – envisioned itself as bringing about a New World Order; thus Progressive Woodrow Wilson spun America’s efforts in World War 1 and his otherwise pacifist Secretary of State – William Jennings Bryan – was self-seduced by his own excited dampdream of “a Christian world order, complete with a global prohibition of alcohol”. (p.19)

You see where this sort of thing can easily lead.

Today – and who can be surprised? – what passes for ‘liberalism’ (and is actually Progressivism and not Liberalism in the classical sense) refuses to think about its own history. In fact, if you haven’t noticed, nobody of that persuasion really cares to talk much about ‘history’ at all – except as a recitation of grievances that justify whatever it is they want to do right now. With a history like this, who wants people poking around?*** Or perhaps to simply dip into the past for a tactically useful (if not altogether illuminating) proof-text or encouraging reference; thus Joe Biden’s recent incantation at the Democratic Convention that “we are on our way”, echoing the assertion of FDR that the country was getting better all the time, as it were: every day and in every way.****

Nor does JG let non-liberals off the hook, since – as We shall see – Progressivism has now rooted itself in both Parties. He quotes George W. Bush about leaving no child behind and “how, when somebody hurts, government has got to move”. (p.23) This had previously been a responsibility ascribed to the Deity – Who presumably had the omniscience and omnipotence and total benevolence to become so minutely involved in each individual life’s trials and tribulations. But by now the U.S. government has eliminated what it considers to be the middle-man and will faithfully execute the Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Benevolence on its own – thank you very much – especially since its prior old-school responsibility to the protection, preservation and defense of the Constitution and the faithful execution of the laws are now … well, soooo old-school.

And the band playeth on.

“Fascism”, says JG, “is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good.  It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is ‘part of the problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy.” (p.23) [italics JG’s]

Unpacking that succinct recitation just a bit, I would say that for all practical purposes We can see all of those dynamic purposes functioning now among Us. The State is not overtly worshipped, but the rival – religion – is continuously undermined.*****

And that the “organic unity” dynamic is operational even in this Age of Identity Politics: everybody is included who is ‘oppressed’ in any way by the one excluded group: the white, patriarchal, straight, older (you can add: sexually violent or ‘industrial-age’ or ‘unionized’ or whatever as suits you) Male. Under the heel of that oppressor, you can include all the ‘marginalized’ and ‘victimized’ of any sort whatsoever.

The infantilization of the Citizenry – alarmingly willingly – is evidenced by the wistfully eager reliance of so many on ‘the President’ (whoever it may be) as Our ‘leader’ and Our ‘commander-in-chief’ and Our national Empathizer-in-Chief and needs no great description. It will only get worse as the increasingly damaged economy throws more infantilized persons into the maw of those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that have always bethumped the species.

There is actually no single “will of the people”, no Volksgeist. Indeed, it has precisely been the aim of Identity Politics and Political Correctness to ensure that no serious public deliberation take place, lest ‘divisive’ fractures in the façade appear too clearly. But that simply results in the government and its enfoeffed elites getting to say just what that “will of the people” is – which is a potentially fatal development.

The government is for all practical purposes ‘totalitarian’ since there is no element of national life, culture, or society that is conceptually immune to government imposition in one form or another, by law or regulation or policy. And of course, to assuage ‘pain’ or redress grievances of oppression or victimization, the government will accept no un-Correct limitations on its writ.

Employment and advancement of those who dissent in thought or action are increasingly becoming doubtful (on top of the problems with the economy and jobs and hiring in general). The social pressure to conform is now joined by the economic pressure to conform.

And “religion” will conform or it will be undermined by whatever means necessary. (See Note ***** below.)

Not a comforting x-ray at all. But if We are to regain (I won’t say retain) the genuine life and polity envisioned by the Framers then We have to face the x-ray and do some serious and urgent thinking.

As Ike said: So much remains to be done.

I will continue this mini-series, and at a faster clip than I have previously been Posting.

NOTES

*Goldberg, Jonah. Liberal Fascism. Doubleday: New York, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-385-51184-1 (hard cover). It’s also out in paperback.

**JG notes that Jewish folk survived the Holocaust in their largest numbers under regimes controlled by Mussolini and Franco. Franco – for whom I hold no brief – actually used his dictatorial powers to abrogate the 1492 Spanish Edict of Expulsion of Jewish folk from that country. Jewish folk fared far less well under the aegis of the putatively ‘liberal’ French and Dutch. [If you haven’t noticed, I dislike the term ‘the Jews’ and won’t be using it in any of my Posts; to me the phrase contains too much a whiff of disrespect, despite its short-hand conversational advantages.]

***There is an odd – even weird – echo of this in the current rape-law insistence that a complainant’s ‘history’ should be out-of-bounds for judging any present complaint.

****I added this last phrase from Emile Coue, 19^th and early 20^th-century French psychologist: “Every day and in every way I am getting better and better”. He proposed that patients deploy this auto-suggestion to encourage themselves and keep up their spirits. It seems to me nowadays around here to be a primary suggestion of the political Parties, moving the voters to close their lying eyes and simply ‘believe’ or ‘hope’ – because if enough folks do so, then of course everything actually will get better. To which I can only respond with French politesse: Mais oui – “but of course”, as the patient is gently ushered out to the sun porch by understanding staffers.

*****This is especially true of those religions that have not truckled to the State by ‘baptizing’ its agendas and providing ‘benefit of clergy’ to the government’s programmes. Thus where some elements of fundamentalism (seen more publicly in Reagan’s day than presently) simply solved their problem by identifying the National Security State with God’s Will, and others of a more ‘liberal’ bent largely adopted the agenda of the National Nanny State as God’s Will, the Catholic Church – as the largest dissenter – stubbornly retained its witness to a Multi-planar reality or Reality, Grounded in a Beyond and indeed in a God Who has created all human beings in His Image, and to Whom all earthly governments must hold themselves ultimately and actually accountable.

 

 

CATHARINE MACKINNON : HOW WE GOT HERE

A classic scene that has always remained with me: In 1939’s film version of ‘Gone With the Wind’, Jane Darwell’s proper Southern dame, Mrs. Merriwether, informed that Union troops were almost upon her beloved city, exclaimed: “Yankees! In Atlanta? How’d they git heah?”

The answer, which came to me as soon as I heard her voice the question, was that they had been coming all along, and for quite a while she had simply refused to entertain the possibility that such was so. Instead she carried on her wonted ways, living the life of a Southern dame as she always had.

And suddenly, the end was upon her.

At which point Gilbert and Sullivan’s obnoxious know-it-all comes to me as well: avoided by all decent company, whom he always loved to put down or to whom he always loved to administer a come-uppance, he laments his situation and “cawn’t think why” nobody wants to spend time with him.

Both thoughts came back to me as I recently put myself through law professor and touted ‘feminist scholar and thinker’ Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 book “Toward A Feminist Theory of the State”.*

Not that either she or any of her sorority of vanguard cadres have ever declared any such moment of self-doubt; indeed, quite the opposite. She continues to receive encomia from other feminist best and brightest (such as feminist historian Christine Stansell and feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum, to name but a couple of recent ones).

Such mutual and mutually self-serving encomia seem to be public valentines delivered to each other in assorted publications for all the like-minded to read. One thinks of the gilded if clunky encomia lavished by the early Soviet state upon those who cooperated with its utopian terraforming of Russia: Indefatigable Hero of the Five-Year Tractor Plan! Brass-hard Implementer of the Three-Year Cement Plan! Unswerving and Indistractable Protector of the Proletariat!

Yah.

And behind each element of such encomia, the bloody, soul-flattening wrack and ruin to innumerable lives and the subversion of an entire society and its culture and its people. Oh, and the enslavement of same.

But all in a good, indeed a marvelous and history-shattering, Cause.

Yah.

So anyway, in light of Our current omni-dimensional mess, I recently decided to look at this decades-old work, which contains thoughts which, she says (p.ix), she had been working on and talking about since 1971. Which, as it happens, is the year the Democrats decided to turn the Party toward the tempting female demographic, declare themselves “the Party of women”, and embrace whole-hog the agenda of radical-feminism (which, MacKinnon says, is the only feminism). Which, as it also happens, is the year before the Presidential election of 1972 when The People rejected the whole scheme  49 States to 1. And which, as it happens, is the year the Democrats began toying with the idea that since The People ‘just don’t get it’ then deliberative democracy (and the Framing Vision) were clearly not the way forward. **

And here We are.

And We are here, I will say, not because some amazing and powerfully coherent Theory suddenly swept all prior conceptualizations before it and had to be adopted simply in order to conform to a history-making discovery and revelation of how things work (such as, say, Newton’s Theory of Gravity), but rather because the desperate Dems (later to be joined by the Republicans for their own purposes) simply committed the entire power of the federal government and the Beltway behind it.

One thinks of Hitler promoting the utterly inexperienced von Paulus to command of the 6^th Army in the Russian campaign, against all warnings that the man was a theoretician and war-gamer who had  utterly no field command experience – let alone in major combat – simply because Mr. Big figured that the man would be a pliable field commander who would without question carry out his orders. (Let alone that the orders von Paulus was to receive were increasingly militarily whackulent and lethally wrong to begin with.)

Radical-feminism ‘succeeded’ so quickly not because of the coherence and validity of its Theory but simply because the Beltway declared it overnight to be The Way in what has turned out to be a folie a deux of (ironically) nation-shattering proportions. Funny how the Theoretical, conceptual, and political night moves.

So let’s get on with this book – published in 1989, containing ideas she had been flogging since 1971 – and I think you will have a much clearer idea of a great part of the reason why ‘Yankees are in Atlanta’ now and the whole show now looks like it’s coming apart.

For that matter, I would recommend that We start looking at the history of the Confederate government – especially after the summer of 1863. (The Gettysburg and Vicksburg defeats were completed on the same day, July 4^th, of that year. Who can say that History doesn’t have a sense of humor?).

What We would want to study, having looked at MacKinnon, is how a government starts to come apart after having fatuously committed itself to a lethal course, drinking vast draughts of the Kool-Aid of best-case outcomes and refusing to imagine any but the best Consequences issuing from its plans, and refusing – even as matters became ever more lethally serious – to ‘revisit’ its whole approach.*** (And can you say Iraq War?)

MacKinnon (henceforth: MacK) declares (p.ix) that she wants to demonstrate how “social power” shapes the way we “know” and how we “know”. In other words, MacK says here that there is no knowledge of reality that isn’t tainted with “social power”. Her plan is to replace ‘male’ social power with feminist social power and thereby create a whole new ‘knowledge’ – and anything built on the old way would be delegitimized.

You can see why radical-feminism was going to be – as Marxism/Leninism was – opposed to the Catholic Church from the get-go: the Catholic position is that there is a Reality, created by God, which human beings through their power of Reason (informed by Revelation) can reliably access: thus, humans can reliably (if not perfectly or completely) access Reality.

A Reality grounded not in human perception, but in God.

A Reality that reliably includes the nature and purpose of human beings, the ultimate meaning of their existence and the general Shape of being-human, boundaried but thus also focused.

Such a Vision was gall and wormwood to Marx as it is to MacK, since it leaves no ‘room’ to philosophically justify their agenda. (This is in no way a totalizing approval of capitalism or of theocracy, but simply a vital and utterly essential and basic aspect of the problem which Marx and MacK seek to merely sweep off the table as an element to be considered.)

MacK’s idea is that “gender hierarchy” actually distorts knowledge of whatever is ‘real’ and literally creates a false reality (p.ix). Therefore nothing that has previously been considered as ‘real’ (let alone Real) really is real, it is all thoroughly contaminated, and everything is up for grabs.

 Imagine, if you will, what such a corrosive idea will do if liberally poured onto the foundations – allowed to flood around, over, and under the foundations – of an entire culture and polity. This is what she’s going for (as Marx was going for) and it was clear not only from 1989 but from 1971 (when, she says, she first put together this book’s chapter on Marxism and radical feminism).

Did nobody in the Beltway care to give a thought to consequences? No. I would say that the Dems  and the Beltway entered into their pact with Marx and MacK and all their pomps and works with as much unthinking, delirious self-congratulation as the assorted State governments of the Confederacy as they seceded and envisioned the quick and easy winning of their war and the ushering in of their idea of the millennium, improving upon the Framing Vision at whatever cost it might take.

They imagined it would cost very little. It was to them as well as the people of the North that Lincoln admitted in his Second Inaugural that everybody had thought to expect “an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding”.**** And, for the Confederacy, catastrophic.  

She will look at the respective claims of Marxism and radical-feminism. (MacK considers radical feminism to be the only feminism; I shall refer to radical-feminism henceforth as R-feminism, to distinguish it from the ‘liberal’ and moderate feminisms which she helped kick to the curb.)

“Whatever its limitations”, she blithely says (p.ix), Marxism “confronts organized social dominance”.

Further, Marxism “identifies social forces which systematically shape social imperatives and seeks to explain human freedom both within and against history” (p.ix).

You have to wonder: did she give no thought to how Marxism actually wound up playing out? How perhaps it had to play out, in the further refinements of Lenin and Stalin and Mao? Mao, in the 1960s, was considered by the American far Left as the great liberator, whose Cultural Revolution – since revealed as a bloody and broad and deep wrecking of Chinese culture – was the clear sign that such a Way was the quick and easy high-road to ‘change’ and ‘progress’.

His 'example' particularly ensnared American leftists and Progressives – who had always harbored deep down an elitism of its elites against the unwashed and ignorant masses who wallowed in benighted ‘false consciousness’ and actually “just didn’t get it” and would have to be herded like sheep and stampeded like cattle toward the Great Good they were too weak and ignorant to embrace on their own.

But she – and she wasn’t alone among far Leftists in this country in those days – must have figured that there would be a way to import this plague bacillus and yet ‘baptize’ it with good intentions and make it work without ill-consequence here.

Or else she knew exactly what she was doing and said What the hell?

And the Beltway backed her to the hilt.

Marxism and R-feminism are alike in that they both have the good intention (let’s hope) of looking at a “social order” with an eye to “change” (p.ix).

And they are “theories of consciousness” before they are theories of change. In other words – sort of like religious belief – you have to “get it” before it all makes sense.

But how she can assert that Marx’s concept of “human freedom” (despite his admittedly good intentions) is valuable is beyond me. He reduced such human freedom to merely the material dimension, and the economic dimension, shearing off at a blithe but ruthless stroke any Higher dimension to human existence, and with it any Higher Purpose or Meaning.

She does the same, comparing R-feminism’s “explanation for the subjection of women” with Marxism’s “explanation for the exploitation of the working-class” (p.x).

This blithe assertion contains two huge assumptions.

First, the assumption that the economic exploitation of the working-class is accurately comparable to the “subjection of women”. Where the economic dynamics of capitalism were widely recognized as depriving the workers of a sufficient economic share of the wealth created, R-feminism’s theory of that “subjection of women” is a far more comprehensive and yet also immaterial, perhaps invisible and perhaps undemonstrable, claim. You almost have to “get it” before you can be sure you can see it … and even then …

Second, the assumption that the “subjection of women” as envisioned and asserted by R-feminism, is actually as easily attributable to some deliberate and determined “patriarchy” as the exploitation of the workers was clearly attributable to inequities in the distribution of the wealth created by the Industrial Revolution and capitalism.

While I don’t deny it as a theory or a hypothesis, yet there are surely alternatives and they are hardly minor possibilities. For one thing, it is equally possible that human civilizations – much like the builders of the Great Wall of China or Hadrian’s Wall – have from the beginning of human history built their social arrangements in some useful conformity with immovable physical realities.

Such as the quite probable evolutionary reality that since human beings are born so weak and require so long a time to reach even basic physiological and neurological maturity, the maternal human (i.e. the mother, a female by Nature’s decree) would be provided as a matter of evolutionary principle with the instincts and core-wiring to oversee that long developmental stretch. So that while the male is ‘gifted’ by Evolution with the urge to propagate, the female is gifted by Evolution with the urge to nurture; and the male is also gifted with the ability (and, it would be nice to say morally, the responsibility) to provide the material sustenance and protection during that long developmental stretch.

I am not here insisting that the Evolution-hypothesis is absolutely demonstrable, but it certainly qualifies as an alternative worthy of deliberation. (But of course, no such ‘deliberation’ was allowed and any such thoughts were, neatly, merely dismissed as “backlash” – not that Evolution seems to have gotten the Memo.)

The Evolution-hypothesis also gives some credit to prior millennia of human beings, who otherwise are hypothesized as being deliberately and mulishly engaged in or enthralled to some “patriarchal” conspiracy that has apparently existed since the beginning of recorded human history.

And that bit instantly raises rather difficult Questions.

How, for instance, did ‘males’ manage to effect this take-over in the beginning? How did they sustain it? If the plan was widely disapproved by half the species, how did it continue for so long (right up until the heroic cadres of America in the 20^th century suddenly discovered it)? If the female half of the species did not sense that they were utterly oppressed and denied of some right, then what are We to make of that? If they did realize it, then what is it about them that enabled this thing not only to get started but to go on for so long (right up until the vanguard-cadres of R-feminism in the 20^th century A.D.)?

We are induced to simply presume that the “oppression” has existed from the beginning of all time and must now be overthrown, just as Marx insisted that his materialistic reduction of all human meaning and fulfillment to the economic and material Plane of Existence simply be accepted as an irrefutable and fundamentally real given.

That is a huge given. And a huge give-away.

Of course, it is only when you have accepted a certain “consciousness” that you can simply accept the(huge and unproven) assumptions and gallop on from there, in the sure and certain ‘knowledge’ that your efforts to overturn the “dominant” and current “social hegemony” (p.x) are Right and Good and Real.

MacK is sure and certain that R-feminism had from the beginning presumed that it would have a theory of Gender as Marxism had a theory of Class (p.x).

But she establishes her cutting-edge creds not simply by taking Marx and substituting Gender for Class and ‘women’ for ‘proletariat’, but by insisting that Marx had not gone far enough.

So she has sought to “create such a theory by distilling feminist practice”, a theory that “could stand on its own” (p.x) and – nicely – perhaps blunt any objections that R-feminist theory simply took over Marx and made a couple of substitutions and then sought – alas successfully – to seduce the desperate Dems to buy what is basically Marxist analysis and put the resources of the American government at the disposal of the agenda to use that analysis and theory to attack American culture and society root and branch.

Did nobody see this in the Beltway? On the Hill? In the White House? Did the media not do any reading?

She quotes liberal thinker Sheldon Wolin that there are “epic theories” which claim to establish immutable basic principles in political life and then there are “scientific theories” that actually try to establish the facts of society and politics and effect changes here and there as much as they can.

Wolin, and MacK, humbly refuse to make “epic” assertions of principle.

But how establish “scientifically” the basic realities and facts of cultural, social, and political arrangements – especially if you plan to overthrow them from the get-go?

But that brings you right back to the queasy reality, even in MacK’s theory, that you have to “get it” before you can “see it”. And yet once you do “get it” then you “know it”, and even Know it with a capital-K since what your newly-raised consciousness is going to give you is nothing less than a reality (not just an opinion or viewpoint but a reality) that has been hidden from the beginning of time. It almost sounds like MacK has also done reading in St. Paul and John the Evangelist. And the Book of the Apocalypse.

And she surely has managed to resurrect the ancient concept of Gnosis, the special and secret knowledge that only the Elect know and that gives them the Key to all fulfillment and to how It All Works. How do you know the Elect? Only the Elect know the Elect and if you just don’t get it then you’re clearly not one of the Elect and you are hell-fodder so shut-up.

Such marvelous progress.

You hear echoes of MacK in the later John Rawls, as he tries to defend or cover the incoherencies in his own liberal-friendly theory of “justice” (first published, by the by, in 1972), by insisting that grand theories that explain everything (such as Christianity’s or any organized religion’s) with their unprovable assumptions should not be permitted to play a role in public deliberation and discourse since they are matters of belief; whereas his own – and MacK’s – theory does not indulge in unprovable assumptions but rather merely works with the ‘reality’ that “any reasonable person” could see.

Yah.

Marx fails, MacK asserts, because until she came along R-feminism “had no account of male power as an ordered yet deranged whole” (p.xi). Neat! But her assertions are more properly classifiable as a ‘theory’ or ‘hypothesis’ and most surely not as an “account”. The latter implies that it is an accurate and more or less complete explanation of something; the former indicates that it is one possibility open for examination and deliberation and analysis and testing. Which former is not at all what MacK or any other agents of R-feminism have ever allowed. (After all, why should they? Most people “just don’t get it” and any doubts or objections are only “backlash” anyway so what’s the point?)

We are still left with the Question of whether there even is such a thing as an entrenched and millennia-old “male power”, working in every known civilization and great culture in recorded history, imposed for reasons of pure macho greed and aggressive, assertive “dominance” upon females. And that has been deliberately structured merely to “oppress women”; a sort of millennia-long and world-wide Crime Against Humanity, or at least against half of Humanity.

That’s not a small Question.

Nor is it merely an academic or quibbling Question. On the basis of an asserted and assumed Answer to it, the US government has embarked on a truly world-historical assault on not only one half of its Citizenry but on the entire Culture and Ground of American society and its (putatively democratic) polity.

And now that the Consequences inherent in such incoherent presumptions and assumptions are now coming home to roost, this is no small Question at all. (And let Us pass over in silence for the moment the next Question: how any government on the planet – especially the government of a democratic and Constitutional Republic – could dare to abet it. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao tried it – among a pandemonium of lesser totalitarian demons – but this R-feminist 'success' has happened in the America of the past forty Biblical years. And was presented as cutting-edge reform and a Good and Great Idea. What are they going to think of Us, in future – and not too distant – generations?)

The state, MacK asserts, “participates in the sexual politics of male dominance by encapsulating and enforcing it in law” (p.x).

And now We get to where the rubber (so to speak) is going to meet the road. Law professor MacK is going to make her mark by leading the enlightened assault on American law. And perhaps now We get a better inkling of why the Constitution doesn’t seem to be working so well recently, either in ensuring fairness (you can’t, after all, have fairness in a system that is rotten to begin with) or in keeping the government itself within bounds (if any ‘reader’ can interpret the Constitution as a literary text however s/he wants, then why can’t the President?).

So she is going to “create a jurisprudence of change” (p.xiv). Which means that the Law will now serve the Revolution … and neither Lenin nor Stalin nor Mao could have put it more succinctly. In fact, now that R-feminism has so thoroughly infected the Beltway and the government, it could find no objection, or grounds to make an objection, to Mussolini’s world-historically pithy formulation:  “Nothing against the State, nothing outside the State, nothing above the State”. (Funny how the conceptual night moves. And who can say that History doesn’t have a sense of humor?) For if

the State has now become the bearer of the Great (and Gnostic) Wisdom, then there can be no opposition to such a Good Thing. This is a fatal error for a democracy and for a Constitutional Republic.

Then (p.xv) MacK goes pre-emptive. Against some, even among feminists, who ask how if we are the only ones who “know”, can we possibly “talk to” anybody else in this democracy? – MacK answers blithely and dismissively that “just because some people don’t like or fear what you have to say doesn’t make your argument wrong or impossible or untrue”.

 

Which is so, as far as it goes. But the fact that other people disagree with your ideas, perhaps profoundly, doesn’t make your ideas right, either. Except to adolescents, who somehow console themselves with the conclusion that if the grown-ups don’t agree with what they’re doing, then the kids must be right. Because, of course, grown-ups only exist to ruin your day and – not to put too fine a point on it – oppress you.

And which doesn’t answer the rather valid question she herself chose to ‘answer’. And clearly indicates that she’s not looking to talk to other people at all, but merely shut them up so she can make her point, which – she is sure and certain – is ‘reality’ and so those who “just don’t get it” don’t need to be talked-to anyway. Or at least, they should be talked-to, but don’t need to be talked-with.

Is it any wonder that democratic politics seem to have somehow collapsed, to be replaced with some nasty, irrational and childish something-else?

And anyway, she goes on (p.xv), Immanuel Kant’s whole approach of constructing universal principles (you know, like the ones that the Framing Vision and the Constitution are based on) is useless and wrong because it takes “real particulars” but then erects them into a “false universal”. Meaning that if anybody disagrees with you on principles, then all you have to do is wave them away with the assertion that there are no principles anymore and it’s all a matter of who can get the political clout to capture the “social hegemony” (which maybe you shouldn’t say in so many words – at least not til the Revolution is complete – but that’s what you can tell yourself – and then walk out and go have yourself a nice glass of a good Chardonnay with your sister-cadres who “get it”).

Kant is not “engaged” (shades of the ‘60s!) and R-feminists are “engaged” – meaning that they don’t approach a subject in the old masculine, abstractifying, detached way, but instead approach it with their deep inner feelings, which only others who “get it” can also feel. In other words, as the old ditty goes: “Here’s to all who wish us well, and all the rest can go to hell”. That “rest” meaning most of the Citizenry – and We wonder why the sense of “common-weal” is gone now.

But this ‘stance’ can hardly be the only one; even for an individual seeking to accurately understand an issue. This ‘engaged’ stance requires one to remain rather stubbornly and monomaniacally focused only on the problem and more specifically, focused only on the problem as one sees it and further presuming that the way one sees it is a) sufficiently accurate and b) the only way to see it. (One is reminded of the declaration (with its subtext of ominous threat and warning) that accompanied Nazi newsreels describing Hitler’s ‘successes’: Mehr als dieses braucht ihr nicht zu wissen!: More than this you don’t need to know!) Modern politics, influenced direly by this entire approach, also includes the cartoonish ‘logic’ that if you do not remain thus focused, then you must be a deliberate supporter of the problem yourself.

Rather, in order to get a fuller comprehension of a problem, you absolutely must also stand – at least for purposes of accurate analysis – outside the Problem. Once clear of its hot atmosphere, you can get a clearer picture of other factors (and their possible consequences); that is to say, you gain a clearer, larger, and fuller perspective. But this is precisely what R-feminist ‘engagement’ slyly forbids: to do anything that might weaken your burning emotional involvement is to betray the cause. Which, then, is precisely the great psychological and epistemological danger facing all ‘revolutionaries’: they purchase their emotionally vital attachment at the price of any fuller and more accurate comprehension of what faces them. They thus run the awful risks of taking ill-informed actions – which, of course, revolutionary theory would insist is not important because ‘revolutionary ardor’ will see them through regardless of the wisdom or whackulence of their actions. Hitler, as things began to go south in Russia, did precisely this, dismissing the Prussian Halder and taking on the Party-friendly Zeitzler as chief of staff: in the face of intensifying bad news, Hitler told Halder that “what is needed now is National-Socialist ardor” and not Halder’s frumpy insistence on facts and military realities.

I also note that when this approach – already well established in the Beltway and the national politics by 2001 – was deployed by Bush-Cheney (from the Right) in the analysis of intelligence during the run-up to the decision to invade Iraq, with lethal consequences. And if one wished to make the case that Bush-Cheney had decided to invade Iraq even before 9/11, then I would say that this simply demonstrates my point even further: the Objective you have decided on is all that matter, ‘facts don’t matter’ (that crapulent and hoary R-feminist mantra), and your zeal and willpower will force history and reality to conform to your dampdreams. Thus baaaad ideas migrate in the Beltway, to the undoing of all.

The R-feminist ‘knower’ is “inside” the problem; she is “situated” within it – that’s the hallmark of R-feminist “knowing” (p.xvi). In other words, I know what I feel, and what I feel is more right than whatever you think, and so I don’t have to listen to you or talk about it – nyah nyah.

My God.

And the Beltway bought it hook, line and sinker.

American politics as a bad 1970s family sitcom. This is the real dynamic around Carol Gilligan’s Breakfast Table. And it is no basis for a system of mature, adult, democratic government. As should be increasingly obvious.

But perhaps it’s too late for all that now.

Well, that was the Preface. There’s more – stay tuned.

 And start thinking.

NOTES

*My edition is the hard-cover edition published by Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-89645-9.

**See my Post on “Justice Brennan” here.

***In this regard, I remind you of Confederate General Pat Cleburne’s instant observation when informed, in the early months of 1865, that the desperate government in Richmond was going to allow ‘Negroes’ to enlist in the rapidly-dwindling army: “If the Negro can make a good soldier, then our whole theory of slavery has been wrong from the beginning”. Funny how the night moves.

****The text of that Address, here , is well worth a re-reading, imagining, as I have said, Ourselves in the position of the Confederate rather than the Union side.

SAUL ALINSKY’S RULES 3

I continue this look at Saul Alinsky’s 1972 book “Rules for Radicals” that – I believe – has exerted and continues to exert a substantial and deforming influence on national politics.

His second chapter is entitled “Means and Ends”.

His first move is to assert that there can never be any general consideration of the classic question “Does the end justify the means?” (p.24) Such a question (I’d call it a Question – it’s that important because of what it’s dealing with) is, he says, “meaningless as it stands”. Rather, he says, “the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, ‘Does this particular end justify this particular means?’” (p.24)

This is in keeping with the Flattened Marxist vision that there is no Higher Law. BUT then it also follows the Marxist-Leninist trajectory: it winds up making ‘the Revolution’ the Higher Law. Because if a dedicated revolutionary organizer is going to be looking at whether a particular end justifies a particular means, then the Revolution is the ultimate criterion. Does this means further the Revolution or not? And if the contemplated act furthers the Revolution (and that ‘furthers’ is no doubt widely defined) then it’s OK. And more: if it furthers the Revolution, then NOT to do it is a treason to the Revolution (and, of course, to “the masses” on whose behalf the Revolution is being carried out, allegedly, in the first place).

And to introduce this into any politics, but especially into a democratic deliberative politics, is going to have monstrously negative consequences. And I think that can be seen now, in a way that during the 1960s and 1970s might not have been so obvious, given the bright heat-haze of ‘reform’ and ‘change’ and ‘changing the status quo’ that blurred the vision of so many back then. By the 1980s and subsequently, I think, Alinsky’s actual prescriptions were formally forgotten, but only because they had become so thoroughly imbibed by the elites that they existed as ‘common knowledge’ that they ‘just knew’ because ‘everybody knows that’.

‘Reasons of state’ had always been a lethal threat to ethics in civic affairs, at least since the days of Machiavelli, who essentially warned – being a ‘realist’ – that any leader who took ‘the high road’ to governance and diplomacy was going to be beaten by any opponent who was willing to take ‘the low road’. If you took the ‘high road’ and held yourself to standards of action that could be judged ‘virtuous’ by ‘God’ or any such Higher Judge, then you were going to get taken to the cleaners; therefore the most ‘realistic’ course of action was to get down low … and, optimally, to get down lowest and get there first. Just to make sure.

The Christian vision of life had always been that humans are simultaneously possessed of a spiritual capacity (localized in the ‘soul’) to follow God’s and Christ’s teaching, but then also of a tendency not only to incompleteness and lack of perfection in developing and exercising that capacity, but an actual tendency to act against God’s ways (which, in the Christian vision, would also be to act against one’s own best and most genuine self and its possibilities).

Thus in the Christian vision, ‘Ideals’ were very ‘realistic’, because sin was as real as soul and humans needed to compensate for that tendency – like the captain of a ship that had a flaw when it came from the builder’s yard.

But Machiavelli took the position that while this might work for individuals, yet in matters of governing principalities or the nascent nation-states, the stakes were simply too high; Ideals were something that princes and leaders could not afford, since – even if they themselves were virtuous – the humans they were dealing with, other princes and leaders, might well choose this occasion to take a short-cut in order to win by doing something ‘un-virtuous’ (or, as the Victorian diplomats might say, ‘ungentlemanly’).

So at least in the matter of statecraft a prince couldn’t afford to be idealistic and virtuous. It was a sad situation, Machiavelli felt, and not one that he liked, but that was the way things were and if you as a prince were to ignore the possibility of another prince’s lack of ‘virtue’ in the conduct of Great Affairs wasn’t going to do you or your people any good – and would probably get a lot of them, and possibly yourself, killed.

Now it’s no coincidence that the growing realm of ‘business’ – the way of ‘merchants’ – was already working on that assumption in Machiavelli’s time (and has only increased since then). You weren’t going to make a lot of money if you were a ‘nice’ guy; in matters financial, you had to be ‘sharp’ in all senses of the word.

You might say that Machiavelli was simply trying to apply to princes what had already been established as a Modus Operandi among the merchant class. The figure of the Prince in Machiavelli’s time was still encased in the Medieval idea that the King or Sovereign was not just a human exercising a job or office, but was the Anointed of God who would live the most perfect Christian life, thus being not only ruler politically but also spiritual exemplar to his people.

Things, Machiavelli saw, were getting wayyyy too complicated for such old-fashioned pieties. His ‘modern’ Prince had to be much more a fox and a wolf than a sheep, even an Anointed sheep.

So this falling-off from ‘virtue’ flowed from a falling-off from any sense of there being a reliable Higher Law that would enforce itself reliably on all ‘players’. Since it was clear that in this world God apparently let a lot of tares grow up with the wheat, then you couldn’t rely on Him as a quick and decisive Referee who would instantly throw a flag or blow the whistle if somebody decided to take a short-cut in order to score.

Rather than old-fashioned ‘virtue’, Machiavelli wanted the Prince to display ‘virtu’, an Italian word that Machiavelli conceived in the sense of ‘manliness’, the ‘courage’ to go beyond old-fashioned virtue and really get things done.

And so it has become.

You might consider it as a race-to-the-bottom, that Machiavelli broke down a wall that in Medieval Christendom had been put in place to instill in human leaders the sense of doing-the-right-thing that would simultaneously i) assure the integrity of the individual leader, ii) give good example to his (or her, if a queen or such) people, and iii) compensate for the very real fact that Jesus apparently meant what He said when He mentioned the wheat being allowed to grow up with the tares until the Harvest.

In the absence of any sense of a reliably efficacious Higher Law that could and would referee the great human game up close and personal and immediately, princes, merchants, and after a while individual folks themselves began to move away from any working respect for a Higher Law. Nobody since then has been free from this dynamic.

Marx – familiar with the government of one of the last Anointed Princes, the Russian Czar – and seeing how traditional ethics and religion seemed not only unable to prevent the Industrial Age’s truly monstrous use of human beings but actually were deployed to justify it all, pretty much decided that Higher Law and Higher Things were at the very least of no help to the struggling masses and, at most, were illusions of a particularly lethal kind.

The hell with ethics and religion, he said (for all practical purposes).

And getting rid of Things Higher, he then sought to fill the vacuum with Something Earthly, but Something so tremendously well-intentioned and so genuinely concerned to achieve such a Great and Good Thing (the liberation of the masses and the achievement of the workers’ paradise, say for example) that it be its own justification, and would not need to look up or down or across in human existence for its validation.

But Marx was a theorist. He spent a lot of time in libraries and wrote books.

Lenin was a man of action and intended to put Marx’s theories to work. And to succeed in that great task. And he was therefore willing and considered himself justified in moving any earthly furniture that needed to be re-arranged (or gotten rid of) in order to build what had to be built. Alas, in the vision of the Revolution as Lenin conceived it, individual flesh-and-blood human beings were as much furniture as the wooden kind was.

Alinsky learned a lot from studying Marx and realized how bloody Lenin could be.

After reading him, it seems to me that he that he thought he could take the Vision of Marx and the Technique of Lenin and ‘baptize’ them by removing the physical violence and Terror and simply turning the dynamics of revolutionary-organizing loose in American politics.

But too much remained: the Flatness of the world that Marx reduced to the material plane and to economics; the never-ending suspicion of others who had ‘more’ material goods than you did; and the awful alone-ness of human beings as individuals and groups: if you were hard put to make it through life when the Haves were keeping you down, how much more so when there was no other Help except whatever you could accomplish on your own?

“The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms – he has no other problem”. (p.24) Meaning he need not trouble himself about any ‘problem’ with Things Higher. For Alinsky, ‘real men’ – you might say – didn’t let themselves be obstructed by Things Higher; they were ‘realistic’.

But then, is it an accurate reflection of the reality of the human being that the human being is a thing of only one dimension? Is it an accurate reflection of this human existence and the world it creates that is mono-dimensional? Surely if THAT assumption is inaccurate, then ‘realism’ goes out the window; the approach would be hugely not-realistic from the get-go.

“To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles”. (p.24) This is a cutesy way of embracing Machiavelli: since you can’t rely on Virtue to be embraced by everybody, then you’re a fool to allow yourself to be hemmed in by considerations of Virtue. Since you can’t rely on everybody taking the high road, then you’re a fool to weaken your chances by not taking that short-cut along the low-road. Since you can’t rely on everybody believing in Higher Things to the extent that they will follow the Higher Way, then maybe there is no Higher Way for any practical purposes in this life.

And if there is no Higher Anything for any practical purposes, then why waste time and energy believing in any Higher Anything at all?

It could be countered, from a Christian viewpoint at least, that such a conclusion is highly impractical and unrealistic: if Christ was right, then human beings are very much involved with Higher Things – and a Higher Person – and have a Higher dimension themselves. And therefore Christ’s ‘practicality’ was far more acute – ruthless, indeed – since it took into consideration all of the dynamic realities of the human being, and not just the ones that appeared to the naked eye. Christ too could suggest that Things Are Not What They Seem To Be.

But it has been the destiny of humans, and not just in the Modern West, to have to come to grips with all the Tares among the Wheat. And so the Tares have actually had a rather large – if negative –influence on the shape of human history and on the shape of human behaviors. And behaviors shape the self.

And here We are.

“The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.” (pp.24-5)

He’s right about that corrupt and bloody aspect of life. Although he concludes that since there is so much blood and corruption, then that’s all there is to life. And to being human. And if you want to accept that vision as ‘total’ then you’ve condemned yourself to a Hobbesian darkness, flame-stabbed and blood-red.

And yes, kids so demonstrate that craftiness that all humans are born with – although it takes, say, a genuine spiritual up-bringing to educate that craftiness into decency and respect for others. The more kids lack that in the family, the less the culture of their society reinforces it, then the more kids will simply join the ranks of the spiritually and humanly un-evolved, and their behaviors as they go through life will continue the cycle of darkness.

And if you fear corruption, does that mean that you must embrace it? Is that going to do you or “life” any good?

Alinsky considers himself a realist for facing the frak. I think it’s called ‘embracing the suck’ as American troops now say on their frontier duties in the Greater Southwest Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But you can see now, I think, what happens to troops who spend long amounts of time under the pressure of bloody events, when they simply ‘embrace’ all that: they become that.

And so will American politics as it descends into a divisive and sempiternal ‘war’ of Haves and Have-Nots. And so it has come about.

“Action” is what you do to achieve “mass salvation”; any concerns for “personal salvation” is merely selfish. (p.25) So, it appears, anybody concerned for their personal salvation is merely “selfish”. There is more than a hint here of the ominous ‘morality’ urged upon dedicated members of, say, the SS: that you must abandon personal qualms (derived from a Christian up-bringing, but even also from a natural human moral sense, one that not only shrinks from acts of great violence against others, but also from the violent consequences of that action to one’s own self).

“The men who pile up heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends – which with rare exception is conspicuous for its sterility – rarely write about their own experiences in the perpetual struggle of life and change.” (p.25) Might as well burn their books, no? And since they themselves, having left the writing desk and ‘gone outside’ may engage in some failures in their own ideals, then they are nothing more than frauds: THIS is a juvenile take, adolescent in its oversimplification, on the admittedly dark complexities of conducting a human life.

In that regard, I can’t help recalling an episode of the TV series “House, M.D.” : House has discovered that his friend and colleague Dr. Wilson, whose character is always the balanced and ‘professional’ foil to House’s impetuous behavior, has been sleeping in a consensual relationship with a female patient. At the end of the episode Wilson’s character says to House: “Just because you can’t always live up to them, it doesn’t mean that ideals don’t exist”. (Or words to that effect; I’m working from memory here.) **

But that’s not for Alinsky. And I respect that he’s sensitive to a lot of blood and corruption, and that a lot of it exists out there. But I’m not sure his solution or response is the way to go. In 1900 American forces found themselves faced with the Philippine Insurrection: the U.S. had liberated Cuba by seeking and winning a war against the decrepit Spanish Empire; as part of the treaty that ended hostilities Spain’s Pacific possession, the Philippines, was ‘purchased’ by the U.S. for some millions of dollars; the Filipinos had imagined that the American troops that had been sent to those islands at the outbreak of hostilities were there to ‘liberate’ them just as Cuba had been liberated; Washington had no such intentions, very much needing a foothold in the Pacific for its navy and for expanding the markets to China (the Depression of 1893 had terrified Washington into realizing how much the U.S. had to find markets for all the goods it could produce); the Filipinos realized that they were not being liberated but rather being taken-over or occupied; being the underdogs and not possessing a modern army, they fought ‘jungle-style’; the Americans decided that since they weren’t fighting a ‘civilized’ opponent then they had to fight in an uncivilized way themselves. It was a nasty affair all around.***

And this is how Alinsky imagine life should always proceed? That if you are faced with barbarity (let alone asking why you are faced with it) then ‘real men’ go and get barbarous themselves. Where will THAT end?

He continues against those who think and write about “ethics of means and ends”: “They are strangers, moreover, to the burdens and problems of operational responsibility and the unceasing pressure for immediate decisions. They are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately, and with reason, draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land”. (p.25)

By this point, Alinsky (like Lenin before him) has given so much away to the darknesses of human existence that he can’t imagine how any responsible man of action could in good conscience (so to speak) legitimately neglect ‘the low road’. (And does any of this sound familiar from the days of Bush-Cheney and the run-up to the Iraq War?). He draws an almost cartoonish pair of alternatives: you can either be some bloodless philosopher in an ivory tower or you can go out and do whatever it takes to accomplish some good in the world. Again with the adolescent oversimplification.

But that’s what American politics has become now, no?

He uses the curious image from the realm of ship-command: those cartoon-philosophers are like people who study navigational charts on land (in other words, without actually being faced with the frightening challenges of sailing a ship at sea, perhaps on a dark and stormy night, responsible for the lives of crew and passengers). But precisely there I ask if the at-sea image is apt to stand-in for conducting a deliberative democratic politics: it is precisely in a democratic deliberative politics that everybody concerned comes together and deliberates, and communicates to elected representatives who are themselves maturely deliberating.

And if you say, with some accuracy, that that’s not how American politics ‘really works’, then things go back to the question about how much Alinsky and Identity Politics have contributed to a debasement of American politics.

In the face of the perennial human failure to live up fully to its Ideals and potentials, Alinsky (and many before him) says that Ideals and potentials are therefore fraudulent and illusory and everybody should just forget about them and get down to getting as dirty as they have to.

After a while, everybody is going to be so deformed by getting dirty on that low-road that the entire polity becomes a pig-pen, it seems to me. And with some mighty feral pigs.

Alinsky thinks that the “means-and-ends moralists” are, in the final analysis, merely “allies of the Haves”, whether they know it or not, whether they want to be or not. (p.25) I think that he’s right that once you’ve got a bit of financial security (a university tenure, say) then you may very well lose touch with the needs of the economic Have-Nots.

But to go and assert that therefore the whole Ideals-and-ethics thing has to be thrown-away and everybody head for the low-road … I can’t see that as being a mature or an ultimately beneficial or a genuinely ‘realistic’ approach. Nor, for that matter, an approach suitable to genuine adults (as opposed to the cartoon figures of ‘real men’ that so many of the elites, including apparently Alinsky, hide behind).

He even goes as far as to quote the respected Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain: “the fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue”. Like his quotations of Lincoln and the Book of Job, you have to ask yourself why so dedicated a this-worldly revolutionary even bothers, but there it is.

He’s quoting Maritain’s 1951 “Man and the State”. Just before the bit that Alinsky quotes, Maritain enumerates all the ways that modern governments take what Alinsky would call the low-road (and the list, from 1951, is sobering reading for anybody familiar with American foreign policy in the last decade). They are among the many ways, says Maritain, that “… the pessimists of Machiavellianism turn to the advantage of political amorality”****

So Alinsky, heir of Machiavelli through Marx and Lenin (although he wants to put both that Italian and the two Russians and himself in the service of ‘the masses’), quotes just the snippet from a noted Catholic philosopher who is precisely rejecting Machiavelli and the tradition that has flowed (downhill) from him.

The Catholic position, especially in Thomas Aquinas, (which is the position against which Machiavelli developed his thought) is that the supernatural realm and its virtues are not only Higher than the natural realm (human life and history and events) BUT rather that the supernatural realm ACTUALLY INTERACTS WITH the natural realm, ‘informing’ it and thereby shaping it.

THIS, you can see, is a hugely dynamic and dramatic element of existence, and if it’s true then Alinsky and Company’s take on what is ‘real’ is hugely inadequate, insufficient, and precisely unreal.

If the Higher Realm is in continuous dynamic interaction with the Human Realm (if I can call this [lace of existence by that name for ease of reference) then there is huge cause (Cause, you might say) for Hope, and a motivation for continuing to pursue what I have been calling ideals and the Ideal. Because the Higher Realm Beyond the Human Realm is continuously working (though beyond the radar of the merely physical senses) to bring Humanity closer or ‘higher’ to its genuine potentials.

Marx and Lenin and Alinsky and countless others couldn’t see that the Higher Realm was having much good effect; and I don’t for a moment deny the oceans of suffering caused by all the afflictions that bethump the Have-Nots. Nor do I dismiss any of them for what sensitivity they genuinely and accurately felt for the Have-Nots.

But they came to the conclusion that the pain and suffering in this world comes from somewhere other than human-nature itself. And the pain and suffering don’t come from ‘somewhere else’: they come from the actions of human-beings who are not acting up to their genuine potential as Images of God.

Consider a fire in a wooden chemical factory: you are faced with several different Classes of fire (wood, chemicals, electrical, and quite possibly flammable fuels). So you can’t just throw water on it (it won’t work on the electrical and the fuel and it may actually intensify the chemicals); you can’t just throw sand on it (impractical); and any specific foam will work on some but perhaps not on others of the burning materials).

Marx wanted to reduce all human suffering to one Class of ‘fire’, the Greed of the Haves. But Greed is, and not without reason, only one of what used to be called the ‘capital sins’*****And you don’t have to have a lot of money to give yourself over – even partially – to one or another form of sin.

Marx rightly noted that in an Industrial Capitalism, there are concentrations of wealth that leave many – most – excluded from even a minimal subsistence level. And that has to be a constant concern of governments in capitalist countries.

But the United States is also a democratic capitalism; it is not (yet) the awesomely rigid combination of Industrial Wealth and Aristocratic Authority that faced Marx and Lenin in the form of the late-19th century and early 20th-century Russian imperial polity. (And, as I’ve been saying, if this country IS beginning to resemble that, it is due in no small part to the Identity Politics which Alinsky’s well-intentioned ‘war’ approach helped foist upon the country – because after 40 years of it, Wealth has concentrated more than ever before and everyone else is left behind.)

And in the vision of Thomas Aquinas, the politician, like the princes and kings of yore, must be a bonus vir, a human being well-grounded in both the natural and the supernatural virtues. It takes a Citizenry who are themselves sufficiently familiar with all those virtues to recognize them in a candidate and elect him/her.

This may all sound like gobbledy-gook to Americans raised in the culture that has morphed since all of this was tossed overboard. But if this vision had remained the Ideal toward which the polity was heading (and you can’t impose this by government fiat) then perhaps the country would be in better shape – and Shape – than it is now.

Maritain is trying to say that you cannot retreat into some ‘personal’ search for salvation, abandoning your fellow human beings to their fate. But he isn’t simply speaking about their economic fate; he is speaking from the comprehensive Vision of a multi-dimensioned, multi-planed Reality that includes that Higher Realm. The human aspects of Spirit and Mind require as much care as the Body; the three are not separate, but neither can you just go and declare the Body and the material plane to be the only ‘real’ one and call everything else ‘illusion’.

Which is the mistake or gambit that Marx and Lenin and Alinsky took.

Alinsky is upset that for those types of humans who worry about ethics “their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced from the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not to men”. (p.26) But what many ethicists are trying to do is not to divorce ethics from politics but to re-establish that ethics must judge politics. And THAT is precisely what Alinsky has surrendered: it is useless to try to tame or judge politics (or politicians).

Rather, he wants to fight fire with fire: if the Haves have exerted the pressure of Wealth to get Power, then the Have-Nots must exert pressure to wrest that Power for themselves. And if the Haves have been low-down, immoral, and ruthless, then the Have-Nots … you can see that the Have-Nots are not going to remain virtuous for very long, if they were to begin with.

But, to Alinsky, if you don’t have a self-interested stake in an issue, then you’re not going to be interested, or at least you’re not going to be interested enough to make anything change. He doesn’t imagine that many people (even in a democracy) are mature and generous enough to take an interest in the common-weal and in the needs of others. And rather than consciousness-raise THAT problem, he’ll simply call the whole common-weal thing a fraudulent and sleazy illusion and organize specific groups to get in touch with their own issues and their own rage and then go into the ‘pressure’ business.

This is a recipe for something other than a functioning, mature, deliberative democracy in which the majority of Citizens seek – as best they may – the commonweal. Which may to some extent explain how We now have less of one than We did before he wrote his book.

That was his First Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends: “One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue”.

His Second Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is “the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment”. (p.26) Which means that one man’s progress is another man’s decay. He uses an ominous example: if you chose to join the French Resistance, then you accepted the necessity for “assassination, terror, property destruction, the bombing of tunnels and trains, kidnapping, and the willingness to sacrifice innocent hostages” for the purpose of defeating the Nazis.

But does he imagine then that in a democratic polity the Have-Nots are as tyrannically and brutally governed as the French were by the Nazis? Does he mean to replace the Citizenry engaged in a politics of the common-weal with some self-chosen Resistance fighters who consider everybody else either Nazi Haves or traitorous collaborators? Is THIS vision going to work in a democratic polity? You’ve got at least 35 years worth of American politics from which to draw your conclusions.

And of course, this whole approach presumes that Haves are irrevocably and totally opposed to Have-Nots so that therefore Have-Nots must remain irrevocably and totally opposed to Haves. There can be no compromise and there can be no sufficient ‘change’ effected by democratic political process; only by the politics of pressure, which requires both permanent ‘rage’ and permanent ‘war’.

He then uses the example of the Declaration of Independence: to Americans a declaration of rights, to the British Crown a declaration of war, deceitful in its selfish and self-serving omission of all the benefits the colonies had derived from the Motherland. (p.27) So, he sees, the colonists saw it one way and the Crown another.

But then he notes that Jefferson and Franklin “were honorable men” but knew exactly what they were doing, what they HAD to do, in order to create space for America: they had to take the low-road and manipulatively and selectively craft a document NOT bound by Truth or Integrity but rather effectively shaped for the purpose of defusing objections, attracting support for their objective, and generally ‘spinning’ their actions as a Good Thing. As “a declaration of war”, Alinsky says, the Declaration had to be what it was and is. (p.28)

It’s a shrewd analysis – too shrewd and darkling for textbook histories or popular historians. Which is a pity – because it would offer students early in their lives (preparing to take up their role as Citizens in a deliberative democratic-republic polity) the opportunity to see just how much ‘sin’ or ‘muck’ in involved in Our own history. It would be a good lesson in a certain sober humility. If there ever was an example of how any great action involves some amount of sin or muck, this would be it.

But in the vision of Aquinas, at least the dynamic interaction of the Higher and the Human Realms (meaning the Human seeking to be open to the inspirations of the Higher) would be possible. That is not the case in Alinsky’s world, where the continuing trafficking of the Have-Nots along the ‘low road’ must go on forever. Generating an equally ‘low road’ response from the Haves, of course. And the beat will go on. And the polity and people will stagger on. Until the whole show collapses from the political incoherence caused by its own internal ‘war’ or is taken over by some more coherent and confident polity.

His Third Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is that “in war the end justifies almost any means”. (p.29) I’ve discussed this already in the previous Posts on Alinsky: this is not a good thing, and surely not for introduction into a democratic – and civilian – polity. I can sense here an opening toward a militarization of the citizens, and from the Left. After 35 or more years of ‘wars’ reaching into the most private and personal sites of social and familial life, who could really object to a war or two overseas? After decades where the media had mostly fed a happy-face mush about ‘progress’ and ‘change’, who could have imagined any longer that ‘war’ was a bad thing and that it could – usually did – have baaaad outcomes?

He uses the example of Lincoln suspending the right of Habeas Corpus in the Civil War. But that was during THE CIVIL WAR, not during the normal course of events. And it is in Alinsky’s vision precisely during the ‘normal course of events’ that America must be at war – the Have-Nots against the Haves. Always with the extreme examples is Alinsky, but this I think stems from the fact that Alinsky’s world is a world ‘in extremis’, always on the verge of the most awful trouble.

The day-to-day conducting of the affairs of a democratic polity – ‘peacetime’ as you might say – is not where he comfortably dwells. He must be about Great Things and small-stuff is merely a sign of small-souled, small-minded, small-visioned folk. But this is no recipe for conducting a polity – or a human life. Not even a ship captain seeks purposely to keep his ship in the middle of the nearest available storm; he can pursue his course in less risky ways, and not be considered a coward or shirker for doing so; a certain amount of fear is healthy in the face of the awesome dangers of a great storm at sea … or in the face of a polity constantly at war with itself.

His Fourth Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is that “judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point”. (p.30) He uses the example of Sam Adams, a leading fomenter of revolution in Boston town, who was faced with the shocking deathbed statement by one of those townsmen shot by the British guards in the Boston Massacre, to the effect that the townsmen really had started the thing and the guards had merely fired in self-defense.

What could Adams do in such a situation? He had to deride the dying man, one Patrick Carr, as “an Irish papist” (and, most folks at the time would have presumed, a drunk). Was it ethical? No. Did it help bring about the United States? Yes.

And from that what lesson should be drawn? That you can do unethical things if there’s a chance that they might bring about a larger good? (Nobody at the time knew for sure that the United States was going to come about.)

“In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue.” (p.31) But what is a virtue then? If you can are only guided by the fact that you want to wrest Power from the Haves, is that enough of a virtue to see you through life as an individual? Is it enough for a country to guide and Shape itself?

The Fifth Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is “that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa”. (p.32) Which means that if you only have one Means available, if “you lack the luxury of choice” among Means, then that’s the one you’ve got to use. And you can’t go confusing and obstructing yourself by wondering if it’s going to be ethical.

Luxury is something for Haves. If you’re a Have-Not you have to make do. But it’s too easy, I’d say, for humans to decide that they only have one choice. As is said famously about the Pentagon, it always sees nails since it has a hammer within easy reach. Why try anything that will require more exertion? Hitler didn’t think he had a choice. The German generals at the outset of World War 1 didn’t think they had a choice: faced with the prospect of war on two fronts, they had no choice but to invade innocent countries like Belgium – and use Terror against the civilian population liberally – in order to get the job done in the West quickly enough to turn and face the Russian threat to the East. And, come to think of it, the American military in the Philippines in 1900 didn’t see itself as having a choice either: barbarity had to be faced with barbarity (negotiating with the Filipino freedom-fighters/insurgents – depending on your point of view – wasn’t an option, apparently).

The Sixth Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is “that the less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means”. (p.34) Meaning that in order to avoid ethical stuff, you really have to have a verrrry important concern. But who doesn’t? Who can’t convince him/herself that THIS concern of mine/ours is Important? (Nowhere that I’ve found does the Alinsky-ite organizer have to spend a lot of time cooling down the folks s/he has whipped up.)

The Seventh Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is “that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics”. (p.34) Meaning that the history is written by the victors. As Hitler said to his generals, in regard to the upcoming Holocaust: “Who remembers the Armenians today?” And had he won the war, the world might have forgotten the Armenian massacres that foreshadowed the Nazi genocide. For that matter, what school-children in the United States today are taught to think of the Philippine Insurrection as anything but a bunch of jungle terrorists who fought the progress and benefits brought by American civilization and occupation? For that matter, can Alinsky pass any judgment on that sad and dark chapter? Perhaps, had he been there, he might have helped organize the Filipinos but he wasn’t there so he doesn’t want to judge. Or perhaps the Filipinos were the Haves (they lived there, after all) and the Americans were the Have-Nots (they were strangers in a strange land).

He asserts that “there can be no such thing as a successful traitor, because if he succeeds he becomes a founding father”. (p.34) Meaning that had America lost its Revolution, the men now known as the Founders would be known as mere traitors to the British Crown. But that would only be in the judgment of a history written by the victors. And what they were really, in essence, would still be – quite possibly – dedicated men who had a dream of human liberty. Had the North lost the Civil War and Lincoln still assassinated, his writings still mark him as one of the most impressive Presidents the country ever had the luck to elect, even though the War had been lost and the Confederacy, now a separate nation, would have been churning out its own official judgment of him in its own history books.

The Eighth Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is “that the morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at the time of imminent defeat or imminent victory”. (p.34)

But his own historical example, and his treatment of it, stuns. If America had had the atomic bomb shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, Americans would have used it and who could say that it wasn’t a good idea? Since there was a great deal of objection at the higher levels of government even when it the Bomb was deployed in 1944, I’m not sure that he is correct. In 1942 the frenzy of the American people might indeed have approved its use – although I doubt they could have imagined its effect – but ‘frenzy’ is no sure guide to ethical behavior.

And he confuses here the actual ethical quality of an act and ethical judgment about it on the part of ‘history’. If Things Are Not What They Seem, then who can be sure about the judgments of ‘history’, especially when those judgments are made by the victors?

Had the Bomb been available in 1942 “the question of the ethics of the use of the bomb would never have arisen at that time”. (p.35) Since the ethics of fire-bombing were discussed through-out the campaigns of the war in Europe – and probably cost Sir Arthur Harris, the robust proponent of such bombing, further honors after the war – then I’m not sure this is an accurate surmise. And the Bomb (atomic) caused even more stunning damage then the massed dropping of conventional bombs.

But he then asserts that “those who disagree with this assertion have no memory [he’s writing in 1971] of the state of the world at that time … they are either fools or liars or both”. (p.35) Once again, the old revolutionary betrays a markedly violent impatience with those who don’t agree. And again, this is not the mark of a mature democratic politics.

The Ninth Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is “that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical”. (p.35) Perhaps. But again, it’s not first a matter of what the opposition thinks, it’s a matter of what the persons contemplating the use of that means decide: it is, to use an old concept, their souls and their integrity as human beings that is at stake, and whatever consequences accrue as a result of their deploying that means will accrue to them (in – as they used to say – this life and the Next).

Alinsky seems more concerned to convince adherents or potential adherents (and indeed, this is a book aimed at ‘organizers’ who will work in the Alinsky mode) that they can expect this sort of thing as a rhetorical response to whatever change they are trying to effect.

But there’s more to ethics than rhetoric. IF you accept a Higher Realm, or even simply a dimension of integrity as a member of the human community within each human being.

The Tenth Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is “that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments”. (p.36) Can you imagine what it does to a human being, let alone a politician in a democratic polity, to take THIS bit of advice to heart? Morality, itself no more than an illusory fantasy, can be used to contribute to the fact that Things Are Not What They Appear To Be.

For ‘advocates’ in the assorted realms of Identity Politics, this recommendation must have struck an attractive note indeed. And The People would be confronted with a ‘change’ that other Citizens, ostensibly dedicated to the common-weal and possessed of a respect for their fellow Citizens, assured everybody was ‘moral’. When in fact such ‘advocates’ might know very well that it was not; or that it was indeed something very much Other Than What They Made It Appear To Be.

No wonder American politics have become so illusory and seem to be a hall of mirrors.

He uses as one of his examples Lenin, who in the early stages of his return to Russia to foment the what would be the October Revolution (he led his revolution NOT against the Czar, who had already abdicated in the Spring, but against the government of Kerensky, working for the people), ordered his Bolsheviks not to mention violence since they were outnumbered by other Russian factions. Rather, as Alinsky himself paraphrases Lenin, “Since our opponents have more guns that we do, then we shall be for peaceful change and the ballot. When we have guns, then it shall be through the bullet.”

Stunningly, Alinsky ends the paragraph: “And it was.”

This is an example of a decent way to proceed? And organizers and ‘advocates’ (as they are known in the era of Identity Politics)are sent forth into a democratic polity with THIS example shining before them?

He goes on about Gandhi at some length, to the effect, among other things, that Gandhi would never have succeeded under the Nazi Reich or any similar regime, because he would have been shot forthwith at the first squeak about ‘resistance’ of any sort, passive or otherwise. But it says a lot for democracy that he would not be shot. Yet this is the type of polity that Alinsky sees as merely ripe for his Technique of eternal ‘war’.

The Eleventh Rule of the Ethics of Means and Ends is “that goals must be phrased in general terms like ‘Liberty, Equality Fraternity’” or some other catchy and inspiring phrase. (p.45) Again, such profound duplicity and dishonesty, deployed against Citizens by Citizens, and in the name of a common-weal that the deploying Citizens think is illusory in the first place … THIS is a lethal treachery to infuse into a democratic polity. And the fact that after decades of it the Haves are in a hugely increased position of Power has to be one of the most serious consequences of his vision. And the fact that American politics are so queasily deranged now, devoid of any substantive maturity or objectivity or intelligent and mature deliberation … this must be taken into urgent and grave account.

Well, that’s Alinsky and his chapter on the Rules of the Ethics of Means and Ends.

I can’t urge you enough to consider for yourself, to contemplate, what effects they have had on where We are today, and to the extent that Americans still cling to them – knowingly or not, where We are headed tomorrow.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

**And curiously, I have the impression that something very much like this inflames elite and Correct attitudes (so deeply imbued with Alinsky whether they know it or not) against the Catholic Church and, more conveniently, against its priests.

***I can’t help thinking that the Beltway cry of the day might have been: Anybody can go to Cuba – real men go to the Philippines.

****Maritain, Jacques. “Man and the State”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1951. Page 62.

*****Pride, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth being the others in the stable.