MICHAEL TOMASKY’S TAKE


It can come as no surprise that the Dems’ commentariat is at work trying to deal with the upcoming election.

Michael Tomasky is editor of the magazine “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas” and is – ummmm – not known for his conservative or Republican leanings.

He’s got a piece in ‘The New York Review of Books’: “The Elections: How Bad for the Democrats?”*

“How did things get this bad for Obama?” he asks, after rehearsing the sobering election possibilities. He ticks off a passel of procedural, historical and statistical responses.

But he has a marvelous way of saying something without actually revealing anything that might actually create enough of a blast to penetrate the Fog of Events. So, for example, discussing some areas where Dems had picked up some seats from the Republicans in 2006 and 2008, he ho-hums that “some of these areas were changing enough demographically to make Democratic candidates more credible” and quickly moves along.

The question as to just How Indeed the Dems have been trying to fiddle with ‘demographics’ for the past 40 years, including lots more immigration by folks who wouldn’t be expected to have any larger a grasp of democratic politics than remembering which Party was their patron … doesn’t seem to engage Tomasky’s attention. Indeed, he even manages to be upbeat while remaining stunningly bland: there are “more Latino voters in the Southwest (even Texas might be a Democratic state by the 2020s)”. Just HOW that came to be, he’d rather not say.

But having ticked off all of the challenges facing the Dems this time around, and noting that admittedly things have come to a disturbing pass, he continues with an impressive and suitably objective poker-face: “Among Democrats and liberals there is, as usual, little consensus about how matters reached this point”.

How indeed. Dems would have to come up with a story that would a) acknowledge the mess without b) suggesting, implying, inferring, or otherwise in any way admitting that anything the Dems did or have been doing might have made any conceivable contribution to the wrack and wreck.

And THAT would not be an easy task at all, given the historical realities of policy and politics here for quite some time.

Obama was too liberal, not liberal enough, too bipartisan or not bipartisan enough, or didn’t try to “set the terms of the debate early enough”.

This last is a useful point: the whole idea of American politics – which may not yet have made it into the civics textbooks – is that pols no longer get together, face a problem, and then come up with a Party response, both of which are then argued until with luck and perseverance both sides can hammer out a workable policy that both sides can live with AND that does the common-weal some palpable good.

Instead – and for quite some time now – the scam has been to get your own ‘story’, complete with the innocently-mentioned assumptions, gently phrased, that are mentioned shyly at the outset, inviting the unsuspecting and politically incompetent voter to agree … and once that agreement is given to the ‘framing’ of the problem, then the Dems’ already-determined course of action appears to the hapless voter as exactly the right thing to do and the sooner the better.

This is the sort of thing that doesn’t happen – or didn’t until recently – in court or around a table of scholarly inquiry. In those venues, no matter who got their ‘story’ told first, both sides would be carefully heard and then deliberately and with care things would be sorted out through skeptical, objective, detached questioning and thinking.

But around the breakfast table, kids are dumb enough to think that whoever can get to Mommy or Daddy (or Today’s Adult Presence in the House) and blurt out the desired spin is going to ‘win’. You’d think that politics for adults would have proceeded beyond the scams and plot-lets of the breakfast table, but actually – in the service of pandering to their ‘demographics’ – the Dems pretty much regressed to trying to pass off the Breakfast-Table Follies as the very essence of cutting-edge liberal thought. And in so doing, regressed the country as well.

Anyhoo, Tomasky is not your average commentariat-zoo bear (or doesn’t want you to think so, at least) so he has his own answer to how things got this way. (Hint: if you are expecting him to admit that the Dems took a huge and lethal risk with their Erect-Many-Identities-Quickly-and-Forcefeed-Them strategy of the late 1960s, then don’t pop that champagne cork yet, nor sacrifice the family dove in thanks unto the gods for the long-awaited triumph of truth.)

The problem, he says, “goes back to the Reagan years” (though he doesn’t actually blame Reagan here) and the manner of it is on this wise: Republicans speak constantly of Liberty and other Big-Thought themes, while Dems speak of small-thought topics such as specific programs and policies and they “steer clear of big themes”.

I do believe the gentleman is on to something here, although I can’t quite imagine he intends to sacrifice himself by jumping on the grenade and preserving the life of Truth. On the postmodern political battlefield, nobody jumps on no grenades for nobody else; or as Rick put it effortlessly while watching yet another customer being dragged out of his joint by Captain Reynaud’s police: “I stick my neck out for nobody”.

Well, so Tomasky has this grenade and he’s pulled the pin: now what?

“There is a reason for this: Republican themes, like ‘liberty’, are popular, while Republican policies often are not … Democratic themes (community, compassion, justice) are less popular, while many specific Democratic programs – Social Security, Medicare … have majority support”.

If you have never taken a moment to marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind, yet also simultaneously at the deviousness of the human spirit, now would be a perfectly appropriate time to do so.

For forty Biblical years the Dems have been avoiding the ‘big themes’ that have always proven of vital and essential importance to Americans because those same Dems had embraced a whole bunch of demographics who A) very much intended to ‘reform’ the outmoded and oppressive aforesaid ‘big themes’ while B) those same demographics also intended to wage civic-war across many axes (the whole gist of Identity Politics) in order to conduct a revolutionary politics-of-suspicion against anyone who had the nerve to disagree with them or even question them. For quite some time now, in these parts, the Dems have been slyly avoiding big-theme talk because their demographics didn’t and don’t want The People being reminded of just what vital items were beginning to disappear from the national stage.

Democrats were advised by their handlers to talk-up the small ‘reforms’ that were actually the thin-ends of the huge revolutionary wedge by which the newly-minted demographics (actually gimlet-eyed, fever-swamped revolutionaries hoping to whack History in the chops and make it turn off meekly to be herded in a different direction) were going to flip the whole American thing over on its back, chop it up, and give it away to … whatever. And the Democratic programs have ‘support’ because they are the ones that pass out money like it was going out of style (which, by the oddest coincidence, it now is).

Postmodern ‘thought’, you may recall, does not admit of the possibility of any Big Picture or Big Ideas anyway. Better that the sheeple be kept in their pens until they’re needed as extras when it’s time to film the stampede scene.

The whole Citizenry is now broken up into myriad little ‘interest groups’ based on Identity (race, gender, disability, ethnicity, weight, height, age, religious preference, sexual preference, sexual self-identity, and so on and so forth and call-me-when-you’re-done).

But human beings being what they are, the Big Themes speak deeply and irresistibly to them. As has always been true of the species. At least until the gimlet-eyed fever-swampers were suddenly given security-clearances and invited into the all the best venues inside the Beltway, courtesy of the eager-to-pander Dems.

You are asking for a Mad Hatter’s hat if you really try to claim that when a human being speaks for a need for belief and ideals, and for some amount of tradition and order, that human being is merely and willfully and obstinately being a ‘backlasher’ (while avoiding the devastating admission that destroying beliefs, ideals, traditions, and order is pretty much the Prime Directive of your game-plan).

But the Dems and their demographics have been running that game-plan for 40 years, or at least since the 1972 Convention, and it’s too late for them to claim that they haven’t.

Their plan, I expect, was to imagine that instead of coming up with a defensible plan based on reasonable assumptions, they’d simply sneak in a bunch of changes that would include their truly extraordinary (as the Brits might politely say) plans and objectives, squelch any public discussion or any negative consequences, and in a while people – like some sort of lower-order mammal – would eventually ‘get used to it’ and consider it all ‘normal’.

Ironically, the feministically-fervored Dems adopted the strategy of the female praying-mantis: after it is over (the act of … you know), she cuts off the head of the critter she has enticed to her. The Citizenry were lulled and seduced by the drugs of optimistic and euphemistic language specifically pitched to make it sound like all the ‘changes’ were just tinkering that was going to make the old Constitution run more smoothly. So move along, folks, and be hapski – nothin’ to see here.

But the bottom fell out of the plan before all the people who still remembered how it used to be had shuffled off this mortal coil. Stalin didn’t make this mistake: as soon as he could, he not only killed all the anti-communists he could get his hands on, but he also killed all the COMMUNISTS who didn’t agree with his version of the Revolution.

The Dems – alas – did not have Stalin’s options; and while I don’t think their demographics would have minded, yet you couldn’t just go an shoot or send to Siberia the majority of Citizens in the country.

So the Dems passed out money in one form or another and just substituted checks and entitlements for public discussion and deliberation. And then quickly claimed that they had lots and lots of support.

“What Democrats have typically not done well since Reagan’s time is connect their policies to their larger beliefs. In fact they have usually tried to hide those beliefs, or change the conversation when the subject arose.”

We are apparently to get the impression that this was merely an oversight. Although an oversight lasting for so very long (30 years) in a matter so vital that the Dems may lose their hold on Congress because of it.

I don’t think so. The Dems haven’t connected their specific policies to larger beliefs for four decades for two very solid reasons. First, the policies themselves were hugely dubious and questionable and the Dems (advised by Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”) didn’t dare open up to public discussion their programme of pandering to the newly-erected Identities.

This was a comprehensive policy requirement. Because what the Dems had taken upon themselves was to essentially terraform American society rapidly, widely, and deeply in response to the varied demands of the several Identities.

And, in point of fact, this was NOT a matter of public comment on a particular policy or two; rather, this was a government-embraced revolution, whereby so much would be changed so profoundly so quickly that the vast body of the Citizenry would be overwhelmed. At which point, so long as public discussion was continuously prevented – distracted, diverted, deranged, or baffled – then it would only be a matter of time before folks would, like lower mammals, simply ‘get used to’ the new state of affairs and take it for granted as ‘the new normal’. (One of the first warning signs that this plan was going to come a cropper was Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that invented a Constitutional basis for abortion pretty much on demand: as the years passed after 1973, with the exception of abortion when the mother’s life was directly and lethally threatened, the public steadfastly refused to accommodate itself to the policy.)

The second reason was that the Dems could not permit ANY reference to ‘belief’ in public. The entire panoply of policies to be imposed at the behest of the assorted Identities required that such patriarchal and oppressive ‘abstractions’ as Reason, Tradition, Common-Sense, Order, Virtue, Character, God, be rigorously denied any place in public discourse.

In 1965 one thinker, Herbert Marcuse,who as a young man had had up-close and personal experience of Goebbels’s manipulative wizardry in the area of propaganda, had published a book insisting that there were ideas that simply could not be allowed into public discourse and that were legitimately to be barred from public discussion. He had been thinking about some of the most outré Nazi ideas, but his general formulation well-served the needs of the American revolutionary cadres of the Identities.

It served them so well because revolution was precisely what they were about, although they would sheeps-clothe that reality, with the Dems assistance and under Alinsky’s guidance, in far less threatening terms, spinning this, that, and the other imposition as mere ‘change’, ‘reform’, or a bit of sensitive and responsive ‘tweaking’. Even when, by the 1990s, so-called ‘governance feminism’ was supporting Domestic Violence and Sex Offense Registration regimes that deployed precisely some of the most ominous elements of totalitarian police-state practice, the public was stampeded by the ‘emergency’ into accepting laws that were passed without even being read by legislators. (And after 9-11, the Patriot Act would be passed in precisely the same way.)

And in pitch-perfect imitation of Leninist ‘vanguard elite’ praxis, the Dems and their budding Beltway elites accepted the axiom that since ‘the majority’ were not in possession of the secret knowledge of the Revolution (and therefore the majority ‘just didn’t get it’) then there was absolutely no use in wasting time discussing the revolutionary agenda with them. The (Soviet) Party would impose its revolutionary changes through the efforts of its vanguard-elite cadres; the job of everybody else was merely to ‘get used to it’ and accept it.

Under the cumulative load of all this, the Dems could not, dared not, and did not allow themselves to be drawn into substantive public discussion of their beliefs.

What were they going to say? ‘Hi, we’re the Democrats and we believe that half this population are violent rapists by nature and we want to get rid of family and marriage; we want to make sex a crime as far as is humanly or inhumanly possible; we want to get rid of all the smelly, macho industrial stuff and turn the entire country into a combination of a PBS TV set and a computer corporation’s office park campus; and we want to bring in as many non-white, non-male, and otherwise non-American folks we can get our hands on in order to dilute any possible electoral opposition to this plan by folks who remember what the country was like before we decided we had to change it if we wanted to stay in business as a political Party. We believe you can kill the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs and still enjoy the Egg supply; we believe you can keep 300 million people sufficiently employed in a knowledge-and-service economy even though the knowledge sector requires huge government financial support and the service sector will pay peanuts; we believe that effort and feeling good about yourself is just as effective for keeping a country solvent and productive as any old stuff about actually achieving results or producing products that are marketable; and overall we believe that human nature is totally plastic, that human beings are totally autonomous, and that there are no consequences that Americans can’t get out of through optimism and hope.”

You can see why what Tomasky is trying to soft-sell as a minor oversight HAD to be a rock-solid and nonnegotiable element in the Dems’ entire political stance.

It wasn’t a shy modesty or bashful diffidence that kept the Dems from talking about their beliefs. It was the sleazy, queasy, and calculated awareness that they were in the process of pulling off a huge scam – I would call it a treachery – and their only hope for success was to keep the people from finding out until, through the introduction of a regressive and immature politics, The People would cease to exist as a competent, efficacious entity and the elites could govern the civic cattle ‘in the open’.

Feh, frak, and phooey.

So the Tea-Party Movement is “well-financed”? The right wing is getting ready to claim the Dems are pushing nothing but “socialism”? So what? These gambits are miniscule compared to the jaw-dropping chutzpah of the Dems’ overall revolutionary game.

More accurately, Tomasky does dare to include the charge that the Republicans are going to “paint the President, his ideas and policies, and his supporters as not merely un-American but actively anti-American.” [italics Tomasky’s]

A little more courageous than the average bear, but still – as perhaps must be the case – sleazy. None of the ideas that are costing the Dems hugely are Obama’s. The man is a junior-varsity player elevated to NFL rank because to the still-pony-tailed the idea of a ‘black’ president would be a final ‘victory’ for a misguided life-long vision that they had been pursuing like a pillar of swamp-gas in the night.

I couldn’t care less about his color, but his competence is hugely insufficient for the lethally complex challenge at hand, which is itself the result of 40 years of Beltway frakkery, first by the Dems and then bipartisanly embraced. If he brings some decency and honesty to his job, and I believe he does, that will hardly be enough to stanch the feculent flow generated by the entire upper 3/4s of the sitting political and bureaucratic classes inside the Beltway, let alone the advocates, lobbyists, experts, and other elites.

And the Beltway media now swim like infected koi in a cesspool all their own.

You or your enabled Identities call the Constitution “deficient” and “oppressive”; adopt Marxist and/or Leninist thinkers upon whose advice you will deploy ‘war politics’ and ‘war ethics’ that were developed precisely to overthrow a sitting government; trumpet that ‘revolution’ is a good thing and many revolutions all at once are even better; openly abet civic-war and the fracturing of the Citizenry in gender wars, age-wars, wars for victims’ vengeance, and call it all ‘good’; reduce a deliberative, democratic politics to the shallow, shrill, childish and primitive politics of Stampede and Emergency, of ‘rage’ and ‘vengeance’ … you do ALL of this and more, and you cawn’t think why anybody would consider you not simply un-American but anti-American?

My God.

But to establish his creds as a detached, objective and sage observer, Tomasky then intones with an almost British understatement: “I believe the Democrats’ hesitance to tie their programs to larger beliefs has been demoralizing to liberals and confusing or off-putting to independents. The impression is left with voters that Republicans are fighting for the country, while Democrats are fighting for their special interests.”

YA THINK? YA FREAKIN’ THINK?

Not that I have any confidence in the Republicans’ politics: the wrack and wreck of American politics has undermined them as grossly as it has the Dems.

But here is Tomasky trying very hard to give the impression that what folks rather accurately have perceived (it appears that those who ‘just don’t get it’ actually ‘get’ a lot more than the elites ever wanted or expected them to – who knew?) is, when you come right down to it, a mistaken impression.

But I will say that Tomasky has precisely limned what the Citizenry has already figured out and that the Citizenry has figured out precisely what the Dems have been up to for the past 40 Biblical years.

I say again: this is not me making a shrill charge in a blog; this is Tomasky, accredited Dem insider, saying it. All I’m doing here is pointing out that what he is trying to spin as a mistaken-impression on the part of the Citizenry, I am asserting to be a rather largely accurate impression that the Citizenry has formed after decades of first-hand observation and quiet deliberation.

And No, I don’t believe the Republicans as a Party are “fighting for the country”. I don’t think any person so conceived and so dedicated could make it in either Party’s politics nowadays.

BUT anybody who is trying to somehow restore some dynamic connection to the genuine Vision and Principles of the Framers, and who is actually committed to what used to be called ‘the common weal’ (abolished by Identity Politics) … THAT person is somebody I’d like to vote for.

Tomasky has the nerve to whine that – alas – the Congress that will convene next January will have lost “the last remaining links to the Senate’s better days” … he refers to Teddy Kennedy; he of ‘The Dream’ – Anaheim or Orlando on the Potomac, Fantasy rather than Vision, Appearance over Reality, Feeling over Substance. In 1961, JFK intoned “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country . By 1971 when Teddy needed to ingratiate himself with any available electoral takers in order to climb out of the Chappaquiddick death-pit he had dug, he supported the thorough inversion of his older brother’s civic philosophy. And since then the politics of the country and certainly of the Democratic Party were set on a dark and fetid road … and, like Teddy himself, never looked back.

And they have striven mightily to ensure that We never looked back either. Focus on ‘the Dream’, dear cattle, and forget Reality – your government has.

Tomasky is right about one thing: if the Republicans as presently constituted get enough seats, there will be yet another ‘impeachment’ soap-opera.

But what else is there left to do? Speak the truth about national policy in front of all those who ‘just don’t get it’?

Anti-American indeed.

NOTES

*Issue dated October 28, 2010. Pp. 6- 10.

HERBERT MARCUSE AND NOW

I want to follow-up on my last Post with a look at Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 article “The Repressive Society”. The text – and it’s a worthwhile if lengthy (22 pages) read – is here.


I’m simply going to proceed down through the text and make comments and tie Marcuse in with the developments I think he very much helped (intentionally in some ways, unintentionally in others) fuel over the past 45 years that have led to Our present situation. As always, when I do this sort of thing, I will quote in full the passage I am commenting about, so that you don’t need to be flipping back and forth between the Post and Marcuse’s linked text.

Enough of the housekeeping chores and let’s get to it.

In the immediately previous Post I was discussing George Lakoff’s tactical exhortation to the liberal-progressive-Dems (the lib-progs and the Dems are for all practical purposes identical here) that they should play the Morality-Card against the Republicans.

Specifically, I had said: “Which is precisely why he makes sure to lecture that against their opponents the Dems must not ‘list their arguments and argue against them using their language. It just activates their arguments in the brains of listeners’. Which is the essence of Political Correctness: you cannot allow discussion of what you are trying to supplant; and the Revolution must control what the public talks and thinks about (though there can never be allowed any actual ‘deliberation’). Anything that does not support the Revolution must be erased from public consciousness, or delegitimized by incessant public manipulation; Correct cartoons can seem like wisdom if no objections or doubt are allowed. That’s Lenin 101 or Goebbels’s Introductory Course.”

It then struck me that this remarkably un-American (perhaps anti-American; see below) tactic of preventing anybody who disagrees with you from receiving a public hearing had to come from somewhere. And while I had mentioned Lenin and Goebbels it struck me that there must also be some source nearer in time to American’s Era of the Identities (and their Revolutions). And Marcuse came to me.

He is writing in 1965 here, just as MLK’s first phase of the Civil Rights Movement came to fruition - alas, to be soon overwhelmed and replaced both by the Black Power-separatist second phase and also by the government’s 1966-ish embrace of ‘good’ racism through what would come to be known as Affirmative Action. And, you recall, that second phase of the Civil Rights ‘revolution’ was quickly mimicked by follow-on ‘revolutions’, especially by the radical-feminists who had imbibed not only Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist theory and praxis but also Mao’s Long-March and Cultural Revolution ideas; and all that on top of their choosing to use the Jim Crow paradigm of the first phase of the black civil rights movement in order to further their own envisioned revolution and of their choosing to add French Deconstructionism into their mix.

Whew.

Marcuse himself had left Nazi Germany in 1933 and come to America. Born in 1898, he was already an adult as the Weimar Republic struggled for footing, overwhelmed eventually by the wrack and ruin of successive financial crises (it had survived its first economic crisis by 1926, but couldn’t overcome the consequences of the Depression of 1929, especially with Hitler making hay of that whole mess).

So he had first-hand knowledge of a Conservative society and culture of the Industrial Age (Wilhelmine Germany) that was then rapidly morphed into a Republic which was then undermined by a dictatorship that used the formal processes of democracy to gain the willing support of many desperation-addled citizens. I think that what piqued Marcuse was the experience of watching democratic processes result – through some dark magic – in a frakkulent dictatorship, and with the willing support of a majority of citizens. Yet, he also saw how Wealth – especially when concentrated in the great Industries – ‘survived’ the fall of the Republic nicely enough, and quickly made its lucrative accommodations with the Third Reich.

When he came to the United States and as this country left the well-mapped waters of the 1950s and proceeded full-steam into the uncharted depths of the second half of the1960s, his own thoughts came to Us in this article, trailing clouds of his own formative political experiences.

And it shows. As I intend to demonstrate in the comments below.

In his article he wished to examine “the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society” (he is speaking of the America he knew in 1965). He gives Us, in the very first paragraph, the conclusion that he has reached: “that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed”. [Italics mine]

What he is going for here is that in order to prevent bad ideas and policies from retaining a choke-hold on society, you must be intolerant of them – even if they are held by the most established elements of society and even if they are supported by a majority of the Citizens – and then you must be tolerant precisely of all the ideas and opinions which that Established Majority suppresses.

What I see here is the introduction (understandably enough in light of the work of Hitler that not only undermined Weimar but poured the Nazi dictatorship into the vacuum) of a dynamic whereby a society purposely represses what somebody judges as Established in favor of whatever opposes that Established vision.

And thus that you have to be INTOLERANT in the service of providing a “liberating” tolerance. Which starts to sound a hell of a lot like the Vietnam military thought (not yet expressed in 1965) that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it”. (And looking at America today, after 45 years of cumulative Revolutions, you have to ask yourself if indeed – in a hell-hot irony – that hasn’t happened HERE.)

Huge problems here as to how to make this idea work ‘on the ground’.

A society that purposely represses the open exchange of ideas has already taken a dangerous path, especially if it intends to remain a deliberative democracy (something the Germans never achieved, or ever really sought in Marcuse’s formative years).

And just WHO is going to have the authority to declare what is Established (and therefore must be suppressed) and what is anti-Establishment (and therefore should be given special preference of public notice)?

And is it ever wise to have a government – presuming that’s the Authority that can make the declarations – arbitrarily taking a position contrary to the majority sense of its Citizens? Especially if it’s a Constitutional, deliberative democratic Republic?

And is it ever wise for a government to take such a simplistic view of the political spectrum of its own polity: that what’s Established is therefore simply ‘bad’ and must be suppressed, and that what is ‘oppositional’ is therefore simply ‘good’ and must be heard …?

Perhaps a bit more thinking than the vote-desperate Dems were willing to do in the later 1960s.

And surely not something the Boomers needed to hear: if you ‘oppose’ the ‘Establishment’ then you are automatically right in whatever you say, think, or demand – so you must be listened to and anybody who disagrees with you must shut up or they will BE shut-up.

And once the Identities and their Revolutions decided to adopt the Leninist ‘vanguard elite’ approach to ‘politics’ (i.e. only the few cadres really ‘get it’ and nobody else is worth listening to anyway in the first place) then Marcuse’s ideas become fuel for a most unholy political conflagration.

Again, what happens to the civic competence of a Citizenry that is somehow manipulated – and by its own government – into simply accepting the content of public discourse as that discourse is controlled and manipulated by the government so that only the Politically Correct ideas, opinions and policies are given wide public exposure?

And what happens to the civic competence of students who are educated into this arrangement from the get-go?* And especially – what happens years down the road when those students are themselves chronologically-adult Citizens and are raising children of their own and sending them to college?

What passes for tolerance in current (1965) American society, therefore, is really, he says, “in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression”.

This introduces a certain lethal hall-of-mirrors effect in American political discourse: the appearance is not only different from the reality, but is actually completely opposed to the reality.

And this also adds a Marxist (though not necessarily inaccurate) twist: The appearance is different from the reality in ways that serve the Establishment and oppress everybody else. Nothing wrong here with a robust dose of Marxist suspicion of the Class Question and the abiding reality of Wealth seeking to engorge itself at the expense of Labor. But once you throw in Race (especially in its American post-1965 mutations), and then Gender, and Ethnicity, and Sexual Orientation, and Physical Ability or Disability, and so on and so forth, you wind up with a very volatile and not well-balanced brew. I don’t think it’s excessive to call the result a Witches’ Brew as classically defined.

But things might be ‘established’ merely because they are proven to work. And, correlatively, to dis-establish what is established, especially if you’re not sure what the result of such a (deconstructive) change might be, might well lead to more problems than you thought. Might even lead to lethal or even fatal problems, such that what previously worked no longer works, and what was imposed as a ‘change’ might not work at all. Compare the overall strength and competence of the nation in 1965 and today and let your mind range over the possibilities.

Marcuse admits that “at present [1965] no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice” but he believes that this is the task of intellectual: “to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does”.

He gets a tad fuzzy there at the end of the sentence, but I respect what he’s trying to suggest: that intellectuals need to help further this transgressive but liberating approach to looking at things.

Which was certainly a reasonable and proper vision of something that intellectuals might do for society. But then his ideas were taken into an already-toxic stream of Deconstruction and Revolutionary Method (imposition by elite cadres who ‘get it’ against the lumpen-citizenry who ‘just don’t get it’) that itself was fully supported, sustained, and abetted by the government itself. Oof. Oy.

Governments, he decides from looking around (from the vantage point of 1965), have gotten their peoples used to accepting as ‘normal’ and ‘good’ all manner of militaristic repression not only of neo-colonial peoples but of first-world citizenries as well. And that’s certainly true – although it doesn’t seem to have gotten any better in the past 45 years and may well have gotten worse.

“The people subjected to these governments are educated to sustain such practices as necessary for the preservation of the status quo”. Again, hardly untrue.

But I add here that “status quo” is a verrrrry tricky concept; you can’t simply take it – as the Boomers did as lustily as they did what they did in the park on endless, gauzy summer afternoons – as a general and totally-accurate phrase.

Let me toss in my Airline metaphor here. An airline – let’s call it TWA since it no longer exists – has complete control over what color the uniforms of the flight crew and the aircraft upholstery is going to be, and can change that color scheme at will; it can change that ‘status quo’. At a higher level of complexity, if the FAA agrees, the flight rules governing altitudes at which Westbound and Eastbound aircraft will fly can be changed; with enough careful thought and preparation, that change to the ‘status quo’ can be made. But when it comes to whether you can fly a jet aircraft or a propeller aircraft in reverse … THAT element of the ‘status quo’ can’t be changed by any human authority because the principles of powered flight simply won’t work if you try to change that ‘status quo’ at THAT level.

In the 1960s and subsequently, this was altogether too much thinking for the Boomer-fueled Revolutions and their demographic-addled political panderers.**

And in the past 45 years We have been saddled with – who knew? – the consequences: from the Left in matter cultural but also jurisprudential and regulatory and legislative; from the Right in matters of economics; and who can forget the Iraq War (recently declared ‘ended’ in as fine a rehash of Nixon’s ‘peace with honor’ and ‘We hereby declare victory and are going home’ speech as you could wish).

“This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested”. In other words, since the majority has been hoodwinked into accepting what is actually an oppressive dynamic and an oppressive reality, then (to use a later phrase) ‘they just don’t get it’ and not only can be but MUST BE opposed.

OK. Put that idea out there and see how it works over time. But THAT is precisely not the Revolutionary Method, and Marcuse winds up – as things worked out – cheer-leading or at least ‘justifying’ a Revolutionary elite’s end-run around democratic deliberation (since The People ‘just don’t get it, why listen to them in the first place?).

And I would add that the agendas did not ‘succeed’ as well as they have because they were truly innovative and ‘liberating’ ideas, but simply because the vote-addled Beltway decided that whatever their new demographic Identities wanted was what was going to happen regardless of what the Citizens – or The People – felt about it.

And now the Dems – and the Beltway – are stuck between a rock and a verrrry hard place and they “cawn’t think why” (to use Gilbert & Sullivan’s fine phrase).

“Tolerance towards that which is radically evil now appears as a good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence and more affluence”.

Marcuse’s deeply-embedded memories of the Third Reich certainly seem to find voice here: the Nazi regime can credibly and reasonably be described as ‘radically evil”. But translated into the America of 1965 … ? Jim Crow could certainly qualify as “evil” and persons raised according to its precepts truly morally deluded. But what of the ‘necessary enemies’ raised up by follow-on Revolutions that adopted the Civil-Rights Paradigm?

Were ‘mehhhnnnn’ radically evil? Did ‘patriarchy’ even exist as an equivalent of the Third Reich? (Yes, said Betty Freidan in 1963, and Alice Miller in 1983, declaring war at a stroke on Family, Men, Parental Authority, and just about anything else (which was ‘everything’) that ‘mehhhnnn’ had touched.)

And could any democratic government actually declare Deconstruction and Reconstruction of its entire polity in the same way that the Federal Government ruthlessly (but legitimately) stepped in to clean up Jim Crow, as it had up to 1965? Let alone after 1965?

In what now appears a hell-hot irony, Marcuse immediately continues with some examples: “The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces [new in 1965 as Vietnam was just beginning to heat up], the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception and merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence …”. He’s going after a whole lotta things here, striking at the heart of American infatuation not only with power but with the affluence of a consuming-society.

I would say that in the ensuing 45 years the adoption of his ideas served not to reduce any of this (maybe the aggressive-driving was for a time reduced) but rather to ramp it all up. So that now the Citizenry possesses even less civic competence than it did in 1965, and national policy – foreign and domestic – has surely been wrenched into frakkulently awful paths as the Beltway pandered BOTH to Deconstruction of the very fundaments of the American ethos and polity AND to the engorgement of Wealth (that ancient and clearly real predator upon the population).

He then nods to the potential dangers of his insight: “Within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game”.

But it’s a half-nod, and selective at that. “The exercise of political rights in a society of total administration, serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument of absolving servitude”.

Again, in his deeply-embedded personal template of the Third Reich (surely a society of “total administration”), the exercise of commonly-accepted political rights (voting, say, in Nazi-run elections after Hitler had consolidated his power) was merely a sham. Absolutely true.

BUT can he be credibly accepted when he describes American society – even in 1965 – as one of “total administration”? (Marvelously, the hyper-development of both the National Nanny regulatory State and the National Security protection-and-prevention State actually render his observation far more accurate now in 2010 than it ever was 45 years ago in 1965.)

Second, once his presumed template is accepted as it applies to America, then the exercise of political rights is completely undermined. And you can then see how a Revolutionary mindset would take increased comfort in its Deconstructive imposition of its agendas, since The People clearly ‘just don’t get it’ and their entire civic life is a sham (and, even worse, huge swaths of that People – as this or that Identity’s ‘necessary enemy’ – are themselves the ‘oppressors’ against whom the cadres must do ‘whatever it takes’). Oy.

Was the United States in 1965 (and not just the South’s pre-1965 Jim Crow regime) really the functional equivalent of the Third Reich from which Marcuse had wisely fled in 1933?

If not, then were the numerous Revolutions of the Identities, with their ‘necessary enemies’ and demanded Deconstructions and corrosively suspicious Identity Politics really justified? And were generations of Beltway pols justified in abetting such a comprehensive assault on the American polity?

“… [T]olerance as an end in itself is justified only when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as the ruled … [A]nd such universal tolerance is possible only when no real or alleged enemy requires in the national interest the education and training of people in military violence and destruction … [A]s long as these conditions do not prevail, the conditions of tolerance are ‘loaded’”.

Marcuse sets up an almost impossibly ideal condition here. When does any nation exist without “real or alleged” enemies? (Though clearly he is speaking here in terms of the Cold War and international rivalry and military expeditions.)

But once this idea is taken over by the Revolutions of the Identities – each with its own “real or alleged enemy” AMONG THE CITIZENRY ITSELF – then this becomes a recipe for no-tolerance-ever. Which, with Political Correctness, is precisely what We now see.

And not simply from the Left. Recall the monstrously queasy and truly alarming police gambit of the election of 2004 here: demonstrators were confined to ‘free speech zones’. I can only recall Lincoln’s huge irritation when, in reporting the victory at Gettysburg, General Meade telegraphed with a flourish that “the enemy is driven from our soil”: “When will my generals get it through their head”, Lincoln cried, “that the ENTIRE COUNTRY is our soil?” [caps mine] The entire country is a ‘free-speech zone’ – or should be, in the Constitutional Vision. But of course, that hasn’t been true for quite some time, either for reasons of ‘security’ or a Correct desire not to ‘offend’ by raising ‘issues’ when ‘you just don’t get it’.

Marcuse looks at John Stuart Mill – font of much of the classical Liberal worldview – and raises a meaty point: Mill “placed an important condition on tolerance: it was ‘to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties’”.

Biff! Pow!

This dredging up of one of Mill’s more careful strictures flies in the face of current American Correctness: NOBODY can say who is and who is not ‘mature’; and indeed ‘Maturity’ itself is a judgmental and thus oppressive concept (thus, in Revolutionary and Boomer style, it either doesn’t exist or doesn’t deserve to exist).

But, demonstrating robust creativity, the Correctness cadres can solve that: you are ‘mature’ only if you ‘get it’, and if not, not. The Revolution (for the cadres) or your youthiness (for the Boomers) is the axial criterion of ‘maturity’. Any other criterion – critical and skeptical thinking, competence to analyze and deliberate and discuss, postponement of gratification, the ability to tolerate dissonance and complexity while retaining one’s conceptual and emotional balance – is merely a tool of oppression and ignorance and serves only to extend the odious reign of that majority that ‘just doesn’t get it’. Ach!

But it gets worse. Marcuse continues quoting Mill: Before they are ‘mature’, “men may still be barbarians, and ‘despotism’ is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians”. So if ‘men’ (Mill would have meant ‘humans’ but nowadays you can never be sure, no?) are barbarians and therefore, of course, ‘just don’t get it’, then the only government they deserve is ‘despotism’. This would nowadays take the form not of Hitler’s Reich but rather the all-wise and ominipotently sensitive Mommy of Carol Gilligan’s breakfast table, dispensing an intuitive ‘justice’ to the squalling, frothy tykes around the table. As Pogo’s Albert the Alligator would pray: Gack!

Marcuse then heads into deeper water: “true and false solutions become distinguishable – never with the evidence of necessity, never as positive, only with the certainty of a reasoned and reasonable chance, and with the persuasive force of the negative”.

In other words, when you are trying to overthrow the oppressive Established ways of thinking and framing things, any solutions will be judged not as certainly positive (or ‘good’ or ‘effective’ or ‘workable’ or ‘prudently possible’). Rather they will be judged by whether they are reasonable and have a reasonable chance (of working?) AND of possessing the ‘virtue’ of not-being what exist now. Sort of a complex way of saying Whatever we do we definitely don’t want what we have NOW!

This is a youthy approach to judging the complex possibilities of a course of action that is both Good and Workable. And youthiness is not known for tolerating well such nuances. And neither are Revolutionary cadres.

So when push came to shove in American politics during the late 1960s and subsequently, the criterion became It’s New and It’s Change and It’s Not What We Are Oppressed by Now … and the games began. And here We are.

But Marcuse is no Post-Modernist. “Tolerance of free speech is a way of … progress in liberation, not because there is no objective truth … but because there IS an objective truth which CAN be discovered, ascertained only in learning and comprehending that which can be and ought to be done for the sake of improving the lot of mankind”. [caps mine]

Again, I can hear the echo of Marcuse’s plaint against the propaganda claims of the Nazi State: that there is no truth except what the State says to be the truth. It was either Goebbels or Goering who stated, to prewar Western journalists, that in the Nazi view, “truth is whatever we say is good for the German people”. Certainly, American mainstream journalism has taken a page from the gentlemen, and not in regard to the German people but to that People much closer to home.

But Marcuse does believe in an objective Truth, which, coming from Beyond the scrum of historical human events, can stand in judgement upon such ephemeral if lethal frakkulence as the Nazi regime.

But such Truth was gall-and-wormwood to the Revolutions of the Identities (as it was to the Nazis and to the Communists as well): nothing can stand or be allowed to stand in real or potential judgement of the Reich or the Revolution. The State is its own Ground and can be judged by no other power.*** As Mussolini pithly put it, the Fascist philosophy of government could be summed up as “Nothing against the State, nothing above the State, nothing outside the State”. It was equally true of the Soviets’ Revolution.

AND it is equally true of America’s assorted Revolutions which, having been granted a lock on the Beltway’s political affections, are very much interested in furthering the power of the State (and thus the National Nanny State poses as great a danger to the American ethos as the National Security State that was Marcuse’s primary concern).

But Mill, good Liberal in the classical sense, was under no illusions that there was any Beyond which would nurture Truth and ultimately avenge assaults upon Truth. Truth is “persecuted in history … and does not triumph over persecution by virtue of its ‘inherent power’, and which in fact has no ‘inherent power’ against the dungeon and the stake”.

Which means that if Truth is going to triumph, the good-guys are going to have to get down in the scrum, muddy themselves in doing ‘whatever it takes’, and what will justify those dirty actions is the End to which they are theoretically dedicated: liberation. (And can you say ‘Iraq War, preventive invasion, and torture’?) There can be no limits on what the ‘good guys’ (or ‘persons’) can do because there is no further assistance to bringing about Good in this world – and there is no other World above or beyond.

It’s a Flat reality to which Liberalism condemns humanity, despite its worthy intentions and bright hopes. And it paves the way not for a Hobbesian vision of people, but rather a Hobbesian vision of States and governments: they are liable, like rogue bull elephants, to suddenly take it upon themselves to go and squash everything in sight. But – unlike the beasts – always in a Good cause (at least the American elephant, anyway). Yah.

And Marcuse continues his observations on the assumptions underlying Mill: “free and equal discussion can fulfill the function attributed to it ONLY IF it is a rational expression and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, and extraneous authority”. [caps mine]

Again, surely a valid point to make in trying to justify opposition to the Nazi regime. But to transplant it to the America of 1965? And then what happened when the cadres of the Revolutions got their hands on this idea?

Because if – as was true of Southerners raised in the ethos of Jim Crow – you are not capable of truly independent thinking, and have been from birth indoctrinated, manipulated, and pressured by ‘extraneous authority’ … then you don’t really deserve to enter into free and equal civic discussion and discourse. Not until you ‘get it’. And right now (in 1965) you ‘just don’t get it’ and are still one of Mill’s barbarians, and so until you do ‘get it’ – and we will use the government to make sure you do – then you have no legitimate place in public discourse.

And you see how quickly Marcuse’s insight turns lethal in the hands of cadres who will deploy it against the entire American polity.

Marcuse then makes a stunningly ominous point: he notes “the general helplessness of radical groups in a well-functioning social system”.

Now surely, if you stood up in any way, shape, or manner for rights and decency in the Nazi system, you would have been, by default, a ‘radical’.

But Marcuse here makes the unjustified leap that any ‘radical’ group anywhere at any time is therefore the moral equivalent of the hypothetically sainted opponents to the Nazi regime. Which is precisely what neither the Boomers nor the cadres of the Revolutions needed to hear.

Worse, in presuming that any established and well-functioning society is merely as unwittingly deluded and oppressive as the Germans were under Hitler, then he makes a plug for ensuring that any ‘radicals’ are given space to operate by MAKING SOCIETY NON-FUNCTIONAL; smash stuff up to give ‘change’ some room: Destruction (through Deconstruction) in the service of Liberation from Oppression! (In another hell-hot irony, this was the essence of mainstream American ‘business philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s: smash your own corporate cultures before somebody else takes you over and does it for you! Thus Tom Peters, Jack Welch, and a galloping herd of business gurus and managers in the red-suspender, blast-fax days of yore. And it worked! Although – ummmmmm – with certain unforeseen consequences. Who knew?)

And in addition, Marcuse here echoes the horror of the postwar French intellectuals at any UNITY of society, since in their experience and the French domestic political experience since the 1890s and the time of the Dreyfuss Affair, any 'unity of society' usually meant a rigid and potentially violent orthodoxy that was bound to create more problems than it solved. Better, they thought, to always keep society off-balance and prevent it from becoming too 'solid'.

And American society – and the dynamics of its core politics – was designed precisely NOT to have to deal with ‘radical’ change (the Framers could see in 1787 where France was going to wind up in 1789). The Citizenry, among themselves and governing their governors, would achieve consensus: providing a sort of filtration system that would take any proposed ‘change’ and make sure that it wasn’t so violently ‘change-ful’ that it would unbalance the equilibrium of the polity.

I suppose the Framers were thinking of an open-boat: there’s only so much change, or jumping around, any one person or group of persons can try before the whole thing tips over. This entire approach, of course, was gall-and-wormwood to any Revolutionary and, to Boomers who had never seen – much less been in – a rowboat, it would have seemed some over-30 senile memory or phantasm. And oppressive in any case.

Marcuse seeks honestly enough to be constructive in addressing his remarks to the America of 1965: “… democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought”.

It’s a nice thought. A good thought. But if you’re going to try to somehow implement it through policy or law, it’s not ever going to work right. WHAT AUTHORITY in a democracy gets to say that such-and-such is genuine ‘knowledge’ and not merely unrecognized or sly fantasy? That this or that information is “authentic”? And who but Spock with the Vulcan Mind-Meld can ever guarantee that what any Citizen(s) hold is “the result of autonomous thought”?

So this idea of Marcuse’s is a worthwhile thought about an absolutely vital necessity for the health of democratic process. But it is a goal that is beyond the reach or competence of government to impose or ensure through imposition.

And it is here, I think, that Marcuse, like so many thinkers who have some respectable insights in the Liberal tradition, ultimately fail: they must ultimately rely on government because in their mono-dimensional world – unassisted by any Beyond – the only palpable power lies with sovereign States and government.

The early Liberals could simply presume the lineaments and fundaments of European civilization so profoundly Shaped by the Medieval world-view, with – almost literally – ideal forces and entities “ascending and descending” into the matters of this world to help fulfill its genuine potential. But as the Scientific and then Industrial Revolutions progressed – capped by the political earthquake of the French Revolution – there was less acceptance that any such Beyond even existed (let alone that it was presided over by the loving God and the Assistance of the panoply of Heaven of the Medieval synthesis). God, by the very core dynamics of the classical Liberal system, had to be Replaced by the State for all practical purposes.

And even now, God has been reduced either to merely another name for Oppression of Total Autonomy or to being – in Marge Simpson’s fine phrase – “a Divine Concierge”, existing merely to fulfill at the buzzing of a Service button every individual human’s every wish and personal pipedream (a gold Cadillac, a mansion, complete ‘happiness’, perfect kids, lotsa moolah … visit your local mega-church for details – warning: results not guaranteed and may vary).

And Marcuse is irritated that “the meaning of words is rigidly stabilized”. But wasn’t it precisely the problem with the Nazi manipulation of reality through propaganda – as Orwell also saw – that ‘words’ did NOT have any fixed meaning and were made to mean – as in the Red Queen’s realm – whatever Power wanted them to mean? But this was a boon to cadres who wanted to crowbar open ‘space’ for whatever their agendas demanded. Thus in culture ‘family’ came to mean something else altogether and in legal parlance all manner of actions (‘battering’, for instance) meant something the average person would take to be harmless (like being silent in a long-distance phone call). And ‘torture’? And ‘liberation’?

Marcuse here - intentionally or otherwise – winds up conforming to the frakkulent Deconstructionist assumptions that ‘facts don’t matter’ and that meaning is ‘socially constructed’ and has no independent reality beyond the individual perceiver. And, of course, classical Liberalism had already ruled out any such thing as Meaning with the capital ‘M’. He winds up buying into the illogical conclusion that if the six blind persons have given such diverse descriptions of the elephant then the Elephant does not really exist. Or that it exists only as what each of them ‘perceives’ or ‘constructs’ it to be. (When it came to War, the American military in the Postmodern era ran into the resounding wrongness of THAT approach ‘on the ground’, ‘up close and personal’.) Ach.

Then, looking at publicly reported ‘facts’, he opines that “when a magazine prints side by side a negative and a positive report on the FBI [his example in the 1965 text] it fulfills honestly the requirements of objectivity: however, the chances are that the positive wins because the image of the institution is deeply engraved in the mind of the people … or if the newscaster reports the torture and murder of civil rights workers [his example, again, in the 1965 text] in the same unemotional tone he uses to describe the stockmarket or the weather … then such objectivity is spurious …”.

HERE he grounds the Deconstructionist denial that any objectivity is ever possible or – from the point of view of this-worldly political agendas – desirable. Which was erected into a Plan by the American media with the early-1970s journalistic philosophy of Advocacy Journalism, which over time has morphed into the sensationalist and selective ‘reporting’ that now corrodes all public discourse.

And of course, if it is going to be ‘balanced’, then the media must be an ‘advocate’ for the Right as well as for the Left, for the government and Wealth as well as for the Identities and their claimed oppressions. Which is something Marcuse probably never would have wanted – but Consequences are not always predictable in human affairs (and can you say Iraq War? Or Housing Bubble?).

Worse, he presumes – again with a queasy and eerie taint of totalitarian praxis – that the role of the media is to manipulate rather than simply to inform The People. But then, to the extent that the American corporate culture since before World War 1 had adopted the advertising philosophy of the early 20th century Swiss, Edward Bernays (you had to CREATE a desire for your product where such a desire did not already exist – and Bernays applied himself to U.S. government propaganda in World War 1 with even more sinister results) then the use of media to not only manipulate but to actually create public perceptions was already established. But before the two great Wars of the 20th century, no Western government would have dared, or presumed, to ‘create’ public ‘emergencies’ as a matter of policy. That was then.

It’s anybody’s guess nowadays how many ‘emergencies’ have been created specifically to lubricate government policies.****

“The tolerance expressed in such impartiality serves to minimize or even absolve prevailing intolerance and suppression.” Again, a worthwhile insight, but ‘implementing’ it – translating it into broad public effect – is a hugely fraught challenge. And probably not one within the competence of a theoretically democratic government. Especially one that has now engulfed – though with their full cooperation, for due considerations received – the ‘elites’ of both Left and Right.

Well, let me not go on too long here.

I had not previously paid sufficient attention to Marcuse. But when We think of ‘thinkers’ and ‘ideas’ that helped prod the Beltway along the paths which have led Us to – charitably – Our Modern American Reality, it is clear that he played a great role.

But of even more significance is the fact that his ideas assumed, as it were, a life of their own as he injected them into the churning flow of American events.

And yet while many parties adapted Marcuse to their own purposes and interests – taking him perhaps in directions he would not personally have wished, though sometimes in directions his own thought implied – those parties and interests would always assure the public (when they deigned to explain themselves) that they were simply ‘taking the next logical step’ outlined by a ‘great thinker’. There are many worthwhile thinkers. But few who can be taken whole-hog.

It is the task of an informed Citizenry either to familiarize themselves with ‘thinkers’ who are put before them, or at least to take the time to look at those thinkers’ essential points with a careful eye; and thus fortified, it is the task of that Citizenry to let the political class know just what it thinks.

Then, thus Grounded in the Citizenry – and ONLY then – may ‘the politics’ begin.

NOTES

*In this regard, the book “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses” by Kors and Silverglate is well worth a look. Their idea is that when Marcuse’s ideas became the basis for the monstrous Political Correctness that was adopted in campus speech codes in the early 1990s precisely resulted in forming generations of college students into the habit of accepting as natural and as congruent with a deliberative-democratic ethos the continuous suppression and outlawing of Politically Un-correct ideas and discourse. Although this alarmingly totalitarian symptom was neatly disguised in the ‘liberal’ sheeps-clothing of ‘sensitivity’ and a kinder, gentler desire to prevent ‘offense’ and a desire to prevent ‘hateful’ speech and ‘hate speech’ and so on and so forth.

**In a very recent appearance on Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’ the chairman of the DNC put it out that the Democrats are always in trouble (simply) because they are “the party of the underdog”. Which is neat, but hardly an explanation of why at this point the Dems are in such trouble and seem to have seriously turned-off a rather large ‘demographic’. Although, I would add, at this point the ship has hit the berg and I can’t see that changing captains is going to do any good – even if the Dems re-elect a ‘minority’ or they or the Republicans elect ‘a woman’ (or a ‘general’) or whatever. Our current national mess has progressed far beyond such symbolic ‘victories’ for half-century old political strategies that have themselves helped create the lethal mess in the first place.

***Except, of course, in the case of God’s Deputy (or Replacement), America, which can declare other States ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’ and invade at will, in the service, naturally, of Liberation – and shame on whomever thinks ill of it.

****And on this anniversary of 9-11 and all that has flowed from it – which itself followed in time decades’ worth of American domestic ‘emergencies’ in the service of this or that agenda – such a point deserves more than a brief moment of silence.

ADDENDUM


Marcuse introduces the hugely fraught suggestion that since Majorities can behave like herds and stampede the rights of individuals and minority views, then in terms of public-discussion, at least, such stampede-supported ‘bad’ ideas must by INTOLERATED (if I may) in the service of a more liberating Tolerance.

His insight reflects his experience of Nazi Germany where majorities – stampeded or deluded into supporting the noxious Nazi government and its doctrines and regime – lent support to the whole abhorrent thing; while the ‘good’ folks were ‘the minority’. He wants to prevent that happening again – and understandably so.

His insight parallels to some extent the postwar French intellectuals who sought to ever prevent large public consensus ever again, since from the time of the Dreyfuss Affair and all the way up through Vichy such ‘conventional and large public consensus’ had simply supported intolerant and noxious regimes large and small within the French polity.

But there has always been a potential fault-line in this position: that the very core dynamics of a functioning democracy – especially a deliberative one – are thereby prevented from operating, although in the well-intentioned desire to prevent the democracy from making such mistakes again. That, you may notice, is very similar to the gravamen of the arguments some of the Framers made in Philadelphia in 1787: most people can’t be trusted to govern their government; or – if I may – most people can’t be trusted to live up to the role of being The People. That Question – could ‘people’ sustain a common role as The People? – is the heart of the American Experiment.

Currently, the putatively liberal-progressives, especially in the person of Martha Nussbaum – noted feminist legal celeb professor – are trying to make the case for a cutting-edge legal theory that ‘the majority’ can never be trusted to respect the ‘rights’ – rather very broadly defined – of any ‘minority’ and that therefore ‘the courts’ must impose controls on the majority in order to prevent what can only be called a ‘miscarriage of democracy’.

The problem here, I think, is that Marcuse’s ‘minority’ trails clouds of the moral excellence and courage of the anti-Nazi few in Germany. The American definition of ‘minority’ – post 1965, certainly – is something else altogether, reflecting not so much a courageous moral opposition to an undeniably clear moral and human evil, but rather an Identity within Identity Politics seeking not to limit or purify government but rather merely – in Jesse Jackson’s accidental revolution – to ‘get a bigger piece of the pie’. And to do so by whatever means necessary, using political pressure and arguments that are not rarely dubious and Revolutionary Method that seeks nothing more than political power at whatever cost to the common weal.

A case could well have been made in 1965 that MLK’s first-phase black civil-rights demonstrators against Southron Jim Crow bore a credible substantive resemblance to the anti-Nazi opposition in Marcuse’s native Germany. But no subsequent ‘Identity’ could credibly make that claim, although all have sought to create the illusion that they too are fighting some Nazi-like ‘oppression’ that they have carefully created for the cameras and microphones. And, in a dark irony worthy of Tolkien, the government itself under Bush then tried to run the same play in the 2000’s, creating a new Fascistical Axis to serve as the classic Enemy, as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and militarist Imperial Japan had once done back in the day.

I don’t think Marcuse could have envisioned the mutation of ‘minority’ as it devolved in the 1970s and subsequently in this country.

I certainly don’t think it was wise or prudent of the government to support wholeheartedly a political game-plan that required one large swath of the Citizenry to be labeled – for purposes of Revolutionary convenience and necessity – ‘Nazis’ or ‘monsters’ by another group that needed an Enemy to catalyze its demands.

Nor was it honest to insist that this was all ‘liberation’ and ‘Good’.

Much mischief – lethal mischief – has flowed from this, and still pours into the ripped hull at an alarming rate.

GEORGE LAKOFF URGES MORALITY


George Lakoff, noted Democratic political adviser, has advice for the Party. “Progressives”, as he now refers to them, cannot allow themselves to think that the upcoming election is only about “kitchen table economics”.

Who can argue with that? The aforesaid progressives have played no small part in the economic mess We’re in and and Lakoff – who not only is a ‘progressive’ but is paid to be one – is shrewd to advise them that they need to break any connection in folks’ minds between themselves and the economic mess. (Apparently, Lakoff realizes that simply blaming the mess on ‘the past ten years’ isn’t going to work – not even after 40 years of Correctness are the American people THAT dumbed-down.)

No, says Lakoff: “This election is about more than just jobs and mortgages and adequate health care”. Well, once you try to put shrewdness into words, it actually DOES sound kind of phantasmagoric, doesn’t it?

“All politics is moral”, he declares. “All political leaders say to do what they propose because it is right”.

Oh my.

Yes but actually no.

He’s right in a way he doesn’t want to be: All life is moral – there is a moral dimension that is not only inescapable in life but is also essential if life is to have any chance of reaching its most genuine potentials. And, not to put too fine a point on it, all ‘life’ is like that because all human beings are built like that – there is a moral dimension to humans that is not only inescapable in their own lives but is also essential if a human’s life (and humans’ life together) is to have any chance of reaching its most genuine potentials.

But I can’t imagine that he could conceivably want to raise THIS mine – buried for decades – up for public examination. ‘Morality’ is one of the capital-letter words that the vote-addled Dems allowed their newly-minted Identities to Deconstruct in order to clear room on the flight-deck to launch their own agendas.

Along with Family, Human Nature, Commitment, Tradition, Virtue, and even the possibility that there was some Order to human life and human society that humans could discover and that they needed to abide in order – like plants around a Trellis – to create a Garden rather than regress to a Jungle. After all, Total Autonomy precisely means that there ARE no limits (and – what they hey? – no Shape to humans or their societies).

The Boomers had imbibed this bit of lunacy from the Modern world that they had grown up in, but in their adolescent wackiness (common to that age among humans), especially as that wackiness was ‘valorized’ by pandering Dems who figured that it was in their interest to deem ‘Youth’ a demographic, the Boomers decided that they had ‘discovered’ a Great Truth, one that ‘grown-ups’ and ‘The Man’ had been hiding from them in order to oppress them by, from time to time, saying No to them.

Airplanes had to obey certain fundamental Laws of physics and aerodynamics in order to fly, ships had to obey certain fundamental laws of physics and buoyancy in order to sail, but somehow that didn’t have any substantive relevance to human beings. Humans were ‘totally’ plastic (even though the befuddled hero of ‘The Graduate’ had rejected the advice to get into ‘plastics’ upon graduation from college) and more akin to play-dough than to any more serious Stuff like – well, the complexity and nuance and dark possibilities of dynamic creatures that were not automatically guaranteed to do Good (itself another of those Capital Letter Words).

You could say No to the world that had dared to say No to you – find what you felt was your True Love – and hop a bus to Perfection and Total Happiness, grabbing the bench seat in the back of the thing and riding it into the eternally warm, bright, sunny Southern California endless afternoon.

Even if you didn’t have the price of the bus ticket – what were a few silly rules when you were engaged on such a Great and Fun Adventure?

Yup. The ‘grown-up’ “thing” and the whole “civilization bag” were just tricks designed by clueless, conformist ‘grown-ups’ (who, soon after, were declared officially to ‘just don’t get it’) to keep you down. What was the use of having such a wealthy society if you didn’t enjoy it? (A question that later found its way into foreign affairs in the matter of military power, as Madeleine Albright would say in that first great Boomer Administration, Billary’s.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

So, then, ‘Morality’ seems not at all a subject that ‘progressives’ (formerly ‘Democrats’ but it’s all bipartisan now, and anyway, it’s not about ‘politics’, it’s about ‘morality’) would want to raise, let alone stake the next election on.

Worse, though, is the idea that politics can be simply reduced to ‘morality’ or ‘Morality’. Because in the first place, not everybody has the same conception of ‘Morality’. In fact, if everybody is ‘totally autonomous’ then everybody can come up with their own ‘morality’ – even if they couldn’t be bothered learning what others have thought about it, or at least how it was structured into any given society and culture from the get-go.

Humans are not ‘naturally’ – in the sense of ‘easily’ and with absolute certainty – ‘moral’. They have that moral impulse, and that in itself is a huge characteristic of the species that has to be deeply and carefully plumbed.

But like the six blind persons and the elephant*, it’s not instantly and easily clear just what the beast is or even what it looks like.

This is the reason that humans have spent much time since the beginning of the species on the task of figuring out what ‘Morality’ is, how it works, and even where it comes from and what authority it might possess that would require not only human attention but even – gack and gasp! – obedience.

And are We going to face an electoral campaign where ‘philosophy’ is going to become an ‘issue’? Will the next American election resemble ancient Greece more than any election since 1860? Or since the Framers sat around giving their most serious, grave, and deliberate thought to just what the hell they were trying to do?

I can’t see it. And I certainly can’t see ‘progressives’ and the Democratic Party leading the discussion.

No, politics can’t simply be about ‘Morality’ any more than politics can be about ‘air’ – the stuff exists, so you can’t really ‘debate’ whether it does.

You can debate what impact the reality of the thing has upon the common weal, certainly, but that’s not the same thing.

And politics even then still isn’t just ‘about’ morality or Morality. It’s about developing a consensus among the Citizens as to just what role ‘morality’ or Morality can play in public policy. It’s about give-and-take; different folks, now, have different ideas about the ‘morality elephant’ and so it’s going to take a lot of public deliberation to achieve consensus about how this complicated reality will relate to public policy. Huge and heavy stuff here.

And politics is also about ‘prudence’ (the Gack and Gasp you just heard is the collective Boomer consciousness recoiling at the resurrection of so primal a Boomer boogeyman or boogey-person). Even if you think you have a ‘good’ idea, you may not be able to simply invite it into the house – especially if it is an elephant and you live in some structure smaller or less Large-Mammal-friendly than a spacious and solidly constructed barn. Sort of like, not bringing your new pet bull into the family china-shop and expecting to keep it there happily and without consequence ever after.

And NONE of this ‘wisdom’ – if I may – was allowed to retain any public role or status in the decades-long mad-rush to clear ‘stuff’ away so that each of the menagerie that are the Agendas of the Identities could be installed, happily and without consequence, ever after.

Thus the handiwork of that collectivity of Sorcerer’s Apprentices known as the Democratic Party in the Boomer Era.

Worse - and Lakoff lets this big jungle-cat out of the bag hoping We don’t notice – the Revolutionary Method (the ‘Revolutionary’ as developed by France in 1789 and sharpened by Lenin in 1917 and Mao subsequently, and the National Socialists in 1933) precisely cannot allow the Revolution’s morality to be discussed: because the only morality of the Revolution is anchored solidly in the Revolution itself: what is good for the Revolution(s) is Good, and what isn’t, isn’t.

That was the fundamental gravamen of Political Correctness over there and ditto when the gambit was brought over here in the late 1960s: you can’t talk about ‘Morality’ because only a very few vanguard elites ‘get it’ about the Revolution’s or Revolutions’ morality so why waste time having people argue with the Revolution because they don’t agree with what the Revolution wants to do?

Better to simply impose it.

And that’s solid, proven Revolutionary Method as those masters practiced it in their dark times.

It made excellent sense because they knew what the Democrats and the Beltway could never admit, perhaps to themselves and certainly not to Us: what was going in the United States starting in the late 1960s was a war of Worldviews, of fundamental construals and conceptions as to just what American life and history was all about, and what they were going to be all about. And, the Boomers being the Boomers as well as Americans, this would be a huge chunk of Progress for all human beings everywhere in the world, whether those poor human lumps realized it or not.

This was a genuine Revolution. ‘Politics’ was only useful insofar as it served the agenda of the Revolution, and if not, not. Indeed, the very working definition of ‘politics’ was quietly changed: ‘politics’ was to be merely a public approval of what had already been decided by the cadres of the vanguard elites; therefore Correctness served the valuable purpose of stopping the public from thinking about anything that the Revolution’s or Revolutions’ elites did not want the public to be thinking about.

Thus you get the public to stop thinking (and arguing with you) and simply inform it and manipulate it toward your concept of what is Good and ‘Moral’. And this is precisely what Lakoff says when he offers his definition of politics: “All politics is moral”.

Yes, but in the Revolutionary master schematics, that ‘moral’ is already defined by the Revolution(s): it’s only ‘moral’ if it supports the Revolutionary agenda, and if not, not.

Which is the master schematic that the Beltway has been working on for 40 years now.

Oh, that and then the bit about the politicians “say to do what they propose to do is right”. Notice the assumption about the job of a politician being to tell people what to do. This isn’t quite “leadership” in the 1787 American vision but more in the 1789 French vision – the one that inspired the hearts and minds of so many subsequent ‘political leaders’ of non-American or anti-American persuasion. But an elite is an elite – in the Beltway as well as anywhere else – and that’s what elites do.

So I can’t imagine Lakoff actually wanting to open the whole thing up for grabs again – which would be the genuinely democratic way.

No, he would have to be speaking in ‘code’ here: Lakoff’s (and the progressives’) “moral” is actually just that collection of agendas that they’ve been pushing and imposing for all this time. And with such dubious (to be polite about it) results and such alarming and profoundly disturbing consequences.

But this enables him to now say that it is the Republicans’ opposition to Obama’s assorted proposals (and I am no Republican, since I care for Tweedle-Dum as little as I care for Tweedle-Dee) that is ‘immoral’ and thus the Dems can robustly put the ‘Morality card’ – the M-card – back on the national political table and play it with chutzpah.

The only way this can work is if the Dems can put the M-card back on the table BUT STILL keep the public from opening the discussion beyond the Revolutions’ preferred definition of Morality. And – alas for them – there are still a lot of folks above ground who remember the days before the Revolutions’ definition of ‘Morality’. In that sense the U.S. is unlike Russia in 1991, where when the subject was once again put on the public table there were no folks left above-ground who could recall Russia before it was choked with the blessings of Lenin’s idea of paradise. (Although Marx’s analysis made some good points and Lenin’s cadres had such good intentions, and … on and on.)

And sure enough, Lakoff starts right in talking-up the “Progressive moral system” and “Progressive moral leadership”.

Which is his prerogative.

But lotsa folks are gonna have lotsa questions.

The morality of Deconstruction? Of imposing it? Of claiming that humans ten seconds away from birth are ‘just parasitical material’ that can be ejected if the womb-unit decides to exercise ‘total autonomy’? Of claiming that the Family is merely an oppressive accretion that must be scraped and blasted away in any case? The morality of everybody having his/her own morality?

Which is precisely why he makes sure to lecture that against their opponents the Dems must not “list their arguments and argue against them using their language. It just activates their arguments in the brains of listeners”. Which is the essence of Political Correctness: you cannot allow discussion of what you are trying to supplant; and the Revolution must control what the public talks and thinks about (though there can never be allowed any actual ‘deliberation’). Anything that does not support the Revolution must be erased from public consciousness, or delegitimized by incessant public manipulation; Correct cartoons can seem like wisdom if no objections or doubt are allowed. That’s Lenin 101 or Goebbels’s Introductory Course.

I am not ignoring the Republican whackery of claiming as ‘moral’ the idolization of the Nation-In-Arms and preventive war and torture, or the pandering to shocking accretions of Wealth against the en-serfment (or re-enserfment) of Labor. But Lakoff is trumpeting the morality of Progressives and the Dems here so I’m focusing on him and them.

He goes for the ‘against their own interests’ gambit: “Why is everybody voting against their own interests [by voting Republican]?”

Perhaps, it comes to me quickly, because they perceive that their own and the nation’s interests include ‘Morality’ in some sense larger than the Revolutions’and progressives’ definition of it? Apparently, if Lakoff’s article constitutes a coded Memo to the cadres, such types are no longer to be tarred as ‘backlashers’ but merely as benighted lumps who don’t understand their own interests.

But most folks were considered lumps anyway since ‘they just don’t get it’, no? So what have We got to lose?

No doubt Lakoff is presuming that the Dems-progressives have by now pandered to sooooo many identity-groups that there must – MUST – be a critical-mass of ‘clients’ who will remember who their all-good ‘patron’ is. And We are back to the client-politics of post-Republic Rome. Or the age of Latinate empires like imperial Spain, where the ‘natives’ were taught that their only hope and future lay in going along with the powers-that-be; and the Machine politics of the 19th and early-20th century American cities. Such progress.

The Dems (before they were ‘progressives’) faced a profound cross-roads back in the late Sixties: the world was recovering from the wrack of World War 2, technology was developing in such a way that ‘capital’ could be easily transmitted around the globe in search of the best ‘return on investment’, and America faced not just a challenge to its continued economic hegemony, but even to its ability to provide for its citizens the decent jobs that didn’t simply generate ‘income’ but anchored the very basis of human efforts to provide for a family and carry on a mature, productive, and genuinely Meaningful life.

The Dems could turn the government’s energies toward making sure that America’s capacities – managed by Wealth – were still kept harnessed to the common weal.

Or they could simply take a short-term view: pander to new ‘demographics’ that would expect much less of all that, and would settle for being ‘children’ and ‘clients’ of a government that would somehow keep them in cash while bathing them in the fake-aura of ‘total autonomy’ and ‘rights’. While simultaneously collecting swag and legal payoffs (through the sleazy legitimacy of PACs) from Wealth to let it abandon the common weal and go off whole-hog to pursue ‘best return’ all over the planet.

And as time went on, hoping like increasingly nervous Soviet elites – Micawberovs – that ‘something will turn up’ to keep free wealth flowing into the national coffers: a new invention, some new way of battening on more productive activities (sort of like the Mob, really) by setting up as a ‘necessary middleman’ demanding to ‘wet the beak’. Or printing more paper money. Or maybe, like imperial Spain in the 15th century, hoping to find a New World chock full of goodies (and enserfable natives to do the heavy-lifting) – but A) that plan was overplayed by the 17th century and B) America was the New World and there wouldn’t be any more of those again).

Which leaves the more overt Mob-like move: go out with enough muscle and take other peoples’ stuff.

Although, this being America, it would all be in a Good Cause and with the Best of Intentions, and therefore very ‘moral’. So ‘moral’ indeed, that America ‘had to’ do it or fail in its Divine Trust as God’s Deputy on earth. (For which role, the elites realized, the Pope would have to be supplanted, and all his pomps and all his priests; Stalin might have laughed off the Pope as having no ‘divisions’ but nobody was going to laugh off the United Secure States of America like that! No siree!)

The self-contented Babbitt business-burgher barbarians of Zenith, Ohio** were now – 80 years down the road – in most dire need of lots of assets, and such anxieties make happy and cocky burghers verrrrrry impatient indeed. Enter the Age of Armed Babbittry.

So – I think like Custer – the wrong road was chosen and it has led to a Valley that this force was never supposed to find itself in. Nor are Reagan the Great Bugler nor Teddy Kennedy the Great Trumpeter around to at least provide some inspirational musical accompaniment. Although you can look all around to see that there are still lots of flags.

Nor – courtesy of decades of officially-sponsored Deconstruction – might the nation consult – or at least formally turn to – any record of earlier expertise as how to navigate a Valley of Darkness. As the Preacher said “You got to walk that lonesome valley, you got to walk it by yoursellllllllllllllf”! For far too many Americans, the deal was that the government would do the walking and provide the necessary infrastructure and cash to fuel a comfortable drive through that bit of otherwise unpleasant earthly geography. This was the entitlement that went with living in the nation that reigned as God’s Deputy (or, in the liberal-progressive view, Replacement).

Walt Disney, alas, has had a success fraught with unforeseen consequences. We might pray, with the late Hirohito, that things have worked out not necessarily to Our advantage. Who knew? Cartoons – especially of movie-length – were supposed to show the way to a more compliant Life where things worked out happily ever after.

Whether the Dems now choose the late-Soviet gambit of trying to do the same-old, same-old until ‘something turns up’, or whether the entire Beltway now hopes individually to just keep collecting swag until each practitioner can retire to a dacha on the Black Sea and party-hearty (the I’ll-be-gone, you’ll-be-gone gambit so beloved of CEOs and other elites) … well that’s an interesting question.

Historians will probably also be interested in whether the elites actually realized 40 years ago that they would have to get rid of the People who had achieved so much and replace it with a bunch with much lowered expectations or whether they just screwed-it-all-up as they went along … that will be an interesting research topic in the not-so-distant future.

“There is no one center” anymore, Lakoff lectures. And he’s right. Decades of a divisive and corrosive Identity Politics, in the service of a Deconstructive Revolution that was aiming toward a best-case and consequence-less quick fulfillment of its brightest dampdreams (and can you say Iraq War?), has neutered any common sense of common-weal.

The Dems have Deconstructed well enough; but the cash ran out before they could solidify their gains (I’m loathe to call it ‘success’).

Now they have to tack together some sort of ‘alliance’. An Axis of Good (or Moral) you might say. And Lakoff is suggesting that eternal gambit: an Illusion. Since humanity seems to have some abiding sense of the moral – and the Moral – then that’s what the Dems will have to make themselves appear to have a lock on.

So they will ‘define’ Morality, or ‘code’ it, so that it contains only what they want it to have; and in that sense they will indeed have a lock on it. (For whatever that’s worth.)

Much like the fake Grail-Lantern in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” they will switch it on during the dark and stormy night and see how many lost knights (and knight-esses) they can lure in. And anyway, they still have the castle – rickety and worn-down as it is – and on a dark and stormy nite knights have to find shelter somewhere.

Such calculations are hardly the High Ground in human existence. But the Dems are no longer in a position to be arbiters of the Shape of such things. They’ll be happy to keep going through the upcoming election and hope something will thereafter turn up.

These are the politics of a banana republic. One that has run out of bananas. And had never cared for the ‘republic’ part in the first place.

We must give careful thought here – or We shall have a Republic as cartoonish as Lakoff’s ‘morality’.

NOTES

*Ancient Eastern tale: six blind folks stumble across an elephant in the jungle – each bumps into a different part of the elephant (thick root-like trunk, sharp-edged tusks, huge silky ears, tree-like legs, house-like body, snake-like tail) – and accordingly come to radically different conceptions of what the beast is actually like. It has for decades been a conclusion of some Western thinkers that since there are so many different conceptions of the thing then it doesn’t actually itself exist. Although in the very recent decades there has developed the ‘total autonomy’ variant of the conclusion: that the elephant can be whatever anybody decides to believe it is, to each his/her own elephant. But the Elephant itself still gets short shrift conceptually (although ‘on the ground’, in the actual jungle, the creature could assert its personal and very real existence by whacking, spearing, stepping-on, sitting-on, or crapping-on anybody witless enough to get too close and too annoying).

** Sinclair Lewis, 1922,“Babbitt” – check your library if you have to.

ADDENDUM


I think I’ve mentioned this before, but in terms of ‘morality’ let me recall John Stuart Mill’s attempt to anchor human morality – in best classical Liberal style – without recourse to any Higher or Deeper Dimension, any Beyond-this-world: anything’s moral, he said, so long as you don’t harm anybody else.

This is Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’.

There are problems with it, and they are not small.

First, it’s always been the problem with the not-Beyond philosophical solutions of the Modern and Enlightenment eras, that they are essentially trying to provide a universally authoritative basis for Morality BUT WITHOUT bringing ‘religion’ or God or any sort of Beyond into it. In the earlier centuries of the Modern Era you could claim a ‘Higher Law’ (capital letters) but without saying where or Who this Law came from. The Framers were working along these lines, and Jefferson gave it a little oomph with his “self-evident principles” that gave you the authority of Nature and even “Nature’s God” but without having to get into ‘religion’.

But like radio waves, if you can’t get the antenna up high enough, then you’re not going to be able to transmit very far; the ‘lower’ your antenna, the ‘shorter the distance’ over which your radio messages can travel.

And it’s also like trying to raise a heavy weight from the bottom of a lake using a winch based on a rowboat that weighs less and is less stably based than the weight that you have to lift: rather than your winch pulling the weight up to the boat, the weight will pull the boat down into the water (perhaps even sink it) rather than the other way around.

Second, there’s the question of defining ‘harm’: Mill had to define ‘harm’ narrowly enough in Time and Space so that a good Liberal could quickly calculate whether his/her action would ‘harm’ anybody else.

But the harmful consequences of a human action aren’t so easily limited. It may take a longer time for some ill-consequences to manifest. Or they may manifest in a less obvious area that doesn’t occur to the good Liberal to include in the initial ‘moral calculation’ analysis.

I prefer to think of human existence as a very large waterbed: if somebody at the far corner decides to jump up and down, a whole lot of somebodies - who may even be out of sight of the jumper - are going to be ‘impacted’ by that action. Using this template, it makes, by the way, for a great respect for the virtue of Prudence – since there’s so much you can’t know about consequences, and it’s better to err on the side of caution.

As I always say, that is neither the ‘revolutionary’ nor the ‘youthy’ approach to ‘change’ and consequences. I think it was G.B. Shaw who said that ‘progress depends on the unreasonable man’, A cutesy and not wholly inaccurate insight, but you can’t go and base a national policy on it.

But in the heady days of the 1960s, the ‘grown-ups’ were shown to have allowed Jim Crow to go on for almost a century and then went and got the country into Vietnam … so clearly the Boomers decided that they must be blessed with the Mandate of Heaven (to use the ancient Chinese phrase for divinely-sanctioned authority) and were Deputized by History (if not God) to clean up Dodge.

And here We are.

ADDENDUM 2


I think another dot has to be pointed out for connection. Lakoff advises the now-hoary and ominous scam: don’t publicly discuss your opponents’ points or publicly debate them – because it will only give them a publicity they don’t deserve (or … that you don’t want them to have).

Given that ideas, concepts, methods and approaches ‘migrate’ within the sacred precincts of the Imperial Beltway, then it has to be noted that this gambit has long been run by the Israeli Realm: given that its founding Moment consisted of an Act that many would – reasonably – consider to be dark, bloody, and largely not-good, the Realm has with a marvelous consistency hewed to the paths originally cut by the dark Masters of public manipulation in the early decades of the unhappy 20th century.

Don’t argue or debate publicly with those who don’t agree with you because a) you’ll be allowing your own status to lubricate an airing of your opponents’ ideas; b) those ideas may well include the stuff that a lot of people may consider quite dark indeed; c) you might then wind up being put into the awful public position of either admitting the darkness or publicly denying what many see so clearly to be the case.

Better, then, not to argue but instead to i) keep your own version and spin and ‘narrative’ in the public eye; ii) to the greatest extent possible, keep your opponents’ best points and narrative out of the public eye (by any means necessary); iii) when you do have to deal with your opponents’ points, avoid giving the public anything solid to deliberate upon and instead distract them with such primitive but efficacious gambits as ad-hominem attacks and appeal to your own suffering as justification; iv) point out to your ‘target audience’ that you aren’t doing anything that it hasn’t done; and – the masterstroke if you can pull it off – v) induce a situation where your ‘target audience’ or ‘target public’ finds itself in much the same position you are in and will sort of be drawn toward agreeing with you through its own dark and bloody experiences.

It has worked swimmingly for the Realm (an ‘ally’ that has – stunningly – no actual treaty of alliance with Us and has consistently refused to sign one for half a century).

And at this point, in foreign affairs, this country finds itself – already stretched to the limits militarily and economically – seriously discussing the possibility of a full-scale regional war (one that would, in the short-term, greatly benefit and hugely please the Realm).

Now We see Lakoff proposing to the liberal-progressives and Democrats that they deploy the same gambit in domestic politics: they must induce their target-public to support them at the polls, and they must work that inducement by any means necessary. First and foremost, as Lakoff says, by not letting opponents get near a public debate where their objections and questions can be raised and put to Democratic candidates or spokespersons.

Funny how the Beltway night moves.