NOT SO MUCH

In light of what I said in my last Post, I’d like to try to get to the nub of it all. I came across a chapter in Clive James’s “Cultural Amnesia”. Although it’s about a European intellectual of the interwar era, Egon Friedell, James manages to wrap a marvelous contextual penumbra around it, much of it having to do with Nazism and Soviet Communism, two monstrosities which bethumped the Austrian Friedell in his lifetime. The page-references are to the W.W. Norton paperback edition of 2007.

Even in the time of Khrushchev there was a movement to bring back the Stalin-era ‘scientist’ Lysenko. Lysenko had tried to force biology into conformity with Communist principles. This, as James rightly asserts, raised Party doctrine and Political Correctness to the level of a ‘religion’ and raised the imposition of that Correctness on genuine science to the level of a “superstition”. Truth and accuracy were tossed overboard in the quest for ‘political’ and doctrinal purity.

The possibility of Lysenko’s comeback engendered dismay in many scientists (though in Stalin’s Russia, most of them had learned to keep their mouths shut, and to ‘go along to get along’).

Except for the amazing Andrei Sakharov, who managed to love his homeland as a true patriot and remain committed to truth and speak up for truth when Political Correctness was threatening any non-conformity to the Party line with professional oblivion, imprisonment, and death – and you don’t run into that type of courage very often in life, not even here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sakharov wasn’t the first or the last intellectual to face the risk of losing his tenure and his union card as an academic; but he acquitted himself better than most.

Sakharov stood up to Khrushchev and persuaded that earthy but lifelong Communist Party ‘macher’ to put the kaibosh on the plan.

But even though Sakharov was successful in this particular case, James puts his finger on the darkness: “The dreadful truth was that the superstitions had reached so deep into the fabric of the Soviet polity that nothing except a complete collapse could get them out.” (p.247)

I’m wondering whether that’s the deep rot that infects the American polity now, after four decades of the Political Correctness of the radical Left (there was nothing ‘liberal’ about it) and since about 1980 the equally toxic reaction to that Correctness developed and deployed by the radical Right of the Fundamentalists and the neocons.

Whether the dubious or downright untrue ‘science’ deployed by this or that advocacy, replete with fake numbers and ‘research’ that was with-held from peer review or public deliberation (long before Bush tried to put the workings and writings of the government beyond public review), or the demand by this or that Identity’s Advocates that such and such an agenda be implemented without any serious deliberation , or the intellectually childish and barbaric insistence on responding to inconvenient truth by shouting down the truth-speaker … or all of the foregoing, I wonder if the rot is now burrowed so deeply into American popular culture and into the government in all its Branches that it will take a complete collapse – a ‘crash’ of the hard drive, as it were – to ‘reboot’ Our culture and society and genuinely Constitutional way of going about conducting life as a People and as a nation. *

“Stalin’s capacity to join in the superstition … is the gateway to the larger subject of how an utterly cockeyed metaphysics guaranteed that the Soviet experiment could not possibly succeed even though the men who led it were willing to murder the innocent en masse.” (p.246) In Our case there is no one dictator. But there is a Congress and a Supreme Court that has now gotten used to ‘accepting’ the most culturally and communally wrenching ‘demands’, on the basis of the most implausible and incoherent and highly dubious assertions backed up by the most sketchy (when not downright inaccurate) ‘numbers’ and ‘studies’, which are accepted either with no effort to ascertain their validity or with illogical chains of ‘reasoning’ that a freshman in any 1950s college Intro to Philosophy course could puncture like a cheap balloon.

Which is no doubt why the cadres of any revolution have always gone after the schools and the universities, to prevent the type of critical thinking that could enable a fresh mind and a sturdy heart to blurt out that the emperor had no clothes on. ‘Elites’ do not think for themselves, they just have a better grasp of what they’re supposed to conform to and – in their decadent stages – can applaud politely on cue and know how to choose the right wines.

The metaphysical assertion that there is no metaphysical reality is not one that prompts visions of a bright future, but rather a Flattened and darkly bloody one, if human history is any indication. And despite several memos to the contrary, I’m of the mind that History isn’t yet dead. Not hardly.

Revolution has its place – it’s a monstrous but true sadness in this industrialized world, one that Jefferson took a little too lightly (until he became President himself). But the Framers specifically constructed the American governmental polity so that actual revolution would not be necessary: the Branches and the Houses were like the several engines of a jetliner: if one went a little off, the others could compensate and keep the craft airborne.

But it was precisely the use of ‘war’ imagery (Emergency! Enemies! Hate and kill!), so reminiscent of “War Communism” and the willful trahison of first the Democrats (for their political benefit) and then the Republicans (ditto) that invited the ‘revolutions’ into the heart of this country’s politics. A citizenry that (too trustingly) assumed that the ‘government’ and ‘Congress’ and surely ‘the Democrats’ would provide ‘serious’ supervision in the service of the common weal was instead forced onto a roller coaster ride of cock-eyed metaphysics so egregious that the ‘revolutionaries’ realized that their only chance for pulling it off was to claim that ‘metaphysics’ didn’t exist and therefore couldn’t be used to analyze or criticize their agendas and their demands.

And then the Republicans decided that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander: they put the same scam into the service of the rich and of a repressive governmental intrusion into the private life and civil culture of the nation.

Not that the ‘revolutions’ hadn’t already been doing the same thing, creating the eerie American revenant of fascist and Communist intrusions into the life of the citizenry, the better to control hearts and minds.

But – of course – ‘only in a good cause’ … as if any dedicated Italian Fascist or Nazi or Bolshevik or Maoist ever got up in the morning and said ‘Today let’s frak up the world and everybody in it’. Phooey, they all got up convinced that they were doing ‘the right thing’, a ‘good thing’, and had Heaven’s or History’s – or at least The Leader’s – warrant for whatever bits of the dark side had to be embraced that day, in order to ‘do whatever it takes’ to drag the lumpish world a few steps further into its bright future.

You may need a 'revolution' in a dictatorship. But you don't need it in a functioning democracy. The country and the American people did not deserve what the Dems did to them - inviting 'revolution' in for the Party's own political purposes. Now public discourse is debauched and - can it be a coincidence? - this country has the highest imprisonment rates of any country in the world or in history, and - yoooo hoooo! - almost all of them male, which is to say 'men'.

What did Wilder’s and Lubitsch’s Ninotchka say to her counterparts? “The show trials are a great success, comrades; from now on there will be fewer but better Russians!” Well, from now on there will be poorer Americans … whether they are better off, let alone whether they are ‘better’ , is a question which will be answered in future episodes. So stay tuned, to see if – Mother of God – this is the end of Little Rico.

Meanwhile a government so debauched by its servility to a cockeyed metaphysics, while denying the validity of any decently coherent metaphysics, now has the warrant of both Left and Right to go forth and invade any nation that might be sitting on enough cash to fund the spendthrift spree of the past decades. In ‘civilian life’, on ‘Main Street’, folks like that are called ‘bandits’ and dealt with accordingly. And not just in Hometown, USA, but in any decent human community on the planet. We’re still in a great Western like ‘The Magnificent Seven’, only now – half a century later – Americans are in the Eli Wallach role. Look that up in your Funk & Wagnall’s.

Whether to get oil, to make the world ‘safe for Democracy’, or to make a country safe for this or that cultural agenda … what’s the difference? And should We be surprised if a country chooses to screw itself up rather than become the doormat for international bank-robbery and cultural deconstruction on a ‘world-class’ scale? A woman in a soldier’s uniform holding a male naked on a leash … the equivalent of political gold in Our domestic politics, the radical feminist (and eerily lesbian) damp-dream of a world where ‘men’ are beasts fit only for servitude and degradation … that photo will haunt Our every effort to gain ‘the trust’ of other peoples of the world and keep a seat at their table. What plays to the ‘base’ over here will – the hot ironies! – ensure resistance to the glorious American agenda unto the latest generation and the Latter Day.

James talks about old Nazis after the war, who “could not resist telling television reporters how sad it was to see a new generation of young people who believed in nothing and had no respect for values, because they had never done anything hard and clean … [those old men] remembered their lives as a crusade.”

This observation bespeaks a reality wayyyy too complicated for current American grade-school conceptions of what makes the world go ‘round. It’s William James’s ‘moral equivalent of war’ problem with a vengeance. How to live one’s life unto its fullest and furthest capacities? How to push one’s very self to its most ultimate (and glorious) limits? How to ‘get the most out of’ your life and your own self? How to ‘make a difference’? How to maximize that?

The Nazis and Italian Blackshirts considered themselves far more vitally involved in life than the intellectuals who ‘merely’ read books and trafficked in ‘ideas’. But they also considered themselves far more vitally human and ‘engaged’ than the flappers and the louche generation that staggered out from under the horror of World War One with a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other, looking for one boozy party after the next and trusting no one who valued sobriety. The Bolsheviks considered themselves more genuinely human and far more authentically ‘Russian’ than the ‘bourgeois’ who had jobs, raised children, and conducted life as decently as might be in this vale of tears.

The fey but intelligent Walter Pater had said that his ideal of full humanity was to “burn with a hard, gem-like flame”, perhaps recoiling from his own inconsistency and lack of an emotional (even spiritual) center. The ‘true’ Brownshirt, Blackshirt, and Bolshevik embraced the ‘hardness’ and the ‘gem-like’ purity.

But it wasn’t enough. Not hardly.

And the ideals of Europe’s old Christendom could have told them that. James quotes Friedell: “Mankind in the Christian era possesses one advantage over the ancients: a bad conscience.” (p.242). You can only access ‘conscience’ by acknowledging that there is a Law – written in your heart but coming from Somewhere Else – that you cannot violate without somehow also violating yourself. It’s that ‘element’ which provides the trellis (capital justified in this case: Trellis) that keeps all your determination and dedication and zeal from bursting forth wildly, crushing truth and integrity and justice and charity and, inevitably, other people’s rights and lives.

Without ‘conscience’ and its ‘Law’ all human energy goes wild, barbarically wild. And that barbarism need not appear unwashed and slavering like a Victorian ink-sketch of Attila the Hun or a pop-eyed histrionic with a funny moustache and hair flopping down over his eye. It can appear dressed rather nice, speaking calmly and confidently from the highest human precincts: ‘Well, we’ll just have to embrace the dark side’.

Nor need it be a Brownshirt screaming about “unlebenswurdiges Leben”; it could be a young female remarking over drinks that she can’t let her life be thrown off by a “discarded bundle of cells” that she one day “discovered” as if by inadvertence inside her body. Ach. A cell here, a cell there … after a while … **

So, James notes, it soon became clear to Friedell in those awful days of the 1930s in Germany that “Christianity was in for a comprehensive rewrite, the main aim being to jettison its moral encumbrances, of which bad conscience was the most burdensome”. (p.242) That should not be unfamiliar to Us.

Frighteningly, the ideals of Christianity have been under assault – ferociously – from both Left and Right in this country for decades. From the Left, knowingly, to jettison the moral encumbrances that obstruct ‘liberation’ and some sort of ‘full equality’ that winds up assaulting Life and lives, although only in the service of a revolutionary ‘good’ that must be acknowledged and accepted here and now without delay. From the Right, unknowingly, in the pursuit of a ‘purity’ and ‘zeal’ that seeks to flood human imperfection with an irresistible force of ‘good’ here and now without delay.

“Even if the Nazis had stayed where they belonged, at the fringes of politics instead of at its centre …” (p.242). But of course, that Our problem too. Forty years ago, as desperate as a Weimar government fearful for its own existence, the Democrats invited the most radical and revolutionary elements into the very center of Our democratic polity, and thereby through everything out of balance (not a good thing to do in a large aircraft flying at altitude).

It wasn’t the validity of the agendas and the false numbers and fake studies and the cockeyed metaphysics of no-metaphysics … it wasn’t the strength and validity of all that which ‘justified’ the sudden irruption of all those numerous agendas into the center of Our national life. It was that the Democrats – without actually admitting it – simply threw their entire weight behind what they saw as their political life-preserver, the radical Left (nothing ‘liberal’ about it at all). Which seems as fecklessly self-defeating as the struggling democracy of Weimar making common cause with the radical Right in order to keep itself going, sort of like inviting in the vampire to protect you against the wolf.

And the Political Correctness that then stifled all intelligent deliberation so as to prevent any ‘obstruction’ to the realization of the agendas and demands … you won’t keep a democracy for very long once you’ve taken that route.

We’ve been on that road for forty years. Wandering in that desert. Now according to one Narrative, things should start to look up about now. But then, in the cock-eyed metaphysics of no-metaphysics, The People can expect no help from … Somewhere Else. They will be urged to stick with ‘the revolution’ . The revolution which after all this time (like the Communism from which it drew so much of its method) has now calcified into its own ‘nomenklatura’, its own aristocracy and big-shots, its own string-pullers and puppeteers, all of whom are doing very well, thank you, and – more acutely – really don’t want things to change and don’t want ‘light’ to be shone into darknesses that have been embraced. Why cry over eggs that had to be broken to make the Great Omlette? Why dig up all the bodies? They’re dead so let’s stick to ‘the living’ and not worry about anything else – only the living count. (An eerily modern bit of advice, no?)

But there is a Somewhere Else. And the dead – here and everywhere – cry out to that Realm from the ground. Because in some other Place the dead are still very much alive. And they know.

Conscience can hear those voices. Courage must answer them.

NOTES

*History, of course, is dynamic. This means that once you have gotten yourself into a mess, and when you finally get around to taking measures against your previous area of mistake to get yourself out of the mess, all of History's other 'areas' will have moved on, so that when you finally do get the particular mess somehow resolved, you will not be returning to your original condition since the rest of that original condition will have 'moved on'. So '1999' or '1959' ... they aren't coming back and nobody is going back to them.

**For a stunning discussion by a young woman, having recently undergone the procedure, of how she’s shocked that “even smart, liberal men are freaked out by abortion” when she tells them, over drinks, that she wouldn’t let “the uterine equivalent of minor knee-surgery” or “a discarded bundle of cells” interfere with her life just because she “had been careless with [her] pill intake”, see here. There is something of a Brownshirt callowness to it.

Nor am I consoled by the thought that this is a ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ and therefore rare position among young women.

First of all, there’s no reason to think that it is and some substantial reason to think that it may be rather the norm, especially among the college-educated ‘elites’.

And second, it was not the ‘middle of the road’ aspect of feminism that was embraced into law and policy, laws and policies that are still very much on the books.

In this I am not voicing an anti-feminist concern; this is an anti-Brownshirt concern.

CONSERVATISM AND ITS DEATH

Sam Tannenhaus has a piece on ‘The New Republic’ site: “Conservatism is Dead”, in the February 18, 2009 issue.

I’d mentioned not long ago that there is a movement among formerly ‘liberal’ (and I don’t think it’s an accurate moniker) publications that had since Bush’s or even Reagan’s accession cozied up to the Right: now they’re trying to make nice.

In this instance TNR will demonstrate its bona-fides by declaring ‘conservatism’ dead .

Tannenhaus mentions “the harshly punitive ‘culture wars’ waged against liberal ‘elites’”. I hold not brief for the Right, but how anybody can read the writings of the Second Wave in its heyday, or the extensively (if incoherently) laid out plans of John Rawls for ‘elites’ and their judicial allies to trump constitutional rights … how can anybody read that and not imagine that ‘war’ was implemented, if not declared, by the ‘liberal elites’ (not my term) long before somebody on the Right in the early 1990s actually adopted Bismarck’s ‘culture war’ phrase and tacked it onto what had been underway here for almost a quarter of a century? All those Reagan Democrats started voting for Reagan as early as ’76, and certainly ’80 … so they, at least, realized something was up all the way back then.

Anyhoo, my main purpose here is not to refute this or that in Tannenhaus, whose article offers much food for thought.

He mentions Edmund Burke, whose conservatism was based “not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on distrust of all ideologies”. Two points come to mind.

First, I’m not sure it’s the ‘ideology’ that’s the problem; I think it’s the ‘ideological mindset’ in human beings that will raise up any set of ideas as a conceptual Golden Calf and thence engage in the most regressive and primitive rigidities and immaturity of thought (and action, oy) in order to sustain their Bubble as to that ideology’s omnipotence. Inside every human there is a reptilian and primitive element waiting to be allowed to be given the steering wheel and take itself out on the highway. Inside every society there is a herd waiting to be allowed to shuffle around in a bunch and perhaps stampede.

This is not a proof for the fatuity of a democratic politics, or a genuine conservatism, or a genuine liberalism, but rather a proof for the importance of a democratic politics. If a deliberative citizenry does not support itself as a commonality and its individual members, by its adherence to reasonable, deliberative processes, then it will undermine itself even as it allows its individual members to yield to more primitive processes.

Second, while ‘ideology’ is indeed something to be avoided, that does not mean that human beings, or a polity, especially a democratic polity, can dispense with an overarching and undergirding consensus, a web of (provisionally but purposely ‘privileged’) ‘answers’ to those burning questions at the heart of the human enterprise, which lie beyond the scope of governmental policy or ‘scientific’ proof. Perhaps, in America’s case, built upon the Christian (not in the Fundamentalist but in the classic sense) worldview.

If the citizens as human beings are not grounded in some Beyond, then they will be at the mercy of any ‘government’ and its ‘elites’ (of Left or Right or both). A citizenry cannot function as The People if it is not first grounded in something Beyond the government it is supposed to manage. If citizens are not grounded in an adequately comprehensive Sense of their own nature as human beings, then they cannot with any hope of success function as The People. Hence the de-Godding pursued by the Left for the past umpty years has proven even more lethal than the repellent ‘Godding’ pushed by the god-addled, powers-that-be worshipping Fundamentalist Ascendancy.

Tannenhaus notes acutely that “most of the most sophisticated founders of postwar conservatism were in many instances ex-Marxists, who moved from left to right but remained persuaded that they were living in revolutionary times and so retained their absolutist fervor”.

I’ve always been suspicious of persons who were once rabidly ‘A’ and then suddenly were rabidly ‘anti-A’ without any pause for serious inward thought. The Nazi judge, Roland Freisler, great proponent of ‘the law at war’ – that concept that he used to justify doing whatever the regime wanted – has always frightened me: he had been a rabid Communist one month and the next was a rabid Nazi, and such a profound and utter change, instantaneous, gave him not pause for thought or doubt at all. People like that, even more than ‘revolutionaries’, seem to me to be possessed of a profound interior moltenness that betokens unboundaried and rabid ‘enthusiasm’ for whatever catches their devotion.

And then of course there are all those first-generation neocons of the 1960s who were 'former' Communists and Leftists who suddenly became avowed right-wingers and 'conservatives', bringing their 'revolutionary' mindset and heartset to the Republican-conservative camp.

Such persons as Tannenhaus describes are also indeed ‘revolutionaries’ – by temperament. They ‘need’ revolutionary activity in order to feel alive; they need to see themselves as ‘being in’ a revolution in order to feel any meaning or purpose; they aren’t reluctant revolutionaries – adults with otherwise successful lives who must for a while put away such things for the sake of a cause. Rather, the ‘temperamental revolutionary’ needs to structure all experience as ‘revolution’ – with him or herself involved in the thick of it – simply in order to maintain a coherent sense of self and of life-purpose.

Too many of this type of folks are not healthy for a democratic politics. And for a democracy to ‘valorize’ and ‘privilege’ this type – under the aegis of Left or of Right – is not going to end well. And for a democracy to de-valorize less arbitrary and ‘excitable’ types as insufficiently ‘sensitive’ or insufficiently ‘patriotic’ is also not going to end well at all.

So you can see where things went seriously awry in the mid-Sixties: both the non-conformist sex-and-luhv googoos of the Flowery counterculture and the fire-eyed ‘revolutionaries’ of the SDS (whose female contingent later split and went into feminism proper), held themselves as far more ‘alive’ than the fuddy-duddies of the ‘50s and before. And they both did not so much refuel a flagging democracy as provide a violent explosive super-burst that made it impossible to steer the thing at all. But that was OK – ‘steering’ was for fogies. It was about this time that America, I would say, ceased to be a ‘serious’ nation. And, really, how can it be said that We have since recovered?

So from the 'Left' you had revolutionary mindset, heartset, praxis, and agenda masquerading as 'liberal' and as 'liberation', and on the Right you had the former Reds of the 1930s with their revolutionary mindset, heartset, praxis, and agenda. What chance did a dem,ocratic politics have once that toxic synergy and feedback-loop got started?

Tannenhaus also notes Burke’s insightful point that “The task of the statesman is to maintain equilibrium between the two principles of conservation and correction”. Alas, the Dems were in no condition to maintain equilibrium, vote-addled as they were in the later Sixties, and by the time they realized just what it meant to be supporting ‘revolution’, it was too late to back out.

Hence, in my vision of things, they took to pandering to the revolutionaries (and their Identities) while enwhoring themselves to the corporate biggies who paid into the PACs and who represented the only chance of keeping up at least the appearances of a functioning economy, especially since the postwar economic hegemony was fading by the early Seventies and nobody knew how to hang onto it or revive it. The Identities were given the Bubble of ‘the dream’, the corporate biggies were allowed to start running economic Bubbles, the citizenry were lulled with the trickle-down effect of these Bubbles, and the whole country was Bubble-icious for a couple of decades. And now at least one of those Bubbles has burst.

Which perhaps might start a trend. It is to be hoped.

“Movement politics” – the earlier euphemism for ‘revolutionary politics’ which was later replaced by Identity Politics – “most clearly defines itself not by what it years to conserve but by what it longs to destroy”. Yes. And this is not the spirit best suited to a democratic politics. Which is why We are seeing and feeling less and less democratic politics, and have been doing so for quite some time. If you get the sense that the trusty old institutions and processes you learned about from American history are no longer ‘working’, well – it’s true. But there’s no mystery about it: We no longer have a working democratic politics and working democratic institutions because ‘revolution’ and ‘movement politics’ became the order of the day decades ago.

And while few of the pols on Capitol Hill are ‘revolutionaries’, they are all pols and they have learned – several generations of them now – to ‘pander’ to ‘revolutionary dreams’ (even as they do whatever it takes to protect those corporate biggies who pay into the PACs).

Wanting to ‘destroy’ things is not something that occurs naturally in a democratic politics. It occurs in imperial politics and revolutionary politics … and so again We can see that democracy has been taking torpedoes on both sides for a long time now. And why it was so easy for this country to slide into its lethal frakkery on the Eastern Front: there was no ‘opposition’ because there was no opposition party, let alone anybody among the pols who still operated on ‘principles’, those things pooh-poohed both by chicken-hawk ‘realists’ and by the cadres of the Second Wave and their spawn. Feh.

William F. Buckley, Jr.’s self-assumption of the term “radical conservative” was not helpful. If he meant ‘radical’ in the classical, Latin sense – from the roots or fundamental – then he might have been OK, so long as he didn’t imagine that being so close to the ‘source’ deputized him to break any laws or principles of thought or decency in order to achieve his goals. But in any case, the word ‘radical’ by the mid-Sixties was simply a lazy way of saying ‘revolutionary’, and that was a reality nobody wanted to really face up to.

In that regard, I can’t help thinking of the movers and shakers of Germany there in the early ‘30s, barons and capitalists and business moguls and so forth, all convincing themselves that Hitler wouldn’t be so bad – even if he had been talking about ‘socialism’ and ‘revolution’ – because they could handle him, could manage him; ‘We’, said Franz von Papen, ‘are hiring him’. Yah. That worked so well.

Conservatism, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. pointed out, was originally concerned “for the social and moral costs of unchecked industrial capitalism”. It had a sense that government had a responsibility – one might almost say a God-given responsibility – to care for its people; in England, certainly, this was a characteristic charge assumed from the monarchy by the Parliamentary power as England’s political governance changed, and not a bad one. And as devious and shrewd as they were – Disraeli and Shaftesbury and others – they still held themselves as ‘Christian gentlemen’ and as responsible before God. Nor were those empty words.

We’ve come a long way. And not the good way. Instead, the Beltway. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

“Do the institutions of the state provide the bedrock of civil society?” This was the question the conservatives asked in the mid-Sixties. No doubt, humanity made great strides 10,000 years ago when it had sufficiently mastered the ability to provide food and shelter, and even a little extra; with those essential necessities provided, and the anxieties as to their lack receded into the background, amazing developments began to blossom.

So there is a sense in which the stable maintenance of necessities and the sustaining of both a sufficient stability to assure reliability and a sufficient flexibility to assure change safely, are necessary for the further flourishing of a society.

But those things are not sufficient in and of themselves to generate or nurture that flourishing. Human beings rely on their government, but they can neither be reduced to complete identification with their government or defined by their government.

The danger of the increasingly centralized and involved government is that it will get the idea that it is the source and origin of all its people’s lives. Instead of being their servant it will become their master.

How the Right is going to recapture the sense of responsibility before God for the moral and social welfare of the citizenry while retaining its clubby and cozy connections with the financial elites is as difficult a question as how the Left is going to seek better conditions for the whole citizenry without alienating the Identity bases with which it is now ensnared.

If neither Party is going to be able to solve its problem , then We are going to have to come up with another Party.

While We've still got a country.

BIPARTISAN BALONEY

Over on Salon Glenn Greenwald is on about ‘bipartisanship’ as exemplified in the excuses given by the Senate for re-re-embracing the execrable Joe Lieberman. Good for Glenn. (‘Has there been too much bipartisanship or too little?’, http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/11/18/bipartisanship/print.html )

You have to read “Liberty Under Siege”, Walter Karp’s jaw-dropping history of the early Reagan years to understand to what rotten purposes ‘bipartisanship’ has been put. Tip O’Neill, hating what the late Sixties had done to his Party machine, and terrified of what the early Sixties had done to his Party’s electoral viability, had stymied Carter’s presidency while simultaneously selling Congress to the corporations by inventing and selling PACs (subsequently blessed by the Supreme Court as ‘free speech’).

In this way he ensured the income of Members by effectively legalizing bribery, hiding it in plain sight. (Whether, with the development of other-national PACs such as AIPAC, this became not simply a matter of Members being bribed but Members engaging in treacherous – perhaps treasonous – collusion with a foreign government, is a question that has not received the recognition it so richly deserves.)

Aware that some of the demands of the various Identities had now almost-permanently fractured the citizenry, and perhaps aware that the economy of the postwar United States was now losing ground to foreign economic developments, O’Neill decreed – under the table – that the Democrats would ‘work with’ the Reagan Administration. There would be ‘bipartisanship’, which became in practice a code-word for abolishing an effective opposition Party and doing ‘whatever it takes’ (in the candid Israeli phrase) to keep ‘things’ rolling.

Perhaps the Tipster feared for the very existence of the Democratic Party itself; if so, it is a dark testament indeed to the damage wrought by Identity Politics and ‘revolutionary’ politics. As if anybody with an ounce of sense couldn’t have seen that outcome just by putting it up on a drawing board beforehand: Leninist tactics, Goebbelsian propaganda, and deconstructionist Theory did not promise easy fraternity (or sorority) with the Constitutional concepts of the Founders. They had been designed, as a matter of fact, with an eye to destroying those concepts. This is news?

Those partial to Democrats who cawn’t think why the Democrats have been ‘duped’ and ‘bamboozled’ all these years and decades need look no further than Tip O’Neill’s ‘bipartisanship’. The Democrats have been Republicans for more than a quarter of a century.

There is no opposition Party.

This country, thus, doesn’t stand in need of a third political Party; it stands in dire and grievous need of a second one. And very very soon. President-elect Obama has to start moving the Democrats along toward recovering their ground and principles and - for that matter - the Constitutional principles on which the country was Founded. Being 'bipartisan' with the Republicans as they are presently constituted is akin to entering into marriage with a corpse, and a plague-ridden one at that.

But the Democrats have allowed themselves to become infected with some hugely plaguey stuff themselves, brought over by carriers from failed tyrannies and revolutionary visions.

ALSO:

I’d like to go out on a limb with this thought: In addition to all of the other reasons for ‘bipartisanship’, I can’t help but wondering if the wily Israeli realm didn’t take a page from that cunning, treacherous freak J. Edgar Hoover and compile its own ‘files’ on high-ranking pols and government officials. Of course, if the Honorable Members have been collecting cash all these years, that may itself constitute enough of a ‘file’ , but it wouldn't hurt to keep a file with anything that might induce a Member to be 'friendly' rather than risk exposure.

THE DEMOCRATIC WAY

Joe Conason has an article over on Salon (“Poor, poor Gonzales”, www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/05/11/gonzales_hearing/print.html).

He’s reporting on the mind-bashing dumbness with which House Republicans strewed Quaint Al’s path with consolation during The Quaintster’s recent hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee hearing (which ran an impressive six hours).

Several ancillary thoughts occurred to me. It is refreshing to observe democracy at work, seeing the stupidity (real or feigned) among the Republicans that can get itself elected to Congress. I’m glad that there is no ‘authority’ in this country with powers sufficiently plenary so as to ensure that only intelligent people can get sent to Congress.

Nor – in the decades of their vigorous pandering to the Identities – did the Democrats accomplish anything less than strike down long-standing firewalls of Truth and maturity and critical, skeptical intelligence; indeed, the Dems made it positively incorrect to kick certain favored tires. Seeking to dilute any intelligence that might criticize urgent favoritisms, the Dems opened the screen-door of Our civilization, through which gigantic stupidities of pre-historic proportions flew or waddled back in. Think: opening the gate in the forest wall not to King Kong but to a herd of omnivorous dinosaurs with brains the size of a walnut. Bad judgment. Bad juju.

And we wonder why nobody could “connect the dots” in re the tortured singleton Cho at Virginia Tech? Of course it was clear that he was seriously unwell and in great and emergent need of psychiatric help. But what administrator in this Year of Sensitivity the Thirty-Sixth (more or less; I’m counting from don’t-blame-the-victim in 1971) would dare risk job and career to a) ‘label’ b) an ethnic minority by c) ‘judging’ him to be d) seriously whacked out. Nor am I trying to smuggle in a nostalgic vote for uninformed, yahoo, macho, bulldog decisiveness (look where that has gotten us in Iraq).

But in the revolutionary arrogance and impatience to totally transform everything immediately, abetted by the Democrats’ and the media’s full panoplium of power and influence, a lot of key American content and process was swept away. To be labeled ‘insensitive’ was (up until the invention of the ‘sex offender’ two decades later) the most awful and lethal opprobrium that might be heaped on a bureaucratic head. Who wanted to risk his/her career to exercise discrimination and authority and act decisively to either make this tortured soul get help or get him off the campus? Suppose some other ‘professional’ further along the chain didn’t back you up and declared him ‘well enough’? Suppose the parents went and got a lawyer? Suppose some pol with a political need to look compassionate got involved on the kid’s side? Suppose – the horror! – a bunch of sensitive and pained students showed up under your office window with ribbons and bunches of flowers and news-cameras? Oy. Better to be ‘sensitive’ and keep your mouth shut.

As Conason notes, the Republicans at the hearing seemed utterly unable to grasp the lethality of the challenge that Gonzales and all that he stands for poses to The Republic, to the rule of Law, to fundamental democratic process, and to the role of The People in the American scheme of things. Or, if they did grasp it, their need to remain in the odour of sanctity within their Party reduced such concerns to irrelevance.

So it came to me: here is the way that the Democrats can make their way back up to the High Ground while simultaneously coming to efficacious grips with the most dangerous threat to The Republic that We now face. Let the Democrats stand four-square for democratic process. Forget, for the moment, the ‘content’ – in the past decades the desire for liberation has led to speech-codes and sex-offender registration and the love of liberty has led to pre-emptive, invasive war. Let Us start off gently and simply restore democratic process. And if the Democrats have the right stuff to stand tall, then let Us have the stuff to exercise Our authority to support them.

Now, this is not a put-down of Republicanism. It is a recoil from the monstrous Frankenstein of Rove-ian Republicanism – that stitched-together medley of dead things Neocon, Fundamentalist, and Jingoist. When the more mature Republicans can get ahold of their Party again, then – to borrow an image of Abe Lincoln’s – Our trip will be made smoother, having a pumpkin in each saddlebag. For now, We’ll have to go to the job with the Party We’ve got: the Democrats. If they’re up to it. Who stands for The Republic?

DEMS DO LIBERAL VIRTUES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCHLESINGER GONE TO HIGH GROUND

E. J. Dionne has a piece on Arthur Schlesinger’s death (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/01/AR2007030101325.html) “A Historian Who Saw Beyond the Past”.

I’ve always felt that Schlesinger had some good observations, but that he failed to preserve a certain independence because of his so-close relationship to the inner-circle of JFK’s administration and – after that – to the Democratic Party.

Back then in the mid-'60s, it was never actually allowable to discuss whether the content and methodology of the Revolutions of the Identities were really the next-logical-step, or any sort of viable step, in the extension and revivification of the New Deal voter-coalition; by 1965 that coalition was shredding due to growing affluence, the Southron rage at civil rights, and the incipient demise of the industrial worker.

The Democrats were too desperately in a hurry; they would not permit this whole vision to be debated and deliberated publicly, even among Party members. They needed a working majority of votes immediately and there was no time for the hemming and hawing built into democratic process. And the advocates and revolutionaries of the Identities, being advocates and revolutionaries, weren’t partial to the time-consuming uncertainties of democratic process either; like the Fundamentalists who were to come after them, whom they were to draw into national prominence (the hot ironies!), the advocates and revolutionaries wanted immediate change – on their terms and according to their numerous agendas – and they wanted it right now if not yesterday.

In order to at least make a case for such ram-rodding, the herd (they could not afford to let us be The People) was told that certain things simply could not be discussed (and still can’t to this day), and that there was an Emergency created by a great Evil and that the herd was either for Good and this agenda or for Evil, and that to be against the agenda and cause of the moment – to be so ‘insensitive’ – was the new ‘treason’ and no ‘insensitive’ or ‘hateful’ ideas should even be listened to or – come to think of it – allowed to be spoken. Nor should any of the foregoing ever be discussed again, or even noticed. The pinnacle (or nadir) of this line of thought was the college handbook that listed among topics of speech forbidden to students: the mentioning of the fact that some topics of speech could not be mentioned.

Whether all of this was the logical or viable extension of Schlesinger’s beloved New Deal and the Democratic Party he knew as a young man … was a question that I think it is now obvious needs to be addressed and widely deliberated. Although, of course, so many “facts on the ground” have been created that – as in Iraq – the wrong things already done have created present realities that make it impossible to do the right things now. When a damaged ship reaches this point while you’re trying to keep her afloat … well, there is need now for Our minds to be concentrated wonderfully.

As the aweful 1990s unfolded under the still-not-properly criticized Clinton vision (the oral sex, as ever, was the least of the dangers), Schlesinger began to sound some legitimate warnings, although he didn’t really give the Democrats their dark due as being greatly responsible for the ominous events unfolding domestically; he was not only a public intellectual but something of a court intellectual, and there is always a cost for that cachet.

Which is too bad because at his age and with his mind he could have been a vital source of deliberation for the hugely difficult situation the Democrats now find themselves in. It has been mentioned elsewhere on this site, but here it is in a nutshell: the Democrats cannot without endangering their new-historic (since the ‘60s and ‘70s) allies re-occupy the ‘high ground’ of Vision and Capital-Letter-Words that they purposely abandoned in order to smooth the path of their hastily erected and vigorously espoused Identities. Was Common Sense or Reason or Tradition or Truth or Morality or Excellence or Virtue or God going to be used to obstruct the desires of this or that advocate and revolutionary? Then it had to go; they all had to go. All of Them. Politics became a matter not of formulating and supporting a shared Vision, a deep yet shining wave of Belief and Purpose that would sustain The People as America made her way through Time. No, instead politics became a matter of quietly putting together small tactical coalitions of interests for this or that sop, with no concern as to the larger implications of what was about to be officially made law or policy, and with no candid public discussion or deliberation allowed.

Does any of that sound kinda familiar?

With the high ground abandoned, the Democrats lost whatever opportunity they might have had to keep the big picture of the field as the Fogs of Life rolled in and roiled around down on the low ground.

And then the Republicans – with their new-found allies, the formerly-fringe Fundamentalists who burst forth with their own revolutionary-like certainty and dogmatism and impatience, so similar to the Democrats’ allies – took the high-ground. It reminds me of some version of the French and Indian War: The ‘professional’ fighters, the European soldiers, are outnumbered by their respective Indian allies, who universally have a much more vigorous and unstructured approach to operations, and who cannot be controlled by their erstwhile masters. So too now: the ‘professional’ politicians (meant in the good sense: knowledgable and shrewd discussers and compromisers) in each Party are now rendered helpless by their obstreperous ‘allies’, the revolutionaries of the Identities on the Democratic side and the Fundamentalists and neocons on the Republican side. This is a monster of a problem.

And of course the Democrats have already yielded the high ground, almost burning their bridges back to it. (How, say, can you as a Democrat re-espouse ‘God’ without frightening the abortion advocates? Support ‘excellence’ and ‘performance’ without appearing ‘insensitive’ and ‘judgmental’ if not indeed ‘racist’? Suggest that the sex-offense mania is not only ineffective but ungrounded, counterproductive and constitutionally dangerous, without appearing as a closet child-molester?) It’s going to be a hard thing to turn your formations - especially your obstreperous 'allies' - around in the press of battle, and then while maintaining formation and a sufficient rate of fire make your retreat back toward and then climb up to the high ground. Which, as aforementioned, was taken as low-hanging fruit by the Republicans after you abandoned it and is now held against you.

This should be a very sober pre-election season indeed. But my fear is that rather than try to deal with the realities, distracting diversions, either of the entertaining or the frightening variety, will be hastily ignited so that the real work needn’t be done, or the problems faced. This, famously, is not the spirit that built the West. But it is our modern American reality.

But Schlesinger brought high-ground back, even though he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit how high-ground was lost in the first place. In 2005 he brought the thought and writing of Reinhold Niebuhr back into the national discourse, such as it is. Writing in the September 18, 2005 “New York Times” (“Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr”) Schlesinger asks – but does not answer – the very good question as to why this evangelically-trained best of America’s theologians is not discussed by current faith-based folk of Left or Right.

My own thought is that Niebuhr deploys a mature character and informed mind to consider the height and depth and breadth and width of whatever topic he examines, and that’s a task utterly beyond the competence or the patience or the interest of most erstwhile activists – of Left or Right – nowadays. They have been ‘emergencified’: there’s a crisis, there’s no time to think, just act … or, better, let the gummint do whatever it thinks best. Left and Right have brought us into these dark and fatal woods as surely as Varus led his legions into the Teutoborg and Braddock led his columns into the Pennsylvania woods.

Schlesinger noted some of the salient points made by this Missouri evangelical preacher’s son (born 1892) who went to Detroit in the 1920s and ministered there in those times of huge labor-capital strife.

He was critical of “national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion”. Americans have a tendency to erect their ‘innocence’ into an article of faith, not an impractical gambit for a society that has built itself on the eradication of one people, the enslavement of another, and the colonization of others. When we encounter a killer who is convinced of his own innocence even as he admits that he has killed, we feel the strong urge to put him into a locked mental institution. But when it is an entire country, and our country … we consider such ‘innocence’ as one of the surest signs of God’s election. Niebuhr didn’t go the psychological route, but rather the theological: all humans are possessed of an innate tendency to do evil things and nobody is ‘innocent’; as Clint Eastwood put it through the character of Will Munny: “We all got it comin’, kid.” This is a lesson Americans have never really grasped, although the immediate future may hold great opportunities.

Consequently, it’s theologically worse-than-useless to go around dividing up the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Nations may have interests, but that doesn’t make a particular people ‘Bad’ for opposing the interest nor does it make a particular interest ‘Good’ simply because it’s something that the nation may want.

We are fragile-ly ordered and volatile beings, we humans. Perhaps it’s that “original sin” that used to be part of the high ground; or perhaps we as a species still haven’t evolved to the point where we can reliably sustain our actions and interior lives in the higher ranges of human characteristics and capabilities, but instead are constantly pulled down (as St. Paul observed) into our lower capacities, or are constantly confronted with the results of others’ lower-capacity acts that intrude into our own life. The human aircraft is not one that its pilot can prudently leave on auto-pilot. Curiously, Bush and Rumsfeld both had pilot’s training – they must have missed some classes.

Nor are we perfectible in this life. Hence we should not be buying into quick-fix or sure-fire agendas that promise ‘total’ this or ‘zero’ that. Neither humans nor their lives nor our common life together can be so purified. Revolutions are not to be trusted in a democracy; indeed the more urgent the revolutionary demand, the more carefully and democratically it should be examined. Thus too he opposed the ‘messianic’ consciousness that has soaked the modern world in blood: Marx and the nobly-intentioned vision that found incarnation in the brutal and bloody Soviet revolution, Hitler’s revolution to save his Volk. We might add that some of our domestic messianic revolutions need to be looked at carefully, on the Left as well as on the Right.

And to be simultaneously ‘innocent’, ‘infallible’ and a ‘messiah’ is hugely inaccurate and unTrue and a profound danger to others, especially in a democracy. And especially for a democracy.

Lincoln was a favorite political model for Niebuhr. Lincoln had a certain well-grounded relativism. It was not the relativism of object:‘God’ could be anything so ‘God’ isn’t a strong enough concept to model your own life or compel other lives. It was the relativism of perceiver: We humans are simply too limited to know for certain what God wants or does not want, and so we have to be humble and patient and proceed with care and deliberation. And so for Lincoln there was indeed a God, and a ‘Beyond’, but neither could be known so clearly or fully or with such certainty that any human being could become either complacent and overconfident about one’s own rights and goodness or become proud and certain about forcing others to do one’s will.

“The combination of moral resoluteness about immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment …”, says Niebuhr, enables us to stay vitally active in the thick, problem-choked life of this world and this dimension, while at the same time remaining loyal to a larger Beyond (and God) through which/Whom we have our shared human creaturely nature and the democratic process that is our great heritage and awesome responsibility.

And thus one can engage on the low ground while maintaining the core position on the high ground. Of all the things that have happened to Us over the past 40 years, it is the abandonment of the high ground and the refusal to deal with it (let alone debate it beforehand) that has caused the most death and damage, to Us as well as to the country and to others around the world.

It is not in the article, but the thought arises that Bush the Fundamentalist – in immaturity if not in sincere belief – is seeking to be to that faith-based ‘core constituency’ what the Pope is to them Kathliks: a ‘pontifex maximus’. The greatest high-priest of the mysteries and of the State, not so much like the Pope, really, as like the Emperor of Japan in its pre-1945 days. The Kathliks already having the pope, the Fundamentalists have to invent one, to which end they are striving mightily; we look on their works and are tempted to despair.

Niebuhr’s vision – his schematic – of the full operating space of Life, is far more complex and robust than the Flattened world and self of the assorted modern-day revolutionaries of the Left and the Right. There is a Vertical as well as a Horizontal, an Up and a Down as well as a Sideways, and there is a capacious and vital Beyond as well as a Flattened and Foreshortened Present, and there is an Interior to the Self as well as an Exterior, and there is Substance as well as Appearance.

And he was able to operate in (though not ‘dominate’) all of that ‘spectrum’ in order to practice a dense yet supple and vital politics. This is a capability no longer open, it must be imagined, to today’s politicians. It’s almost bizarre: our military brass bray about ‘full spectrum dominance’ but neither they nor the civilian leadership of either Party really understand the Life-space of our species.

Niebuhr had it (dead white European male though he was). Lots of other folks throughout Western history have had it. But We don’t have it – not any more. The problem today isn’t that We just don’t get it; it’s that we had it and we threw it away.

DEMOCRATS AND LIBERTY 2

Glenn Greenwald has an article in Salon: “Uncle Sam, keep out” (www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/11/15/az_gay_marriage/print.html).

No, it’s not about gay marriage. It’s about what Dems can learn from the fate of the Arizona gay-marriage amendment.

The author says that the important lesson revolves around the sharp conflicts between the “evangelical social conservatism” of the South and the “libertarian political ethos of the Mountain West. Neisss. Yes and No.

Yes that the West is libertarian and the South is communitarian. And in an era when the federal government is engorging itself even domestically, and where the Dems’ alliance with postmodernism has driven even the modestly spiritual willy-nilly into the Republican fold, then the South isn’t the only chunk of the votery who will want to see a Republican-type federal intrusiveness continue and expand. And let’s face it: the West never really had to twist itself into weird shapes in order to control its ‘problems’; the natives were driven off or beaten down through broken treaties and force of arms in relatively short order and folks could ‘move on’ in the march of Progress. But the South had to close ranks against its ‘problem’, and it never enjoyed the dispersing effect of the West’s wide open spaces; geographically the South was a pressure cooker, Hell in a hot, small place for a long, long time (until air-conditioning and civil rights came along, neither of which are ancient history). That sort of stuff does things to folks.

But the Dems as they are today are hardly the bunch to be talking turkey with the libertarians. If the postmodernists (and so much of the Identity phenomenon is grounded in postmodernism) are against the religiosity of the South, they are also very much in favor of the intrusiveness of the federal government. Indeed, without the engorgement of the federal police power domestically, it’s hard to see how most of the Identity programme could succeed. Or how it can be sustained. It was under the Democrats that we saw the police power of the federal government engorge domestically over the past 40 years, in the service of the Good Cause and the Outrageous Emergency of this or that Identity.

There was the ominous fine-tweaking of federal law to chase down, and then to pre-empt, even the thought of racism. Western civilization had evolved to restrict its jurisprudence only to the judgment of an act, a deed; this wisely prevented the police-power (and the government – king, Parliament, President, Congress) behind it from literally creating ‘evidence’ which could not possibly exist in any way that it could be examined. It respected the Interiority of the citizen and of the person, not only as a philosophical and even a spiritual entity, but as a political entity upon whose creative and free participation the polity rested. The effort post-1965 (well-intentioned and Good-Caused) to tear up racism root and branch, once and for all, brought the four-engined police power of the federal government down to tree-top level, indeed into the mind of the suspected ‘racist’; and since anybody in the South was considered a racist to begin with, there was little chance of not finding racism wherever one looked, and there was little chance that a police foray would turn up without evidence, especially since – the ancient firewalls of Western jurisprudence having been increasingly twisted out of shape by the heat of the righteous fires of Good Cause – what constituted ‘evidence’ no longer needed to be an act, but might simply be construed from words and thoughts or inferred from circumstances and results or might simply be presumed. But what the hey? Western Civ had to go. And so it has.

The feminist Identity-Advocacy (which I do not equate with the rights of women as human beings and as citizens) brought something new to the ongoing, developing equation: a more or less full-blown postmodernist philosophy that 1) rejected capital letter words (CLWs) or any Vertical dimension to human existence (the capital letter world, CLW), thus 2) flattening human existence into a Horizontal this-dimensional world, 3) into which much-shrunken vessel all of the intense passions and energies of human existence would have to be poured – all of the wondrous complexity of the human Personal reduced, Lenin-like, to ‘the political’.

And on top of that it also brought the specifically feminist assumption that “men” were evil, oppressing women for the purpose of ‘sex’ or through ‘sex’, such that the power of men had to be broken in order for women to be free (E. Ruth Klein has a worthwhile discussion at www.philosophersnet.com/magazine/printer_friendly.php?id=728). And, nature abhorring a vacuum, somebody else’s power would of course have to flow in to create the void created (hopefully) by the destruction of the power of men. And, women (or at least the feminists) being an Identity upon whom the Dems desperately relied, then the police power of the federal government and of the criminal law would be deployed on their behalf. And once again, the evidence of the (already presumed) ‘evil’ became even less tangible (a man could now commit a crime of violence without being physically present), and said violence might not be physical but ‘emotional’ and need only be ‘felt’ to be violent by the ‘feeler’. The presumption would be in favor of the ‘feeler’ (also by definition the plaintiff and/or victim) simply because the evil oppressiveness of men was a presumed given.

And then came the sex-offender phase (distinct from although causally connected to the earlier initiatives). A suddenly-discovered class of person never before noted in law or medicine, possessed of mysterious and incomprehensibly devious powers, yet simultaneously out-of-control and ravening, sex-maddened, against whom the patient application of Due Process was an insult to the pain of his (always ‘his’) victim or victims, and whose very existence created an outrage and an Emergency in the response to which the Rule of Law as traditionally understood had to be circumvented or dismantled (‘reformed’ is the fig-leaf of choice) and made to operate not carefully and rationally but ‘responsively’, responsive to the emotions rather than to the masculine (thus oppressive, thus evil) detachment of Reason. [And does any of this sound pretty much similar to the behavior of the government and the citizenry in the run-up to the catastrophe that is now Iraq?]

The police-power of the federal government was enhanced not only by the several weakenings (“reforms”) of the classical and traditional constraints of Due Process, but by the power to create Registries of citizens, to impose upon them a level of government intrusion into privacy not before seen in American history, to render them liable for pre-emptive detention with only the most modest requirement for justificatory evidence and with the most modest opportunity to appeal and with no set limit upon the confinement, and – as we have recently seen in the Great State of Ohio – without the requirement of conviction or even a trial. [And again, can the infamous Bush & Co. really be blamed for thinking that they could simply take the ‘sex-offender’ gameplan and apply it to Saddaam and Iraq?]

And this ‘gameplan’ was put in place by the Democrats. Nor can any West-state libertarian forget that the debacle at Waco was later justified by the Democratic US Attorney-General because the government had reason to believe – she claimed – that ‘the children were being abused’ – which, even if it were to be believed, condemns the government as lethal bumblers on the scale of post-Soviets for effecting a ‘rescue’ that killed every child in the place. But then, as in the Democratic war in Vietnam, some things have to be destroyed in order to be saved. Children included, nowadays, it would appear.

So, this idea of the Democrats sitting down in peace with the libertarians of the West, while a seasonably heart-warming vision, emits more than a whiff of fantasy. Their ‘revolution of the Identities’ has turned out to be as authoritarian as any revolution eventually turns out to be (with the wondrous exception of a short string of them in the West from Magna Carta through the Glorious Revolution and up to the American Revolution), and it has dismantled ancient protections won, it has engorged the federal police power, and – through the postmodern presumptions that almost none of the Dems want to admit to any longer – flattened the many-dimensioned field of human existence itself.

The Democrats have no business inviting anybody to any tables until they discipline themselves to the reality that their dismantling of Western Justice in the Good Causes of their assorted Identities has gone a very very long way toward undermining the Rule of Law in this nation, engorging the police and executive (and Executive) power of the government, and debauching the citizenry through a sustained series of emotional circuses that has greatly weakened their ability to function as The People.

We desperately need a Party that will restore the Rule of Law, domestically as well as in foreign affairs, and that will restore our standing and our reputation as decent adults, domestically as well as in foreign affairs, and that will reaffirm our citizenry in the community of nations and of peoples and in the family of Humanity. We need, thus, a Party that will invest in our restoring ourselves as The People, upon whom the structural and moral integrity of this Republic and its Branches rest. The Democrats as presently constituted, committed and addicted do not seem up to the job. Hoping that they can get by with some subtle innuendo of who-else-ya-gonna-call? isn’t really a respectable plan. They need one. And there isn’t much time. For them or for us.

DEMOCRATS AND LIBERTY?

Easy now. I’ve run across a bunch of articles in the past couple of days that are heading toward the idea that (since) the Republicans were for big and intrusive government, then the Democrats are for Liberty. Now let me put this out there right off the bat: the Democrats being for Liberty is – as certain dead, white, European males used to say – a consummation devoutly to be wished. But between such marvelous Democrats and the ones we have on the hoof today running around the preserve … a great gulf is placed. And, as has been said elsewhere on this site, the Democrats mostly placed the gulf there themselves.

Tom Schaller has an article in Salon: “Do Democrats Need the South?” (www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/11/14/no_south.print.html) He discusses the South as being “the most religious and evangelized region of the country, making it the most fertile ground for a socially conservative message.” And, he then adds, the rural nature of most of the South reinforces that.

I’d riff that the concern for capital-letter-words (CLWs, for short) and the capital-letter-world (CLW, for short) does not make one a ‘conservative’ (as opposed to a ‘liberal’). It can’t. We can’t let it. Life cannot be coherently lived, a self cannot be coherently grounded, without some incorporation of some CLWs, some working sense of the CLW. One of the great disasters for the Democrats was to let their (admittedly desperate) need to please the Identities rope them into accepting without serious debate or thought (sorta like the Patriot Act, later on) the postmodernist conceit that CLWs are simply a tool of oppression invented by the oppressor (mostly those dead white European males, but expanded to include American males, and not always just the dead ones).

This was a catastrophe conceptually and politically. Conceptually, it put the Dems in the position of wanting to make the wondrous benefits of sea-travel available to many to whom it had previously been denied while simultaneously relying on the assumption that the hull of a ship doesn’t have to be solid or built of anything in particular or built in any particular way. You want to give more people a better shot at life, but then you go and remove what every civilization in recorded history has assessed as absolutely and utterly indispensable: a crafted relationship to the CLWs and the CLW. Thus the Dems allowed the ‘liberal’ position to be defined as one that didn’t need CLWs and the CLW.

But politically, the Dems are doing business in a country where almost all people “believe”. This ‘belief’ doesn’t necessarily reflect a fact that each and all of those people are ‘religious’ but it most certainly does indicate the presence of their deep preference for CLWs and the CLW. So in a stroke the Dems placed themselves in opposition to that massive chunk of the citizenry who felt in their deepest self that you most certainly cannot run a life or a country without CLWs. And between all that massive chunk and themselves, the Dems allowed a massive gap to develop, a chasm, perhaps even an abyss. And into that dark gap, the hordes of Roveian (and before him, Atwaterian) minions poured, clothed in the armor of light, an identity not so much earned as granted to them by default by the Dems.

And now, how are the Dems going to bridge this gap? If they start accepting the reality or the validity of CLWs and the CLW, then those same CLWs might be used tactically to disrupt the placatory ‘arrangements’ the Dems have made with their assortedly raised-up Identities and their Advocacies. If they don’t start accepting the reality or the validity of CLWs and the CLW, then the Dems are not going to be able to capitalize on this huge Moment in the Republic’s history and may permanently marginalize themselves as a Party.

The present Dem ‘solution’ seems to be: focus on this-worldly, Horizontal, tactical alliances. Maybe we can hook up with the libertarians, maybe do lunch with the evangelicals, maybe even let the Catholic bishops back into the limelight for something else besides … all that stuff. But this is America. Here (if not indeed in most places) you can’t bind a nation (or its wounds) purely on the basis of Horizontal, tactical, ephemeral alliances. The spirit of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive struggle against the robber barons and “the interests”, of FDR’s zeal for the economically displaced and his implacable resolution to wage the war thrust upon him, of King’s doggedly majestic struggle for civil rights … none of these defining American notes could have been sounded, could have been sustained or even conceived, without the common grounding in the CLW. There is a Vertical to life, a Beyond, and the personal must first and foremost be Spiritual (loosely defined and not achieved with the active interference or ‘help’ of the government).

The core mistake of the postmodern, and its fundamental conceptual, philosophical, and spiritual bankruptcy is situated precisely here: since the CLWs were at times (mis-) used to oppress, then they are thereby utterly discredited a-n-d they are thereby demonstrated to be unnecessary to the construction and maintenance of human life, individual and communal. To which the only mature and educated response can be: Phooey. And if the Dems allow the national political alignment to remain what it has become over the past 40 years (liberals are Horizontal and conservatives are Vertical) then the Dems are indeed in a suicide-pact. We don’t need preachers running the government, but this is a nation of spirit-hungry folks (however bumbly they may be about it).

And now the Dems have been given the opportunity for resurrection. The Republicans (at least the modern variant: neocon, fundamentalist) - like kids who were turned loose with the family car and trashed it before running it into a ditch – have had the keys taken away. But they only got those keys because a politically viable chunk of American citizens were fed up with the flattened and flattening world that the Dems’ reliance on revolutionary postmodernism was creating in the civic community. The Dems got the keys back by default. They’ve got to come up with a way to re-establish themselves on the ‘high ground’ of the CLW or else we’re going to get into a vicious cycle here. But not forever: each cycle will take us as a nation, along all axes of success, a little lower (or a lot), until finally the Republic is no longer viable, and we wind up with either a modern Caesar or a Louisiana Purchase in reverse.

The Dems are hugely well advised to heed Ike’s advice – his warning – in that last TV address he made to the nation: “So much remains to be done.”

Jeff Cohen writes about How To Turn This Election Into A Progressive Mandate (http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/103006O.shtml ). Lemme riff.

I wonder if the country hasn't had enough Progressivism. The Progressive movement of Teddy Roosevelt's time believed in a strong government and in a rightly-minded, elite wielding of the powers of that strong government on behalf of the non-rich, the little people, and just about anybody who wasn't either a Robber Baron or living off of one. The government got stronger and stronger, buttressed by World War 1 and the New Deal, and then World War 2 and what has been aptly termed the National Security State. Well, OK. Nobody said it would have to remain small as the nation and its citizenry increased in size and number. Not even the Founders would have advocated that - except maybe Jefferson in his dewy-eyed moments.

But I think the Founders would have expected that as the government got bigger the People would willingly do even more Peopling, more of the Citizen's task of keeping a close and informed eye on the activities of the government. Because the Founders knew that - aside from the largest natural scourges and disasters - no other predator in human history had caused as much damage as government. Yes, you couldn't live without it and yes, some of them had done some impressive things and even some good things. But a government was by nature a cold and wild thing and you could never really domesticate one.

Much of our problem these days - and we do do do have a problem - stems from the fact that as the government has grown to the point of engorgement, the citizenry has done correspondingly less Peopling. There are a lot of reasons for that: some citizens are lucky if they can keep a roof over their heads, some are having too good a time, some can't imagine themselves connected to such a huge entity except in a mode of subservience, some don't bother because they can't imagine that something so big and so powerful can really go irretrievably wrong (a variation of the Titanic Syndrome).

Worse, some citizens think they're doing a day's citizening when they're really accomplishing nothing good at all. This has been one of the more dangerous of the damaging unintended consequences flowing in a toxic stream out of the recent past. 'Thought' having been demoted because it's too masculine, judgment having been demoted because it's too oppressive, scepticism having been demoted because it's such a downer, and privacy having been demoted because people can go crazy or - worse - inappropriate - locked up in there, then what has flowed in to fill the resulting void is Emotion and Feeling, preferably displayed for public (and hopefully televised) viewing. If you've been Feeling, then you've done a day's work and your life has meaning and - what the hey? - you've probably gotten a good rush out of it as a benny. It hit me forcefully when Princess Diana died: all those people jostling to bring flowers, teddy bears, holy pictures, candy bars ... to be left in a pile near where ... well, wherever. What were all these people doing? Did they have any possible connection to her? I mean: a real, an actual, connection? Yes, if they saw her as another member of the communion of saints, but a) not many of them seemed motivated by such a subtle and strong belief and b) weren't there wakes and funerals closer to home that these folks could attend? And didn't these people have actual and real relationships they might be attending to? Were there not children left alone? Elderly parents? Blood not donated? Anything constructive? But it felt good to be feeling, and to be doing it in a big bunch, which is oddly reminiscent of the 'high' that soldiers experience when performing marching drill (or did; and many vets might dispute the whether that 'high' was worth it). And also eerily reminiscent of the 'high' so clearly felt by those crowds who in their dozens of thousands cheered themselves to tears for the successful Mussolini and the successful Hitler. This is not what The People do. It's what people do nowadays, but that's not at all the same thing. Democrats kindly take note. Republicans, join with them.

It's been mentioned elsewhere on this site that the postwar era has degraded the ability of the citizenry to fulfill its responsibility as The People. While much is made currently of the need for balance among the three Branches of the government, almost nothing is made of the fact that all three rest on a foundation of The People. The People is the great plate upon which the Congressional, Executive and Judicial continents rest, and if that plate goes south then the Branches too will slide inevitably into the abyss.

The erosions of our popultion's ability to function as citizens and as The People in the postwar era - stemming from the Right and the Left at various times, and from the Goverment itself always - have been so insidious and long-lived that most citizens are no more aware of them than a fish is aware of 'water', the medium in which it swims, moves, and has its being.

The National Security State, whose first foundational act was the double atom-bombing of the Japanese while they were trying to surrender, required a People who at their best would be akin to the crew of a ship, waiting unquestioningly for orders that they would execute to the best of their ability, while being 'professional' enough not to raise a fuss if they were sealed up in a flooding compartment should the occasion be deemed to have arisen. To keep up the rush, assorted national-security threats were raised up - some of them based in a bit of fact as was the concern about some Communists among us, some of them easy two-fers, such as hounding gays because they would constitute security risks against the Commies.

Following the loss of great numbers of its Southern and then its Northeastern voters in the mid-to-late '60s, the Democratic Party desperately sought to raise up new voters to replace them, bringing them in en bloc according to a now classic 'script': Outrage perpetrated by Evil Other creates an Emergency that Requires Immediate Gratification of Demands by said Outraged Identity ... Thinking, Doubting, or Abiding by Established Rule of Law is tantamount to Approval of the Outrage and even Indicts One as Co-Perpetrator of Same. The role of the People in this scenario was to function for all practical purposes as the extras in a Hollywood crowd scene or as the four-legged actors in a stampede scene. No previous experience required; talent not an advantage; thought prohibited. Nothing we have seen since 9-11 can justify our suprise at the stunning erosions of our Republic, unless we also admit that we haven't been paying attention as a People; and that, like some folks during the Vietnam years, we were busy having 'another agenda'.

As has been noted elsewhere on this site, the Democrats have become placators of the very Identities (whose name is now Legion) that they raised up, helter-skelter. They can barely take a stand on any issue, for fear of alienating or wrong-footing one or more of the Identities. Can 'judging' be used to mask racist discrimination? Then no judgment is to be exercised. Can 'maturity' be used to criticize the behavior of some? Then no maturity is to be sought. Can 'God' be used to frustrate the desires and aspirations of some? Then 'God' cannot be discussed - well, not publicly, but we of the Party still think a lot of .. ummmm .. the deity, or - what the heck? - the Deity .. or Deities - please don't be hurtful or negative by asking - so please go home, however you choose to define 'home', and pray, however you choose to define 'pray', and please have the good taste not to be rocking this boat we've cobbled together here.

And the role of the People in all of the foregoing: Don't ask questions, don't rock the boat, don't be negative, don't inquire as to what happened to stuff that's disappeared from public discourse; as one university handbook put it with the graceless succinctness of the true revolutionary apparatchik: it is not permitted to discuss the fact that certain topics are not permitted to be discussed. Again, all that the other side had to do was to take this script plan and deploy it for their own purposes, stampeding the now-degraded People in the service of a different agenda, but one that still required their performance as organ-grinding trained monkeys.

Imagine the Scriptural Prophets addressing Israel, as they memorably did, as a fallen woman. Having thrown away her dignity, yet the Prophets called 'her' back. Substitute Lincoln or your favorite Founder for the Prophet, and The People for the biblical Israel. We've had quite a time, and maybe let ourselves go. And now night is coming, and it will be dark and cold. But we are called, re-called, to our dignity and to our high purpose, and thus to our duty, and to our true Identity.

It's not going to be easy. Just about nobody wants us to function as The People anymore. Not the Advocacies, not the high and middle and low-priests of war, not the sellers of this and of that. Thinking, sifting, judging, using our famous frontal lobes - no, none of that is desired. Disciplining ourselves to self-mastery so that we can perform our duty as The People with a clear head and a clear heart - nope. As a matter of fact, once told that we were at war, we were immediately told to go shopping, by which is not meant quite the same thing as 'making a purchase'. Making a purchase is a careful task made by serious sober people who have finite resources and various needs, and they must make the painful calculus of possibility. 'Shopping' is something else again: closer to Bonnie and Clyde making a raid to scoop some goodies and to summon back from its well-deserved grave the childhood exhilaration of having your immediate desires gratified immediately- wheeeeee!

A People must be made of sterner stuff, for it must deal with sterner things.

Can it be any surprise that the Members of Congress - Democrats even more than Republicans - have proven so helpless, so feckless in the face of the present challenges? The Congress, like the other Branches, is founded in The People. And when The People are incapable, the Branches will reflect that lack, that failure, that absence. And when The People is degraded in its abilities or - what the hey? - its character, or even it's Character ... then who can claim surprise that the Branches become degraded as well?

To find themselves as a Party the Democrats must be willing to support the Raising of The People, for far too long lulled into helplessness like King Theoden in "The Lord of the Rings". But there will be, there can be, no Gandalf here. This must be a group effort. Democracies are endangered by wizardly powers, however benevolently they are exercised. Humans have some wonderful ideals and are capable of some wonderful acts, but on the whole one is best advised to recall (without embracing) their dark side. Keeping in mind the possibilities of that darkness, a People's mind can be wonderfully concentrated upon its stern duties. Thus the Founders, who took the game to the next level and kept fixed firmly in front of them the Ultimate Danger. No, not sex-offenders in the house next door or in the park or in the computer upstairs or around the holiday table or even in Washington ... no. The Founders saw that the Ultimate Danger, upon which all would rise or fall, was the Government, the Great Predator. Of course, being capable of far more insightful analysis than is possible or desired nowadays, the Founders also realized that this Great Predator was at the same time capable of some Great Acts and of doing some really Good stuff. So they wanted to harness it. Thus the checks and balances.

To the extent that the Democrats can become again a party of The People, they have a future. To the extent that the Democrats can only seek to stem the rising tide by attempting more desperately to play the placator to any Advocacy that will have them, then they will defeat themselves. They will defeat themselves as surely as the neocons are presently defeating themselves on our 'Eastern Front'.

But to become a Party of The People the Democrats have to respect just what an awe-full being is The People. The Democrats as know-it-all elites for whom 'the people' are required merely as extras in those crowd or stampede scenes ... no, that way lies extinction, and not only for the Party but for the Republic. The standard bearers of 'the democratic masses'? No, The People is not 'the masses' - however democratic, nor is The People a 'mass'. The People is a communion of individuals, adults, upon whom ultimately rests the future of their Republic.

So to the extent that for the sake of lubricating the agenda of this or that Advocacy over the course of the past few decades, 'maturity', 'judgment', critical and sceptical 'thinking', 'seriousness', 'character' and - what the hey? - virtue and Virtue have been kicked to the curb, to that extent The People have been degraded. Nor do I for a moment deny thereby the awe-full advantage which the present Administration's assorted interests have taken of this gaping civic weakness. Nor do I try to smiley-face-away the awe-full Nemesis that must await the active but also the passive perpetrators of such terrors and horrors. Nor do I propose an embrace of the type of 'religiosity' wherein believers are simply actors on a flat stage, vigorously going through the motions of belief and - with breathtaking presumption - redemption.

I suppose I'd have to say that just as the ancient Christendom was yet based - despite the weight of its massive organizational 'footprint' - on the heart of each of its individual believers, supported by the communion of other believers under the umbrella of 'church', so too the Republic must - despite the massive organizational 'footprint' of the postwar American government - be based on the vigorous heart and mind of each individual Citizen, working in concert with the other Citizens and thereby forming The People. Whether against that People the forces of demagoguery and manipulation and and ignorance and disrespect shall prevail ... is a chapter yet to be written. It is for this generation to write its own chapter in the Book of the Republic; it is this generation's rendezvous with Destiny, and it is every bit as important as the rendezvous with Ares Ferox proclaimed by FDR on that December day 65 years ago.

Once the task of Re-Calling The People is well begun, then we can debate whether Progressivism or Scoop-Jacksonism or some variant of a combination of them or of some other possibilities, is the best path to take. But until then, with the great engines stilled and the water pouring in, discussions about which new hat to try on, which new image to project, which new set of objectives to be photographed with ... or even earnest debate about any of the foregoing, will not be equal to the situation that confronts us now. Now more than ever, we need to be told, as we were when once a very mature and insightful adult spoke from the White House: "It is in your hands, fellow citizens, and not mine, that the momentous question ... rests."

Do the Democrats dare to Re-Call The People? Does anyone? If not, then it is certain that we shall meanly lose this nation that has been a beacon and the hope of humankind. The dark work of that loss is already much advanced. Who will stand and speak for America? If we might borrow from D'Annunzio: "A qui l'America?' And The People must accept and affirm: "A noi!".