SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL

Thomas Edsall has reviewed a new book by noted economist Joseph Stiglitz entitled The Price of Inequality.

The book is, in Edsall’s opinion, “the single most comprehensive counterargument to both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican laissez-faire theories”. And there is much justification for that assessment.

But it’s also not the key to what has happened to Us that has led  – to use Edsall’s term – to “our bleak present”.

Stiglitz – and rightly, I think – refuses to accept the very widespread professional economist’s view that Our current mess is and always has been “inevitable”, i.e. that megaforces both historical and economic have simply dethroned the U.S. from its postwar (1945-1970) economic hegemony of the planet, and thus that “our bleak present” is simply the result of all those forces (globalization, automation, the easy movement of capital and goods around the planet) working on Us and working through the rest of the economies on the planet.

And Stiglitz is surely correct to reject the “inevitability” of the Bubbles (credit, mortgages) that – finally in 2008 – burst and tore the bottom out of everybody’s boat. (The remaining two Bubbles – U.S. government solvency and the status of the Dollar as the world’s reserve currency - still have not burst, although the bankruptcy of an increasing number of American municipalities and towns is ominous in that regard, as are the increasing number of arrangements among governments in various around the planet to trade among themselves in currencies other than the Dollar).

But I can’t completely agree with Stiglitz’s conclusions: that while what has happened to Us is not and cannot be ascribable merely to “uncontrollable technological and social change”, but rather Our current “two-tier society” is “the result of the exercise of political power by moneyed interests over legislative and regulatory processing”.

This shades too closely, I would say, to being merely a repetition of the dynamical explanation classically assigned to the First Gilded Age (1880-1929, roughly).

“Politics shapes the market” as well as historical and economic forces, says Stiglitz. Yes. But that’s precisely where things have gone off the track, and while the bad Consequences of much of that political maneuvering may not have been foreseen (I said “may not”) yet they were not considered with sufficient seriousness, so eager was the Beltway to run a very dodgy and certainly highly-fraught political strategy to ensure electoral viability since at least 1972.

As I have often said on this site, the Democrats in the period 1965-1972 were first and foremost concerned for developing some reliable electoral coalition of voters to replace the New Deal coalition of Southern (and Jim Crow) interests and the blue-collar industrial workers in the Northern and upper Mid-Western cities.

With an impressive practicality, the Dems worked with the materials at hand. But they were unable to keep steady on the surf board as the Wave began to take some very very torturous twists. Advocacy for American blacks had with an alarming quickness dropped Martin Luther King’s marvelous, sober, and almost Lincolnesque vision of blacks joining the mainstream of American life through the liberation from the constraints of Jim Crow (the stunning counterpoint of the Watts riots took place within ten days of the passage of LBJ’s Voting Rights Act of 1965, fatally hampering his ability – as that President realized instantly at the time – to get any further major ‘civil-rights’ legislation passed). Replacing King’s vision was a congeries of black separatism, anti-white sensibility, and even ‘revolutionary’ agitation that deranged even so seemingly worthwhile an impetus as the emphasis on Black Pride.

But the Dems tried to work with what they had, vowing to put the full weight and force of the government behind a now-urgently-needed new ‘demographic’.

But the profound problem – in view of the Constitutional and Framing Vision – was that while the Jim Crow South had comprised a matrix of many (Southern) States’ unconstitutional race laws, which clearly could be overridden by the Federal government, yet this was not true of other regions of the country.

And even in the South, there remained the ominous Question: once the Federal government had forced the abolition of those matrices of race-laws, precisely how much further could it go without deranging the entire balance of power (Federal vis-à-vis State and local government) and engorging itself vastly in relation to government’s role in regard to not only political but cultural and social dynamics? Was the Federal government really designed and authorized to terraform the Southern culture and society, rather than merely ensure that the matrix of laws in regard to racial relations was made conformable to the Constitution? Would that not simultaneously engorge the government and set it on a dangerously slippery slope?

This Question became even more vital – and, alas, thus also even more un-disussable – as the civil-rights movement entered a second phase (i.e. beyond King’s first phase) not only in the South but in the rest of the country. Which immediately complicated matters even more because there were no matrices of overt and clear Jim-Crow-type race laws in the rest of the country that would justify the engorged and active power (such as it might or might not legitimately be) of the Federal government to start terraforming not simply the Southern Jim-Crow culture and society but the national culture and society.

At this juncture, postwar French and German (the Frankfurt School, as it is known) thought became useful. There are ‘structures’ in societies, cultures and civilizations; these structures work at profoundly deep levels to accustom their peoples to see as ‘natural’ many inequalities and injustices (a stunningly complex and yet vague concept, an empty suitcase waiting to be filled by whomever gets to it first); these deep and preconscious forces exercise a profound and powerful formative influence before the conscious thought and will of individuals and even the formally-embraced principles of a society and culture come into play; thus conventional (and traditional) political activity enters the picture far too late to really have any worthwhile effect because by the time people are ready to exercise Citizenship they are already mal-formed and tainted; and so clearly the government (European revolutionary thought is inevitably statist in this regard ,even when it seeks to be ‘revolutionary’ – it doesn’t seek to simply overthrow government but to capture it and, more specifically, its power and its capacity for expanding that power) must actually take it upon itself to profoundly run the society, the culture, and the people (which is hell-and-gone from the Framing Vision).

These ideas were developed partly by European writers critiquing ‘colonialism’, which was still alive (barely) and kicking after World War Two, and partly by transplanted German and other European writers who had spent their formative or early-adult years under Hitler, had escaped in the 1930s or after the war and come here, and now hit the nails that their hammers required: the U.S. was in its own way also a ‘regime’ and demonstrated the power-patterns so monstrously demonstrated by Hitler’s Reich. And consequently, but of course, steps have to be taken …

And, of course, there were also numerous intellectuals – native-born or otherwise – who still thought that Communism – Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, or a misch of all of them – was The Way Forward for the world and its peoples.

The Dems may not have wanted to be seen embracing such an alien (and, in truth, profoundly anti-American and anti-Framing Vision) set of dampdreams, but they were desperate. Perhaps they might ‘baptize’ all the whackness while taking political advantage of the remarkably broad menu of (statist) possibilities that was on offer in this panoply of concepts? Perhaps they could graft some of the body-parts of the European Frankenstein onto the (apparently diseased) American body politic?

And thus the Dems could somehow both create a new demographic for themselves (the American blacks) while also hugely engorging the power of the Federal government to terraform the country’s culture and society in order to give this newly-‘empowered’ demographic everything its self-proclaimed ‘official advocates’ desired and demanded.

Thus the American Federal government would start down the road of so many European governments: actively arrogating to itself the power to not merely tinker-with but to profoundly Shape and re-Shape the minds and hearts, the thoughts and feelings, of its own Citizens – who in the Constitutional and Framing Vision were The People, and who, acting in their collective capacity as The People, were the governors of their own government and the sole and indispensable source of its Sovereign authority … and legitimacy.

You can see the problems here.

And then it dawned on the Dems that even at their most numerous, their newly-valorized ‘black’ demographic would only constitute nine percent of the population.

Thus baffled once again, the Dems were obviously going to be open to any ‘solution’ pushed their way.

Feminism – most especially in its Radical variants, shrewdly enamored of European and Euro-communist and structuralist thinking – offered the jaw-dropping potential of a full fifty-one or fifty-two percent of the population. This was a demographic to be sought at all costs and in the service of whose agendas the pols would have to ‘do whatever it takes’.

It has taken quite a lot.

Especially when the Radical Feminists kicked their more moderate sistern to the curb and then (without too much messy attribution) shrewdly and slyly adopted the culture-war, culture-undermining strategy of early 20^th-century Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci. And his signature concerns were: hegemony, dominance, oppression, and marginalization; his objective:  to bring the marginalized into the center (of political power, not of any moderate centrist political praxis) and thus undermine the functioning democratic polities of the West and open the path for Lenin’s version of communism.

The Dems figured they could baptize this into the American Vision and in their lab on the Hill create some fresh new creature that would combine all the best of Gramscian and Framing thought (with the indubitable emphasis, of course, on their clients’ Gramscian bits).

Thus in a stroke the Dems a) ensured their political ‘success’, b) engorged the statist power of the Federal government, c) conceptually doubled the workforce at a stroke (women needed jobs to be ‘independent’ and shouldn’t have to spend their lives enserfed to families and raising kids and having happiness-obstructing babies), and d) ignited a profound culture-war (spun as merely backlashing by traditional power-holders who didn’t want to share power) that then also e) served to distract national attention from the hugely vital and increasingly urgent Question of how to remain a powerful and productive and solvent economy in the face of increasing competition from a Europe now recovered from World War Two’s devastation and a Third World now able to begin emulating the West and competing for production and business opportunities.

Quickly surfing in on the coat-tails of ‘structuralism’ came Victimism. This was an international movement that had begun in the immediate postwar era, concerned for the innumerably and monstrously demonstrated ways that people could be victimized by their own governments.

It quickly went viral here, under the eager horticultural ministering of the pols. And mutated ominously: now ‘victims’ were not ‘victimized’ by their governments, but rather by the structures in their culture and their society that ‘marginalized’ as well as ‘victimized’ them. A Problem for which the government would, in the engorged plentitude of its power, ride to their rescue, as if it were saving baby harp seals from evil predatory hunters (formerly known as the Citizenry, now cast as the ‘dominant, oppressive, hegemonic, marginalizing and backlashing’ evil power-holders).

Additional Identities were quickly embraced: Youth being one of the largest (the Boomers clearly constituted a seductively huge demographic and 18 year-olds were given the vote in 1972).

Immigrants were another: and a neat two-fer, since you imported a vast amount of ready-made non-White Oppressor folks who would vote (somehow) against all the ‘traditional’ arrangements while also undermining the well-paid status of unionized blue-collar American labor (the iconic Archie Bunkers who were destined now for the trash-bin of America’s History).

Neat again.

And if you added up all the Identities, and their inevitable Necessary Oppressor-Monsters, you got an amalgam that could be handily described as the White, Adult, Patriarchal, Sex-crazed (and later Straight) Male, especially if he was Middle-Class or Working-Class;  and thus conversely you got a Victimry (if I may) comprised of everybody who, in whole or in part, was not that.

Neat.

The problems this ‘strategy’ posed for a democratic politics along the lines of the Framing Vision should have been as clear as a fire in an oil refinery, but while the flames were acknowledged, they were cheeribly asserted to be merely ‘creative destruction’ and ‘liberating transgression’.

The Dems worked overtime in the lab up in the castle on the Hill. By the presidential election of 1972 they were ready to unveil their new Party to The People. They were rejected 49 states to one (Teddy K’s Massachusetts). And then they got really dark. And decided that ‘traditional’ democratic politics were not The Way Forward.

Meanwhile, watching the Dems fabricate a new Leviatha, the Republicans decided it was OK for them to bring back Leviathan – that monstrously engorged and omnivorous government that had been caged so ably by the Framers, and locked-lips with the Big Money interests.

This wasn’t such a big problem for the Dems, since now both Parties were somehow indenturing themselves to not only their ‘special interests’ (Identity-politics demands and Big Pain on the Left, Big Money on the Right) but also to the Very Very Big Government necessary to ensure that all the agendas, objectives, and demands of the various ‘special interests’ could be met.

And as Theodore Lowi observed as early as 1967, the government had now solved the Problem of not-wanting to appear ‘coercive’ in the immediate postwar era by allowing the ‘special interests’ of that era – mostly Labor, Business, and Agriculture – to write their own laws, which the pols would dutifully pass, or their own regulations – the authority for which the pols ‘delegated’ to an increasing pandemonium of all-powerful regulatory Agencies. Which, I would then add, was a dynamic monstrously engorged when the ‘special interests’ were astronomically expanded to include the various Identities of the Left and all their demands and their agendas and their objectives.

Meanwhile, the economy – and especially the Dollar – was in as much trouble as were the Culture and the Framing Vision. Nixon had to abrogate the 1946 Bretton Woods international financial arrangements and float the Dollar in 1971. And nothing really worked right after that.

The Identities demanded all sorts of regulation and policy and legislative ‘reforms’ that made hiring and keeping employees increasingly onerous for employers large and small. Big Money and Big Capital sensed that there were far less complicated sources of labor overseas. The solution for the Beltway (now in a condition of abject but robust Indenture): make American employees increasingly unattractive through various ‘protections’(ensuring continued domestic political ‘success’) while simultaneously allowing Capital and Production to go overseas (thus ensuring the satisfaction of Big Money and Investment Capital).

Genuine domestic Productivity dropped at intensifying rates.

The solution deviesd to handle that was to create government jobs wherever possible; although government employment beyond a certain point is not useful economically because it doesn’t create produced-materials for sale but rather simply re-shuffles (and redistributes) public tax monies like the peanut in the proverbial shell game. And to create an increasing panoply of ‘entitlements’ (so many people were ‘victims’ and were being ‘structurally victimized', no?).

And in addition to all that, the intensifying sense of ‘entitlement’ – coupled with the increasingly unreal environment of a national life that offered few constructive employment opportunities for the enterprising or the simply dutiful and responsible – did nothing to improve many folks’ sense of personal industriousness, productivity, and even responsibility (which was itself kicked to the curb as being ‘oppressive’ and 'blaming the victim').

Meanwhile, and especially as actual Production declined, the actual management of Big Money (the so called F.I.R.E interests: finance, insurance, real estate) actually became the primary sources of such wealth-generation as remained, and they had their own agendas and objectives which the government (Executive as well as Legislative) could no longer ignore … or even control: as regulations increased in the service of the Left, they were increasingly removed in the service of the Right and Big Money.

And this led to an intensifying downward spiral of smoke-and-mirror shows to try to keep up everybody’s confidence in the health and wealth of the financial system and the economy: there was borrowing on the authority of America’s (former) economic strength and hegemony – in Reagan’s second administration the U.S. went for the first time ever from being a creditor-nation to being a debtor-nation); diversification (corporations that made machinery getting into cookie-manufacturing and such); and hostile-take-overs (to simply lay off workers, drive up the stock price of the acquired business and then sell it to whomever at a profit, where the process would be repeated); out-sourcing (the jobs going overseas); off-shoring (not only the jobs but the taxable profits going to the host country); and then finally a series of Bubbles (about which you probably already know).

And, of course, extensive and habitual government jiggering of official figures to make the whole thing look a lot less bad than it was quickly becoming; while simultaneously everything was being spun as ‘liberating’ and proof that you can have ‘many revolutions at the same time’, kill the Goose that laid the Golden Egg, and still keep up the world’s greatest supply of Golden Eggs.

And then – even more ominously – as the tricks finally ran out, there was a lethal turn to overseas military (mis-)adventure to Go Out And Grab (GOAG) other people’s stuff. Which was cheeribly and nobly spun as ‘liberation and thus We embraced the national strategy of Go Out And Liberate And Grab (GOALAG), using – marvelously – the well-entrenched domestic trope of ‘sensitive’ Liberation to justify ‘humanitarian interventions’ and the regime-changing of whatever governments had lots of useful resources and couldn’t fight back and had – by whatever standard was convenient to the case – an ‘oppressive’ government. (And of course, if you’re talking about ‘women’ being ‘oppressed’, then just about any other government on the planet could easily be placed on the List.)

And yet these military (mis-)adventures cost the lion’s share of whatever actual national wealth remained and required a huge investment in the Pentagon operations.

(I pass over in silence the huge costs to military operation efficiency imposed by the various Politically Correct impositions on the military, and the catastrophic ill-consequences to the fighting forces of not only those impositions, but then the experience of fighting un-winnable military operations for years on end. We had been assured in the 1990s that with the USSR gone We would have no peer-competitor in a military sense and that thus We could afford to 'de-prioritize' military operational efficiency and competence, and then that It Doesn’t Make Any Difference Anyway because computers and whizz-bang technology would win all the wars and operations. And has any of that been working for Us?)

So then, I don’t think Stiglitz gets to the heart of the matter by blaming everything on the Right and the rich – who, admittedly, are now a ‘top-tier’ that approaches the obscenities of the First Gilded Age, but at least back then We were a rising nation whose potentials had not been fully tapped … which isn’t the case any longer. Not hardly.

And thus too, “inequality” is not the heart of the Problem now: just as the inequality of passenger classes on Titanic was not the core Problem facing those hapless souls after she ripped herself open like a tuna can on the berg.

If for no other reason, there really isn’t any money left to ‘equalize’ people; even if you took all the billions personally owned by the ‘top-tier’ tomorrow and ‘redistributed’ it (the Big Lie seduction of the past 40 Biblical years of the Left’s magic-act) you wouldn’t begin to make a dent.

People need not only to ‘earn’ money, but they need to feel like they are earning it through a useful and productive job: otherwise you don’t create Citizens but only unripe and (dependably ) dependent  ‘clients’, like the masses of ancient Rome (and Czarist Russia’s serfs and proletariat). No democratic and Constitutional republic can survive if it has to rely on material like that. As you perhaps have begun to see.

Thus also I can’t fully credit that assertion that “inequality violates moral values [and] … also interacts with a money-driven political system to grant excessive power to the most affluent”.

In the first place, it hasn’t been just “money” that has been driving the political system for the past 40 Biblical years – it has been the agendas of the ‘special interests’ and organized Advocacies of the Left’s Identity-Politics, whose lethally deforming influence has been exercised not through political contributions of cash but through the power of votes – votes ‘bought’ with the various schemes and stratagems of their pandering patrons in the Beltway.

Face it: individual ‘votes’ that have been ‘bought’ with the deliberately un-boundaried largesse of public tax monies are as lethally deranging to the American Vision’s political dynamics as legislative votes bought with corporate cash.

And face this: “dominant interests” cannot accurately be defined today as merely the old bugaboo ‘special interests’ of the First Gilded Age. Today’s dominant interests include those on the Left, through Identity-Politics and the whole of that lethally misguided strategy.

If Big Money has “captured” regulatory authorities and legislators, so has Big Identity – and if either of them are cause for serious concern, then both of them working in tandem are cause for the most vital and profound public alarm.

Nor is it enough for Stiglitz to lament – accurately enough as far as it goes – that “lack of opportunity” means that the nation’s “most valuable asset – its people – is not being fully used”.

Decades of the government operating as a snow-plow of first-resort to clear the paths of Life that human beings vitally and profoundly need to feel they have cleared for themselves have worked a horrible and soul-stifling corrosion, as any sense of personal or communal enterprise and responsibility were baffled and choked away.

Nor is it completely relevant – although hardly inaccurate – for Stiglitz to observe that “the rich”, needing fewer “public services”, don’t want to pay for any. The rich need fire and police and highway maintenance just like everybody else.

What’s more accurate is to acknowledge that what is nowadays meant by “public services” is hell-and-gone beyond what that term has usually meant in prior eras of American history: that term now means the entire panoply of government largely and literally substituting itself for both individual maturity and enterprise and effort and local community concern and effort, and the ever-increasing pandemonium of ‘service providers’ that battens off the whole thing.

We have replaced the fiber and capacities of individual human beings and communities, of Citizens and their locally-administered polities, with blanket government imposition of tax monies in the service of political convenience. And – who can be surprised? – the more that such a dynamic undermines the competence of individuals and communities, the more We ‘need’ the ever-engorging Feds and their government impositions. We are well on the way to becoming soup-rabbits, caged in iron or velvet, awaiting the Call to the Cook-Pot.

This is the genuine fons et origo of Our intensifying and expanding en-serfment, which is now no longer merely political (as if that weren’t bad enough) but morale (used as an adjective here; ‘moral’ has too many religious connotations, which are not inapt but in this context, I think, distracting).

Avoiding that reality will do Us no more good than having another glass of champagne or a quick shot of rot-gut or moving queasily aft toward the still-dry fantail appeared as a good idea to the hapless and doomed souls aboard Titanic.

ADDENDUM

We approach – by coincidence – the 46^th anniversary (August 20, 1966) of Mao’s kick-off of the Cultural Revolution with the campaign against “the Four Olds”: old Stories, old Customs, old Habits, old Ideas. That ‘Revolution’ – as revolutions so often do because that’s what revolutions do – wrecked so much of the matrix and fabric of Chinese history and culture that almost half a century later China is still trying to repair what damage can be repaired.

It is, however, more than a coincidence that at precisely that point in time the Dems began to consider doing the same thing here. Because if the demands and agendas of its soon-to-be-embraced Identities and Advocacies were to be met, then huge and deeply-laid chunks of American Tradition, Culture, Belief, and Ideas would have to be ripped out and tossed away – under whatever ‘philosophical’ or legal or political pretexts could be devised.

Neatly, the Advocacies pushed a whizzbang New Idea their way: if you call all of our demands and agendas “rights”, then you pols won’t have to worry about trying to explain anything or persuade the Citizenry – you can just claim that this is ‘a matter of rights’ and so you don’t have any choice but to give in and rip out the Old; you’ll be covered by the hallowed American respect for “rights’ so you won’t even have to do much heavy political lifting.

The Supreme Court had already beaten Mao to the punch – without perhaps quite realizing it – when in 1965 it declared that it had found more “rights” in “the penumbras of the Constitution”, which is to say, in the shadows and darkling historical and conceptual fog surrounding the actual document that the Framers wrote … where nobody had seen anything before. Neat.

Then the structuralists got into the act and claimed that since there were levels of ‘marginalization’ and ‘victimization’ so deep that nobody even realized they were there, then – but of course – all such marginalized and victimized persons (and groups and demographically valuable groups) must – but of course – have some “rights” that required the government to make all that marginalization and victimization go away. And the pols – and the Supreme Court – were happy to agree and comply.

And the victimists certainly agreed with all that.

And so did the Gramscian-soused ‘radical feminists’ and the Eurocommunist ‘radical democrats’ (who really had no use for ‘democracy’ or ‘deliberative democratic politics’ at all).

And lubricating the friction of the whole queasy and treacherous scheme was the general and specific frisson provided by Mao’s then-current and then-imagined ‘success’ in imposing and unleashing the Cultural Revolution against the Four Olds in Red China.

The Great Helmsman would rip out the framework of the hull while the Great Vessel, loaded to the gunwales with ‘souls’ trying to make it through Life, was far out on History’s sea, ploughing through the mountainous waves and the not-infrequent storms and typhoons of modern History.

ANDREW SULLIVAN LOVES JESUS, NOT THE CHURCH

Just in time for Easter – or, more Correctly, the Day of the Spring Egg Hunt – Andrew Sullivan has a piece on The Daily Beast site.

I’d like to comment on that article here. (The Post I promised on Theodore Lowi’s 1967 article on ‘interest group liberalism’ will follow shortly.)

Sullivan goes for the Thomas-Jefferson gambit: take the New Testament, snip out all the “supernatural” stuff, and then what you have left over will be a handy ‘moral guide’ for the Enlightenment mind.

There are at least two problems with that approach.

First, Jefferson lived in a time when Western culture still lived off the ‘interest’ from the investment of Christendom’s integral and coherent and well-Grounded moral and spiritual heritage bequeathed (and achieved) by the Medieval Synthesis of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas took the best of Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics, combined them with the Fathers of the Patristic Age and placed the whole under the guidance of the Judeo-Christian revelation … and thus effected the planet’s most comprehensive and integral and well-Grounded moral synthesis, which yielded what might be characterized as an Owners Manual for human life and for human be-ing.

The Enlightenment, teetering on the edge of oncoming night – if I may – could still carry on as if it were daylight, because the late 18^th century was the first moment of dusk, after ‘sunset’, when there was still more than enough light to play around with carefree abandon.

Thus Jefferson’s confidence.*

Second, the Jefferson approach is actually a variant of a strategy most vividly deployed by Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”: it presumes that there is no deep and integral and visceral interconnection between the various elements of a living organism; thus – in Shylock’s grossly inadequate analysis – you could chop out a pound of flesh with no thought as to consequences to the other vitally interconnected and interacting systems within the living organism.  (And many thanks to Portia for belling that witless though potentially lethal cat.)

A culture, based in a comprehensive belief system, is not something that can be chopped up without dire consequence. Nor can the belief system itself, if it is complexly and integrally constructed (like, say, a modern large aircraft or spacecraft).  And Aquinas accomplished as much conceptually – more, I would submit – than Leonardo did with his sketching of flying machines.

So then when Sullivan wants to introduce his affinity with Jefferson’s principle of the Separation of Church and State, he is not quite anchoring himself on the mark. The key Question in all of this is the Relation of Religion and Culture, and not the Separation of Church and State.

Perhaps Sullivan is deflected and confused by the very visible efforts of the government to expunge religion from culture that We have seen going on for the past 40 Biblical years around here. But even if so, this is a vital and lethal confusion.

But this confusion – presuming it is not a carefully worked-out strategy – works toward his general purpose: to combine ‘religion’ with “power and politics”. This opens up the vast poppy fields of claims that the Catholic Church (which he takes under direct fire in the piece) is nothing more than merely another power-politics organization and establishment that seeks to impose its will, justified on the putative basis of some ‘supernatural’ warrant.

And which, he immediately continues, has given rise to nothing more than “war, pogroms, reformations and counter-reformations”. That the Church had played a constitutive role in the development of Western Culture after the Fall of the Roman Empire, seeking to establish and maintain some basic level of coherent decency in the face of warring  chieftains and barons and lords, nascent and then rampant monarchies, and all this on top of the perennial deformations and derangements generated by humanity’s innate tendency to betray its own best possibilities … none of this apparently counts for much in Sullivan’s assessment.

Nor does it give him pause that the foundations of Western Culture laid down by the Church in the age of  Christendom constituted – not to put too fine a point on it – a well-grounded foundation.  And you don’t need an engineering degree from MIT to realize that once you have a rather large structure, chock full of human souls toiling and living, you don’t want to simply go screwing around with the foundations with gay abandon. What homeowner can’t figure that out?

Sullivan will save his situation by focusing on “Jesus”, for Whom he evinces a large admiration.

After all, Jesus came up with all those neatly “radical” ideas (can you hear a certain drumroll starting up here?).

He’s especially enamored of Jesus’ insistence that His followers had to “give up power over others” because power inevitably requires “the threat of violence” and “violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching”.

Supporting his statement, Sullivan notes that Jesus “never defended his innocence at trial”. Just how defending one’s innocence in a trial is a form of violence, I can’t grasp. Surely – if Sullivan is going to be reducing his advice to Us to his conclusions about Jesus and violence – then this is rum advice indeed. Especially nowadays, when folks faced with an engorged and rampant government have few defenses left except defending themselves in trials – to the extent even that right is still operative.

But it does sound eerily and ominously familiar: defending yourself in a trial simply ‘proves’ you’re guilty. We’ve seen this poisonous serpentine ‘reasoning’ deployed against all sorts of designated-targets of the Left as well as the Right in the past few decades.

It was the Church that worked out the careful reasoning that in the light of Original Sinfulness and the violence that inevitably flows from it, there are legitimate grounds for self-defense in certain carefully determined circumstances. Humans must not only live with the human capacity for love, but the human capacity for violence (unless Sullivan – channeling Rousseau – wants to assert that only ‘institutions’ and ‘organizations’ create violence and humans, left to themselves, will simply live in love and mutual respect until the Second Coming).

But Sullivan is not going to let you think that he is some secular type of guy. He fully believes in Jesus’ “divinity and resurrection”.

But that’s not going to mean for him that there was anything to all that “supernatural” stuff. Nope, Jefferson was right about all that mumbo-jumbo. (I can’t help thinking of Francois Mitterand’s marvelously sly bit from 1965: “I was born a Christian and shall doubtless die in that condition. But meanwhile …”)
Rather, the “divinity” of Jesus simply goes to ‘prove’ what Sullivan sees as the take-away of His entire ministry: “What’s the use of preaching doctrines if you don’t live as these doctrines demand?”

This – if it sounds somewhat familiar – is the Question the Church has been posing to humanity for two millennia . Nor has the Church ever proclaimed itself or its agents divine, rather than being participants in humanity, constructed of the same crooked timber, although blessed with the guidance of the Holy Spirit that – or rather Who – is an integral part of Jesus’ “divinity”.

But that’s not where Sullivan is going with it.

“What is politics if not a dangerous temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself?”

I don’t know how this fits in with the Framing Vision or that “deliberative democratic politics” that is the lynchpin of that Vision. I don’t know if Sullivan knows either – or cares.

Surely he doesn’t see Identity Politics as perpetrating – as a matter of Plan – ‘violence’ upon the body politic and the common-weal through its rejection of “deliberative democratic politics” and the manipulation of public law and policy through assorted agitprop tactics and strategies of manipulation and misinformation and the sidestepping of “deliberative democratic politics” through – as Obama noted in ‘The Audacity of Hope’ – an “overreliance” on courts, where – as Catharine MacKinnon acutely observed – the vanguard elites can avoid “messy” democratic political process neatly and effectively.

What, for that matter, is human life except an ongoing temptation to sidestep the dignity and rights of others in order to have it your way? That’s why there is a Constitution and – I submit – why there is a Church.

Which brings me to my next point: the Church evolved – and Jesus rather forthrightly intended to build it (at least if you take the Gospel text literally; if not then read on) or the generations succeeding Him realized that they somehow needed to preserve His teachings and structure their lives around those teachings.

You can go up, down, and all around as to whether Jesus imagined that with the Fall of Rome and the imperial government the Bishop of Rome would find himself and his Church in the unenviable position of being the only source of order left in the West.

But to propose that the Church as she is represents nothing more than an evil contraption constructed with malice aforethought for the purposes of a violent conspiracy of – to use the familiar recipe – “dominance, hegemony, marginalization and oppression”?  Sullivan, actually, uses the same thinking that gave Us ‘patriarchy’: that other phantasm of a deliberate conspiracy-to-oppress that somehow was put together a day or two after the beginning of recorded history and has been chewing away gaily ever since with the agreement of both the (putative) oppressors and oppressees.

Jesus, Sullivan insists, wants everybody to live as He said to live and as He Himself lived.

But what does that mean? If Sullivan has a decent house and a nice steady job and took the time to get an education, if indeed he is tapping away on a computer instead of wandering the streets of towns and cities and living under the stars … is he living that life?

What does it mean to live as Jesus lived when it becomes clear that He is not coming back right away? This is the Question that Christians faced from a moment not very long after the Ascension. Sullivan’s own well-established and well-furnished life is his answer and that’s fair enough.

But does he really think that the Church is not an answer to that Question? Does he think he can reasonably demonstrate why that should be so?

Jefferson – says Sullivan – had a vision of a “purer, simpler, apolitical Christianity”. That’s nice.

It was also a Ground-less vision, one that relied merely upon the Afterglow of Christendom illuminating the lives of Western Culture, but without any solid support structure underneath it. And as the Afterglow wears off, or wore off, or was ‘deconstructed’ – then there’s nothing to hold it all together.

Unless you want to rely on ‘the government’, that will replace the Church with whatever laws and regulations it feels it would like to impose. I see this option as neither progress nor conformable to the Framing Vision, nor conducive to the continuance of the Republic.

He then – conveniently – blames the Republicans and the Right for creating “a polity now saturated in religion”. Neat.

But if one changes the axial term from ‘religion’ to ‘ideology’ then who is responsible for American society and politics having become ‘saturated’ in ideology? I’d say you can make an excellent case for that being the handiwork of the Dems, who embraced radical-feminism’s Marxist-Leninist-Gramsican analysis (with ‘women’ substituted neatly for ‘proletariat’ and ‘the masses’ and ‘the marginalized’ wherever those terms appear in the original texts).

And for all practical purposes regarding Sullivan’s plaint, ‘religion’ and ‘ideology’ are the same: a pre-existing matrix of assumptions, presumptions, and beliefs about the validity of which their adherents entertain no doubt.

But that’s not where he wants to go with all this.

“Organized religion” is “in decline” he crows. His prime example in regard to Catholicism is the clerical abuse crisis, although that mania-stampede is now starting, finally, to run down as it is exposed for the hyper-inflated and oh-so-selective hatchet job it has always been.

The Protestant polities, he observes, have been declining ever more steeply in the past 50 years (thus since about the time post-1965 ‘liberalism’ got rolling) because they sought to embrace “religious moderation” (meaning: because they tried to appease the tide of secularism by abandoning their insistence that their faith and belief were Grounded in any Beyond and then gave themselves over to providing benefit-of-clergy to secularism and its demands and its agendas and all its pomps and all its works – seeking to ride the back of the tiger, they have wound up as a hot lunch for a beast that should have been recognized at the outset as being viscerally committed to consuming them). In the old tale of the scorpion and the horse – where the scorpion asked the horse for a lift across the raging river, then stung the horse halfway across, and when the dying horse asked Why since now they would both drown, the scorpion merely replied “I’m a scorpion and it’s what I do” – radical-feminism with its repellent Marxist-Leninist roots should have been recognized all along by the Beltway elites as being the scorpion it truly is.


The politicized saturation of religion “would also, one imagines, baffle Jesus of Nazareth”.  After all, “the issues that Christianity obsesses over today” – homosexuality, abortion, marriage – were not matters that occupied Jesus’ attention. And in regard to adultery, he merely preached “forgiveness” (although that ‘forgiveness’ presumes it is indeed something sinful that needs to be forgiven – a breach of trust and commitment, one would think … though those virtues are not high on the liberal and secularist agenda these days).

But Jesus didn’t “obsess” over nuclear weapons either – so where do Sullivan’s exegetical games really lead Us?  For that matter, Jesus did not ‘obsess’ over most of the issues currently defined as social-justice. That does not at all mean that ‘social justice issues’ cannot be derived legitimately from the principles Jesus enunciated. But clearly you have to derive your practical conclusions from His principles, and thus the necessity of the Church. Jesus was primarily concerned with the individual human heart and soul, whose Stance under Grace would lead to actions more in conformity with the responsibilities of being created in God’s Image. But He was not primarily concerned with ‘reforming’ (or deconstructing) the political and cultural institutions of that time and that place in which He found Himself. First things first.

But Sullivan  presses on. “The family? [Jesus] disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him.”

Here you see the gaping error in his entire approach. How distinguish between what Jesus as the man situated in his mission in life in that time and that place recommended to those who would join his little peripatetic missionary band … from what core principles Jesus was propounding for any and all human beings who would in present and future times follow Him?

Or are We to presume that Jesus never wanted anybody to live in (or start up, or remain faithful to) a family ever again?

These are precisely the type of Questions for which later generations of Christians needed to find guidance. And from that need – obvious as hell even to the Christians of the earliest era – the Church’s role as focal matrix for careful and prayerful deliberation on the genuine import of Jesus’ sayings developed. And how else to carry on?

Ditto as Sullivan notes that Jesus “was a celibate” and that Jesus and his “followers” actually “anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant”.

Well, then, so … if on top of the practicalities of having his immediate band of disciples leave their families so they could live on the road with Him, Jesus really didn’t imagine in His human capacity that the world as they knew it was going to be around much longer … then what the frak to do when later generations of Christians quickly realized that somehow that ‘End of the World’ didn’t mean exactly what it seemed to mean? How then to figure out what He did mean?

Hence, again, the need for the Church. Much later, the Protestant solution was to let every believer work out whatever the hell Jesus meant for him/herself. But that was simply to let each player in the orchestra play whatever s/he thought would be a nice melody – and who would pay to sit through a symphony like that?

But if I infer correctly, Sullivan wants Our take-away to be simply (and simplistically) that Jesus didn’t worry about questions of family and sex so why should anybody claim to oppose recent cultural agendas from the Left on merely religious grounds? Verrrrry eeeenterestink … but unfortunately, incoherent. (With attributional nod to Arte Johnson’s German soldier on ‘Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In’ show.)

Sullivan uses the example of Francis of Assisi, who embraced poverty and eschewed violence and the conventionality of the 13^th century Italian world around him. But then even Sullivan notes that before long Francis found himself in an organizational quandary: so many wanted to follow him that he had to – not to put too fine a point on it – organize his followers so that they would keep to his vision and principles and not simply go off into all sorts of stuff claiming to be following his path.

Precisely the problem that gave rise to the answer called the Church in the earliest Christian times.

But this is not where Sullivan wants to go, or wants Us to go, with it.

It appears that – humans being humans – even a good idea about getting beyond conventionality and organization requires that you somehow preserve said good idea by organizing some normative (and in a sense conventional) praxis in order to sustain the genuine idea. Who knew?

If you have a great piece of rich and complex music, then you need an orchestra to play it. But you also need a score, and you also need some sort of Conductor to keep everybody at the same place on the same sheet of your music. Surely Alinsky saw the same thing when he insisted that folks had to Organize.

Otherwise you will surely wind up lamenting in the accents of the Songstress**: ‘What have they done to my song, Ma?’

Jesus left behind a ‘rich and complex and textured’ heritage of sayings, and it would take and still takes a whole lotta careful and informed and prayerful work to figure out a) just what the core content of His principles and guidance actually is and b) how to apply that in one’s contemporary world and one’s own life.  You can simply leave all that up to the occasional illuminations and excitements of this or that individual, or perhaps leave it up to a government that insists nothing can stand outside of it, nor against it, nor above it … but you can’t intelligently expect that if you just toss the sayings out there you are going to sustain a coherent conceptual grasp of the heart of the matter.

Jesus “was without politics”. Phooey. Phooey and baloney. His timing, His confrontation with the authorities, His shrewd rhetorical but ironclad logical one-liners always delivered in front of a useful audience … this guy was shrewd to the very max. Even His death was expertly crafted for maximum impact on public opinion (though, unlike so many, He most surely put His money where His mouth was and backed up His teachings with His own blood, and did so with an iron intensity of purpose and careful arranging that must seem ‘obsessive’ to the modern and postmodern, secular mind).

After what can only charitably be construed as some gay (he is most publicly and avowedly ‘out’) Irish sentimentalism about his dear granny, Sullivan insists that he is not advocating some sort of Irish-granny type of “privatization of faith, or its relegation to a subordinate sphere”. Because “there are times when great injustices – slavery, imperialism, totalitarianism, segregation – require spiritual mobilization and public witness”.

Ummm – and not ‘sin’? But of course, ‘sin’ is something that is taboo in secularist and – alas – post-1972 ‘liberal’ circles nowadays. You won’t stay on many A-lists by talking about (let alone preaching – or ‘obsessing’ – about) ‘sin’.

But Sullivan reduces here the entire content of Christian spirituality and religion to – by remarkable coincidence – the assorted agendas of his favorite politics. Which is the gambit that so utterly deranged the mainstream Protestant polities in this country and seduced them to self-deconstruction.

Is there no venue for exercising ‘spirituality’ except in some form of social action (but not if you are acting against ‘sin’, of course)?

And then he asserts that King and Gandhi did indeed “renounce power”. Well yes, but really no.

Both Gandhi and King were immensely shrewd in developing the power (and political power, at that) of non-violence. Neither of them simply quietly lived out his life in a private renunciation of ‘violence’; they both wielded the power they craftily evoked and managed in order to realize their agendas. (And in King’s case, certainly, We are the better for it – although he was kicked to the curb in 1966 by black-power proponents, almost immediately after his greatest achievements – yet even then he kept fighting for his vision.)

Sullivan wants to support “mystery”, but apparently not the profound and lethal mystery of ‘sin’. And he assumes blithely that every believer can be sent forth to sail him/herself across the Seas of Mystery with no compass and no charts and no navigational skills and that somehow it will all work out nicely enough, precisely as Jefferson could blithely assume that folks could just make up their minds to ‘be moral’ and everything else would work out well enough.

They both want to have their cake and eat it too: they can presume the sublimely effected Shaping afforded by Christianity, while simultaneously pooh-poohing it formally and playing to the peanut-gallery, urging everybody to just ‘getcha’sef free’ (a nod to Simon and Garfunkel, of course).

This can only end in a spring egg-hunt that will never discover the eggs.***

NOTES

*Let me say right here that I strongly support the constitutional principle of Separation of Church and State. But what has been happening around here most recently is not really an instance of that particular matter but rather something else: the government-abetted imposition of a secularist culture that acknowledges no Beyond (and thus, alas, no sufficient Ground for any morality and any wide and deep cultural consensus).

John Rawls gave this gambit the ‘benefit of philosophy’ by coming up with the neat claim that ‘comprehensive meaning systems’ cannot be admitted into public discourse and deliberation. This neatly eliminated ‘religion’ or religious belief as a legitimate obstruction to the various elements of the secularist agenda that required cultural, conceptual, and moral ‘space’ that the Christian moral tradition (as comprehensively formulated by Aquinas) would not permit.

Neatly, his own matrix of post-1972 ‘liberal’ presumptions, assumptions, and beliefs were not – he insisted blithely – to be considered as a ‘comprehensive meaning system’ but rather constituted merely a collection of insights and illuminations that ‘any reasonable person’ would come up with on his/her own.

Neat.

**Melanie Safka, if memory serves from 40 Biblical years ago.

***One thinks too of a recent book by Alain de Botton (‘Religion for Everyone’), urging that Yes, we secularists can develop sufficient substitutes for such fuddy-duddy old stuff as ‘sacraments’: so, he urges for example, when you sit down to eat, stop for a minute and think of those who have gone before and whom we love. This, apparently, will cover Correctly and sufficiently all of the bases covered by the Catholic Eucharist, the Mass.

We can “create shared meaning” all by ourselves. No need for any Beyond nor for any external supports to sustaining genuine belief. We can just sort of ‘will’ ourselves to do it, whenever we feel like it or whenever we remember to do so and have the time.

This is the brave new world that the secularists figure will more than adequately replace – will indeed hugely surpass – the world Shaped by sustained communal belief in Christ (or anybody/thing else). A vacuum constructed over an abyssal void. Oy.

Cue the Bhagwan. And prepare to be adrift.

ADDENDUM

What would the Framing Vision – and hence America itself – have looked like if there had been no Afterglow of Christendom that Shaped the culture and spirit of the Citizenry even before the country itself was formally established?

How could Slavery have seemed repugnant? For that matter, how could Lincoln have formulated his opposition to it in the debates with Douglas, counting upon the moral sentiments of the Citizenry? Plato and Aristotle both accepted it; St. Paul himself – focused so intently on the primacy of the individual Christian’s spiritual Stance toward life in Christ – didn’t devote much ink to the worldly station of believers. How could Abolitionists – those among them who gave thought to the theological – anchored their concerns morally?

And among the Framers themselves, that ‘universality’ of Jefferson’s in the Declaration of Independence – that all human beings are created equal (a theological concept before it was a political concept) – is derived from the universality that derives from God’s creation of each human soul.

As Jefferson tried to have Jesus without the supernatual, Sullivan wants to have Jesus without the Church. Just what will precipitate out of such alchemical distilling is food for serious thought.

My concern is not so much for the ‘religious’ mindset as for the 'ideological' and 'authoritarian' mindset, because it is a more basic and dangerous problem. It is one that is shared by both Left and Right, but we can't ignore it just because it doesn't conform to conventional political framing.

Related mindsets are the 'fundamentalist' (although you can be a of fundamentalist secularist mindset as easily as you can be of a fundamentalist religious mindset) and the ‘primitive’ mindset (stereotyping, either-or thinking, self-servingly selective, refusal to accept contradictory facts). They all share basic dynamics and they all degrade the competence and effectiveness of public discourse.

There is a thus revealed a clear authoritarian streak on the current Left as well as on the Right. After all, if most of the citizens 'just don't get it' (however you define that 'it'), then the danger is instantly created that you will want to sidestep deliberative democratic politics because it's not worth the time or effort to debate or deliberate with so many people who 'don't get it'. Down that road - think of MacKinnon and Chantal Mouffe, among others - lies authoritarianism just as surely as down the corporatist and neocon Rightist road that seeks to make everybody cannon-fodder. The touted Knowledge and Service Economy (as dark a cartoon phantasm as any Night On Bald Mountain) will reduce the country to Correct college-educated elites or coffee-pouring, leaf-blowing helots, bereft of status as both Citizens and as Images of God and existing simply as creatures of the State.

Mussolini's assertion "Nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, nothing above the state" can - ironically - support the demands of an ideologically-controlled government of the Left as well as  of the Right. Funny how the conceptual night moves.

The issue is not so much 'Separation of Church and State' (a constitutional principle I fully support) as it is the Relationship of Religion and Culture. The Framers and especially Jefferson could erect the Separation Principle because they lived at a moment in Western History where the burning sun of a culture controlled by a single authority had set, but there was still enough daylight in the early dusk.

Thus the Framers lived in the Afterglow of the comprehensive cultural and social shaping of the old Medieval Christendom: they could quietly presume that common structuring and shaping of society that had already been achieved, while formally erecting the Separation between Church and State in the new American order.

The universal equality of all human beings that Jefferson pronounces in the Declaration of Independence is taken over from Judeo-Christian theology as synthesized by Aquinas - that idea is grounded solidly and immovably in the rock-solid belief that all human beings are created in the Image of God;  the idea of some Higher Law that judges and boundaries the actions of the government and forbids  it from creating laws that interfere with the genuine fulfillment of those human beings is also derived from that theological synthesis; the idea that since people are so marvelously created in the Image of God that they deserve and must be given some voice in their own government is also derived from that theological synthesis.

In fact, the Question might well be asked, as I have asked it before: what would the American Framing Vision have looked like without that heritage from the Medieval Synthesis?

Lastly, and coming around to current political eventsthat Sulllivan mentions: the Tea Party is in some ways a counter-burst of ideology generated by the sustained ideological suppression by Political Correctness from the Left. But both Tea Party and the Left-Correct agendas and justifications are instances of ideological and authoritarian thinking and it is that type of thinking - beneath the conventional framing of 'religious-or-secular', conservative-or-liberal, that is the great and lethal  danger.

In fact, I would go so far as to propose that what should be an unwritten principle of the American Vision is: the Separation of Ideology and State ... because an ideologically-driven government, by the very  dynamics of its presumptions, is going to have no use for deliberative democratic politics. And that will be true whether it is a government of the Left or of the Right.

Hence, the reality that now confounds the conventionally framed national political narrative: Bush 2 is continued and intensified by Obama who should - in the conventional and Correct framing - be the marquis paragon of all that post-1972 'liberalism' has been trying to do.

And, I would conclude, perhaps he is.

ADDENDUM 2

I recall also the Italian Maoist radical students’ slogan of the late 1960s: “Only violence helps where violence reigns”.

This sentiment quickly, I would say, found its way into radical-feminism here: since the ‘patriarchy’ is based on sexual violence, then any violence done (to truth, reality, objectivity, and to the patriarchally dominant, oppressive, hegemonic and marginalizing American Culture and Tradition and Framing Vision and Polity and Common-weal is all to the Good and is also Necessary.

Again, you wonder how any government could swallow this and take  it on board in a democratic polity based on deliberative democratic politics.