THE UNDERSIDE OF LIBERTY

For July 4^th, writer Kurt Andersen wrote an Op-Ed  for The New York Times.

He had recently been at the Woodstock Writers Festival and the question had been put to him: “Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts … but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?”

His answer: what has happened “is all of a piece”: “extreme individualism has been triumphant … selfishness won”.

He has part of good a point, and one that fits in with my own view of the history of this past half-century or so.

Because – yes – there has always been a “tension” in “the American idea”: “between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal”. And in the 1960s this – he says – led to a supernova explosion of “self-love” (which, he also notes, Thomas Jefferson had derided as “the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others”).

There has indeed always been a “tension”, but it has been a dynamic and tensive tension (if I may): the interaction of the two poles (radical individualism, the demands of the common-weal) actually energized the vitality at the core of the lived American experience.

In fact, in the best-case scenario, you would work hard to develop yourself as an individual precisely in order to not only secure your own life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also to contribute thereby to the general common-weal of everybody else, who were also doing that same thing.

The two energies were harnessed together, like horses to a wagon. They were to be competently handled by the individual holding the reins, and this project would form the common Project of all Americans, each and every one.

Jefferson’s “self-love” – in the bad sense – would work out to something like this: you simply focused on your own pursuit of happiness and (parasitically) let the rest of the country and your fellow citizens eat your dust. Sort of like a quarterback: your only interest is to get the ball you are carrying down to the goalpost and everybody else on the field is irrelevant at best or a potential obstruction at worst. Your only ‘duty’ is to the ball and to your getting the ball to the goalpost (where you can happily spike it and do your favorite little dance, just to remind everybody you did what they didn’t or couldn’t). It is – I imagine – a very self-gratifying little exercise. A restorative little diversion, if practiced occasionally.

Whether you can build or sustain a society, a culture, a polity, and a country by making that your life’s primary objective is another Question altogether. But then again, there’s such a thing as ‘thinking too much’, especially in football American-style.

Andersen notes some historical examples of this and that era in American history when “Americans have gone overboard indulging our propensities to self-gratification”, such as the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Given the Abundance (to use historian David M. Potter’s term from the 1950s) with which the country was naturally endowed, there was more than enough to go around, and everybody could just get to it – making a life for themselves and their families while simultaneously contributing to the common-wealth. With so much Abundance, getting-ahead wasn’t a zero-sum game.

Human nature being what it is and always has been, there was always a ‘moral hazard’ to the whole proposition: you could get so carried away with getting more material Abundance for yourself that you lost sight of anything else. And that would not only morally and materially weaken the common-weal for everybody else, but it would also turn you into a troll – not to put too fine a point on it – although a very nicely-accoutered troll. And you might turn your kids into trolls in the process, or your game-plan might induce others around you to start ‘taking a walk on the troll-side’ themselves. And you can see where that dynamic might go if it really got rolling.

After periods of such intensive and general selfish self-indulgence, an “economic crisis” or “reassertions of moral disapproval” would somehow work out a restoration of “a rough equilibrium between individualism and the civic good”.

So the consequences of an economic crisis or reassertion of moral-disapproval were able to work as a corrective when things got out of whack.

But coming up to more recent American history Andersen starts to sail into troubled waters.

The “two decades after World War II” were notable for a couple of things – and he doesn’t quite touch on all of them. The generations that as young or middle-aged adults had fought – in the military or on the homefront – in that Good War were also the generations who had experienced the deprivations of the Great Depression that extended from 1929 well into the 1930s.

In 1945 the country emerged as the Primary Victor of that War since it had not only spear-headed the winning side with its industrial might and military prowess (although the Red Army had proven itself a kind of frightening peer in that regard), but by 1945 all of America’s peer-competitors for industrial and economic productivity had pretty much been wracked by the War, while the U.S. productivity base had remained untouched by bombing or invasion or combat waged on its own national territory.  The country’s natural Abundance and the natural productiveness of its citizens were reinforced and amplified by the wrack and ruin of all of its peer-competition.

And that verrry comfy economic reality lasted until 1965 or – at the latest – 1970.

The Boomers, alas, spent infancy and childhood thinking that this was the normal state of affairs, now and forever.

Andersen doesn’t mention that.

He does mention that to the Boomers their parents seemed kinda worn-out, conformist, and sort of over-invested in just leading predictable and boringly peaceful lives. That those parents had pretty much had a too-eventful youth between 1929 and 1945 didn’t occur to their kids; that they had seen in the wartime wrack and ruin of Europe’s and Asia’s societies and in America’s own shocking experiences with the Depression and the Dust Bowl so much human destruction that they treasured ‘order’ and ‘stability’ and ‘peace’ … that didn’t occur to the Boomers either.

Like Dustin Hoffman’s eponymous ‘graduate’ in 1968, they only saw that ‘going into “plastics”’ wasn’t going to get you all the happiness that could be had: rather, get the girl, walk out on everything else, hop a bus, figure to score that night, ride out for more exciting pastures, and cut before any larger and longer examination of the consequences could be examined. Hollywood!

Or maybe like an “Easy Rider”, hop on your hog and blow through the boring and backward towns, making sure your very presence reminded all those troglodytes that they lived in caves and you had crawled out and really knew the score.*

And in “Bonnie and Clyde” it didn’t even make any difference whether you obeyed the law. You were just so ‘freeeee’ and ‘liberated’ by robbing banks (of other folks’ hard-earned cash) and living large. The law and ‘society’ were just things meant to oppress you and get in your way. Precisely a kid’s view of it all.

Of course, the kids wouldn’t have long remained mired in such natural (for a kid) misconceptions if their parents had been doing their job. But something had happened to the parents of the immediate postwar period: they really didn’t know what was right or wrong anymore and didn’t want to be too ‘authoritarian’ and bothersome (look, after all, where that had gotten the Japanese and the Germans and the Russians). ** And perhaps Rousseau was right: if you just leave them alone the kids will ‘naturally’ be good and ‘society’ will only screw them up.

After all, 1914-1945 had been a thirty-years or so that pretty much demonstrated to even the most unreflective observer that even the most extensively-developed civilization could screw itself up and deprive or kill dozens of millions in the process. Maybe we should just ‘let it be’ and trust the kids. Maybe that would be better. Maybe that would work. Yah.

Meanwhile, there was money to be made at all levels: the Little Guy could unionize and get a steady decent job and raise his family (think of ‘Archie Bunker’ – and who wouldn’t kill now for a steady job that paid decently, even if you had to carry a lunch-box to work every day?). And the bigger fish could take advantage of the country’s planetary pre-eminence in industry and finance.

Money could insulate you (and yours) from another Depression’s ravages. And nobody but the whacko far right-wingers imagined the government could start to look like those bossy monstrosities that Hitler and Stalin had put together.

But in all of that, as Andersen notes, there was still a balance: if beatniks and hippies were distasteful  weirdos, so too were European-type superwealthy permanent aristocrats whose families and fortunes simply engorged to the point where they might as well have been Dukes and Countesses and all that, living on their estates far away from the troubles and toils of ordinary folk.

As he provocatively juxtaposes it: “Greed as well as homosexuality was a love that dared not speak its name”.

And he continues: “But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment”.

That’s a good start. But only a start. In the first place, the counterculture was only one of two prongs of the Boomer revelation. The summer-of-love Flower Children – just looking for a boozy, bong-y, permanent summer afternoon on a California beach – were the laid-back siblings of the gimlet-eyed ‘revolutionaries’ of an increasingly large number of revolutionary agendas, seeking – complexly – to achieve individual fulfillment or empowerment by massing ‘victims’ together into Identities and groups whose advocates and agitprop organizers could hit the streets and head to the Beltway.

And that is the key element that Andersen doesn’t mention: it was the Beltway, spearheaded by the Dems and later joined in bipartisan bonhomie by the Republicans, that fueled the fires that birthed the Left’s new Leviatha while melting the bars of ancient Right-leaning Leviathan’s cage.

This wasn’t just some vague cultural synergy. This was a calculated political strategy conceived and hatched for their own purposes at the highest levels of government, there in the Beltway.

The deal – as I have often said – was that the Left’s organized Advocacies would be pandered-to in exchange for the votes of their Identity-group’s ‘demographic’ while the Right’s unsleeping ‘moneyed interests’ would once again be allowed to run free, like they were in (what would now be known as) the First Gilded Age.

Government (thus taxpayer) monies would be showered upon the Left’s agendas and groups while government legislative and regulatory authority would be engorged to enable those Big Outrage and Liberation agendas and impose them on society and culture, while government legislative and regulatory authority would be precisely weakened in order to allow Big Money to play its eternal Game.

But then – who knew? – the rest of the world recovered from World War II or started to develop along American and capitalist lines. Suddenly the country had competitors again.

So much so that in 1971 Nixon had to abrogate the Bretton Woods agreements of 1946 and float the Dollar. The vaunted U.S. currency was now no longer based on the amount of gold in the national vaults but would ‘float’ in the aether of international financial calculations. The economy began to wobble instantly.

But precisely at that same time, rejected 49 states to 1 in the 1972 presidential elections, the Dems desperately welded themselves to their newly-hatched client-Identities and went for ‘revolution’ from above, engineered and administered by deceptively happy-face New-Order elites and the pols who eagerly and happily loved them.

While simultaneously the Big Money elites now went international with an increasingly avaricious avidity that was only intensified by Reagan’s seemingly happy-face but restorative Presidency (when Gordon Gekko’s cinematic ‘greed is good’ became the official morality of the Right, as ‘revolutionary morality’ – which is not really morality at all – became the official stance of the Left).

There was no balance and no proportion now: genuine revolutionaries have no truck with ‘balance’ and ‘moderation’ on principle, and wealth has never accepted limits on its own engorgement.

The fundamental American ‘moral hazards’ – frakkulently and whackulently – intensified precisely as ‘morality’ was kicked to the curb both by the Left (morality is simply a code for sustaining the oppressive status-quo) and by the Right (there’s nothing immoral about making as much money as you can).

With ‘morality’ deconstructed, there was no balancing element to Shape or Boundary either ‘liberation’ or ‘wealth-creation’.

“Do your own thing”, says Andersen, “is not so different from “every man for himself”. True enough.

Although he neglects the revolutionary morality of Identity-group ‘liberation’ as it mutated here: there is no morality because morality ‘oppresses’ and it is only in the service of the revolution (whichever one you choose to benefit-from) that anything can be judged morality; revolutionary success is by definition the only ‘morality’ and is by definition ‘moral’. Case closed. If you ‘just don’t get it’, then get out of the way and shut-up or you really will ‘get it’.

The entirety of the foregoing brought to you by your government. And spun as (marvelously) simultaneously both ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ and also ‘traditional’ and ‘red-blooded’. Something for everybody! Although – weirdly and ominously – the common-weal somehow got kicked to the curb even as ‘everybody’ got something.

But as the world itself became America’s productive (and lately financial) competitor, the government had to resort to more and more tricks to keep up the flow of cash and the illusion that the Golden Eggs were still flowing: diversifying, out-sourcing, off-shoring, juggling the government fiscal and employment figures, re-jiggering the definitions, juggling the books, and then finally, Bubbles – as shiny and glossy as everybody who knew how to work the levers of power could make them. And now the government is simply printing the money and figuring that as the financial Hegemon it can keep doing that as long as the special ink and paper hold out. You might as well have printed up tons of special paper to sop up the water and started stuffing it ‘optimistically’ into the holes in Titanic.

Nor, as he notes, was there any longer any “social opprobrium” to provide speed-bumps to slow down the lemming-rush from Left and Right, nor watertight doors to stop the increasing flow of water leaking into the Great Ship.*** The same deconstructing of social opprobrium that lubricated ‘unwed motherhood’ and ‘gay sex’ and half a thousand other fresh, rich and transgressive bits of progress and liberation also deconstructed any sense of ‘decency’ in the amassing of personal wealth.

Nor am I here primarily disagreeing with the content of this and that ‘liberation’ and ‘transgressive progress’. Rather, for both Left and Right, I am pointing out primarily that nobody stopped to think through the larger systemic Consequences.

Whether you A) agreed or disagreed with the Content of this or that ‘liberation’ or ‘reform’ – from Left or Right – was only one part of the deliberative analytical task and the challenge that demanded to be faced.

There was also B) the Question as to how such changes would be introduced. What sort of government would it take to achieve all this? This was the Question of Method. To what extent could any Constitutionally-grounded American government achieve all this and still remain Constitutionally grounded? And to what extent would have to mutate into something else altogether (Leviatha and Leviathan)?

And there is then also C) the Question of Consequences: regardless of whether this proposed change is ‘good’, is it workable at a cost (financial, ‘moral’ – in the sense of the Framing Vision) that the country, the culture, the society can bear? That can be borne without the entire fabric of society and culture becoming so frayed or pressured that it unravels sufficiently i) as to be unreliable as a matrix of living and conducting a decent human life and/or ii) mutates into some other type and shape of thing altogether?

Costs and Consequences: not simply economically, but in the larger and more Classical sense of ‘the Human Economy’ of values and prudential judgments and decisions, made by all of those whose lives will be impacted.

Or, as one militarily-informed participant in the run-up to the Iraq War put it: nobody wanted to ask the essential strategic Question: And what then? Once you have ‘won’, what happens next? And how do you respond to it?

So: given, as Andersen related at the outset of his piece, that the social and cultural revolution(s) of the 1960s had been “mostly won” … what then? And really, if their Costs and Consequences had not really been appreciated, have they really been won?  Which, of course, has been the abiding Great Question about the Iraq War and the seemingly endless string of military mis-adventures that it has spawned.

If you ‘win’ what you set out to win, and yet wreck yourself in the process, to what extent – really – can you be said to have won anything at all? Hitler – to use that realm of reference only because of its general familiarity – ‘won’ in Poland in 1939 … and yet he wound up – quite beyond his intentions – with World War 2 on his hands. The Japanese ‘won’ at Pearl Harbor … and yet they wound up – quite beyond their expectations – with the War in the Pacific on their hands, the strategic initiative of which by June of 1942, a mere six months later, they lost spectacularly and permanently at Midway.

Thus what Andersen calls the “Me Half-century”.

Except that the individual ‘me’ was organized into ‘Identity-advocacies’ (Left) and ‘interests’ (Right) and thus amplified the lethal Consequences astronomically.

And here We are, in the Year of Grace Two Thousand and Twelve and of the Independence of the United States the Two Hundred and Thirty Sixth … and counting. Literally.

Nor can it be asserted that the ‘culture wars’ of the 1960s can’t be held responsible for the economic perversions of the 1970s and 1980s and subsequently. It was precisely the American culture that provided the matrix and Ground of the Boundaries that would Shape and Contain America’s morally-ambiguous energies.

And when those Grounds and Boundaries were culturally kicked-to-the-curb, then all bets were off as to where the now unguided American energies might go.

And the government’s energies ditto.

So here We are.

And what then?

And what now?

NOTES

*In that 1969 movie, it didn’t hurt that Fonda and Hopper blew through the Jim Crow South, where folks were not only set in their ways – which in itself isn’t such a bad thing – but were set in the ways of Jim Crow. From a scripting point of view, a neat loading of the deck.  

**It’s interesting to look at – say – Lewis Stone’s Judge Hardy shrewdly but wisely fathering the bumptious Andy Hardy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jim Backus’s almost pathetically helpless fathering of James Dean in 1955’s “Rebel Without A Cause”, and Donald Sutherland’s Knowledge-and-Service society architect father in 1979’s “Ordinary People”.

***Thus, I would say, it’s really nothing but a distraction whether one is ‘optimistic’ or not: arguing whether the glass is half-empty or half-full is irrelevant when the glass itself was filled with a poisonous concoction that you have already half-consumed. Or, to use another image: arguing whether the ship is half-empty or half-full is irrelevant when in either case you have now taken on so much water that your critical reserve-buoyancy is negated.

ADDENDUM

I just finished watching an installment of Ken Burns’s superb video history The Civil War; the episode that deals with the events of 1864. There was a photograph of Lincoln, described in Walt Whitman’s words as craggy-faced, serious, his homeliness somehow elevated by the depth and power of his personality. So very much, I thought, a strikingly impressive example of human beings in the full flush of their adulthood, forged in no matter how hot the fires of life and events.

And it struck me: would Lincoln have ever become what he became, had he been required to play to the kids’ mentality?

But isn’t that precisely what has happened to American politics in the past forty or fifty years?

The world and era of the Civil War was an adult world and an adult era: kids had to learn quickly and as best they could what Life and History required of them, and make the best of it. And they acquitted themselves with a stunning sobriety and determination and achievement.

One might wonder, in the twilight, what Obama might have become had he himself not been under the pressures of that type of politics his Party did so much to promote forty Biblical years ago; or had he himself, perhaps, not been heated – but only to a softness – by the mushy flash-pan evanescence of a youthy politics of the quick Impulse and of the easy Intention.   

One might wonder how long – without genuine human adulthood – the country might longer last.

AFTER THE FOURTH OF JULY

Frank Rich wrote an Op-Ed in ‘The New York Times’ on for the 4th of July.

What caught my eye was the last paragraph: he quotes (as “smug”) Chief Justice Roberts’s recent comment that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”.

Rich and Roberts are both wrassling with a truly difficult – frakkulously difficult – problem; one that has bethumped Us as society and polity since the inception of (what I would call) the Second Phase of the Civil Rights Era that began in about 1966.

The First Era you will recall as the one dominated by Martin Luther King and his vision of simultaneously conducting (and instigating, to some extent) “direct non-violent action” while also casting the entire movement as a Call to all Americans to achieve a new level of genuine national fulfillment, united around this project of eradicating racial-injustice; it was specifically focused on the Jim Crow South and it pretty much required the Federal government to exercise a level of intervention that it had only previously exercised on the basis of its war-and-civil-insurrection powers in the years of the Civil War and the decade immediately thereafter, when Federal troops occupied the South during the Reconstruction Era (ended in 1876 when national party political strategy required the mollifying of Southern voters).

The First Era, in a sense, sought a continuation of that hugely unfinished Federal project, abandoned far too soon; and after watching Southern police and pols trying violently to defend Jim Crow by beating up black demonstrators (and white Freedom Riders), a national consensus pretty much existed that the Feds had to go back down there and finish the job … it was sort of an Open File left from the Civil War, although the File was a century old by the early 1960s.

But once the procedural corrections were made that cleared away the operational political blocks that Jim Crow had erected to continue the repression of Southern blacks – and this was accomplished in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 respectively – the country came to a huge crossroads.

In the intervening century – especially in the period from the 1890s to the 1950s – large theories and experiences had come into existence:

First, sociologists and political scientists, in conjunction with the large-visioned psychology of groups and societies – had developed much more subtle theories as to how ‘reality’ was ‘constructed’ in self-fulfilling (and often self-serving) ways by ‘majority views’.

Second, the emotional malleability of ‘crowds’ and the manipulation of public opinion had developed from the more or less neutral observations of Gustav LeBon in the mid-1890s, through the consumerist advertising theories of Edward Bernays, and the truly vast (and monstrous) government-controlled manipulations of public discourse and opinion effected by the Leninist-Stalinist and Maoist versions of Communism and the diabolically clever government machinations of Hitler and Goebbels.

And third, in the US certain academics were becoming infatuated with a newly imported French Literary Theory that considered the reader, and not the writer, as the arbiter of the meaning of any ‘text’ (over here, the great gambit involved envisioning that all of reality – and especially public reality – was nothing but a ‘text’ and it was up to the current ‘readers’ (especially those vanguard elites who knew how to ‘read the text’ because they ‘got it’) to interpret the text and then get the government to impose their views on the population, who had suddenly been demoted from being The People to being the ‘benighted masses’ who just didn’t get it and who needed those who did get it to make them – like confused cattle – take the Correct path).

All of this was in the dense and agitated – and legitimately excited – air of the mid-1960s.
Along with the myrmidons of the Boomer in their gushy Youth, either happily basking in an eternal Summer of Love, unbothered by sobriety, maturity, or the need to make a living or provide for posterity and families or else eagerly seeking to apply the wisdom of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the doddering, fuddy-duddy United States and its boring democratic ethos where nothing truly exciting or interesting ever seemed to happen and everything took too much time.

Yes, Brown v. Board of Education – the landmark Supreme Court Opinion of the mid-1950s – had urged ‘all deliberate speed’ in desegregating schools, but the Jim Crow folks simply used ‘deliberate’ as an excuse for not-desegregating at all. So clearly then ‘deliberate’ was a baaaad thing since baaaad people could use it to keep things from ‘changing’, and ‘change’ was the Great and Good Thing.

Trust the Boomers to draw the wrong lessons – but booze-and-drug fueled midnight bull sessions don’t require logic or prudence; you want to go for what ‘your gut’ tells you (your brain being kind of in neutral due to the drugs or drinks). Worrying about ‘consequences’ is just a form of ducking the ‘change’. Ah, those were the days!

So, getting back toward Rich and Roberts, the Feds faced a massive problem after July, 1965. The ‘experts’ were telling them that there were a whole lotta ways to Deconstruct Jim Crow and Reconstruct Southern society: the government would have to ‘go deep’ as it were and start aggressively and vigorously changing the entire complex matrix of Jim Crow laws – even on the local level – and THEN get into changing the habits of thinking and feeling, of mind and heart, of the Southerners themselves.

It’s sort of like a modern van Helsing ticking off ALL of the possible ploys that a trapped vampire might use and ALL the places that a vampire might hide in: not enough to plan on a tough hour or two with a stake and some garlic and holy water. No, to clean out all of Transylvania, you were going to need government-level fearless vampire-killing. (Alas, this whole approach, in the foreign adventures field, was coming a cropper in Vietnam but to notice that would have been ‘insensitive’ and – as always in the matter of Boomer practice – thinking too much.)

But the Second Phase, after 1965, now hyper-agitated by the view that the entire country (and populace) was ‘racist’ and had to be Deconstructed (the French Theory term) and Reconstructed (the Civil War era term) – and on just the same level of intrusive intensity as the Jim Crow South.

In addition to questions of ‘prudence’ and ‘workability’ there was the question as to just how much of an Operation like this could be mounted by the Federal Government that was specifically ‘limited’. Surely, a government Operation like this was going to require a government hell-and-gone from the one envisioned in 1787. And not just in terms of size and complexity, but in terms of the very scope and nature of its authority, power, and role within the overall American ‘thing’.

King himself, in his ‘Letter from the Birmingham Jail’ in 1963 had confessed his frustration with ‘liberals’ who were more concerned for ‘order’ than for ‘justice’ and were urging him to tone-down his demonstrations and ‘be patient’. No, said King, ‘justice’ has to take precedence over ‘order’ – especially when that ‘order’ is unjust.

It would be hard to disagree with him.

But he was writing for a pre-Boomer, American adult audience, and he was trying to get established precisely the objectives enshrined in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that would soon be passed into law.

The post-1965 situation was much different: ‘adults’ had kinda disappeared, unless they were – in a queasy similarity to Chinese Party officials – marching in support of the Young (whom Mao had declared to have the real spirit of the Revolution). The Youth had gotten it into their heads that the world was more fluid than solid, that anybody who couldn’t embrace ‘change’ like a 19-year-old could was just ‘old’ and ‘lazy’, and that ‘consequences’ were just another way of saying No to the foaming torrent of creative freshness that would lead to Summertime for Everybody (they were generous, in their Youth – the Boomers were).

King himself had started to develop into even wider areas of concern: that Vietnam was an unjust war and that it would certainly sap national energies much needed to effect genuine justice domestically; that the ‘violence’ and the impatience of the young Black Panthers and the separatism of the Black Muslims of the era were going to fracture, rather than unite, Americans; and while he didn’t come out (as best I know) and say that ‘order’ was also vitally important and necessary in a nation and in a civilization, he was concerned that things were spinning out of control (including the control of the Young, who didn’t see ‘controlling events’ as a worthwhile use of their time and energies in the first place).

Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom! – as Mao had said – and the Garden would shape itself. Having not paid enough attention in high school (so much other interesting stuff to do, maybe down at Bikini Beach!) the Boomers hadn’t realized that vegetation, left to itself without trellis or tillage and given adequate light and water, tends to the Jungle more than the Garden (which requires sustained and careful and patient and prudent and knowledgeable adult skill if it is to flourish).

And King was pushed aside – both by LBJ (who was looking for a little payback of his favors in the form of King supporting LBJ’s war as LBJ had supported King’s civil-right campaign) and by younger and more impatient blacks.

So what began to develop – initially under the moniker of ‘affirmative racism’ until the government PR flaks realized that the phrase was toooooo truthful – was a comprehensive Federal campaign to use regulatory and civil and criminal law to Deconstruct and then Reconstruct the entire country, which was now considered as racist as the Jim Crow South.

(And you can imagine what happened in the very early 1970s when the far-more organized radical-feminists came along to run the same game plan although for their own purposes: that the entire country was ‘sexist’ which was even worse than ‘racist’ and involved now not the entire white population but the entire male population and required even more aggressive and invasive government action to Deconstruct and Reconstruct Everything Tainted With Patriarchy – which they also imagined included, not to put too fine a point on it, Everything.

And not just Everything American: race slavery was a particularly vicious North American affair, developed in the earliest days of European arrival in the New World – but Family and dual-gender parental dyads splitting up the chores according to each gender’s gifts and predispositions was pretty much the way the entire human species had arranged itself since the beginning of humanity’s history … so the Feds were being seduced (perhaps like Custer, or Napoleon on his march into Russia) into a much more profoundly complex and much more hugely questionable Deconstruction/Reconstruction project.)

The concept of affirmative action - which nobody can really deny is a discrimination based on race – made its quiet appearance in the mid-1960s, with all its attendant profound difficulties (Should the government discriminate at all on the basis of race? If you focus on ‘outcomes’ won’t you wind up undermining objective assessments of individuals? If you do that, won’t you actually be undermining the very individuals you are trying to help? What will happen to the perception that the government is legitimate because it is fair? How will everybody else in the country react to this favoritism?)

In regard to that last question, I note here that the Beltway’s solution was to include most of the country, by the late 1970s, as beneficiaries – for one or another reason – of such ‘preferential discrimination’: the various Identities that blossomed like Mao’s Hundred Flowers now constitute between 2/3s and 3/4s of the population – just about everybody except those White, Working-Class Males who ran the patriarchal and oppressive Industrial Culture … the Culture is gone now. Along with – who knew? – the genuine national wealth.

So Roberts has a point: logically speaking, the best way to stop X is to stop doing X. And he needn’t be (I don’t know enough about him to know for sure) a mere shill for wealth and corporate (and white and male) power to make this assertion. The preferential-discrimination theory has more than enough deeply troubling questions and truly alarming potential consequences built into it.

And at this point the Feds have hooked sooooo many folks on this thing …

Although the Feds have also lost all the Wealth that was necessary to fund it (you could take all of Bill Gates’s fortune tomorrow, and it will disappear into the low-reservoir of entitlement monies with hardly a bubble – and tomorrow you’d have to find another Gates, and the day after, and the day after …).

Rich avoids taking his chosen path all the way to the precipice, which – conceptually and historically – is just a sentence or two up ahead.

Instead he takes a final trumping bipartisan swipe at the “delusional” nature of both Roberts and LBJ.

And thus can wrap up with a Big Finish: “America is still very much a work in progress”.

Ach ja! The brave words of the 1960s, though they were ringing with queasy hollowness in the 1970s, and then with brassy sheen in the 1980s, and then with smugly arrogant assurance in the 1990s, and then in quicker succession with violent and self-justifying arrogance in the early 00s, and then with a pathetic nostalgic sentimentality as the last of the herd of the Bubbles collapsed.

The buffalo are gone, the bubbles are gone.

This generation has a rendezvous with Destiny – and it has nobody to blame but … (fill in the blank).

I.F. STONE AND US

Jonathan Mirsky reviews D.D. Guttenplan’s biography of I.F. Stone in ‘The New York Review of Books’.

I have a couple of thoughts, not totally connected; I’ll follow the order of their appearance in the piece.

Guttenplan notes that Stone saw himself reflected in the central character in Jack London’s ‘Martin Eden’. Stone said “I look to the state for nothing. I look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the state from its own rotten futility”.

This is a sense of government that We lost after the 1930s were swallowed up by the 1940s: World War Two and then the Cold War. The engaged folk of the 1930s were tempered by the Depression, and saw the increasing “iron triangle” (they wouldn’t have used that phrase) of government-and-wealth (the new corporate kind) as oppressing the working folk of America. There wasn’t so much of a middle-class then, raised up by the wealth generated from the 1940s war production and then launched into the suburbs in the later 1940s by the automobile.

And they saw that the War to End All Wars that had ended in 1918 had accomplished no such thing, despite Woodrow Wilson’s ringing assurances. They felt more than a little bamboozled. And they sensed that it was precisely the government in Washington that had been the agent of the scam.

There wasn’t so much of a middle-class (and I don’t use the term disparagingly, or quite in the sense that the Boomers used the term ‘bourgeois’ in the later 1960s) embrace of ‘respectability’ and ‘fitting in’. In the 1930s folks were starving, even though they were working as hard as they could (when there were jobs for them) and the only decent thing anybody of good-heart could do was to try to fix that.

And there wasn’t yet the emphasis on national order and organization and teamwork that was imparted by the experience of dozens of millions of Americans, on the fighting fronts and on the home front.

Nor the deep need for some peace-and-quiet felt by the former children of the Depression who were also the military and civilian veterans of the massive deprivations and exertions of World War Two. And their desire to make sure that their kids – the aforementioned Boomers – had a better time of it than they had.

The engaged adults of the 1930s felt themselves duty-bound to try to improve the lot of the average American, and they felt that to do so they had to vigorously engage the government and show it the error of its ways. Which is precisely what a democracy is all about.

Alas, the governments of the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy seemed to be more vitally concerned for their people and more successful at providing for them than the Wall Street-wracked American government. After Wilson in 1913 gave the power over the currency and the fiscal system to the very bankers of the Federal Reserve who most folks would have imagined to be the foxes who should not be guarding the national henhouse, it seemed like there was a cabal in Washington far more immediately dangerous to Americans than whatever might be happening in governments elsewhere. (In the early 1930s, Hitler had not yet come to power, and it wasn’t til the mid-1930s that his monstrosity started to become evident outside Germany.)

So a lot of those 1930s concerned intellectuals and activists wound up taking a closer and somewhat wistful look at the Soviet system. That system was shrewdly spinning itself to the world as the ‘workers’ paradise’ and making all the right noises and wearing all the right clothes to induce the civilized peoples of the planet to imagine that here, at last, was a government that was working for its people – and not indentured to its Big Money classes.

Alas, nobody realized then that a government can become as monstrous if it indentures itself to a ‘revolution’ and a ‘revolutionary ideology’ as a government that indentures itself to Big Money. And, after all, every government – possessed of a monopoly of power and authority – seeks first to preserve and extend itself … that’s what governments, and all living organisms, do. That’s why the Framers built such a careful cage around theirs – and folks still remembered that then, though We certainly have forgotten it now.

And so Stone, vital and energetic, poured his energies into genuine active efforts on behalf of the average American, taking his encouragement where he might find it. Thus “the strong man on horseback” (a pose Mussolini particularly liked to strike whenever the cameras were rolling).

In this kindler gentler era I’m not so much worried about a “man on horseback” as I am about a national Daddy or Mommy, whose parental wisdom would guide the gaggle of unenlightened citizens. Sort of like John Wayne riding herd on – well, the herd – except without all the macho, ‘traditional’ Wild West stuff like a horse and the sweaty, imposing leather accoutrements. But still with a six-shooter, hidden somewhere – no government, no matter whether a Daddy or a Mommy or a Nanny – ever gives up its six-shooter; sometimes, with blundering herds, you have to fire off a few rounds, or even take down one or two of the offending mammals so as to encourage the others. It’s what governments do.

Stone sensed a (or, in his words, “the”) “rotten futility” of government. It’s not hard, sometimes, to feel that way. But if that’s what We’re going to settle for then We might as well close up shop now rather than wither away into herd-dom. And I still feel like We as Citizens have a responsibility to improve the heritage that Our forebears passed on, for the sake of future generations, not only here but around the world. In that sense, especially, I embrace the mantra “for the children”. But it’s also for Ourselves, because in allowing government to go bad through Our own lack of civic competence or civic courage is to betray Ourselves, and each other. We are all – despite what the multicults and the rabid-Right loonies insist – Americans with responsibilities: to each other, to Our common American heritage, and to the rest of humankind – present and future.

How, I sometimes wonder, can anybody be bored here? This isn’t enough to make a life meaningful?

Guttenplan goes on to note that Stone displayed an ability “to get to the bottom of things”. Yes. The 1930s generations weren’t quite so trapped on the level of appearances – they knew that there was a substance and a reality to things, and that more often than not it was hidden away down below somewhere. And it was preferable that the non-elite and those not ‘in the know’ didn’t go looking beyond what ‘information’ was sprinkled upon them by their enlightened betters. To which Stone would have said Phooey and Baloney. And upon him be much peace.

In 1933 Stone wrote “The way to a Soviet America, the one way out that could make a real difference to the working classes, was closed”.

A couple of things.

Clearly We can see that in some of his beliefs Stone, like many of his cohorts, was wrong: the last thing America or any nation should undergo is a Soviet-style government. But We can also see that although they wrote and spoke and tirelessly tried to persuade, they did not mount a coordinated effort to effect a ‘revolution’ here. They went digging, and reported back to the Citizens. But they never chose to take it upon themselves to see to it that their ‘vision’ was imposed upon the Citizenry.

Which cannot be said for later generations (see my immediately previous Post “Michael Lind’s ‘The Next American Nation’” of September 29th). Whether in waging a ‘revolution’ or a ‘war on’ this or that, far too many eager and certain souls among Us have gone gaga over imposing what they think will work best, for Us all or at least for their own favored demographic. And the government – over the past few decades – has shown itself not simply to be responsive but to be invertebrate in its serious deliberations as to what might be and might not be such a great idea.

Second, the “working class” has had a tough time of it. In the 1930s it was attacked, as always, by Big Money – especially the corporate kind. In the 1960s and since it has been under sustained assault from the erstwhile Liberals, a ‘New Left’ that has left the ‘Old Left’ of Stone’s era in history’s dustbin. Again, see my immediately previous Post: whether from Multiculturalism and the more radical elements of Feminism, or from the corporate-worshipping Rightists who see building military equipment – and using it – as pretty much the perfect solution to everything that bethumps Us.

Nor did he lightly yield his hopes, even the misplaced ones. It took until 1956 (the year of the Hungarian uprising, brutally suppressed by the Soviets) for him to declare that “the Soviet Union is not a good society and it is not led by honest men”. Spare me the ejaculation that if only the Soviets had allowed women into their government, things would have been much different, much kinder and gentler. It’s hard to let go of hopes and admit that you had misplaced yourself emotionally and intellectually – who wants to admit that? And in so doing cast yourself once again onto the arid plain of a human History whose evil seems always and everywhere to triumph over its good?

And is it too “quaint” to expect that a government be led by “honest men” (or, yes, women)? When was the last time you asked yourself if your government was so led? Or is it simply enough that this or that elected personage makes the right noises and the desired choices for your taste?

But before that he had degraded himself somewhat by trying to defend the Moscow show trials of 1937: “Revolutions do not take place according to Emily Post [google her].The birth of a new social order, like the birth of a human being, is a painful process”.

That’s actually a bit of ‘realism’ in its way. Very big changes in the social order are bound to be messy things; especially when they are imposed by those cadres who ‘get it’ upon the unenlightened masses who ‘just don’t get it’. Which is why the Framers were especially concerned that a competent Citizenry would have the authority to deliberate before knocking down walls (decorative walls or carrying walls – there’s a big difference) and throwing all the ‘old’ furniture and books out the nearest window.

But the Boomers had read Mao’s Little Red Book and knew that the Master Helmsman had revealed that “A revolution is not a dinner party”. And indeed, Our own Secretary of Defense but one opined not so long ago that even “democracy” can get messy or untidy (I forget exactly which). Sigh – just the time for Mary Poppins to fast-rope down and clean the mess up. Although both the Helmsman and the Secretary seemed willing to see a lot of stuff – and lives – broken first; perhaps to encourage the others.

But by 1972 he was publishing bitter attacks on the Soviet Union for, among other things, “its use of bogus psychiatry” against dissidents. Surely, especially against males in the past few decades, there has been enough government-approved bogus psychiatry claiming that the entire gender is potentially an ‘enemy of the revolution’. Funny how the night moves, as the songster saith.

A supporter of Israel – and himself Jewish – he finally wrote about the Arab-Israeli conflicts (expanding, rather than receding, with every year): “For me the Arab-Jewish struggle is a tragedy. The essence of tragedy is the struggle of right against right. When evil men do evil, their deeds belong to the realm of pathology. But when good men do evil, we confront the essence of human tragedy”.

Well, I can see where he’s coming from. And where he’s going with this.

But I’m not so sure. I would say that what We have here is a bunch of good people reacting against a terrible wrong, but willing to do much evil in order to accomplish their good intentions; while a bunch of other decent folk are resisting the plan that casts them as extras in some drama where they are destined to be very expendable indeed.

It’s the good folks doing evil that sticks in the craw.

There is a Sin in the world, the sum of sin in human hearts but also – I believe – supported by a grand Puppeteer of Evil residing just offstage. And well-intentioned human beings may be tempted to take short-cuts, to take an easy or at least a quick path to their goals, no matter what it costs. That cost is far too often seen as some price to be paid by others, but the well-intentioned themselves inevitably wind up darkening their own selves and souls. And imprinting on themselves a dark pathology indeed.

This may indeed be tragedy in some definition of the concept, but when the well-intentioned intentionally do evil or start a predictable chain reaction that they gamble will not sustain itself but then it does and they have to descend deeper and deeper along steep dark paths … then I’m not sure ‘tragedy’ is the accurate descriptor.

But something akin to it, perhaps.

In 1963 he was already writing that the war in Southeast Asia was being lost. He hadn’t gone over there, but he had gone to France to consult the French who had just recently gotten whipped out of the place (which is how We – flush with cash, might, and good intentions – came to find the rental available). He knew just from putting the elements together in a sort of ‘virtual’ gaming (before there was any such virtual equipment) that this thing would never stay in the air, even if got up there.

Other reporters, including Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam, went over there but also became – for a while anyway – carried away by the high-ranking smoke-and-mirrors which seem to occupy as many Pentagoons as the fighting itself does. And who wouldn’t want all those kids sent over there in the flush of life and youth to succeed at their assigned task? And upon them all be much peace.

And he got to the bottom of the Tonkin Gulf attacks of 1964 very quickly. They were a) hugely exaggerated and b) triggered by the presence of US military and CIA units carrying out secret attacks on North Vietnam and Laos. As Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense so aptly middle-named “Strange”, revealed and confirmed, finally, decades later. Nice of him to let Us know.

I keep asking myself, in regard to this or that current development: is this something that’s going to do a lot of damage, that could be stopped or reworked now, rather than have it admitted ‘finally’ decades down the road from now, when all the damage has already been done? It’s an unpleasant question, especially if you keep room in your mind to ask it frequently or make a habit of it … but how else does a Citizenry keep an eye on the government that works for It? Government, as the Framers saw, is not some half-dozey, friendly old rent-a-horse you pick up at a stable for 50 bucks an hour; it’s a very high-powered war-horse that really has a mind of its own and intends to take the hour you just paid for to pursue its own plans and amusements. So you need to keep a tight grip on the reins, sit right in the civic saddle, and show it just who’s boss. Or you will wind up on your butt in the cactus and out the 50 bucks as well.

But maybe We sort of see that now.

P.J. O’ROURKE AND ‘THE TWILIGHT ZONE’

I haven’t yet read P.J. O’Rourke’s just-published book* about the American relationship to the automobile, but I’ve bought my copy and know that at one point he makes the following observation: “In 1970 the Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. … Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan.”

Forget for a moment the purely conceptual yield of that little blast.

I was there – I remember that car. It is true.

And, more to Our present point, it is true no longer.

I even recall telling myself to enjoy this brief, shining moment because before long – surely by 1980 if not before – the decades-old promises of “Popular Mechanics” and “Popular Science” magazines would be fulfilled and the cars would be flying. These old ground-huggers, for all their throaty tiger-paws, would be extinct.

Well. Yes but no.

The American car is just about extinct, but the moon-landing in ’69 was the end of the space and rocket-car stuff. The Seventies and their bumptious brood of lethal consequences brought very little in the way of lasting fulfillment – although there are wayyy too many ‘elites’ on Left and Right who can’t afford to be having Us realize it now.

Henry Ford saw the problem. His strategy – Fordism – was to sell so many cars that he could afford to pay his workers enough to keep buying them. It worked rather well for quite a while: workers got a good wage, and they bought the stuff that they and other American workers made.

But then Nixon had to take Us off the gold standard (who remembers Fort Knox, or why Goldfinger wanted to mount an assault on it?) after LBJ tried to buy voters with his ‘Great Society’ while refusing to back away from a loser’s game in Vietnam, all the while too bent upon doing great things as he imagined them to notice that the almost ridiculously easy American economic primacy of the postwar era was passing away as the world’s other nations recovered or developed.

And money – no longer required to drag its own weight in gold around with it – became light enough to travel easily, especially across borders. So while the American worker stayed home, the money went elsewhere.

And when it finally got around to doing something about that, the already besotted and indentured Beltway tried to make a virtue of its prior failures by telling Us that self-indulgence and debt were good things, and that nobody should be ‘oppressed’ by owning a Ford or Chevy when they could lease a Mercedes. Ah the greasy, buttery glow of Reagan’s Castle Chariot shimmering queasily in the Klieg lights!

Reagan, the B-level movie actor, outdid Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Carl Laemmle, the Warner brothers, and all the rest of them. Where they simply made fantastic movies to entertain and enchant America and the world, Reagan made America into the greatest phantasmagorium of them all. He even grinned his way by Katherine Hepburn’s acid-tinged insight that Yes, you can have it all – just not all at the same time. Americans would have it all, and all at the same time: revolutions and democracy, wealth and self-discipline, war and peace, eternal youth and maturity. Consequently, America in Our time has come to incorporate the worst elements of both plastic and butter. And has learned to call it ‘good’. Oy.

Back to that conceptual wallop in PJO’R’s observation. It’s a symbol of what happened to Us as a hugely successful democratic capitalist enterprise: the things-of-this-world, available to Us in superabundance, so captivated Our attention that things not-so-obvious – maturity and genuine seriousness, say – were forgotten: the pimply kid on the block could command more horsepower than Genghis Khan could ever hold in a set or reins, which the kid promptly deployed to impress girls, go buy beers, or to wrap himself around a tree. Marvelous.

I recall a 1960 or 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone” where visiting aliens – ludicrously made up in latex and spandex – looked in on a typical American bar (whose owner, deliciously, “watered his drinks like they were geraniums”) and gave the shy nerd who was always getting beaten up the strength of 300 humans. The nerd was no kid – it was Burgess Meredith, playing to the hilt a mid-life nobody going nowhere but trying to be nice about it. But he wound up doing nothing with all that gift except performing feats of ‘strength’ trying to impress the other barflies, a local ‘girl’, and a disturbingly accurate cross-section of townsfolk doing their best impression of Emily Dickinson’s “admiring bog”.

I don’t know how many of Us – even if impressed by Serling’s vivid and acute imagination – realized how neatly he had skewered the shortcomings – the ‘growing edges’, if you prefer – of America’s use of the power it possessed.

In the last brief sequence, the aliens return, realize that ‘humans’ don’t make much of their gifts, and take their physical powers back; only to be interrupted by another visiting pair – from Venus, I think – who proceed to give Meredith’s less-than-Loman character 500 times more intelligence than the average human. Which he promptly uses to impress the barflies by predicting the horse-races to which they, bookies and bettors, are enthralled. The departing Martians – sadder but wiser – warn their extraterrestrial associates that their experiment will not end well, and CUT. Marvelous.

Come to think of it, you could see where maybe Serling predicted the Bubbles that have recently burst and crashed, each – like an atomic bomb – containing within its modest papery folds the destructive power of a hundred-million Hindenburgs.

So Wall Street was a cheap, fly-blown bar, filled with unripe no-lifes trying to make a buck however they could. But the bucks could never do much, because they were harnessed to small-souled, unripe visions of almost juvenile unseriousness.

So too the corporate biggies.

So too the Beltway.

So too the academic revolutionary elites.

My word. And all right there in a half-hour show – in black and white, even – from the benighted years of Eisenhower’s last year in office. Nor did Serling – a ‘man’ – spare his erstwhile co-conspirators in patriarchy. And did I mention that the show was only interrupted by 5 or 6 minutes of commercials?

And if memory serves, the 1960 Chrysler 300F delivered 375 horses, or 400 with the ‘ram induction’ option.

No ‘child’ today can look forward to that. And by ‘that’ I don’t mean the guzzly machinery; I mean a future that promised an improved material life that would leave the parents’ era in the dust. Nope. Not hardly.

But maybe that’s the good news. ‘The children’ now will have to learn to get serious, and sooner rather than later. Which will be an accomplishment their parents’ generations didn’t quite seem to manage. Or even realize what they had failed to achieve.

We weren't driving like crazy. We were driving like immature. And still are.

So, kids of all ages: To maturity … and beyond!

NOTES

*Entitled “Driving Like Crazy”, Atlantic Monthly Press. And if you now find yourself in need of inexpensive but meaty yet un-depressing beach reading, I strongly recommend one of my perennial PJO’R favorites, “Holidays in Hell”.

LBJ AND HIS DAY

Robert Dallek has a piece in ‘The New York Times’, entitled "How Not to End Another Preisdent's War (LBJ Edition)". He’ talking about the “fears” that drove LBJ into Vietnam.

LBJ was afraid of looking ‘weak’. After all, the Democrats 15 years before had ‘lost’ China to Mao (did America ever ‘own’ China?); and LBJ didn’t want the Democrats to ‘lose’ again. Nor did he want to look weaker than the recently-assassinated JFK, especially with RFK (arguably the last competent Kennedy) waiting grumpily in the wings.

Nor did LBJ want the Commies to get the idea that if they ‘won’ in Vietnam they could presume to continue subverting other nations, especially those that had in the past 20 years been ‘liberated’ from their assorted European colonial governors; such a sustained and broad-front subversion would not only spell unending trouble for the United States, but would intensify the risk of nuclear war with the Soviets and the Chinese (who had just ‘gotten’ their own Bomb in 1964).

And lastly, Dallek notes, LBJ didn’t want his great domestic reform program to get sidetracked by all that foreign-affairs skullduggery. He wanted to be known as a great reforming President, “one who changed the domestic life of the nation”.

Dallek leaves that last point rather delicately hanging.

I’d add a bit to it.

LBJ did what neither JFK nor Ike had managed to do: in July of 1965 he institutionalized on a federal and national level the end of racial discrimination against American blacks, an objective that had not been fully grounded after the Civil War ended a century before.

But he was completely taken aback, and his effectiveness hugely undermined, by what happened immediately afterwards. The great, genuinely patriotic and spiritual program shaped by Martin Luther King, was undermined almost instantly, and LBJ with it, as the focus of ‘civil rights’ shifted to the urbanized Northeastern and Upper Midwestern cities (and the equally urbanized Southern California cities, especially Los Angeles). ‘Revolution’, black ‘separatism’, ‘rage’, and ‘victimization’ suddenly replaced the politically and morally unifying trajectory and content of the ‘first’ civil-rights movement; the second ‘phase’ was hell and gone from that.

Not only LBJ but the Democratic leadership were stunned. And terrified for their very existence as a politically viable Party.

And not only ‘blacks’ seemed to ‘turn against’ them. Northern industrial workers, frightened by the sudden eruption of ‘second-phase’ black agitation, but also starting to feel a little queasy about the economic security of their jobs (America was just starting to lose its unchallenged economic and industrial dominance that had been honed and perfected in World War 2).

The Democratic ‘solution’ was to find new voting-blocs.

I’ve mentioned all this before, but I’d like to just limn that ‘new voting-blocs’ a bit more.
The Party, still pretty much the only political Party in the country, still riding the huge crest of FDR’s New Deal, used its immense ‘soft’ power to raise-up and ‘support’ a large passel of such voting-blocs, which I will call Identities.

First, the American blacks*. Latching onto the intellectual argument that what had been achieved in the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts was only a ‘beginning’, the Party governmentalized ‘racial discrimination’. In essence, it rejected ‘fairness’ in any palpable sense in order to favor blacks in various ways, using the regulatory and legislative authority of the government, supported by the still-powerful media, and draping it all in the unquestionable moral stature and popularity of the New Deal.

The wisdom of involving the government in such a massive and ‘deep’ effort not only to change laws but to change ‘minds and hearts’ (as American forces were occasionally trying to do in the hamlets of South Vietnam) was not the most ominous problem, though huge and ominous a problem it was.

Even greater was the problem created when the clear preferences and plans of the nation’s largest and most powerful political Party were telegraphed to large numbers of more or less well-intentioned Americans of an activist bent (nothing wrong with that) who were still wondering how all the awesome political efficiency of the Maoist and Nazi era might be usefully deployed ‘over here’. After all, King’s great moral crusade, when looked at through a Marxist or Leninist or Maoist lens, could easily be seen, and – it was thought – more ‘relevantly’, as a great moral and political ‘emergency’ (the Dems wouldn’t argue with that last bit) for which the techniques of ‘revolution’ – suitably ‘baptized’ – would be a more efficient and effective response, producing a greater ‘good’ a hell of a lot faster than the clunky mechanisms of a Constitutional and democratic politics. And anyway , the bright young things of the late-Sixties figured, ‘democracy’ and ‘capitalism’ had resulted by 1968 in a conformist, spiritless, and truly boring bunch of citizens, and adults … and there had to be a better way to go about being ‘America’ than that.

The institutionalization of government racial discrimination – albeit in what the times saw as a ‘good’ cause – came back before it ever really went away. Worse, the enculturation of it: any citizen even doubting the wisdom of this huge change (or non-change, if you want to look at it that way) was shouted down in the media and preemptively made to stifle himself (or herself), and to either ‘get it’ or shut up. ‘Go along to get along’ – that lethal infection of the Soviet citizenry – or frenzied, unthinking, and even violent support of the latest government initiative – that lethal infection of the Maoist citizenry – did not seep in; they were poured in.

Second, the Party (and willy-nilly, the government) turned its generous light on feminism.** The demographic the Party was going for was ‘women’ (and in 1972 McGovern even burbled that the Party was now “the Party of women”) but when push came to shove that meant the feminists – and particularly, their ideological ‘base’, the radical (and far too often anti-male) feminists that I’ll call Ideological Feminists (or IFs).

Many of the early feminists were the late-Sixties radical SDS members who were repelled by the chauvinism of the mostly male-dominated ‘movements’ of the era, and went off to form new groups and to do it around a new cause, feminism. They were shrewd enough to take – whther they knew it or not – a page from Hitler, and realized that the way to succeed in their ‘revolution’ was not to have a ‘revolution’ at all, in the sense of guns and bombs and riots in the streets. Rather, they – like him – would ‘grab power legally’; in this they also took a page – probably intentionally – from Mao and his “Little Red Book”: they would start a ‘Long March through the institutions’, as Mao advised.

But where Mao faced a hostile and entrenched government authority, the feminists and the IFs faced a Democratic Party desperately eager to please (including a Teddy Kennedy rather desperately in need of re-establishing his political viability after his stunning and repugnant problems stemming from Chappaquiddick). Imagine Mao facing a Chiang Kai-Shek (sorry, I haven’t mastered the memos on the new forms of writing Chinese proper nouns and names) who invited him to the capital and eagerly placed the government at his disposal.

The media were happy to help; Democrats and ‘good’ causes were a lot more fun than simply ‘reporting’ those stupid old facts; once again, Citizens were not required and the media started to lose interest in providing the public service of factual reporting to them.

(Of course, History being hugely complex and dynamic, the Republicans were actively watching all this, looking for an opening; the unease, even wider than the purposeful objections, catalyzed in much of the citizenry by all this created the initial ‘opening’ which throughout the 1970s the Republicans were to build upon, until Atwater brought Reagan and … you may know the rest.)

By 1972, the philosopher John Rawls had used his Harvard perch to provide a suitably ‘baptized’ version of the revolutionary concept that in a ‘good’ cause, no existing ‘government’ or Constitution must be allowed to stand in the way. He also improved upon the Hitler-Mao game-plan by specifically urging that those who ‘believed’ should seek to effect change through the courts and the law rather than through legislation. By the Clinton era, two decades later, the legislatures had proven themselves sufficiently corrupted so as to be as reliable as, or even more reliable than, the courts.

The price paid was huge and not completely obvious. Most notoriously, the ‘abortion’ issue – jump-started by the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade, became not a marvelous shock-and-awe, lightning-quick decisive strategic victory but rather the catalyst of a decades-long, bitter, divisive public argument that has lasted to this day, despite the massed authority of the Branches and the ‘elites’ and much of the media to suppress and otherwise ‘make go away’ the deep public unease that it has caused. For the purposes of this Post, let it simply be noted as a striking irony that the same sort of thing happened in the invasion of Iraq 30 years later. For those who ‘hope’ that Our misadventures in the Middle East and Southwest Asia will be over any time soon, let it be noted that in four years Roe will be forty years old.

More deeply and even more lethally, law was now construed as ‘fungible’, such that no long-standing hallmark elements of Western law and justice were to be allowed to stand in the way of ‘addressing’ needs and bringing ‘closure’. But of course, even Western Civilization was considered an enemy of the revolution and, as Jesse Jackson sagely opined, “Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go” – which it indeed may.

Most lethally, the Democrats, and by the mid-1980s the Republicans as well, had gotten used to the fact that the government in all its Branches had allowed itself to be co-opted into a ‘war’ of one gender against another, effectively taking sides in a vision that cast half the population as a ‘class’ enemy of the revolution. I am not here saying that all ‘feminism’ is anti-male, but that the Ideological Feminism which does indeed hold that position was the ‘wing’ or ‘base’ of feminist thinking and doing that most clearly effected the initial breakthroughs into government policy and behavior. It is hardly improbable that had not the economy so brutally and egregiously failed in the Fall of 2008, then the profoundly disturbing McCain-Palin ticket would have been elected, so deep and pervasive is the powerful subterranean public displeasure and unease with the consequences of the ‘revolution’. Our politics, even more than Our law, is now profoundly deranged. In addition to the economy, by what cannot be a coincidence.

Thirdly, the opening to the Israeli government, originally embraced by LBJ both for foreign policy (a bulwark in the Middle East against the Soviets) and desperate domestic political (the need for voting-blocs among American Jewish voters) reasons. Not only does this country now find itself voluntarily welded to a government whose very existence from the beginning was a guarantee of incredibly sustained political and military strife. But as well, this country finds itself infected by the very worst elements of the Israeli mindset and heartset that ‘justifies’ its behavior: we are the ‘victims’ and thus cannot be aggressors; we cannot be ‘wrong’ because our cause is so ‘good’; those who doubt that must be our ‘enemies’; and as to any who oppose us in our efforts to get what we feel we need then (in T. H. White’s marvelous phrasing) ‘they’ are attacking us by defending themselves. It cannot be a coincidence that much the same line of ‘justification’ was used by the Bushist Imperium in spinning its own invasion into the Middle East.

The Israeli adoption of Goebbelsian propaganda techniques, especially in conjunction with the ideological Feminist adoption of the same sinister play-book, has vitally deranged Our public discourse and even Our consciousness.

Fourthly, the desperate Democrats raised up ‘Youth’ as a new demographic. Anybody who watched TV during the later 1950s and the 1960s could sense how a skewing toward ‘youth’ was deranging a serious, adult-centered American attitude, dragging the national mind and heart down into the molten and un-solid rhythms and content of those parts of the human brain that, in youth, dominate in a brain whose most advanced and human elements – the prefrontal lobes and cortices – are not yet fully formed.

If anything, the voting age – especially in national elections – should have been raised to 25. Instead, national political discourse was set on the course already taken by TV, and in 1972 the voting age was lowered to 18. You couldn’t be trusted with alcohol, but you could be trusted with the power to help determine who would be elected to Executive and Legislative Branches of a hugely complex nation bethump’t by grave and vast challenges, foreign and domestic.

But precisely those undeveloped brain-parts that render ‘youth’ simultaneously so emotional and so impatient and so unable to conduct sustained critical reflection were actually – as Hitler had seen – hugely useful to a government that no longer sought for its Citizens to understand, but rather needed merely a reliably pliant herd that would settle into its own distractions unless needed to stampede in the service of this or that ‘good’ thing.

I'd add a fifth as well: immigration on a massive scale. This would serve two darker purposes not usually discussed. From the Left, the massive influx would help 'water down' the 'white, male, industrial' culture of the country, in the service of a multicultural and deconstructive 'change'. From the Right, the massive influx of workers willing to work for lower wages and grateful for the chance would undermine the American unions; it's almost like 'outsourcing' without the 'out'.

Draped in the legitimate American openness to immigration, this massive influx would actually hugely expand the demand for jobs (on top of the theoretical 'doubling' of the worker-pool created by the feminist agenda) precisely at a time when the economy was shedding the jobs that were available to begin with. An adult flipping burgers or gardening is not going to be making the money that a unionized industrial worker would make, of course; the solution to that was to wildly expand credit so that even those adults stuck flipping burgers could buy lots of stuff and 'feel' good about it all - which was a non-solution that the short-sighted Beltway biggies figured was good enough for government work.

But We see now what happens when government plans like a teenager, simply kicking the can down the road for a later day and living 'for the moment' - there hasn't been a lot of adult supervision, or much of the mature and serious discharge of their sworn duty to deliberate in the common interest, from the Branches in quite some time.

The economy now has to provide a decent living for over 300 million people, when it has less decent jobs than it did when there were 175 million people. Do the math.

Nor will the reigning Rawlsian approach work for much longer: if there isn't much money to 'redistribute' (for purposes of his idea of 'justice' or for any other reason) then We will face a situation where a whole lot of folks are going to be without the means of support.*** And that is going to make them verrrrry unhappy.

So the ‘bases’ developed, several of them. And in consequence not only a centrist politics, but even an adult and truly ‘human’ politics, grounded in truly ‘mature’ adults – adults, that is, effectively committed both to an awareness of their limitations and to their potentials and to their responsibilities – became ‘quaint’. Like a huge armored vehicle with an impaired driver, the nation began lurching down History’s highway, careening from side to side and smashing over anything not nimble enough to escape its awful trajectory. This ain’t pretty. And it will not end well.

Given the monstrousness of the economic catastrophe, it could be said that all of this is, even if relevant, a bit abstract. But I say that the economic catastrophe is directly a result of the failure of Our politics and Our failures as a Citizenry, as a collective of Citizens empowered in ways ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ by the Constitution to ground this government.

NOTES

*As always, when I refer to any matters referring to any Identity, I am not looking to turn back the clock nor am I 'against' the improved life of any members of the citizenry. In all of this I'm simply trying to point out the consequences - unrecognized or ignored, somewhat unintended - of policy developments that have had and continue to have a very serious affectr on Our life, polity, and common weal. We will have to recognize those consequences and then consider whether something must - or can - be done to counter the negative effects.

**When I say ‘feminism’ I am not speaking of all females, or all ‘women’, or all conceptual and political efforts to improve the life of women within American life and society. I am specifically referring to ‘ideological feminism’, a loose but broad synergy of dogmatic assertions about women (and about the evil of ‘men’ and ‘males’), deeply shaped by the revolutionary and propaganda praxis of Soviet and Maoist examples and also by the adoption of Goebbelsian propaganda techniques, all of which was marshaled to do an end-run around an inefficient democratic politics in the heady emergency of imposing the ‘good’ result of whatever it was that ideological feminism determined was ‘good for’ and ‘owed to’ the ‘women’ it claimed to represent.

***If the world's nations decide, as they are contemplating even now, to abandon the US dollar as the world's 'reserve currency', then We are going to be in profound financial trouble almost overnight. We can never pay off the amount of debt the country and government now owes. We could inflate the dollar - print money - but then no other nation is going to trust Us enough to buy Our Treasury bonds. We could default on the debts, but that would reduce Us to a third-world economy in a heartbeat.

POPULISM ISN’T THE PEOPLE

Over on Salon, Gary Kamiya notes accurately that the current economic catastrophe has lifted up hopes of “the peasants storming the Bastille”; he figures this would be somewhat of a good thing. Over on Alternet, Robert Freeman wonders “Does America Face the Risk of a Fascist Backlash?”, which he thinks – who can disagree? – would not be a good thing.

It comes down, I think, to the distinction between ‘people’ and ‘The People’. That mass of ‘people’ who are alive and buzzing or booming around are simply individual wrapped up in their own matters, connecting with other similar types who are ‘near’ them by virtue of relationship in family, friendship, business, or the myriad connections of daily life.

‘The People’ is composed of those who have gone to the trouble of developing their capacity to function as Citizens. This is no easy task: it requires civic involvement – active participation in the political developments of the day; but it also requires civic awareness – alertness to what’s going in and – especially – what ‘government’ is up to . But even before that, it requires that one school oneself in how to think and assess the events and doings affecting the common weal – which is an act of mind. And even more deeply than that, it requires that one purposely and consciously seek to develop a character appropriate to the Citizen: a willingness to face the shimmery brights and swirling darks of the political goings-on.

This last point is especially important. We expect that Our fire departments do not simply sit in the stations waiting for a call, but rather keep themselves and their equipment in a continuous state of competent readiness. We expect that Our armed forces do the same. In this sense being a Citizen is a ‘discipline’, an ‘askesis’, a responsibility to achieve competence in a certain project or mission, that is ongoing and around which one may – and in a democracy must – build a life and, to no small extent, a self.

The unthinking assumption that folks can allow themselves to sink into the mire and boombuzz of a modern, consumerist economy, to allow themselves to focus solely on making ends meet, raising a family or conducting worthwhile human relationships, and only on election days rush out to ‘cast a vote’, and that by some magic or alchemy the Republic will be preserved and the common weal will be ensured … that’s a Bubble from Hell itself.

And one that was foreseen by the Framers. It was no small challenge for them: to declare freedom from the tyranny of monarchy (today’s ‘unitary executive’ but also today’s ‘Beltway complex’) while at the same time worrying that a whole bunch of ‘people’ , rushing and shouting together, would create an equally lethal threat to democracy in a Republic. Throughout Our history, this has been one of the great engines of political thought and action: can you trust ‘people’ to be The People? If not, then what does a government do?

This never-solved and never-fully-answered question assumed even more ominous proportions in the 20th century. The Age of industrialized, urban, ‘mass society’ was upon Us, linked and yet also divided by increasingly efficient yet also increasingly intrusive means of ‘mass communication’. Learning how to work all these developments, and perhaps turn a profit from them, and then deal with all the ‘possibilities’ that these developments brought, on top of raising a family and keeping a job and building a life … who could have a lot of time and energy left over for maintaining the capacity to be a Citizen?

As with the old bucket-brigades of citizens and with the militia, We left it to ‘professionals’ so that We could get on with the tasks and excitements and conveniences of ‘the modern age’.
And with the end of World War 2, America’s tremendously complex national life was intensified monstrously with the added roles of ‘leader of the Free World’ as well as with the perks and benefits of being the only developed nation whose economy and infrastructure was unscathed by the ravages of war.

We left it to ‘politicians’ to sort of ‘run’ the government, which increasingly meant running the country as corporations and ‘national security’ began to infiltrate and take root in all areas of American experience.

But the developments of the early 20th century had left a mark far beyond their initial historical context. From Soviet Russia came the idea of ‘revolution’, which in a ‘good cause’ was justified in inflicting huge levels of violence on its own people, because in order to bring that ‘good’ into reality in the shortest possible time then large numbers of individual lives would have to be immediately changed; and those lives that ‘just didn’t get it’ had to be eliminated by the dedicated cadres of the revolution who did indeed ‘get it’, and the whole bloody thing justified in the name of the revolution’s ‘good’ intentions and its ‘good’ objectives.

Compared to the complex machinery constructed by the Framers precisely to prevent such revolutionary ‘waves’ from building up, steps of procedure and consensus-building designed to ‘baffle’ both calculating wealthy power and the unchecked emotions of vast numbers of the citizenry … compared to that, the ‘efficiency’ of a well-guided revolution and its relatively few but dedicated cadres stood out as a political ‘improvement’ as great as Henry Ford’s awesome assembly lines and Taylor’s ‘efficiency’ methods. Just as no ordinary citizen could build his own car, so – the unconscious assumption of the age figured – no ordinary citizen could keep a ‘country’ running at peak efficiency for the common weal.

And then, based in part on what had been learned from American advertising (designed to motivate ‘consumers’ to buy whatever the company that hired the advertiser was trying to sell), the Nazis – embodied in the dark brilliance of Josef Goebbels – mastered the technique of manipulating public opinion for their Party’s purposes. ‘Truth’ as a stand-alone went away; “truth is what the Party thinks is good for the German people” as the Nazis boasted.

Manipulation in the service of economic advantage shaded over into manipulation for political support – and later, for political control.

It was a poisonous century, the 20th, and although America didn’t get bombed, it got poisoned. And so deeply, in the mind, that nobody noticed it. If there was poison, it was from atomic fallout that the Russkies would deliver, or from space aliens who showed up as pods or reptilian creatures or imperial adventurers from Hollywood’s idea of ancient Rome. But ‘we ourselves’ weren’t poisoned. And neither were all those biggies – those ‘professionals’ – to whom We had left the running of the country.

As Lenin and Stalin and the Nazis saw, there was no requirement in their visions and schemes for Citizens. The citizenry would be the great patient beast, flattered and amused and excited by spectacles or distracted and worked up into a frenzy by ‘emergencies’, and the job of the great lumbering thing would be – like the oxen and the buffalo – simply to provide the wherewithal which the real ‘elites’ needed to run their game-plans in economy, politics, foreign affairs, and general societal restructuring. A ‘Citizen’ would only be in the way.

A ‘Citizen’ would ask questions, ask to see information, and generally look under the hood, test-drive, kick tires. A ‘Citizen’ would talk with other ‘Citizens’ and share the fruits of deliberation with everyone (ideally, ‘everyone else’ was also a ‘Citizen’, but it’s not an ideal world).

The government modus operandi came to be based on the idea that you could fool most of the citizenry most of the time, and cow or co-opt a lot of the rest, and that was usually good enough. ‘Good enough’, as they say in the Beltway and the military-industrial complex, ‘for government work’.

And in the Sixties of the 20th century, not only ‘government’ but also ‘concerned’ folks of a theoretically Liberal bent and purpose decided that this would work for a genuinely ‘good’ cause (as if anybody had ever gotten up in the morning dedicated to a ‘bad’ cause). A whole bunch of ‘good’ causes, as it turned out. And thus Liberals abandoned the vision of 19th century Liberalism and also the vision of the Framers: they would themselves organize as the Soviets and – ummmm – the post-Weimar German government had organized, only this time in a ‘good’ cause. Secular modern America would adopt – without acknowledgement – a Catholic idea: you could ‘baptize’ something out of sin and into ‘good’. Not ‘souls’ – which was the key to the Catholic vision – but techniques. After all, if Lincoln could say with bemused pride after the Civil War that ‘we’ owned the song ‘Dixie’ now, then Americans could say after they had beaten the Nazis and supplied the Soviets, that they ‘owned’ all those techniques and handbooks from the various Propaganda Ministries of the defeated enemy.

And so, in best Saturday matinee style, the alien substance was eagerly brought ‘back to town’; the vampire wasn’t invited into the house, it was dragged in eagerly.

So here We are.