WE ARE TRULY EXCEPTIONAL

In the latest, April 5, issue of the  ‘The New York Review of Books’ Michael Ignatieff reviews  a new book entitled “All the Missing Souls” by David Scheffer, a human rights expert who among other things  worked with Madeleine Albright during the Clinton years.  

I haven’t read Scheffer’s book, but Ignatieff’s review itself is instructive; I’m focusing my comments on the review itself.

Ignatieff rightly notes that “affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics”.

He’s got a solid point there.

America is and has always been a unique phenomenon in world and human history. A nation that arose on a piece of large and remarkably endowed property that, compared to other countries, had sprung into the midst of the planet’s political affairs ‘fresh’, comparatively unencumbered by prior claims since it was, in a very real political sense, a ‘New World’.

The whole of this New World was the home of tribes of ‘natives’ who had gotten to the place long before the Europeans, who were themselves emerging from the awful forge of the millennium that followed the final fall of the Roman Empire. During that time, when the Europeans were enmeshed in myriad struggles among themselves and subjected (as late as 1683, less than a century before Lexington and Concord, the Ottomans were again before the gates of Vienna) to lethal and bloody power struggles among themselves and with other, still robust, civilizations (the aforesaid Ottomans).

But that millennium had not been one of simple ‘victimization’ for the West. Throughout the genuinely Dark Ages, Europe forged itself under the aegis of a Christendom that had managed to combine and re-combine the gifts and genius of various tribal and nascent evolving national identities and – later – monarchical polities; anchored in the perhaps under-appreciated (then, as well as now) synthesis of Greek and Roman insights into law and government combined with the Hebrew and Christian theological affirmations of the primacy of God’s reality in the affairs of humans who were simultaneously His creations, made in His Image and endowed with an immutable dignity as well as carrying an innate predilection to fail that Image.

In that regard, even the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution – which contributed mightily to the formal break-up of the Medieval synthesis of Christendom intellectually and politically – did not so much create anew from nothing, but rather continued to work variations on those great Themes, resulting in a stunning (and often confusing) profusion of thought as to how the various national cultures and polities might preserve the space and the freedom for humans to develop and sustain the deployment of their gifts.

In a vital sense what the Framers then inscribed on this political tabula rasa (granted fully that in other very real senses this New World was not a blank slate but the home and habitation of other human groups and tribes) was indeed a novus ordo seclorum, a new order for the ages.

Because the Framing Vision – especially as expressed in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then given sustaining shape in the machinery emplaced by the Constitution – produced through their efforts the first large-scale polity that was grounded in and upon that idea of the equality of all human beings that extended in this and that conceptual form back to the Greeks and the Stoics, Aquinas and the post-Medieval political thoughts of Protestantism and English Constitutionalism and up into the Enlightenment. (You may well add the example of the Iroquois Confederacy, though I would then also add the communal voting-for-leaders of Aquinas’ own Order of Preachers.)

(Yes, in the crooked paths of human history that are consequent upon the crooked timber of humanity, the foundation of the United States, at its moment of construction, had to take into account the even-then odious reality of Southern race-Slavery. The Southerners, as I have said in prior Posts, made the Framers an ‘offer they couldn’t refuse’ in the darkest and most coercive sense of that phrase: a country with race-Slavery or no country at all.

It took a further 75 years for that hellish reality to be finally expunged through – under Lincoln’s torturous and subtle but profoundly noble efforts – “a great civil war”, testing both whether a democratic republic can “long endure” in human history and whether the ancient concept of the universal equality of all human beings is sufficient to ground a large polity over the long haul.

I would add two brief observations about that.

First, the universal equality of all human beings was conceived most immediately as a political equality, of the right to participate constructively in the governing of the government and as an equality before the laws thus erected.

Second, that equality was based in an observed ideal given expression in Aristotle, who based it in the observed commonality underlying the panoply of diverse human cultures, societies and civilizations encountered by the Greeks even in his time, whose commonality indicated, to him, a nature and essence and purpose common to all humans.

That equality was then merged with Christian-Catholic theology by Aquinas, who anchored it solidly (and uniquely) in the Christian-Catholic Vision, informed by revelation, of that omnipotent but benevolent Creator God in whose Image all humans were called into existence in this life (while on their way to final fulfillment in the Next).

Protestant Reformation thought further emphasized the liberty of conscience of the individual and the visceral caution towards if not also suspicion of organizational power (the Church figuring large in their experience – but that spilled inevitably into a certain stance toward political organization as well).

English Constitutional thought added that tradition’s ever-evolving and expanding definition of political rights against the intrusive power of the Crown and the intricacies of elaborating a legitimate parliamentary power and the complexities of extending the utterly vital political franchise even to those who had no property whose experience of ownership and stewardship would impart some lived experience of sober and responsible and prudent stewardship and ‘governance’.

The French Revolution demonstrated the hellish potentials of a purely ideal-driven (thus ‘ideological’) insistence not only upon Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity but also on the demand for a pure and immediate imposition of those three worthy but general goals.

And Lenin’s October Revolution (as opposed to the actual Russian Revolution of February, 1917) further exemplified that lethal potential, especially when the regime thus erected was assisted in its impositions not only by a highly-developed (if – relative to the genuine Western tradition – whackulent) ideological justification but also by all the technical machinery available to a modern state and lubricated by the post-Medieval eras’  inevitable weakening of any constraints by a Higher Law upon the actions of a putatively well-intentioned and Politically Correct regime.)

And following that further 75 years that culminated in the political refinements consequent upon that “great civil war”, it took a further century until, finally arising under the profoundly unitive as well as reformative vision given its most elaborate and elegant expression by Martin Luther King, the barriers of the Jim Crow regime – that network of state laws that supported the Southern sub-culture that sought to somehow continue the ethos of Southern race-Slavery (without the formal Slavery bit) – were rightly removed by the authority and action of the Federal government.

(The further engorgement of Federal authority and action since 1965, influenced – in the crooked dynamics of human history – by the attempted blending of Soviet and Leninist thought and dynamics with the Framing Vision and its consequent dynamics … is an actual historical development whose ultimate wisdom or folly I have addressed in recent Posts and which for the purposes of this Post shall remain bracketed.)

The efforts of Jefferson and Lincoln and King, supported by the efforts of many others not so eloquently gifted, have bequeathed to Us a very truly ‘exceptional’ Vision, and in the Constitution a machinery best conceived – by an even more exceptional Framing cohort – to sustain it on what was never considered to be anything but a long voyage through History, with all the dangers and challenges attendant thereupon.

To the extent that We as individual Citizens and as The People embrace and remain faithful to that Vision, then We too are truly ‘exceptional’ in human history.

Although, as Washington and Adams observed – and they were not the first in that long tradition – such ‘exceptionalism’, while it must instill a genuine pride and consequent sense of responsibility, does not and cannot be construed as some sort of existential (or divine) Warrant to go forth and terraform the planet, culturally and politically and – oy – militarily. We were to be a ‘beacon’ and a ‘citty upon a hill’, but not ever a benevolent Leviathan (that awful species of non-divine idol-god is of its very nature incapable of sustaining benevolence).  

And there ever remains the profoundly awful possibility – to which the crooked timber of the human psych is always prone – of a) assuming unthinkingly some misplaced and unjustifiable pride in the mere fact of Our existence as ‘exceptional’ and to then b) assuming with a lethal blitheness or callow self-assurance that We therefore are somehow exempt from not only the crookedness but also the perverse and torturous complexities of human history.

A genuine ‘patriotism’ – love of country – is and must include a mature and competent love of the Framing Vision (hard to achieve when the experience and definition of ‘love’ has undergone so many deformative and immature distortions over the years). ‘Love’ includes an element of active and deliberate and constantly-willed ‘respect’ (as it once was held, ideally but not phantasmically, to be the case in marriage and all deep human commitments).

Genuine patriotism, then, involves – before anything else – a habit of ‘respect’ which, by the by, cannot but then assume a transformative role in shaping the ‘character’ of each Citizen and of The People as a whole and – from The People – thus also of that government of which The People remain the ultimate and final governors.

To assert, as some in positions of influence do today, that America is exceptional because “it still has an unmatched military” betrays – aside from the functional accuracy (or otherwise) of that assertion – a lethally shallow and thin and indeed toxic under-appreciation and a profound misunderstanding of the nature of this country’s actual and genuine ‘exceptional’ nature.

Of course, and ominously, Correct ‘patriotism’ as it is now evolving cannot really dare to delve more deeply and genuinely into the matter. Because to do so runs the risk of involving ‘comprehensive’ systems of explanation – to use Rawls’s Correct and toxic burbling – that have been kicked to the curb in the past 40 biblical years’ worth of ‘creating space’ for rich and fresh and transgressive and groovy and world-historical diversities of culture and praxis, and – not to put too fine a point on it – to involve some thought about and reference to a Beyond, a Higher Law which the increasingly engorged Leviathan/Leviatha of government refuses to acknowledge as a boundary to its actions. Or as a standard by which those actions might be judged (or Judged).

If We, The People, are losing control of Our government, it is because We are losing control of ourselves.

Should this sort of thing happen with a carnival ride – a Ferris wheel at a local fair, say – and the operators allowed the machine to become loosened in its connections to its restraining struts, and then on top of that to allow it to pick up speed and revolve at increasingly higher speed, while loaded with passengers and in the midst of a crowded fairground … wouldn’t those operators be held responsible for the consequences? You see where this sort of thing can go.

So, yes, ‘American exceptionalism’ is no mere rhetorical sugar-rose on the cake-frosting, to be squeezed out in a pleasing shape to the oohs and aahs and the delectation of the assembled lip-smacking party-goers. It is one of the most awfully and awesomely real elements of ‘being’ if you are genuinely and fully an American and a Citizen. It is most surely not kid-stuff.

Nor is it merely a come-on phrase to be deployed seductively and manipulatively by carnival hawkers for the purposes of the stereotypical used-car salesman or world-changer. Which would include far too many of the national elites and those souls – in barrooms or consciousness-raising sessions – who find meaning and purpose in merely mouthing repetitively those same phrases, with whatever boozy and brassy embellishments or conceptually whacky assertions that might come to mind, to the amazement of the crowd and the amusement of the children.

Ignatieff is spot-on when he asserts that “law, after all, constrains power”. Although, as I mentioned in the immediately prior Post, the “rule of law” has been sorely bethump’t around here in the past 40 Biblical years, not only from the neocon and corporatist Right but from the radical-feminist and Correct Left – law for those types being merely an oppressive embodiment of patriarchy and the status-quo.  

(It was Obama himself who observed in ‘The Audacity of Hope’ that the Left had made a serious error when it “over-used” the courts to “avoid political fights”, thus seeking – I would say – to subordinate the law and the courts to becoming mere agents of their agendas and their ‘revolution’, much as Lenin referred to “our revolutionary courts”.

Although this was precisely what Catharine MacKinnon had recommended when she put forth her essentially Gramscian-Leninist legal and political agenda for radical-feminism: since The People ‘just don’t get it’, then go around them and – with charming conceptual incoherence but acute revolutionary cynicism – take it to the courts, thus avoiding “messy” politics altogether and getting the judges, inspired especially by the sublime legal stylings of Justice Brennan, to impose the revolution for them. As I said in the immediately prior Post, the true nature of this profoundly anti-American and anti-Framing Vision approach seemed and seems to have escaped the effective notice of the commentariat and the Correct elites and the sworn upholders of that Framing Vision in the Beltway.)

But of course, if there is no ‘Law’ and there are only laws passed by a government that acknowledges no Higher constraints upon it, then ‘law’ simply becomes the football in the general scrum that Identity Politics envisions as the primary reality of such ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic politics’ as it considers legitimate and useful. As Chantal Mouffe, noted Eurocommunist of the 1970s and 1980s put it, her fresh and rich “radical democracy” had no use whatsoever for a “deliberative democratic politics”.

And as I have often said, between radical-feminism’s blanket presumption that most of The People ‘just don’t get it’ and Mouffe’s logical Marxist-Leninist presumption that there is no need for a “deliberative democratic politics” when most of the Citizens are either patriarchal or self-cooperating oppressed lumps who essentially are too politically ungulant to want to free themselves from the status-quo of their various oppressions and need to be herded (or stampeded) by the vanguard elites who do ‘get it’ … then there is a fundamental authoritarianism built into both of their resulting political agendas.

Long live the revolution, then. Trangsression uber alles.  But you aren’t going to keep faith with the Framing Vision at the same time. America is not – pace the old saw – a Hollywood movie where in the end you can get the girl (or guy), the gold watch, and everything and live happily ever after and/or ride into the sunset towards California. (Or, in that early 1990s chick-flick’s equally whackulent ending, hold hands and drive over the cliff into an iconic Western canyon-gorge. An abyss is an abyss, no matter how tastefully arranged by local geology and photographed by the camera crew.)

Surely, now, neither heading to California nor driving over a cliff should be considered a good idea; although who knows, in the current desperation, how many are considering the possibilities.

The Hebrews considered the Law as holy not simply (and perhaps simplistically, to the secular mind) because it was given to them by God, but because the effect of that Law was to create social and cultural and political order out of the chaos that existed before. And that order was thus considered to be the most marvelous gift of God to a chosen people mired, as was all of humanity, in the abyssal swamps of living-together without reliably grounded and life-enabling Law.

In the general scrum of the past 40 Biblical years, that bit of rather vital insight has been lost. But the reality that it describes remains. Shutting off the fire-alarm – who knew? – doesn’t extinguish the fire.

Ignatieff notes that Scheffer reports his becoming increasingly aware of the truly shocking fact that during his tenure in Madeleine Albright’s patch of the Clinton Administration, the US was now coming to see itself as above the very law (and Law) that it had sought to strengthen through the erection of the UN in FDR’s last Administration and in the Nuremberg trials in Truman’s Administration.

Albright herself is relevant here. A woman, and older, she was also possessed of assorted memories and some personal experiences of the Holocaust and of World War Two’s epic struggle against Fascism and Nazisim and Imperial Japanese military hegemonism. So in her own personal history she covered a number of useful ‘bases’: a woman, tied to the Holocaust (and thus now to the Israeli government’s agendas), and a revenant from that last Moment when America had both the chops and the high purpose of saving the world from militant hegemony.

But she was also soused with the more recent radical-feminist authoritarianistic presumptions which not only came from that alien political Universe of Marxism-Leninism (imported here when the radical-feminists filched Gramsci and adapted him to their purposes, with Beltway collaboration) but also served as a marvelous cover for the neocon Right’s own dampdream of American world-hegemony (which has proved as dependent on the military for the fulfillment and imposition  of its purposes as the radical Left has proven dependent on the courts).

Nor have things gotten any better now that several of the most ‘successful’ women in the current Administration have embraced ‘R2P’, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Based on the radical-feminist legal and political theory first deployed here domestically – that since ‘the personal is political’ and since patriarchy is most fundamentally furthered by the patriarchal dominance of the sexually aggressive and violent male ‘within the family’ then no ‘old ideas’ about the government being boundaried against interfering in that most intimate private sphere can be considered legitimate – the R2P ‘doctrine’ insists that no ‘old ideas’ about Westphalian ‘sovereignty’ can be allowed to interfere in the US government’s ‘right’ to step in (militarily, of course) wherever it deems it necessary to ‘protect’ against ‘victimization’.

Queasily but revealingly, this doctrine seems only to be deployed now against nations that either don’t have the military strength to defend themselves against such intervention, or have somehow become an obstruction to this or that US foreign-policy objective. Sending the peerless military against China or Russia, for example, is probably not going to happen, no matter how much ‘protection’ those citizenries (especially their ‘women’ and – of course – ‘children’ might need). And, of course, if there is any ‘sexual violence’ and ‘patriarchy’ in, say, Israel, well – even if it does exist, no doubt the Israelis can handle it themselves and don’t need any intervention. Neat.

We are “exceptional” and – to add Albright’s own spin – “indispensable”.

We are not “chosen” (or – in Lincoln’s fine phrase – “almost-chosen”) any longer. To assert that would upset the Israelis' Jewish religious sensibilities and, more importantly, would upset the secularist sensibilities over here who most surely aren’t interested, from either Left or Right, in suggesting that there is anyone (or any One) who might have the authority to do the Choosing. (George Bush the Lesser may have been the Deciderer, but there will be no Chooser with a capital ‘C’ in the brave new secular world order).

For a while the Republican-abetted embrace and valorization of the whackjob Fundamentalists provided benefit of clergy – as it were – for the Gott-Mit-Uns trope. But that was then. Now, as the new coinage indicates, America doesn’t trust in God. Or, more cogently, doesn’t trust God to approve of what it’s up to.

The Left will now try to plaster over the lethal divisions in American society induced and even required by the past 40 Biblical years of cultural and political destruction (or rich transgression, if you wish) by insisting that all types of ‘oppression’ – racial, gender,and class – are bad and evil.

Like Stalin suddenly faced with the (somewhat self-induced) catastrophe of the rampant calamity of Hitler’s invasion in June, 1941, all previously demonized classes will now suddenly become honored participants in (and cannon fodder for) the regime’s Great Patriotic War.

Were you a kulak or other oppressive parasite life form? Don’t give it another thought - you are now a Russian, even if you are not a member of the Party, and – but of course – we are all Russians together. Da! And wheeeeeeeeeeee! So pick up a shovel or rifle and head for the front (which, helpfully, will shorten your journey by coming straight at you at high speed). Don’t vorry – be hapski!

The Left – still clinging to command on the Titanic-bridge of the Democratic Party – will now embrace the formerly lumpen-oppressor ‘males’ and the small-businessfolk and their lumpen-culture of Productivity and Family, even as the Correct elites whose ultimate conceptual objective is to eradicate them and all their pomps and all their works continue to double-down on the agenda that ran everything and everybody into the berg (and over the cliff).

Why, even Archie Bunker may be ‘rehabilitated’. He too may receive the type of leaden encomia  of the type most recently reserved for Correct and elite thinkers: Tireless Implementer of the Five-Year Oil Plan! Stakhanovite Toiler for the Ten Year Solvency Plan! Courageous Dreamer of the Twenty-Year Impossible Dream Plan!

Obama has now had to lunch in the White House the neocon huffer-and-puffer Robert Kagan, who has feathered his nest richly by insisting that as long as the US has its military, it will never be out of business as hegemon or at least as world-class Macher and Player. And as Madeleine Albright said to the feckless Colin Powell – channeling, marvelously, Hitler himself: What’s the use of this great military if we aren’t going to use it?

Funny how the world-historical night moves.

It is on currents as powerful but lethally convoluted as this that this increasingly ‘almost-chosen’ People is adrift, bereft of compass or pole-star and, oy, fuel and even watertight integrity.

We do indeed have a rendezvous with a world-historical destiny now.

But perhaps it’s time to take stock of just what Citizenship means. It may be time for The People, as a feisty pitcher, to save the game lost by the elite ‘team’ that has been calling the shots for so long.

LINKS

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/apr/05/were-so-exceptional/?pagination=false

OLD THOUGHTS VERY NEW

Before I get back to the inimitable philosophical stylings of Catharine MacKinnon I have to put this essay up.

I just finished reading for the first time the December 29, 2008 issue of ‘The Nation’ magazine.

I find that there is a tremendous value to reading ‘old’ journals of opinion ‘fresh’. As you get into the reading, you are of course absorbed into the streams of thought that were very much ‘fresh’ and usually ‘urgent’ and presumably insightful when they were written. Yet simultaneously your mind is informed by all of the actual events that you know have happened since the articles were written (now 3 full years ago and a bit).

It’s a rather stimulating and useful mental exercise on several levels.

So to a couple of the articles or columns and the thoughts they prompt.

Eric Alterman discusses the up-coming Presidency of Barack Obama in terms of whether Obama – as a welcome relief to the outgoing George W. Bush – is going to repeat the failures of a longish string of Democratic  presidents who failed because of their “militant liberalism”.

First he tries to dispose of the fact that “barely one in five Americans embraces the label ‘liberal’ to describe themselves”.

“This is easily explained”, Alterman breezily asserts, “by the mountains of opprobrium that conservatives – working hand in glove with a cowed MSM [mainstream media] – have heaped on ‘liberals during the past three decades and the negative associations that have resulted”. So, it’s all been the work of a predominantly conservative and cowardly MSM and the ‘conservative’ political machines themselves.

I think not.

First, I am not at all going to get into the ‘liberal’-vs-‘conservative’, he said/she said kabuki that has come to pass for politics and political commentary over the past Biblical 40 years here. In my view, the ‘liberals’ are not really liberal, and the ‘conservatives’ are not really conservative. And they both are “sisters under the skin” insofar as neither of them have any use for any “deliberative democratic politics” or the Framing Vision which anchors the entire Constitution and the political vitality and survival of the American Experiment and the Republic on the robust fundamental of a three-point circuit consisting of The People, their elected representatives, and the Sovereign Authority of the government, all of which is underlain by a common and mature commitment to that Framing Vision.

Second, as We have been seeing since the very early 1970s – and especially after the stunning defeat of the Democrats’ New Order Party vision in the presidential election of 1972 – The People, given what may have been their last chance to kick-tire and deliver their judgment on that vision, utterly rejected it, 49 States to one (the hold-out being Massachusetts, politically controlled by Teddy Kennedy and his powerful electoral machinery in his home state).

Third, I would have wondered then – and certainly so now – if Alterman et al. aren’t trying to pull a leaf from the Israeli playbook: that if you object to anything the ‘liberals’ have done or to any consequences that have flowed therefrom, then you are a ‘conservative’ (and a ‘backlasher’ and etcetera and etcetera). After all, especially now that the aura of national ‘wealth’ has been burned away, all sorts of consequences of so much of their agenda are now suddenly appearing, as if by magic although actually they have been hiding in plain sight for decades.

So it is hardly outré to imagine that The People sensed something very wrong, perhaps even very dangerous, deep in the Democrats’ vision for the country’s New Order.

Indeed, Nixon (for whom I hold no brief) realized that some sort of ‘elitism’ – comprised as We now have seen of both homegrown Progressive elitism and the shockingly Alien Universe of Marxist-Leninist thought as shrewdly developed by Antonio Gramsci and already by 1972 embraced (without attribution) by radical-feminists here - was lurking in that Democratic New Order.

Recognizing that ‘elitism’ Nixon made a hardly-ungrounded claim that the views of a vast majority of Americans – whom We now know to have been classified in the Gramscian scheme as bourgeois, dominant oppressors of the marginalized (all of which are Gramsci's terms), and in radical-feminist thought as being a huge bunch of oppressive lumps who ‘just don’t get it’ – were being sidestepped and utterly disregarded (as per the gameplan of Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and the radical-feminists who had filched that gameplan for their own purposes).

That vast majority of Americans constituted, in Nixon’s phrase, “a silent majority”.

Apparently, by 2008, even Alterman has to admit that that group remains very much in the majority.

Rather than engage the idea and examine the whole matter, Nixon – who voiced it – was wholly discredited by the later (and in light of, say, LBJ’s machinations in regard to Vietnam and Israel’s acquiring nuclear material for their upcoming Bomb,utterly secondary) Watergate brouhaha.

But – of course – while the messenger was slyly done in, the reality of the message, to the extent that it was real, remained very much alive, despite the best efforts – widely picked up by the MSM – to spin it as merely ‘backlash’.

But the spin-stampede was kept up in a massive elite-driven and Democratic and Beltway-supported demonstration of all the primary plays in both Gramsci’s and Goebbels’s game-book. Thus unto this very day.

Of course – as We now know – “majoritarian politics” and “deliberative democratic process” had already been written off by the Dems at the behest of their newly-embraced radical-feminist clients, whose ‘philosophy’ was slyly plagiarized from Gramsci and that Alien Universe. Since most Americans ‘just didn’t get it’ then they would have to be herded, stampeded, or penned up into irrelevance. Or: if The People failed the elites in 1972, perhaps then The People need merely to be replaced: youth were given the vote and immigration increased to bolster the possibilities of destabilizing the Culture that had rejected the elite dampdreams.

While all the while, the whole thing was spun as merely a continuation of MLK’s marvelous and genuinely American vision, calling all Americans to participate in a “new birth of freedom” for the American Vision.

But, of course, what had happened by 1970 or so was that the entire American Framing Vision had been written off in favor of a) an elite-driven imposition (with the full collaboration of the Beltway) and of b) that thorough-going and multi-form assault against the ‘dominant, hegemonic, oppressive’ Culture that Gramsci had envisioned (and those descriptive terms are his, not radical feminism’s) as the best way to undermine the target Cultures of the West.

Alterman says that if you change “liberal” to “progressive” then you will double the “number of respondents” who identify themselves on that end of the spectrum.

But that is hardly a solution here. “Progressivism”, even as a natively American movement, had always relied upon ‘elites’ to help educate the unwashed masses of newly arrived immigrants. And, in a hardly irrelevant coincidence, Progressivism was contemporaneous with the burst of anarchist and socialist thought already running at high speed through Europe and Russia. As was, by amazing coincidence, Gramsci’s thought.

But to embrace and unleash this approach on the mature postwar American polity and politically mature Citizenry in 1970 and since then was a hugely dubious and dangerous gambit, even without taking into account the stunning presumptions of Gramsci that the whole targeted Culture was rotten and irredeemable and had to be undermined and attacked as often and as widely as possible, and by any means necessary.

Alterman then goes on to sniff assertively that “it’s rather a stretch to argue, following George W. Bush’s Vietnam-like Iraq misadventure, that Obama is likely to reprise [LBJ’s and Bush’s] catastrophic combination of arrogance and incompetence”. And here We are in 2012 and what do you think?

But I would agree with him, to some extent, that Obama did not “reprise” that “arrogance and incompetence” exhibited and deployed by his aforementioned presidential predecessors. Rather, I would say that Obama – a callow and youthy as well as ambitious fellow – merely found himself indentured from the get-go to the nefarious dynamics of that Alien political Universe that by 2009 was already (irretrievably?) embedded in the nation’s politics and its political discourse (greatly and intentionally corrupted and weakened by decades of dishonest and distracting spin into nothing more than a mostly immature kabuki of dueling cartoonish conceptions and assertions, into which no light of clear analysis was allowed to intrude).

Whatever his natural fall-back gifts, he wound up reverting to them in order to keep himself afloat in the treacherous riptides between the Scylla of the National Nanny State and the Charybdis of the National Security State, between the now-embedded pandering government indenture to both Big Identity and Big Money.

And here We are in the Year of Grace Two-Thousand-and-Twelve  and of the independence of the United States the two-hundred-thirty-sixth.

America is, Alterman perhaps regrets, far “less liberal than Europe”. But he refers to a Europe wracked by Eurocommunism, which was the 1970s erection of Gramsci into a Plan by numerous European nations whose Socialist and Communist Parties were already trying to somehow find a new role for themselves, given the brutal postwar and post-1956 revelations of Leninist-Stalinist Communism’s treacherously violent wrecking of the very ‘masses’ in whose name that regime – in Russia and in the satellite nations – imposed its ‘visions’.

Thus in Christopher Hayes’s article “The Pragmatist”, that author seeks to explain what it might mean to say that Obama is a “pragmatist”.

He notes a then-recent George Packer essay proposing that in order to secure election, Obama’s campaign rhetoric  had been neatly designed to send out ambiguous messages that would lead both “progressives” and “post-partisans” to think he was on their team.

That “post-partisan” is a clear if oblique reference to the fractalizing partisanship that is built into the Gramscian-derived Identity Politics.

In the context of Beltway dynamics, to be “pragmatic” therefore means  that one is not going to remain restricted by – or committed to – the de rigeur (one could say ‘ideological’) requirements of that Identity Politics so irretrievably permeated with Gramsci’s thoughts and plans  from that Alien political Universe of Marxism-Leninism and Eurocommunism.

But the restriction of having to satisfy its now decades-old Indenture to the Far, radical feminist Left constitutes one of the only ‘reliable bases’ of the Democratic Party – which had been precisely the pols’ intention to establish 40 Biblical years ago.

In the service of which they had to slyly (and treacherously, in light of what they had sworn to preserve, protect and uphold) begun a double-life: for public consumption praising the American ‘thing’, while claiming to merely demonstrate their wise and effective chops in implementing ‘reforms’ and ‘continuing’ MLK’s great civil-rights work; and yet actually betraying all of that in order to implement whatever their New Order advocacy bosses and bossettes wanted.

Thus the Beltway and almost the entire sitting political class (in 2008 as well as 2012) were already into a verrrrry baaaaad habit of duplicitous treachery, for which ‘pragmatism’ is very much too nice a term.

If even in 2008 Obama and his strategy staff realized that somehow he had to distance himself (and the Party?) from at least the appearance of its indenture to Big Identity, then the 2008 version of ‘pragmatism’ was only going to be rhetorical, because the vampires and vampiresses of that Alien political Universe had now gotten very used to being in the Beltway house (having been invited in by the gate-keepers themselves) and, indeed, with the help of a helpfully unreflective and shallow MSM had gotten wayyyy too many folks thinking that if If it’s Democrat, then it’s ‘liberal’ – and Gramsci and the Eurocommunists are nothing if not anti-liberal and anti-Liberal: for them only ‘radical democracy’ will do, and that type of ‘democracy’ doesn’t include ‘deliberative democratic process’ since so many Citizens are enthrall to Dominance, Hegemony, and Oppression (whether the poor chumps realize it or not).

And when Hayes reports that Obama “plans to govern from the center-right of his Party” then that’s not usefully insightful either. Because by 2008, both ‘left’ and ‘right’ had been long-trapped in the swamp of endless cartoonish assertions of one’s ‘position’ – accompanied by all sorts of TV-friendly sound-and-light effects. But nobody of importance on either ‘side’ wanted to look more deeply into mattes, for fear of exposing the Gramscian Elephant in the middle of the national political room.

Nor did the MSM want to risk its ‘access’ to A-list dinner parties by mentioning the Elephant either.

In that context, to be “open-minded” and not “excessively partisan” – which to all appearances seem worthy objectives – could only mean to the Far Left cadres that you were not going to consider yourself bound by any ‘fetishizing’ of the Constitution, traditions, principles, or any of the other tools of America’s fundamental Hegemonic Oppression of its “marginalized”. While to the Rightist or even centrist, such an assertion would seem fatuous and guaranteed to fail, in light of the fanatical rage of the cadres (and ‘advocates’) of the Far Left bases who would no more consider yielding their ‘revolutionary’ gains than any Scriptural demon would politely leave a possessed body if asked nicely.

And – let’s face it – ‘pragmatism’ by 2008 meant simply layering yet one more level of unprincipled plasticity over an already hugely ‘plastic’ and mushy sense of principle that had been cemented into place by the original Beltway trahison in the early 1970s.

The name of Cass Sunstein flits by in the article, a University of Chicago law professor who had a nice little run explaining how Obama was not really a “flip-flopper” and not a “doctrinaire liberal”.

But of course, by 2008, both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ had morphed together into a new Leviathan (or, in the Left’s Nanny State, Leviatha) that had no use on Left or Right for any ‘deliberative democratic politics’. Either the emergency of ‘oppression’ or the emergency of ‘national security’ required an engorged and intrusive and impositional government that knew far better than its Citizens or than The People what had to be done.

So commentary at the level of even bosky academics like Professor Sunstein and his ilk was, if more polite and polysyllabic than in-your-face radical feminist crowing or Fox News declamations and insinuations, about as useless.

Sunstein burbled that Obama was a “minimalist” who “prefers solutions that can be accepted by people with a wide variety of theoretical inclinations” – that is “his defining trait and chief virtue”.

Very nice.

But in the context of what had been going on in American politics since 1972 at least, then such competences were guaranteed to be of little use and would create even further damage. Because at the heart of American politics for the past 40 Biblical years has been a truly Either-Or Question that demanded to be recognized and Answered: would the Framing Vision of 1787 or the Gramscian vision derived from Marx and Lenin be the ‘ground’ for Beltway policy and legislation and for the ‘elite’ vision of what was needed for this country?

On that Question , I am saying, there truly could be no waffling and no middle-ground. You cannot simultaneously support the Framing Vision (shared by MLK, embodied in the Constitution) and the Culture which that Vision informs, and also the Gramscian vision that democracies are merely bourgeois tools of Dominance, Hegemony, and Oppression (adapted by radical feminism here, of course, to include Patriarchy and etcetera and et cetera) which along with their Cultures had to be attacked, weakened wherever possible, torn down, and replaced no matter what it took nor how long it took.

Like Hitler who, when initially planning the Wehrmacht’s invasion of England in the summer and fall of 1940, paid little attention to the “mere 20 miles” separating the Greater Reich and England, traditionally called the Channel. So too, the Beltway biggies apparently figured that they could paper over the genuine abyss yawning between the Framing Vision (to whose defense they were formally sworn) and the Gramscian Project (which was the price the radical-feminists were going to charge for ‘delivering’ the allegedly monolithic ‘women’s vote’). How, after all, could a simple ‘abstract’ matter of ‘principles’ and a long-past history really interfere with the big plans of major Macher in oh-so-cutting-edge modern American politics? How many divisions does the Framing Vision have (to borrow a trope)?

Thus the Beltway as it descended into the Valley of the Little Big Horn (to borrow an image).

Thus, Hayes quotes Packer quoting Sunstein, it is wrong for people to “expect Obama to be the anti-Bush” (remember him?).

After all, says Sunstein, the only problem with Bushism “is not its content but its form”. Which precisely reveals – although slyly costumed – the fact that by 2008 both ‘liberal’ Nanny State and Rightist ‘Security State’ subscribed to the same content: The People can’t be trusted to know what’s good for them nor to govern their own government. And that, I am saying  – ‘justify’ it how you may – is pretty much the end of the Republic in a nutshell.

In trying to make the Great Experiment of 1787 a lot less demanding and ‘oppressive’, the Left grossly weakened it (and hardly surprisingly, considering they imported Gramsci’s methodological refinements of Marx and Lenin to do the job). And into that vacuum the ancient demon of Leviathan, traditionally seen as arising from the Right, did indeed awaken and burst back into the American polity, since the Left – out of the purportedly best of intentions – had weakened the walls built by the Framers to keep that ferocious Kong a safe distance away. And the sworn defenders and guardians of the Wall had, in 1972, happily put all the government’s resources into the Project.

What a movie! Or, to borrow the master vampire’s best line from the 1985 movie of the same name: “Welcome to fright night … for real”.

And here We are in 2012.

But back to 2008.

Obama, continues Sunstein, is really the “best kind of anti-Bush” because he is not “ideological”. But that’s bullplop. The entire Democratic agenda had become indentured to ideology the moment it invited Gramsci inside in 1972, brought to the nation’s Beltway entrance by radical-feminists insisting that such an Approach and such a Stance were simply the most ‘cutting edge’ and ‘fresh’ and ‘rich’ and ‘creative’ and ‘transgressive’ stuff and was completely their own invention and just a more efficient way of realizing MLK’s truly and genuinely American  civil-rights Project.  Should the Beltway pols – especially the Dems – join and support them, the radical feminists prophesied, they would make History rather than be oppressed by it, and they would all be greeted as liberators.

Not hardly.

Sunstein intones that it is a fallacy to think that “all ideology is dangerous”. Meaning by 2008 that commitment and faithfulness to an overriding (and underlying) vision is not always dangerous. It is only dangerous when it is some other vision than their Correct elite vision (which, as I have said above and in the immediately prior Posts, is actually Gramsci’s and the Eurocommunists’ and Marx’s and Lenin’s vision about how to go about wrecking a well-established Western, democratic polity and its Culture).

If even – as Hayes slyly notes – Pat Buchanan observed that Bush’s biggest failure was his “embrace of ideology” (and I don’t at all deny the accuracy of that statement) yet We have to realize that the Beltway had been indentured to an even more Alien ideology – and even more lethally dangerous for being ‘spun’ as ‘liberating’ – since 1972.

So the kabuki mudfight between ‘pragmatism’ and ‘ideology’ had been nothing but a magician’s distracting trick for decades by 2008. And still is today.

Starting to get wrapped up in the toils of his own conceptual incoherences, Hayes then tries to point out that after 9/11 “pragmatists of all stripes – Alan Dershowitz, Richard Posner – lined up to offer tips and strategies on how to best implement a practical and effective torture regime, but ideologues said no torture, no exceptions”.

But by 2008 any essential and fundamental loyalty to the Framing Vision and its ‘traditional’ virtues had long been ‘deconstructed’ by the ‘liberals’ and the Left precisely according to Gramsci’s gameplan. The objections raised against torture had to be only ‘practical’, because to claim any authority for the Framing Vision (and ‘virtues’!) was considered career-wreckingly not-Correct.

Indeed, as Rawls (and more recently Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen) had tried to assert, any commitment to any “comprehensive system” of explaining and grounding life and human action was inadmissible in American public discourse. Unless it was his and their Correct comprehensive system, which anyway was not based in ‘abstractions’ about traditions and classical Virtues, but rather in the (Gramscian and Eurocommunist) presumptions that a) you could not legitimately Ground and restrict humans’ ‘autonomy’ on the basis of such ‘abstractions’ but that b) you could ground such restrictions on merely human feelings and the insights of any particular historical moment.

Which turned out to be a ‘fence’ about as useful as an artfully constructed wall of oatmeal and corn-flakes in stopping either Leviathan or Leviatha.  As We have now seen.

The Framers sought to boundary government because it would be made up of human beings and, the Framers knew, humans also needed boundaries not simply to ‘restrict their autonomy’ but to give them some reliable (and hopefully decent) Shape.

Absent such restrictions, human beings became mushy exo-skeletal insects and without the exo-skeleton to boot. And quite probably irrational and violent on top of everything else.

Humans are not ‘born free’ because, the Framers were convinced, they are born with a disturbing predilection to wreck other humans’ lives in pursuit of their own satisfactions. And the governments humans erect tended to do the same.

To give in to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bland and burbly happy-face assumption that if there were simply no ‘society’ with its laws and customs and folkways then humans would be happy and good … that struck the Framers as the height of lethal and witless imbecility.

Who can deny it?

Hayes tries to recover himself by going for the spin that it is only the Right that is ‘ideological’ and that the Left’s ‘pragmatism’ is a counter to that. But the Left is committed to an even more fundamental ideology: that there is no Ground Beyond this life that somehow authoritatively (and benevolently) sets limits to human actions and beliefs in the service of helping humans reach their most Genuine Shape.

Such a Ground and such a Beyond would obstruct and ‘oppress’ the ‘total autonomy’ demanded by the Far Left bases, spear-headed by radical-feminism and now after 40 Biblical years distributed widely like a toxin throughout the American body-politic.

Nor is Belief on so profound and vital a level really adequately describable as ‘ideology’, as Hayes then tries to assert.

Certainly in Western Culture, built willy or nilly upon the bedrock of the classically Christian (not to be confused with the ‘Christian fundamentalism’ brought to the table in the Reagan years) Vision, this ‘comprehensive Vision’ (Rawls got that part right, at least) served the Framers as an unstated but utterly reliable bedrock upon which to build their American Framing Vision.

Without that Vision, the whole American Experiment would not work, could not function. Thus neither ‘secularist’ America as sought by ‘liberals’ here nor religiously fundamentalist cultures such as Islam nor Marxist-inspired cultures, have proven themselves hospitable to a genuinely ‘deliberative democratic politics’.

And without that ‘deliberative democratic politics’ the entire Framing Vision and the Constitutional machinery and the Republic cannot stand.

Hayes then works toward his conclusion by tying in Obama’s ‘pragmatism’ to the historically American philosophy of Pragmatism espoused principally by William James in the first decade of the 20^th century.

For James, as Hayes says, Pragmatism meant a “skepticism toward certainties derived from abstractions” and that “truth is pre-eminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief”.

But surely, Gramsci channeling Marx and Lenin is based on a whole trunk-full of presumptions and ‘abstractions’ that must be taken as a given if you are to ‘get it’.

And most certainly, if We are to consider the track record of the Marxist-Leninst system, however variously re-jiggered over ensuing decades, then its “practical consequences” have been irrefutably baaaad.

And I say that if We are to consider the track record of the Gramscian-Eurocommunist Project here, especially without fear of being considered politically un-Correct and a ‘backlasher’, and especially on the profound but vital foundational level of its effect on the most essential and utterly principle of Our Republic, then I think the conclusion must inescapably be that things have worked out far less than well.

Our politics and political discourse are truly deranged, and thus seem so ineffective at addressing national problems, precisely because the problem on this profound level has not been addressed and indeed is being either ignored or spun as ‘progress’. *

It is, on this level, nothing of the sort.

Obama, Hayes says, “has no taste for culture war”. But that is precisely and unavoidably what the Gramscian and Eurocommunist gameplan call for.

Further, Hayes tries to go for the high-ground by quoting Lincoln: “We are not enemies but friends … Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection”.

But the Gramscian ‘war of positions’, the font and origin of Identity Politics, and essentially committed to an eternal war of “antagonisms” (via Chantal Mouffe’s “radical democracy” – which is no democracy at all), has already precluded any such appeal to Lincoln’s superb Vision. And to MLK’s as well.

You cannot simultaneously embrace Gramsci and appeal to Lincoln. They come from fundamentally different political Universes and the former is lethally Alien to Our own as well as lethal in and of itself.

There is an old Catholic maxim: suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. It translates roughly as: be decent and skilled in how you apply your principles, but be unshakeable in your own commitment to those principles.

It was, I would say, precisely this that both Lincoln and MLK were going for. But their unshakeable commitment was to the principles of the Framing Vision – which is precisely where the Gramscian-Identity Politics Project differs necessarily and inalterably.

Nor is it a matter of making the imposition-by-elites (those who ‘get it’) a little ‘nicer’. The entire ‘anti-majoritarian’ Gramscian Project must be abandoned and all matters and demands and ‘issues’ returned to the aegis of the Framing Vision, that is to say of a genuinely ‘deliberative democratic politics’, in which a fundamental common bond of Citizenship and commitment to the American common-weal override any other considerations.

The active and vital circuit of The People, their elected representatives, and the Sovereign Authority of the government must be re-established and nothing must be allowed to undermine it.

This is a slower and more deliberate process, but it is the only one that respects the Framing Vision (and sustains the Republic). The alternative for Lincoln – as Hayes mentions – was a terrible Civil War. In Our modern situation, it has been a Gramscian ‘war of positions’ or Culture War in which the Citizenry have been divided presumptively (and ideologically) along the axes of the Race and then – even more lethally – Gender. And, additionally, huge swaths of the Citizenry were presumptively branded as ‘hegemonic, dominant, and oppressive’ (Gramsci) and ‘patriarchal’ (radical feminism).

This has to be stopped. As Lincoln also said, quoting an ancient text Grounded in the Beyond: “A house divided against itself cannot stand”.

NOTES

*In that regard, this article helpfully exposes the happy-faced burbling by which one recent author quotes another of her sistern to the effect that a) Nietzsche’s assertion that “truth is merely an illusion that we have forgotten is an illusion” has been “central to the liberal critique of American ideals” and that b) Nietzsche’s “perspectivism” – that there is no truth except what you can see from where you are standing, thus no truth except your own point of view – is also “central” to that “critique of American ideals”.

Nor can it be denied that “perspectivism” is on its surface simply a euphemism for relativism and in its substance an even more lethal proposition than relativism: not that positions or beliefs are all ‘equal’ but that each individual (or Group or Identity) has its own ‘truth’ which must be ‘respected equally’.

I would add that the radical-feminist Gramscian Project has not been simply a “critique”. If it had been only that, then it could have been proposed within the national political discourse, deliberated upon, and The People would have engaged in ‘deliberative democratic politics’ and things would have proceeded – vigorously no doubt – from there.

But precisely because The People ‘just don’t get it’ then this ‘critique’ became a ‘war of positions’ and a Beltway policy of imposition. And a sustained assault on the Framing Vision and the Constitution, the Culture, and the common-weal which they both vitally sustain.

 

JUSTICE BRENNAN: ROBUST AND WIDE-OPEN

I want to take a quick break from my mini-series on Terry Eagleton to discuss an article* about Justice William Brennan, supporting his stature as a “liberal champion”.

The comments made by the author, Justin Driver, give so clear and succinct a statement of Brennan’s approach that I consider them to be of great value to any clear-eyed assessment of how Things have gotten to their current condition in this country.

The author takes a swipe at ‘conservatives’ who have tried to paint Brennan as what could be called a ‘deliberate, scheming and manipulative judicial activist’ (my phrasing). As early as 1984, he notes, an article described Brennan as being “among the purest of the result-oriented judges who first determine how they want a decision to come out (the ‘fundamental fairness standard’) and then go about trying to find a legal justification” for what they have already decided.

Another author is mentioned for having observed in 1988 Brennan’s “penchant for identifying his personal predilections with constitutional dogma”.

Driver wants to support the spin that Brennan was a key and genuine “liberal champion”. I think Driver is indeed correct, but that what he demonstrates in his review establishes clearly just how frakkulent a championship that has played out to be for the country (or, in the inimitable words of Chester A. Riley: “What a revoltin’ development dis toined out ta be!”).

Amazingly, Brennan indeed had once nobly asserted (in the 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan) that “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open … it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials”. Well said! It is the indispensable function of a genuinely deliberative public democracy; the process by which Citizens deliberate and sift and analyze together in considering matters of great import to the common-weal.

But surely this classically Liberal (not to be confused with the contemporary ‘liberal’) principle has been hugely undermined, and was  undermined from Brennan’s own Left before it was taken over by the Right. Before Bush-era public officials were shielded from ‘protest’ or even un-approving remarks in public appearances, a broad and sweeping kaibosh – regulatory and statutory – was put on speech that was ‘offensive’, ‘hurtful’, ‘hateful’, ‘insensitive’ to this or that favored demographic. As so often in recent American political history, a seemingly ‘liberal’ principle unthinkingly embraced by pols and bureaucrats in the service of their ‘liberal’ agenda then – and hardly unpredictably – compounded their potential for frakkery when adopted by the Right.

By which time the mainstream media had become so desperate to remain viable and influential that they simply parroted the press releases of whomever threw some ‘access’ their way, refusing to analyze for fear that their analysis might offend current or potential future ‘access’ to the history-makers.

Which resulted , I would say, in the American public becoming used to believing, with the Red Queen, “as many as six impossible things before breakfast”, day after day after month after year after decade.

Until now the point has been reached where a substantial chunk of the vital Citizenry – supposed to be the governors of the government in the Framing Vision – are hard-pressed not only to distinguish fantasy and fraud from reality, but also even to muster the competence to think as to how they might go about that vital Kicking-of-Tire and analysis and individual and then mutual deliberation.

If ‘mass politics’ weren’t challenging enough, Identity-Politics and its emotional, anti-rational or manipulatively fake-rational agitprop in the service of achieving the ‘deals’ necessary to impose its demands has provided the second and even more lethal prong of a double-whammy against genuine democratic process.

But it is toward the very end of the article that Driver really gets to the heart of the Brennan-legacy matter (all of the remainder of this Post is based on the last two columns on the last page of the article, page 39).

Brennan, he says, “was a crucial part of the coalition that extended Brown’s [i.e., Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case decided against the Topeka, KS board of education] fundamental principle over the ensuing three decades”.

I pause for a moment to recall a point I have made before on this site: the adoption of the legal thinking specific to civil-rights cases of the 1950s sparked the adoption of the entire civil-rights ‘script’ and ‘scenario’ as an implied (and – vitally – publicly unquestionable or unchallengeable) template or paradigm by later ‘advocacies’ and ‘revolutions’ in the 1960s and 1970s.

This was a hugely fraught gambit, gravid with ill-consequence, both as to the Content of the idea and as to the Method by which it was insinuated into American political life.

The Content of this ‘adoption’ gambit was largely inaccurate to begin with. The ‘Negroes’ of the Jim Crow South were deliberately and consciously restrained from the exercise of basic political rights guaranteed by the Constitution and by the immediate post-Civil War Amendments as a matter of purposeful State policy by the Southern States collectively if informally known as the Jim Crow South.

This state of affairs was repugnant to the national ideals (as even slavery had been) and as soon as the mid-1950s televised examples of Jim Crow dynamics in action had flashed across the country, a general public antipathy to such a condition quickly manifested itself in favor of the suppression of the already clearly illegal and unconstitutional Jim Crow regime.

But after the corrective steps taken by the Court and the Congress up to and including the Brown case of 1954 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there was A) a very legitimate question of just how much farther government action could go without deranging – or certainly un-balancing – the essential American principles of government and democratic political process.

Because B) in no other part of the country did there exist so clearly and provably illegal and unconstitutional a system as the Jim Crow regime as it was enforced by the States of the South.

Further government action – in regard to the black population let alone any follow-on Identity or Identities – was going to be doubly fraught: i) there was no such overt illegality anywhere else in the country, and thus ii) there was no such clear and strong public consensus either on the nature of any further problems/complaints or on the most suitable and workable way of addressing such problems/complaints.

The Jim-Crow era template thus inaccurately portrayed the situation in the rest of the country and therefore its further deployment would enjoy no such easy and sure public consensus.

Thus the Content of the “further extension” of the Brown principle was going to be lethally weakened by both the inaccuracy of its purported assertions or implications about further situations in other parts of the country.

And then the Method of implementing any such “further extension” was going to have to either advance through a long slow process of public deliberation and consensus-building or else it would have to be imposed by the national government. Which would be on its face a profoundly dangerous dynamic to set loose, the deployment of which was easily justified against the States of the Jim Crow South only because their regime was and had for almost a century been clearly and overtly and deliberately noncompliant with clear and vital and fundamental Constitutional provisions.

But absent that overt Constitutional noncompliance on the part of State governments, this gambit would wind up being an exercise in government-by-imposition that could not avoid side-stepping or undermining genuine democratic, broad-based deliberative process conducted by the Citizens as well as their elected representatives.

In no other part of the country was there such a State-administered un-Constitutional regime, and of a regional scope encompassing a number of States. There may have been – as there would soon be – the possibility for further complaints seeking redress in other parts of the country for other less-clear problems, but those would, ideally and necessarily, require a broad and deep national discussion in order to build a consensus: such ‘problems’ and ‘complaints’ were neither clearly visible nor instantly acceptable to the reasonable Citizen … this would not be wise ground for a forceful imposition of government force as had been deployed against the Jim Crow South.

So it is stunning to read Driver as he then asserts that the Brown principle which Brennan helped “further extend” insisted “that the judiciary plays a vital role in ensuring the American experiment in democracy functions in a manner that does not appear incompatible with modern constitutional understandings”.

That is precisely what was not happening.

Because by deliberately mis-applying the Jim Crow template to numerous successive ‘revolutions’ – the second and Northern urban phase of civil-rights in the post-1965 era, the torturous bureaucratic imposition of wide-spread affirmative action, the ‘gender revolution’ in almost all of its manifestations, and further successive revolutions – Brennan’s efforts resulted in the Judiciary taking the lead in justifying, indeed requiring,  the government’s imposition of itself upon the entire national culture the same way that it had – i.e. quickly and with the full force of broad and sustained federal imposition – in the almost historically unique and anomalous Jim Crow situation.

And since the issues for which the government claimed the warrant for such profound and forceful imposition precisely did not enjoy the wide public consensus that had existed in the matter of Jim Crow, then the government precisely had to deploy itself anti-democratically.



And you notice here in Driver’s statement the crapulent concept of “appearance”. As in ‘not-substance’ or ‘not-substantial’. The whole thing was a matter of spinning your ‘reform’ so as to at least maintain the appearance of compatibility with, I would have to point out, not mere “understandings” but instead with very fundamental constitutional principles.

This is a poisoned font of ‘appearance politics’: it’s all on the level if you just hold your head the right way. This is no way to run a railroad, and – as is now becoming clear with ineluctable and rock-solid stubbornness – the trains don't run on time around here anymore.  

It was here that an anti-democratic ‘elitism’ of Correctness took root in the Beltway, far surpassing what the elitist Progressives of the Prohibition era had sought to achieve (with such shocking counterproductive consequences) half a century before. **

And Driver knows this, and doesn’t want to admit it. Which is why his intended crowning encomium to Brennan fizzles in such a clunky and vague way: “in ensuring that the American experiment in democracy functions in a manner that does not appear incompatible with modern constitutional understandings”.

What Driver is slyly seeking to avoid here is that those “modern constitutional understandings” essentially saw the Constitutional principles (and the Framing Vision) as “quaint” and no longer relevant, in the face of the numerous ‘emergencies of outrage and rights’ that the Dems sought to mollify with an increasing and intensifying deployment of federal imposition upon a Citizenry that ‘just didn’t get it’ and therefore needn’t be consulted in the first place.

Thus Brennan’s project (to ensure that what could not easily be achieved through democratic process could be imposed by government fiat lubricated by judicial declarations) and Driver’s project (to make this all seem the epitome of democratic process) were and continue to be profoundly dishonest.

And gravid with counterproductive consequences beside which the shocking results of Prohibition pale in comparison.

Nor is any of this ascribable merely to a winsome American impatience to accomplish good and great things. The ‘revolutionary’ potential and elements in the post-1965 agitations – which should never have been allowed to infect genuine democratic processes of consensus-building and deliberation and public debate – were instead ‘valorized’ by the Dems precisely because in 1972, when the now demographically desperate Dems rolled out their ‘new model’ Party Vision in the presidential election, they were given one of the soundest public rejections in American political history, losing the election 49 states to one (Massachusetts, home turf of Teddy Kennedy).***

It was at that point that the fundamentally anti-democratic ‘revolutionary’ wing of the assorted ‘advocacies’ of the new Identities – led by a radical feminism soused with Leninist and Maoist theory directly or as interpreted by a platoon of European tiersmondiste thinkers who rejected all Western ideas and democratic processes  – were brought to the fore in the Dems’ now urgent effort to fig-leaf their pandering to their newly ‘valorized’ and freshly- constructed demographics.

And from this flowed the truly anti-democratic Beltway embrace of the rejection of the nation’s vast and long-embraced ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle/working class’ culture and – as can now be so frightfully seen – the industrial and economic Productivity and the civic culture of the commonweal that that culture had long sustained.

Brennan was indeed instrumental in seeing to it that the Supreme Court and the Judiciary played a major (and in the absence of democratic consent, a necessary) role in accomplishing this treacherous frakkery.

Driver calls this “animating theme” of Brennan’s “living constitutionalism”. Which is in many respects a code phrase that boils down to the arrogant assertion that the Constitution and the Framing Vision were “quaint” and no longer worthy of respect when compared to the fever-swamp illuminations of the radicalized Identity advocacies now animated by the awareness that the Dems were ready to put the entire resources of the Beltway (and the nation) at their disposal and engorged with the many-multipled hundreds of billions in public monies that the Dems were prepared to shower upon their dampdreams.

Nor am I here implying a valentine to “originalism”, the counter-theory ignited by the Left’s chicanery.

What neither Leftist nor Rightist cared to imagine was a genuine democratic Constitutionalism whereby the Citizenry – The People – would be given the time and accurate information to conduct a broad and deep process of public deliberation and the building of a consensus.

The Dems had seen in the election of 1972 that they had nothing to gain from that and so much to lose for themselves, and thus treated The People as a donkey that ‘just doesn’t get it’.

And in a hardly-unpredictable parallel illumination, the Republicans saw that corporate power would – as it always had – be highly amenable to a donkey-citizenry rather than a robust and assertive (and unionized) People whose governance of the government was far too inhospitable and unpredictable to suit the schedules and schemes of great and powerful interests.

For both sides, it was easier to buy a few pols rather than to convince a great People. Thus The People had to go: and this not being Stalin’s or Mao’s geographic turf (and since The People were given a major role in the Framing Vision of democracy) The People would be weakened in numerous ways and deliberately confused and misinformed, assigned thus in the great National Adventure the role of the cattle-herds in a B-movie Western, useful only for fodder or for stampeding on cue.

And here We are.

Driver continues along his chosen path: “Brennan did not suggest that the original understanding played no role in constitutional interpretation; he contended instead that its role is necessarily a limited one”, which Brennan slyly spun thus: “We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can – as 20^th-century Americans”.

BUT that phrase “20^th-century Americans” was itself code for what I would say is better put as ‘we post-1972 liberals who reely reely need more conceptual space to get what we want right now’.

Originalism’s enterprise, in Driver’s accurate phrase, was “quixotic” (immediate ancestor of the mid-00’s declaration that the Constitution is “quaint”). That is somewhat true.

But it is also beside the point. What was fundamentally and vitally at issue was whether genuine democratic political process as envisioned at the Framing was going to be allowed to remain vital, or whether it would be kicked to the curb in favor of the treacherously unholy, Frankenstein blend of homegrown Progressive ‘elitism’ and Leninist-Maoist revolutionary cadre ‘vanguard elitism’.

It is this truly awful and awe-full treachery that will come to be seen as the hallmark political development of the past Biblical 40 years, when historians come to conduct a postmortem.

Historically speaking, this watershed mistake – or treachery – is ‘visible from space’, and it will be the sad wonder of future generations that this Age failed to see it for what it was all along.****

Driver continues with Brennan’s burbling: “The ultimate question must be: what do the words of the text mean in our time?” BUT of course, that is not nor ever was the ultimate question.

Rather, the ultimate question is and was and always will be not one of words but rather: what role does genuine democratic process play in the Shaping and sustaining of American culture and society, and of the American polity itself?

Brennan piously continues to declaim: “For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs”.

Very nice. But, alas, Phooey. Phooey and baloney.

In the first place, because the “genius of the Constitution” rested solidly upon the Framing Vision of an active and deliberative People governing the government. Like a vaudeville magic-act, Brennan – and he is hardly alone in this – distracts attention from the real action and displaces it onto a secondary McGuffin (Hitchcock’s favorite concept). Because it is not primarily a matter of the text of the Constitution (although that is indeed vital), but rather of the role of The People in determining just where matters of profound national interest are going to go.

In the second place, because while the world of the 18^th century is indeed “dead and gone” , which is an eery echo of  that favorite radical-feminist cackle “It’s not your grandfather’s … (fill in the blank: Constitution, society, culture, military, economy, Productivity, or what-have-you)”, yet if the Framing Vision of the role of The People is also “quaint” and deserves to be kicked to the curb because that Vision itself is dead and gone and because  that Vision ‘just doesn’t get it’, then what are the prospects for sustaining the “American experiment in democracy” that Driver and Brennan so piously praise?

In the third place, because the “principles” mean squat if the soil provided by the Framing Vision is poisoned. You can’t expect to grow world-class prize-winning roses if the soil in your garden has been lethally contaminated.

And in the fourth place, “current problems and current needs” is treacherous verbiage on so many levels. It is code for the current problems and needs of the Democrats in 1972 and ever since; it veers perilously close to the rejection of the genuine dynamics expressed by those verbal principles whenever enough emotion (or behind-the-scenes power and skullduggery) are marshaled to neutralize those dynamics. It is the dynamics themselves, and not their subsequent verbal formulation in ‘principles’, which are the indispensable life-sustaining fonts of the American Experiment and the Shape of this polity as a democratic and Constitutional Republic.

Is this ‘news’?

Thus again, to squeak praises of Brennan’s “robust defense of the law’s evolution” is utterly beside the point. A law that is changing because its core dynamics have been and are being undermined is not e-volving, it is de-volving (and I mean that in the worst sense of the word).

Thus ditto when Driver bravely praises Brennan’s embrace of the idea that “courts have a creative job to do when they find that a rule has lost its touch with reality and should be abandoned or reformulated to meet new conditions and new moral values”.

Once again, Phooey and Baloney. This is nothing more than the old vaudeville magician distraction at work.

In the first place, because what is at issue here is not a ‘rule’ (should there still be a one-way on Washington Avenue now that it’s become a major shopping artery?) but the very fundaments of democratic process and the Shape of the culture, the society, and the polity itself.

In the second place, because a great deal rests on just what you define as “reality”.

In the third place, because a very careful and gimlet-eyed assessment has to be made as to just what is involved in the definition and demands of “new conditions” and – good grief! – “new moral values”.  This is profoundly vital and complex ground here – you don’t approach it with the breezy and cocky arrogance of a Boomer cutting classes to burn down the ROTC building.*****

And in the fourth place, what is really being conducted here is not ‘creative’ but de-creative process (‘destructive’ might seem a bit much rhetorically, although not factually – perhaps ‘deconstructive’ is apropos). Thus Brennan commits the Judiciary to a de-creative or deconstructive role, and on a lethally profound level. (And matters are not helped when his excesses ignite a counter-excess against his efforts, which simply reduces the Judiciary to an ongoing Punch-and-Judy show of whack and counter-whack.)

And in the fifth place, because if such huge challenges were truly afoot, then why not let The People deliberate upon such momentous (and potentially lethal) matters? And surely, if it is suggested that The People wouldn't agree with the liberals' 'solutions', then that fact alone should have given pause to any responsible major public figure. (But of course, the come-back prepared to cover that little problem was that The People ‘just didn’t get it’ – Brennan secured his place in American history by playing to that ominous peanut gallery with all the force and ingenuity  his personal kazoo could muster.)

Rather amazingly, Driver admits that “today’s mainstream legal liberals would blanch in the face of such language … judicial creativity is out, judicial modesty is in”.

But of course. Unless you are prepared to establish the revolution by overt coup d’etat like Lenin, then you need to wrap your schemes in the cutesy and familiar swaddling clothes of more familiar concepts that won’t spook the herd when the script doesn’t call for a stampede. And nowadays ‘legal liberals’ would very much not like to be seen as ‘revolutionaries’ but would rather enjoy their golden years as the great wizards and wizardesses (‘witches’ doesn’t quite capture it here) of deep and serious and responsible legal wisdom. ******

But it’s all phooey and baloney.

At the heart of this entire scheme, to repeat, was not a matter of ‘creativity’ or ‘modesty’ but of outright usurpation of the role of The People and the undermining of genuine (and indispensable) democratic civic process in a gimlet-eyed determination to impose the New and the Good upon herds of lumpen-folk who ‘just didn’t get it’ (and – even more treacherously – probably wouldn’t decide in favor of it if they were given the chance, as they were – for what proved to be the last time – in the presidential election of 1972).

Now the agents of the revolution, mimicking the Soviet nomenklatura of the post-Stalinist age, would like to be seen as thoroughly respectable and mainstream. Phooey and baloney again. No more slouch caps and trench-coats and shifty, knowing glances among themselves. Now it’s expensive suits and dresses and shoes, tasteful homes, power-phones and personal communication devices, and a secure spot in the contact-lists of all departments of ‘The New York Times’.  Feh.

Driver sounds an alarm. “More importantly”, such modern day legal liberals “may distance themselves from the Justice who has been most prominently associated with living constitutionalism”.

And so what? The damage has already been done. If anything, the public – or what’s left of it – might want to consider the old Medieval Catholic gambit of digging up the body and putting it on trial, just to make a point and air the true facts of what the body’s now-departed inhabitant had actually done when he was resident therein.

Driver sighs that nowadays “it would be difficult to imagine judicial nominees citing Brennan as an intellectual influence”. But of course.

In the first place, nobody wants to be seen as revealing the raw tooth-and-claw revolutionary origins of so much that now passes for legal Wisdom.

And in the second place, the failures and consequences and perhaps even the core treacheries of the revolution are becoming increasingly too clear to spin away with pious burbling or manic praise. Not even the ‘Times’ can spin it all away now, although its efforts to keep up appearances almost rival the heroic efforts of Pravda and Izvestia towards the end as the whole monstrous Thing started to reveal its true nature like the final scenes in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

And then Driver starts pulling out all the stops as he swings into his peroration. “The disembodied quality of Brennan’s legacy is regrettable because he, along with his allies, brought about some of the nation’s most treasured decisions in constitutional law”.

Curious – no? – that the accomplishments of such a declared paragon are yet  only so vaguely adverted to by his follow-on cadres. While all of them want to admit off-the-record that he was an important figure, yet nobody really wants to be caught on-the-record describing what those accomplishments might actually be. Sort of like Stalin. And at least Mussolini can be remembered by die-hard admirers for having made the trains run on time (and for having sent in the army to eradicate the Mafia – though, alas, re-introduced by the Allies courtesy of J. Edgar Hoover’s ‘Italian-American contacts’ in 1943).

But then, Driver gives the game away – bless him. “Brennan “helped to broaden the prevailing conception of the judiciary’s ability to address inequalities that resist political remedy”. [italics mine]

In other words, if The People can’t be trusted to do what elites want to see done, then the answer was not and is not to see what The People really think (why do that when The People ‘just don’t get it’?).

No. Instead you do an end-run around The People and get the judiciary to fluff their sober robes and get the job done that way. (In Gilbert & Sullivan’s phrasing, the corrupt old judge brazenly sings “It was managed by a job – and a good job too!”) Nor is it irrelevant that Brennan served as a military lawyer in WW2: in there he would have learned the military’s approach to law, which is: the Command Authority knows best, and the only Outcome of any ‘trial’ is going to be the one that Authority wants, and the military is not a democracy. Not the best experience for a highly susceptible and ambitious elitist looking to apply the law to a nation full of Citizens who ‘just don’t get it’.

And then, trying in conclusion to justify what he has just described, Driver nails the lid down on himself, Brennan, and the whole liberal legal aristocracy: “It is Brennan’s implicit resolution of the fundamental paradox of constitutional law that decisions contravening majority preference can nevertheless be democratizing”.

Good frakking grief. This isn’t a paradox; this was and is a treacherous abandonment of the Framing Vision and an even more treacherous betrayal of The People in order to accomplish a politically convenient agenda that you want to impose no matter what the cost.

This was no resolution. No more than it is a ‘resolution’ to throw somebody into deep water but then insist that he isn’t wet (and perhaps also drowning). This isn’t the resolution of a paradox (which by definition isn’t resolvable in the first place); it is the treacherous use of language to deny the reality of what you have done.

It should be a maxim of The People: beware of those who come bearing ‘solutions’ to paradoxes.

This was a solution of achieving an illicit agenda by simply undermining the constrictions that were holding you back. Precisely the gambit of any gangster or criminal who gets what s/he wants simply by removing the constrictions of law (or ‘morality’) from the calculations and forging ahead.

The People and the Framing Vision were in the way, so you just write them off (after all, they ‘just don’t get it’ anyway) and do whatever it takes to achieve the purposes you seek. This is a pretty good example of the dynamics of committing a crime.

Some Justice. Some Justice.

NOTES

*Online access to this article is blocked by a paywall; access is for ‘The New Republic’ subscribers only. However the article originally appeared in the print edition of that magazine, in the February 17, 2011 issue, pages 36-9. It is entitled “Robust and Wide-Open” and its author is Justin Driver, who is reviewing a book about Brennan entitled “Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion”, by Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel. I shall deal with Driver’s comments in his review, and not the text of the book itself.

**I can heartily recommend Michael Okrent’s recent book “Last Call”, a splendid legal, political, social and cultural history of Prohibition, premised on the candid and vital question: “How the hell did it happen?”. Ken Burns has also released his own fine video history of Prohibition, shown on PBS.

***Nor am I here implying an encomium to Richard Nixon. But I will point out that in light of what We now know of LBJ’s treachery (trying to use the highly dubious August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ as a new Pearl Harbor to lubricate the rush into the Vietnam War; suppressing any US Navy defensive response to the ruthless and unprecedented June 1967 attack on the USS Liberty and the machine-gunning of its wounded sailors in lifeboats by naval and air units of the Israeli realm and then instructing the high-ranking Navy lawyers to ensure that the subsequent inquiry did not "embarrass our Israeli ‘frens’" (who do not have and never have had and have constantly avoided signing any treaty of alliance with the US); and allowing American supplies of fissile nuclear material to become ‘lost’ and end up in Israel, thus reversing Eisenhower’s and especially JFK’s adamant rejection of Israel’s efforts to become a nuclear-armed power and consequently introducing nuclear weapons into the frakkulent Middle Eastern situation) … compared to all of this, Nixon’s shady skullduggery in breaking into the Watergate offices in June 1972 (a gambit that had been tried in the Nixon-Kennedy election campaign of 1960 to get demonstrable proof that Kennedy had serious medical problems) assumes the proportions of almost garden-variety political shenanigans.

****I can’t help relating this choice bit. In the very early 1930s, realizing that the Prohibition strongly embraced by Progressive elites, fundamentalist religious elements, and the hugely engorged organized crime bosses (all “sisters under the skin”, in Kipling’s fine and vivid phrase) was in danger of being repealed, Alphonse Capone, that noted Chicago entrepreneur, began investigating diversification of his interests. In addition to expanding into dry-cleaning inter alia, Mr. Capone stumbled upon milk – which, he discovered to his amazement, enjoyed a higher mark-up than bootleg liquor. “We’ve been in the wrong racket all along!” he exclaimed to his associates and underlings around the mahogany table.

I envision the same type of meetings being held in various tax-funded mahogany meeting rooms around the Beltway after 1972. And the same exclamation being made about genuine democratic process.

And while repeal of Prohibition probably saved the American dairy-cow herds from a rather unpleasant ‘organization’, yet no such happy outcome has materialized for The People, who have been ‘organized’ (Hitler’s favorite phrase was Gleichschaltung – brought into conformity) into those B-Western cattle herds that inhabit the background of the real action of the plot.

*****And thus let me here refine a thought I have often expressed on this site: while the Boomers provided the fuel and generated the emotional waves, it was an older generation then in power that sought to surf those tricky waves generated by Boomer enthusiasm that spear-headed the whackulence of the past 40 Biblical years.

******I think it was the historical novelist Caleb Crain, a few decades ago – but I might be remembering the source incorrectly – who noted in one of his New-York-in-the-1880s books that one effect of the Comstock Laws of that era, which greatly prohibited brothels, was to drive the very wealthy madams who ran the brothels out of New York City proper. Whence they promptly decamped to Long Island where they became the establishing generation of a number of 20^th century respectable Long Island fortunes and families of great social stature. One is reminded of Balzac's observation that "behind every great fortune there is a crime".

ADDENDUM

In personal conversation with a reader I received a few thoughts about this Post and a couple more ideas flow from that encounter.

To the possibility that the ideas in my Post merely mask a harrumph (or worse) regarding all the ‘progress’ of the past 40 years, I would respond as follows.

It is a matter of which end of the telescope you are looking through. What I am saying is that from the get-go the post-1965 ‘liberal’ revolution was lethally and probably fatally flawed because of its Method.

As evidenced in Driver’s final comments about using the courts because there was no acceptable (to the Democrats) ‘solution’ to the problem of quickly effecting the changes to the national culture and society that were necessary to woo their suddenly-created Identities and their advocacies: the Citizenry were not going to accept all of that quickly and without reservation, so the democratic political process had to be sidestepped.

To do that the later-60s Black-Power revolutionaries’ violent and in-your-face rejection of democratic process was too obvious and heavy-handed.

However the radical-feminist advocacies had almost overnight shrewdly amassed piles and piles of ‘philosophical thinking’ which they got primarily by taking Marxist and Leninist writing (there are literally tons of the stuff) and more or less simply substituting ‘women’ for ‘proletariat’ – providing an instant corpus, consisting of thousands of closely-printed if turgid pages of ready-made ‘justifications’, for doing here precisely what Lenin had always insisted on doing: avoiding ‘reform’ and ‘democracy’ and going straight for an imposed revolution by the ‘vanguard elites’ who were the only ones who really did ‘get it’. (See Addendum 2 below.)

Ditto the tiersmondiste thinkers – French but also German and Central European – of the immediate postwar era who had either had a bellyful of totalitarian and government-heavy thinking and wanted to undermine all government and traditional public authority (this would work marvelously for undermining American culture and tradition) or else wanted to bypass government and simply reject all ‘established’ authority and ‘hierarchy’ and 'tradition' and 'common sense' (which would work marvelously toward ‘deconstructing’ anything ‘established’ – by, of course, the utterly evil and useless dead white European males and sustained by the lumpen-herds of those who ‘just don’t get it’).

I am saying that before even considering the Content of the various demands that the advocacies made under this pretextual smokescreen in the late 1960s and 1970s, it was the very Method of profoundly and deliberately anti-democratic process that was the fatal bug built into the very foundations of the whole gambit. And that it is this plague-bug which is now metastasized throughout the nation’s entire political system.

And thus of course the Democrats committed themselves and the Beltway (the Republicans soon saw how it could work for their own favored constituencies and so the frak became ‘bipartisan’ by the mid-1970s) and the country to a profoundly anti-democratic dynamic. (Ironically, by the time the actual original embodiment of Marxist-Leninist thought, the USSR, collapsed in 1991, the anti-democratic dynamics at the dark beating heart of the Thing were already well-established in the Beltway. Funny how the deep-political night moves.)

As an aside, I can’t see how the Democrats can now provide a political home for both the radical Identity-Politics ‘bases’ – whose elites helped introduce the plague of anti-democratic process into the nation’s political bloodstream and rely on its continuation for their own ‘success’ – and the populist desire for an end to ‘big government’ or, as the more refined thinking among them goes, a government engorged wayyyy beyond its proper boundaries.

My take on that is that you can expand the government’s scope as much as you think is necessary, so long as the utterly indispensable and uniquely American Framing Vision is respected: i.e. The People absolutely must have their full say in what is going to happen, and that consensus (rather than any non-smoking, smoke-filled room ‘deals’ among the ‘players’ at the Beltway tables) must be given utter and absolute primacy.

The People are the governors of the government, not its lumpen, wayward, helpless, victim-prone, passive ‘children’; nor is the President their ‘commander-in-chief’ ... he is their damned employee and if any folks need an idol or a walking-talking official teddy-bear then they can go to the dealer’s and buy one, but they cannot remain faithful and responsible to their responsibilities as Citizens by turning the Executive into one.

This of course is now and always has been gall and wormwood to both the Left ‘vanguard elites’ and the Right corporate elites and the Fox-or-Jeezuzz-addled patriotistic flag-wavers; and the pols are now so indentured (permit me to intensify that: enwhored) to these elites and 'bases' of both Left and Right that it seems greatly uncertain whether the sitting political class is capable of restoring the primacy of The People at all.

It is in this context that I view Brennan’s efforts and Driver’s remarkably useful revelation of Correct thinking: the courts must do whatever must be done when the elites’ desired agendas “resist political remedy”, i.e. when The People aren’t largely convinced that the agendas are good for the commonweal or at least can’t all be introduced in one quick sweep of terra-forming government imposition that will probably derange if not destabilize the entire foundational and under-pinning structures of culture and society.

Brennan’s efforts did not help ‘politicize’ the Court and the entire Judiciary – that is too mild and actually distracting a word.

Rather, Brennan’s efforts committed the Court and the entire Judiciary to collaboration with the treacherous anti-democratic dynamics that had been set loose by the pandering Legislative and Executive Branches, against which ideally the Judiciary would have been the last firewall, committed to retaining the integrity of the Framing Vision’s absolute insistence upon the dynamics of genuine democratic process.

That is his legacy, and that will be the most lasting legacy of post-1965 ‘liberalism’ in regard to the Great American Experiment: they undermined its fundamental dynamics, like a collection of Sorcerer’s Apprentices who unleash all Hell, and worse – a Hell from which the Framing Vision had most carefully and strenuously raised the country at its very inception.

If this doesn’t rise through callow and arrogant imbecility to actual treachery and infamy, I don’t know what does.

ADDENDUM 2

I offer this entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in regard to feminist political theory to indicate just to what extent most feminist philosophical thinking is opposed to “deliberative democratic process” in way or another, for one reason or another.

Whether that thinking embraces a “Maternal” approach (modeled on Carol Gilligan’s idea of Mommy At the Breakfast Table, with government being the Mommy and the Citizenry being the squalling kiddies) or an oppositional approach of one kind or another (that doesn’t trust deliberative democracy to provide the desired outcomes for feminist theory), the point is that the dynamics of deliberative democratic process are not and have not ever been well-received by the feminist agenda which – as I have said in the essay – was embraced by the Dems after 1972 and by the Republicans later in the decade for their own purposes.

I also offer this link from Wiki in regard to Antonio Gramsci, the early-20^th century Italian Communist thinker who took aspects of Marx’s and Lenin’s thought to develop his theory of “cultural hegemony”. Gramsci called for the undermining of a culture’s established traditions and institutions by means of the working class (changed to ‘women’ for feminist purposes) first developing its own culture and then forming a “historic bloc” by making whatever (temporary) alliances and compromises (again temporary) in order to take over the core institutions of a targeted culture and then subverting it to Marxism-Leninism (or feminism, as it were) from within.

You can see where Justice Brennan’s tactical machinations played right into this strategy; thus – you should pardon the image – enabling the Court and the Beltway to lead the country into political and cultural catastrophe pretty much the way Custer led his elements of the Seventh into the valley of the Little Big Horn.

So, what I am saying – and not in any shallow ‘gotcha’type of way but as a profoundly serious maxim for conducting analysis – is that any study of American politics of the past 40-plus years must take into consideration the admittedly shocking reality that American politics are now and in no small way an actual historical demonstration of a political embodiment of Leninist political thought, since ‘feminist political thought’ (as embraced, enabled, and raised to powerful influence by the US government itself) relies at its very core on Leninist and Communist thought and praxis (either directly or through such writers as Gramsci). The quintessential Communist "class struggle" has simply been re-badged here as the "gender struggle", but all the classic and vital dynamics remain the same.

In this sense, the history of the US becomes a chapter in the sorry history of Communist thought and praxis. And it is nothing short of self-delusion, individual or collective, for American ‘thought’ to wish this stunning frakkulence away by either denying it (it couldn’t happen here!) or insisting that somehow any generalities that have possibly been imported from Leninist thought and praxis would be magically purified through the filters of American exceptionalism or the ‘good intentions’ of those who imported such plague-bacillus and force-fed it into the national political bloodstream.

 

Worse, it seems to me that if radical-feminism was and from its earliest stages has been committed to a Leninist-Gramscian revolutionary Project, seeking neither rational intellectual debate nor deliberative democratic process, then the American democratic system and Vision was a sitting duck from the get-go.

To approach so determinedly anti-democratic a Project with the intent to parlay and deliberate with it reasonably with an eye to working out some prudent and mutually acceptable compromise arrangement could resemble and repeat nothing so much as Chamberlain’s efforts to do the same when faced with the lethally vital and determined aggressive powers confronting the West in the 1930s.

This is so not, in the first place, because of the Content of the demands issued to American society and culture by radical-feminism. Rather, first and foremost because of the Method already embraced by radical-feminism: i.e., the revolutionary Project that did not seek or intend any deliberation whatsoever, but rather ultimately to undermine the ‘hegemonic’ American culture for its own purposes.

To approach this Project as if it were simply an opportunity for honest democratic discussion was tantamount not only to your bringing a knife to a gunfight, but a gunfight whose specific purpose was your own undoing.

But of course, the ‘revolutionary’ talk brayed by the radical-feminists in the early 1970s, coming so soon after the hyperbole of the Boomery 1960s, seemed merely more youthy exaggeration. But it was not. It was in deadly earnest.

The radical-feminist Plan was not so much a continuation of Boomer excitements (flower children and hippies never really ‘planned’ stuff) as it was the calculated and deliberate introduction of Leninist thought from that verrrry Alien Universe. And the Dems led the Beltway into collaborating with it, and turning over the full faith and credit and force of the government.

And the Dems, desperate for the demographic advantages offered by an embrace of ‘women’s issues’ (as defined and claimed and represented by radical-feminism), could not afford to allow such an opportunity to pass them by merely for the sake of honestly calling the Thing what it was. So they called it all ‘liberal’ and burbled it was all merely ‘reform in the service of rights’ – sort of a simply quickie follow-on to the first phase of the civil-rights movement, that culminated so well in the summer of 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

If the American political system seems to have stopped working, then before making fun of the Framers or losing trust in their Vision, consider what stupendous pressures have been placed upon it for the past Biblical 40 years: it has been assaulted from within, and with the vigorous support of the very government whose officials and elected representatives were sworn to protect it, by what is and always has been at its very core a Leninist revolutionary Project.

If the great ship seems to be sinking, it’s not because it is old or poorly built, but rather because its own guardians have been ripping it apart from the inside for decades now, allowing the lethally anti-democratic explosives of Leninist revolutionary praxis to be planted in all the vital internal locations and detonated by agents of a Project that precisely did not have and never had the best interests of a common-weal sustained by ‘deliberative democratic process’ as its objective.

In which case the Questions facing Us now are: has the ship been damaged beyond repair? And is there enough political will left in the polity and among the Citizenry to conduct the necessary repairs?

ADDENDUM 3

I imagine that a Correct come-back to what I have been saying – and what the links in the two preceding Addenda indicate – is that everybody is entitled to his/her own ‘opinion’ about how the Framing Vision or the country nowadays is supposed to work.

In which case I would immediately respond with the image I used most recently in some of the Eagleton Posts: the cargo-cult native of a remote Pacific island in WW2 who one morning suddenly discovers on the beach a brand-new Army staff car that has been (perhaps mistakenly) dropped off in the middle of the night with the keys and a full tank of gas but no owners-manual.

There may be different ‘opinions’ among the tribe as to the purpose of the shiny big thing: a strange type of hut, a planter, even an exotic form of out-house.

But there is really only one way this curious gift can actually work. Any other use, while within the ‘rights’ of the tribe, will fail to harness the full benefits because any other such use will fail to grasp the operating dynamics and purpose and thus the full potentials of the vehicle.

The Framing Vision and the Constitution – absent the indispensable ‘deliberative civic and public process conducted consistently by a fully-informed and competent Citizenry – cannot work properly and to full potential. And this country, this Great Experiment, this greatest gift and hope to humankind, will remain simply a glorified planter or out-house, with clueless natives, no matter how well-intentioned, pouring water or other stuff into it ad infinitum.

For that matter, let me offer this thought: It has become fashionable to lubricate the gyrations of the past 40 years by insisting, as do the university literature departments where so much of this Theory officially resides, that the Constitution should be approached just like any work of fiction. That is to say, while the author had a point or points to make, the reader – even centuries later – may consider his/her own take on the work to override the author’s intentions. This approach has had vast consequences in political thought and legal praxis here over the past few decades.

But suppose that one looks at the Constitution not as a work of fiction but as an instruction-manual or an owner’s manual. Just how much weight do you then want to give to the  ‘subjective’ thoughts, feelings, responses, and musings ginned up by this or that reader?

Would you really want to trust a contractor who tells you that while the blueprints are clear, he sorta feels it would be groovy to try something else? Would you want to fly an airline whose maintenance crews treated the manufacturer’s manuals as merely ‘texts’ about which the mechanic, as reader, might agree with or disagree with? How ‘creative’ do you want your airline mechanics to get with the ‘text’ of the maintenance and repair manuals? How much does the mechanics’ ‘subjectivity’ enter into it?