OBAMA AT ANN ARBOR: NICE IDEA BUT

At U/Michigan’s graduation Obama tried to pull off a verrrry complex maneuver: to urge the upcoming generation to get beyond radically polarized politics.

As they used to say: from his mouth to God’s ear.

And it’s encouraging to see the Bully Pulpit used to try to inject some sanity and common sense into what has become a carny midway and – is this insensitive? – a freak show on all sides.

I’ve linked to the text of his 9-page speech here. What I’m going to do is to proceed along the text and make some comments where I think they’re useful.

As it turns out, I’m going to wind up saying things I’ve said before. That’s not because I’m a one-note, but rather because this speech of his actually is trying to address (without admitting too much) some of the genuinely substantive issues that have bethumped the nation for the past several decades. And so have I.

So, without further ado, let’s to it.

“It's just sometimes all you hear in Washington is the clamor of politics. And all that noise can drown out the voices of the people who sent you there.” Well, yes. That’s built into politics. Although in a representative democracy, no matter how insistent the myriad voices, you’ve theoretically got the elected Members of Congress who will listen to all those voices and then distill their content so that a useful deliberation can be conducted there on Capitol Hill. But if the Members lose – or cast off – such a competent political method – for whatever purposes and objectives – then the whole system starts to go wrong in the heart of its machinery.

“We've got politicians calling each other all sorts of unflattering names. Pundits and talking heads shout at each other. The media tends to play up every hint of conflict, because it makes for a sexier story-- which means anyone interested in getting coverage feels compelled to make their arguments as outrageous and as incendiary as possible”. And it’s been this way for decades. Suppose that they’ve all realized that it’s more in their interest to distract people with the appearance of action (all the telegenic fireworks) than trying to deliberate, especially if they’re going to try to deliberate about essentially impossible initiatives that – for whatever purposes – they’ve already decided to let loose in the country.

“Now, some of this contentiousness can be attributed to the incredibly difficult moment in which we find ourselves as a nation.” Nice, but toooooo clever, and frankly almost sleazy under the circumstances. This “contentiousness” was injected into the system decades ago, when the Maoist revolutionary Method was wedded to the in-your-face attitude of Boomers who had then gone and become cadres in, among other things, a stunningly corrosive and negative anti-male radical feminism. * In a ‘revolutionary’ approach you are clearly on the side of Good, and since you are working against an entrenched Evil then all stops must be pulled in the effort to subvert and supplant your Evil (pick one: enemy, opposition, rival). Which is hell and gone from any method of a Constitutional, democratic politics.

“The fact is, when you leave here today you will search for work in an economy that is still emerging from the worst crisis since the Great Depression.” Well, this is a verrrry optimistic spin and certainly not yet an established fact. We may very well have not yet bottomed out, so to say the country is “emerging” is kind of premature. And whether, presuming that the country is indeed emerging on the other side of the catastrophe, things will return to the pre-catastrophe levels of affluence and lifestyle is another question altogether.

For that matter, the Beltway may indeed have been the source of a world-historical ‘deconstruction’ of the Western era of world history that surpasses anything dreamed of in the cadres’ philosophy (which, in best Boomer style, assumed that you could perform quick, deep and dangerous heart surgery on the goose that laid the golden eggs without disrupting the egg supply).

“You live in a century where the speed with which jobs and industries move across the globe is forcing America to compete like never before.” This gets neoliberalism off the hook, and the Reagan-Clinton era strategies of collecting their reliable swag from PACs in return for allowing corporations to off-shore the heart of the vast American productive strength, thereby undermining (those white, working, male) unions while deconstructing the ‘quaint’ and ‘oppressive’ macho Industrial culture and its values in favor of more ‘sensitivity’ and – vaporously – more ‘knowledge’.

Which would lead to the reduction of (most of) the Citizenry’s economic future to a short-order serfdom, tending to the whims of a ‘knowledge elite’. Which incidentally permitted a fat fraction of the business-school graduates to earn increasingly huge bonuses simply by proving themselves adept at off-shoring and ‘cutting the fat’ (read: workers) from whatever industries and businesses these red-suspender vampires got their teeth into.

“And as our world grows smaller and more connected, you will live and work with more people who don't look like you or think like you or come from where you do.” This gets ‘diversity’ (a key trope of the cadres) off the hook and justifies its top-heavy frakkeries (there is a goodish insight at the heart of the thing, but then they went and tried to erect it into a philosophy of government and a business plan – oh, and a philosophy of military operations).

Nor is it very enlightening to spin Our economic indenture to Chinese banks and sovereign wealth and Our general status as the world’s largest debtor as mere forms of “connectedness”.

“And all these changes, all these challenges, inevitably cause some tension in the body politic. They make people worry about the future and sometimes they get people riled up.” Again, a sly way to consider the incoherent and profound gambles masquerading as the ‘liberal’ agenda enshrined in the Awful Age 1972-2000 as mere ‘change’ and as ‘keeping up with the times’ – so let’s not look back and Kick Tire because it was all just ‘reforming change’ and at this point Why point fingers?

(Surely you don’t think Obama is avoiding genuine Tire-Kicking of the Bush 2 administrations out of the kindness of his Lincoln-esque heart? He’s trying to get Us out of the habit of Kicking Tire for fear We won’t stop at 2000 but instead will exercise Our theoretically sovereign Citizens’ authority and keep looking even further back. And, face it, while the egregious Bush Gang took the heat for injecting profoundly anti-Constitutional and frankly un-American methods and content into Beltway power, yet it has to be admitted that such power can serve the purposes of any subsequent Administration, especially in some other adumbration of ‘a good cause’.)

And this is also a sly way to dismiss the deep, wide, and profound public unease at both the content and methods of the Awful Age ‘changes’ as merely fuddy-duddy fear of change, and/or as the “backlash” of an entrenched white male patriarchal oppression and so on and so forth fill in the blanks. There was hugely good reason to fear not only the content of many of the Awful Age changes, but also the revolutionary methods by which they were spun and injected into the nation’s politics and laws.

“But I think it's important that we maintain some historic perspective. Since the days of our founding, American politics has never been a particularly nice business. It's always been a little less gentile during times of great change.” Neatly, he again tries for the high ground by trying to urge “historical perspective”. But while American politics has always tended to be bumptious, that bumptiousness took place within a genuinely deliberative and debative (if I may) politics; which was precisely not the revolutionary method of the cadres’ politics, which were to suppress public deliberation (and accurate information) while imposing the agenda on (alas tooooo eager) politicians and press. (And, of course, I hold no brief for the Fox News approach, which is simply the Right’s copycat version of the same manipulative and dishonest ‘spinning’ in place of accurate information.)

And again with the ‘change’ trope, as if that’s all it was.

“There was even a caning once on the floor of the United States Senate -- which I'm happy to say didn't happen while I was there. (Laughter.) It was a few years before. (Laughter)” [audience responses included in the text of the speech] I note this merely to acknowledge a bit of a pleasant surprise. Obama here refers to the caning of Massachusetts Senator William Sumner by North Carolina Representative Preston Brooks on the floor of the Senate in 1856 (it was about slavery, which Rep. Brooks took rather personally). I’m pleasantly surprised to see that anybody in the audience actually got the reference – especially since a large percentage of college grads can’t even place the American Civil War in its proper century, nor name 3 politicians or generals involved in it. But maybe the University, given advance notice, sent out a quickie email to the grads beforehand, so they wouldn’t just sit there scratching their heads when the punch line landed in front of them.

“Moreover, democracy in a nation of more than 300 million people is inherently difficult.” Well, it was difficult in a nation of 180 million in the late Sixties, which was precisely why the cadres and their political enablers didn’t want to waste time with it. Better to pull the wool over the public eyes, impose a stifling and dishonest Political Correctness (the term itself comes from the lexicon of the Leninist playbook), and simply strike a dark bargain between the cadres and the vote-hungry, short-sighted politicians, thereby doing an end-run around The People and deliberation and ‘democratic politics’.

“So before we get too depressed about the current state of our politics, let's remember our history.” Nice, but tooooo nice. Throughout Our history, the differences – and the Content of many of them was substantial and substantive – were tackled through the Method of deliberative and democratic politics. Which is no longer the case, and hasn’t been for about 40 Biblical years. Such that at this point the entire sitting political class has spent its professional political career (don’t get me started) doing something hell and gone from deliberative and democratic politics.

But I really do agree with him: LET’S REMEMBER OUR POLITICAL HISTORY. And, I would add, the Ideals and Methods that lie at its very heart.

“ … our experiment in democracy has worked better than any form of government on Earth. (Applause.)” Whistling by the graveyard. What made Our “experiment in democracy” work so amazingly – and what constituted the true ‘genius’ of the American tradition and its Founding Vision – has been deconstructed, subverted, undermined, and side-stepped. And has been for so long now that it no longer operates as it did. Or as it should – IF We are to remain heirs to a living American tradition.

Our “democratic politics” is in no better shape than Our world-class productive economy, which – as you may recall – was broken up and shipped all over the planet while We were distracted by the numerous soap-operas that have become the staple of “news” now. Oh, and distracted by the cheap credit and borrowed cash – procured for Us through “the full faith and credit of the United States” that enabled Reagan to burble that it was “morning in America again” and enabled Clinton to pretend that you can indeed gut the goose and still keep the golden eggs coming. The party – be ye not deceived – is so very over.

“On the last day of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was famously asked, "Well, Doctor, what have we got -- a republic or a monarchy?" And Franklin gave an answer that's been quoted for ages: He said, ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ If you can keep it.” [not a typo; Obama repeated Franklin’s punch line for effect] I’m glad this old chestnut made it into the speech. But I’ve been watching pols use it for decades – to the great amusement and flattered feel-good of the crowd – precisely as We have been in the process of not-keeping it.

“Well, for more than 200 years, we have kept it. Through revolution and civil war, our democracy has survived.” And again … We didn’t really keep it through Revolution, since during the Revolution We weren’t formally the United States. But perhaps this is a revealing slip: perhaps Obama is actually thinking of what was indeed ‘revolution’: those cadre-cored revolutionary agitprop Ideas and Methods of the past 40 years.

“Through periods of great social and economic unrest, from civil rights to women's rights, it has allowed us slowly, sometimes painfully, to move towards a more perfect union.” Sooooo much not-so here. The sly effort to cast “women’s rights” – the core agenda of the largest element of the revolutionary radical-feminist cadres for 40 years – as just a continuation of the Black Civil Rights struggle, “so nobly advanced” to 1865, and then left grossly unfinished from about 1876 to 1965. But whereas the country (except the Old South) saw a genuine justice in eradicating in the 1960s Slavery’s nasty offspring, Jim Crow, yet there was no such general consensus about the far more vaporous excitements cobbled together in the minds of radical-feminism (to whom, if you recall my recent Post on Alice Miller, American family life for women and children was the equivalent of being a prisoner in Dachau).

At this point, of course, the exhortation toward a new national historical awareness is most certainly NOT expected to apply to those agitations and their Long March into national policy; rather, the Beltway and the cadres are hoping that an already sorely-bethumped Citizenry, especially those too young to know otherwise, may simply accept their ‘fait accompli’ as ‘the new Normal’. If ‘Titanic’ had taken long enough to sink, perhaps an entire new generation of passengers would have been raised aboard, assuming that it was merely normal that all great ocean liners leaned to starboard 35 degrees and sort of slanted down towards the bow.

Further, the Beltway’s original, awful mistake is here evident: that you can preserve “a more perfect union” simply by attempting to impose your idea of that state of more-perfection, even though you have had to ride rough-shod over the essential dynamics of that perfect-union in order to do it. This is akin to believing that you can impose democracy whether the target community wants it or not.

(And you can see then how lethally a baaaad idea can migrate and mutate to increasingly frakkulous effect in a system such as the Beltway: having tried to impose the end-state of a “more perfect union” upon the Citizenry of the United States (and having deluded themselves into believing that they succeeded), the Beltway best and brightest – no matter what their formal Party affiliation or ideological hue – figured that they could do it to a foreign people (and can you say Iraq War?).

“At a moment when our challenges seem so big and our politics seem so small, how will you keep our democracy alive and vibrant; how will you keep it well in this century?” Nice phrasing and an accurate insight. However the very fact that Our politics are now indeed “so small” is a diagnostic indicator that this democracy of Ours is no longer healthy nor vibrant, and thus the matter of keeping it going is actually far more ominous a challenge than Obama lets on.

Indeed, the Beltway Bear is now so thickly engorged that there is every possibility that its head cannot be extracted from the national milk can – which in any case has been drained dry.

“On the fourth panel of the Jefferson Memorial is a quote I remember reading to my daughters during our first visit there. It says, "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but...with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times." Well, again, a sly effort to justify the wrack of the past 40 Biblical years by implying that it was all just a marvelous effort at keeping up with the times (and thus of course that if anybody has any doubts about any of it, then they ‘just don’t get it’). For the past 40 years, and from the Left before from the Right, there has been a sustained (and Beltway-enabled) assault on not only the Constitutional ethos but on the very fundaments of democratic politics.

“The democracy designed by Jefferson and the other founders was never intended to solve every problem with a new law or a new program. Having thrown off the tyranny of the British Empire, the first Americans were understandably skeptical of government. And ever since we've held fast to the belief that government doesn't have all the answers, and we have cherished and fiercely defended our individual freedom. That's a strand of our nation's DNA.” Well, again. He’s trying to strike a note of governmental humility by piously bleating, and rightly, that the Framers never intended for government to have every answer. He’s right. But he’s not complete: the Framers were rather convinced that government – on its own initiative and by riding roughshod over the majority of the Citizens – is probably going to come up with some very baaaad answers indeed.

Apparently, as well, We need no longer retain any skepticism about ‘government’ since We are now free of the British Empire. If THAT had indeed been the Framers’ thought, then they would have considered everything hunky-dory after the Brits gave up in 1783. But of course, they didn’t – and thus the marvelous Constitutional instrument and its ethos in 1787.

And if he’s serious – as he damned well should be – about skepticism being part of Our national DNA, then he should know what happens when you mess with the DNA, especially because you precisely want to avoid, muffle, undermine and otherwise disable that skepticism. When you’re pulling off a revolution – the most efficient of the Great Revolutionists of the past century realized – the last thing you want is for folks to be skeptical. Indeed, the massacre in the Katyn forest was carried out by Stalin precisely to ensure that no skeptical leadership would survive to oppose his postwar plans for gobbling that country up.

“ … American democracy has thrived because we have recognized the need for a government that, while limited, can still help us adapt to a changing world.” Sooo true, but the devil is in the details – specifically in just how you define that “limited”. Does anybody really believe that this government now is “limited” in any tolerably safe sense?

For that matter, how can you keep a “limited” government when that government has subscribed hook, line and sinker to the limitless corrosive dynamics of ‘deconstruction’? Once that universally solvent acid is applied liberally to the Constitutional fabric and machinery, then there is no stopping it. It dissolves the limits like acid eating its way through watertight compartments or firewalls.

The combination of revolutionary Method and ‘deconstruction’ has created the conceptual equivalent of The Borg. If resistance is not few-tile (to use the Borg and Picardian pronunciation) then skepticism and widespread deliberation is utterly and absolutely essential. (I see the Beltway, at very best, as those Weimar-era honchos who embraced the upstart Hitler’s dream of becoming Chancellor because – they complacently assured themselves – “We are hiring HIM”. Ja! Within a month, the canny Crapster had eliminated his erstwhile masters and embarked Germany on its date with doom.)

And no small part of the “change” in “changing country” and “changing world” is precisely the strategy to effect the change itself, pushed by its revolutionary advocates and embraced by addled pols who figure that they can without Consequence or even much Effort let slip the Dogs of Deconstruction and yet keep them on a leash.

“But the other strand is the belief that there are some things we can only do together, as one nation -- and that our government must keep pace with the times.” And again. We have done nothing together “as one nation” since about 1968, and in light of the monstrous presumptions about one half of the population – ‘men’ – loudly and frequently asserted by the self-designated cadres of the other half it is utterly impossible to imagine how any sane person could have imagined otherwise. And when you start ticking off the list of further Identities in the Identity Politics bullpen, it’s simply even more incomprehensible how anyone could expect national unity to survive.

Except in those cases where ‘fear’ – of ‘attack’, of ‘evil’ – and the ensuing emotional high of ‘war’ could operate at the most primitive levels. Which would of course let slip within Americans the dogs of primitiveness – as perhaps has become more unspinnably obvious these past years.

And again with this “keeping pace with the times”. This reminds me of McKinley’s diabolically clever strategy of forcing events through his own machinations, and as those schemes had their intended effects, he could then claim “merely to be guided by events”. Thus he forced Spain into a situation where she could not possibly placate his diplomatic demands, and thus he was able to shrug his shoulders, claim that it was Events and History (the Marxist excuse!) and God Himself who was forcing him to start war with Spain and – in fear that Spain would surrender before his occupation army reached the Philippines – grab as “spoils of war” that archipelago and all its peoples, who did indeed greet the Americans as liberators … until they found out that the Americans had come not to liberate them but to occupy them.

Obama is here giving sly voice to the Beltway belief that its will is actually the tide of History and of “the times”; nor must you let yourself think that it was only some neocon whackjob in the Bush 2 Gang who thought that henceforth the Beltway would make history, and the rest of the world’s schmucks could stand by to find out their seating assignments.

“Now, this notion -- this notion, class, hasn't always been partisan. It was the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, who said the role of government is to do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.” Once again with the shady and selective history. What has been going on since 1968 is not something that the people couldn’t do for themselves; it is something(s) that the people never had a chance to think about (lest perhaps they think it a baaad idea); the government in 1968 and subsequent did not take the part of Lincoln, but of Lenin: it embraced a Vision hell and gone from what the Citizenry might have contemplated, and simply set itself to imposing that vision.

The peculiarly and bathetic American twist was that whereas Lenin saw himself as a revolutionary and no bones about it, the Dems and then the Republicans as they all morphed into the gelatinous and toxic Beltway all tried to convince everybody that they were ‘liberals’ and enablers of an even more genuinely democratic politics than the country had ever had before. And to make it easier to live with themselves, they actually began drinking their own Kool-Aid: they think they are world-historical instances of genuinely democratic liberators, foreign and domestic. Phooey.

And then – again with sly selectivity – he ticks off some stuff that the feds did that nobody else could: the transcontinental (the text says intercontinental, but … that’s the trouble with having kids write your speeches for you) railroad and the land-grant colleges (Lincoln), the national park system (Teddy Roosevelt), the interstate highway system (Eisenhower, who got the idea from Hitler), and – a quick slide-by here – LBJ’s Great Society.

Obama slides by this last one since it’s getting a little too close to those anti-democratic ‘impositions’ in the service of this or that Identity that he would like everybody to accept and fuhgeddabout. Gee, that’s swell!

As for Deconstruction, Multiculturalism, Identity Politics, gender politics, and all their frakkulous spawn … as was said heretofore, so must it be said again: Fuhgeddaboutit.

(You could, if you wanted to, take any standard analysis of Marxist-Leninist praxis, substitute the word ‘gender’ for the word ‘class’ whenever it appears in the text, and have a pretty reliable guidebook as to how the cadres of radical-feminism would go about doing what they were certain they had to do. Do you think that ‘History’s laws’ are going to guarantee the radical-feminist dampdreams and their paradise any more surely than they did the Marxist-Leninists’ dampdreams and the workers’ paradise?)

“But what troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad.” Sigh. After the past 40 years it’s not hard to see why an awful lot of folks might think that way. Local government at least has a fighting chance of supporting a democratic politics, since at that level the citizens have at least a fighting chance to keep an informed eye on things.**

But the bloated bear of Beltway government – at that distance the voters haven’t got a prayer of penetrating beyond the “fog of government”, that miasm of lies, misdirection, avoidance, secrecy and all the other panoply of the compleat government when it has grown beyond its People. And to the extent that government has now over the decades managed to immunize itself against efficacious public oversight then it has indeed morphed into something inherently baaaaaad.

But then he starts to get kinda edgy – and We should most surely take heed: “When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us. We, the people -- (applause.) We, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders and change our laws, and shape our own destiny.” We are indeed rightly conceived of as an army of occupation and invasion by a disconcerting percentage of the world’s peoples.

But here Obama – stunningly, like Goebbels in his Sportpalast Speech of February 1943 – seeks to invite (although only after the fact) the people into accepting responsibility for what has been done in their name. In 1943 in Germany the idea was to create a Blutbund – a bond of blood – between the German people and the Nazi Government; willingly complicit now in the deeds of that Government, then the people too would have a stake in a total war to the ultimate end.

Ach.

Now, after 40 years when this, that, and every other thing has been done in such a way as to sidestep, demean, undermine, deconstruct and otherwise subvert the authority of The People, Obama would very much like Us all to own this bloated Beltway Bear and all its pomps and all its works as Our very own. Engorged on Our last supply of milk, the Bear would now like to hide behind Us.

Oh puhleeeeeeze.

Shrewdly, he doesn’t let that fact stay ‘abstract’: “Government is the police officers who are protecting our communities, and the servicemen and women who are defending us abroad. (Applause.) Government is the roads you drove in on and the speed limits that kept you safe. Government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them. (Applause.) Government is this extraordinary public university -- a place that's doing lifesaving research, and catalyzing economic growth, and graduating students who will change the world around them in ways big and small. (Applause)” Once you get beyond the now discouraging Applause, you realize that this is a stark play for soapish ‘feeling’.

The police may well be invading your home without evidence and depriving you of access to property and even liberty (domestic violence law); the military (don’t let’s get started on the feminists in the military stuff) is occupying and shooting up far more of the world than they are ‘building’; I thought we got rid of national speed-limits because they didn’t work (or is Obama trying to hide the Beltway Bear behind local and State government?); mine safety standards were relaxed as a Beltway sop to PAC-paying corporations as were the oil companies (many recently dead miners and the still bubbling oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico … he’s using these as feel-good examples?); government funding for universities has hugely compromised their independence (on top of the cadres of Correctness, diversity, genderism and all the other –isms, multiculturalist denigration of all things American, and on and on); and they catalyze economic growth merely by adding more hungry mouths to be salaried in the bloated ‘knowledge’ sector – whereas the golden goose of the ‘industrial’ sector is now dead and taken its bankable eggs with it to that golden-goosey Valhalla where it will await rebirth in a country serious enough about its national life to nurture it.

“So, class of 2010, what we should be asking is not whether we need "big government" or a "small government," but how we can create a smarter and better government. (Applause.)” Again with this truly discouraging Applause.

Obama might have headed into the peroration ala JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country”. But of course, less than a decade after JFK delivered that ringing call, the Dems – under the leadership of his frakkulent baby brother – had not only abandoned it but turned it upside down.

And it would be that turning of the now-separate Identities in upon themselves, and against each other and against any sense of national commonality, and thus rendering those Identities dependent on the federal government that became one half of the permanent electoral strategy of the national-level pols (the other was selling themselves through PACs to whatever corporations would pay the price of purchase).

And how at this point to create a smarter and better government? Voltaire’s advice – “Ecrasez l’infame!” – is too simplistic. Simplistic impatience – witless or deliberate – has gotten Us into this mess, and as no democratic politics can survive by relying on it, so no democratic politics can be saved or restored by relying on it.

Probably every national pol who has been sitting more than two terms should be turned out forthwith. That will at a stroke undo the Augean honeycomb of pandering, purchased legislation, shallow politics of distraction and appearance to prevent any politics of substance, and the overall stench of an undiselectable nomenklatura that now pervades the entire Federal structure.

To the objection that the nation would lose so much “experience” I would simply say that that experience is so toxically tainted that it cannot be maintained without the acute danger of re-infection.

His second bit of advice: “Now, the second way to keep our democracy healthy is to maintain a basic level of civility in our public debate. (Applause.)” Well, that was mentioned 40 years ago – but the Dems would rather not think back that far … about anything.

Worse, the incivility is itself part of an infantile and primitive politics that was precisely the goal of the Left’s advocates and revolutionaries and the Right’s neocon and fundamentalist world-beaters. You didn’t want a mature democratic politics because then The People would ask questions and take up time and might in the end decide not to give you what you wanted; better to do an end-run around them, buy a vote-or-cash-addled pol or two or ten or hundred, and use the Federal route to sidestep all the pesky ‘local’ venues (called “States” in the Constitution, but that was “quaint” and the times they were a-changing – as the songster sayeth).

So if Obama is recommending a return to a democratic and mature politics (where the Citizen is mature and their common competence is well-practiced and thus mature) … if he is recommending that then he does these grads no service by understating exponentially the magnitude of the task.

And if he is simply recommending ‘civility’ without maturity, then he is looking merely for a Citizenry that resembles nothing so much as the Children of the Corn – and you can’t maintain this Constitutional Republic (or restore it) with Citizens like that.

Sounds nice, but again, more frosting than cake (and the kids needed meat and vegetables in the first place anyway).

NOTES

*As always, when I use the term ‘radical feminism’ I am distinguishing it from moderate feminism. The radical-feminists were the ones who ‘organized’ themselves along the lines of Maoist cadres in order to wage a genuine ‘revolution’ in behalf of their conception of The Right Order of Things, and to do a Long March through the institutions to subvert the vaporous but allegedly sempiternal and ‘hidden’ “patriarchy” which, neatly, was said to have so thoroughly infused all of the structures of Western (and world) civilization since just after (or before) the beginning of recorded human history that any attempt to root it out would require the ‘deconstruction’ of just about every aspect of Western (and American) civilization and culture – which entire programme, however, had to be insistently appreciated not as an assault upon Western and American culture, society, and civilization but rather merely as a ‘liberal reform’ of them. And the Parties – and later the Beltway after their frakkery had melted and fused them into an indistinguishable lump – signed on to all of it.

**For those harboring warm fuzzies for the Framers’ view of either the (necessary but dangerous) “central government” or the (ditto) military, let it be recalled that those learned and wise gentlemen entertained so great a degree of caution towards both that they didn’t even want the military inflicting courtsmartial on troops except in time of actual war.

The text of the 5th Amendment is grammatically as clear and precise as it could be: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger …”

By 1858, a generation that was gearing up for civil war decided that they knew more than the Framers. In Dynes v. Hoover the Supreme Court doubted whether when the Constitution granted Congress the right “to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces” it actually implied that Congress would thereby have the right to deprive citizens of their rights in trial.

But not to seem too wedded to formalities, the Court held that the jurisdiction extended beyond the written articles established by Congress to include any actions traditionally held to be punishable in the service.

The Court, however, carefully avoided the glaring grammatical fact that the 5th amendment phrasing and grammar was clear as a bell in denying the court-martial right in capital or infamous (presumed to mean ‘felony-level’) cases.

In 1866, in Ex Parte Milligan, Lincoln-appointee David Davis opined that “civil law and martial law cannot exist together; the difference is irreconcilable” and that “no graver question was ever considered by this Court”. He admitted that military life has its peculiar “emergencies” and that serving troops give up their right to be tried by civilian courts” (but doesn’t get into whether that could conceivably apply to draftees).

He also observes that the country has no right to expect that it will always be ruled by wise, intelligent, and honest men, “sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution … Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln”.

Both Davis as Chief Justice, and Chase in his Dissent, simply ignore and do not even include the Key Comma in their quotations of the Fifth Amendment; they knew what a bombshell it was and didn’t want to go near it.

In 1895, in Johnson v. Sayre, (the military justice thing has been up before the Court a lot more than its goo-goo eyed supporters would have you believe) the Court simply declared that there were “two ways” of reading the Key Comma (which it admitted did indeed exist): you could read it in such a way that it meant something and that it should be construed by the accepted rules of grammar, or you could read it as merely some odd thing accidentally put in for no real reason at all. Having thus re-written the rules of English grammar (talk about activism!) the Court then proceeded to choose the second way: the Framers just sorta stuck it into the text for laffs. The Framers!

You can follow the checkered legal history of military justice in a couple of Posts I did several years ago here and here. It gives you a stunning idea of how profoundly concerned the Framers were about government (even Constitutional government); how liable it is to slip its leash, and even if you construct so marvelous a machinery as the Constitution you can't be sure it won't be subverted by the dark forces alive in the nature of human beings. And how indeed the government over the course of time made "changes" precisely in some of the most vital areas, and by using reasoning that you could drive a truck (or a 20-mule team) through.

The military's ultimate solution, by the way, grudgingly implemented in 1950 at Harry Truman's insistence, was to borrow Stalin's 1930s idea of promising whatever golden promises you wanted to so long as you owned all the 'players' in the game; your 'wholly owned players' would ensure that your objective in any case was realized, while mouthing the proper pieties.

Thus the 'Grand Jury' equivalent in the military system today is an officer subordinate to the general officer who decided to bring the charges in the first place. The results are, by amazing coinicdence, conviction rates just south of 100% (if you factor in the plea bargains by defendants who know they are doomed to a rigged game to begin with).

"Optimism" is probably not the best approach here.

SANDEL ON RAWLS

I’ve just finished reading Michael Sandel’s “Justice”. He is a philosopher at Harvard who has been putting a lot of thought into just what works and doesn’t work when it comes to defining Justice and putting some sort of national policy together.

It’s finally helped me – after 38 years; I’m no towering intellect – to get a grasp on what went wrong in the ‘liberal revolution(s)’ that burst upon the country in the early Seventies. (And please don’t assume that since I have put ‘liberal’ in quotation marks that I am a ‘conservative’: both of those terms have been largely undermined now, since both Parties have descended into the trough of a politically and humanly immature politics that has regressed and coarsened Our entire national discourse.)

A moment to recall the relevant history.

In the marvelous first-phase of the Civil Rights Movement (up to the first week of July, 1965) the country was engaged in the fulfillment of the Civil Rights promises made and paid for by the Civil War. Martin Luther King led a campaign in which all Americans (some die-hard Southrons excepted) could take heart, a renewal and fulfillment of the national commitment – morally and religiously as well as politically grounded – in the full political enfranchisement of the American Negro (the term in use at the time).

The federal government had to step in – in some cases with armed troops as well as battalions of Federal marshals – to enforce laws long-neglected and even subverted, stretching back to the end of Reconstruction in the mid 1870s.

Since the Jim Crow culture of the pre-1965 South was so thoroughly entwined around the ongoing political repression of the Negro, then the government wound up spearheading a profound cultural change – drastic and of necessity immediate – in the South. That had to be done; when a culture becomes deranged to the point where it flaunts the Constitutional guarantees, then the culture is going to have to change in order to conform to a genuine embrace of the Constitutional guarantees.

This was a huge and painful process, as it had to be.

It also set a verrrry dangerous example for follow-on ‘revolutions of liberation’ that were to come, but let me not get ahead of things here.

The whole country pretty much recognized (the Southrons to varying degrees excepted) that all this brouhaha was fundamentally only a belated correction of the derangement of the promises won by the Civil War that had ended almost a century before.

The Democrats, under LBJ, risked an awful lot. They had to accept the probable electoral loss of most of the South for at least a generation; in addition to die-hard out-and-out racists, there were many more Southrons who had grown up with ‘their’ culture and simply didn’t like to see it changed, especially (again) by armed federal forces and the power of the government in Washington.

But that grand week in July of 1965 came. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was capped by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Dems racked up a huge national achievement – but it promised to be an expensive one, politically.

Still, the indelible images of long lines of neatly dressed Negroes of all ages standing up against the worst that the South of that era could throw at them (supported by large numbers of white, Northern ‘freedom riders’) certainly made it all seem worthwhile (Americans love to see that third act where all the good folks finally come together and win – the classic Hollywood happy ending).

Alas, within 10 days of that July day in 1965, Watts erupted in a days-long orgy of rioting, burning, and looting which – thanks to TV news cameras – was also indelibly imprinted on the national consciousness.

The riots effectively gutted LBJ’s popular mandate – and his political ability to pursue a program of nurturing the huge gains just made.

And furthermore, I’m going to imagine, the Dems sat down there in Washington, did some calculations, and realized that the Negro constituted less than 10% of the national electorate. Which meant that even if all Negroes now voted Democratic, they still wouldn’t provide a safe electoral margin.

The Dems urgently (perhaps desperately) needed a lot more votes – in ‘demographic’ amounts – and they needed them fast.

Things got even worse as the second phase of the Civil Rights era suddenly erupted, in the Northern cities. But this second phase was hell-and-gone from the first. Angry urban ‘blacks’ – vividly represented by black activists who weren’t interested in help from ‘whitey’ and ‘honky’, who had read wayyyy too much Mao and ‘revolutionary’ theory, and who were more than willing to deploy violence against ‘the establishment’ – presented a much different picture from the orderly lines of freedom-marchers in the first phase.

It being the Sixties, revolution was in the air (Mao had instituted his own Cultural Revolution in 1966 and it seemed to be working wonders).

Along came the radical feminists – who basically cast their programme as a long-deferred ‘Civil Rights’ struggle at least as important (if not more so) than the Negro-Black struggle. They based all that on some not-so-obvious and not-so-widely-accepted assumptions: ‘patriarchy’ had been doing to ‘women’ for millennia what Jim Crow had been doing to the Negro in the South for a (mere) century or three; ‘women’ had been as unjustly ‘oppressed’ as the ‘slaves’ and the Negroes of the Jim Crow era; consequently the ‘feminist revolution’ was nothing more than a replay of the Civil Rights movement.

Except for that part about the oppression of ‘women’. (I use the term in quotation marks because it was never – and has never – been established that the majority of females in the country agreed with these assumptions, or embraced their consequences.) There was nowhere near the broad and deep national consensus about this newly discovered ‘oppression of women’ that there was about the still-unfulfilled promises of political equality made to the Negro through the winning of the Civil War.

But ‘women’, any Democratic pol with even minimal computational abilities could see, constituted 51% of the population – and THAT was a ‘demographic’ that seemed heaven-sent to rescue the Party from the triple-whammy of the consequences flowing from the eradication of Jim Crow in the South, the Watts riots and the Northern second phase of the ‘black power revolution’, and the overall smallness of Negro-Black electoral strength.

Almost overnight, the certainly consideration-worthy but still somewhat dubious agenda of the feminist revolutionary agenda (spear-headed by the most radical proponents of the thing) suddenly became The Next Big Thing: in the run-up to the 1972 national election the Democrats burbled that they were now ‘The Party of Women’.

And, as at Santa Anita, they were off!

But there were two problems, at least.

First, the country was not so easily and largely convinced that the plight of ‘women’ required or justified another ‘revolution’. Especially with the Black Power revolution now assuming disturbing proportions, eroding public order and assaulting the entire American ‘white’ culture. Was this the time to have a second ‘revolution’ now assaulting not only the national culture, not only ‘white’ culture, but ‘male’ culture and ‘men’ generally? *

It quickly became clear – although it was now no longer Correct to notice it – that if the second phase (the Black Power) phase of the Civil Rights movement was taking a verrry rackety turn, then the feministical ‘revolution’ (spear-headed by those most radical of the feminists) was trying to overturn the entire basis of American society and culture and even Western (‘patriarchal, oppressive’) civilization … and large numbers of sober folks could be forgiven for wondering if that was a good idea, or even a workable one.

But the Dems knew enough not to look a gift-horse in the mouth. And, consequently, they put the full weight of the nation’s largest and most influential political party behind everything the feministicals pushed their way. And you know the rest.

The sober folks 'just didn't get it'.

Second, the whole ‘revolution’ thing – proceeding to change American culture and society by means of the method and image of ‘revolution’ – so profoundly assaulting the fundaments of American culture and civilization, had no philosophical grounding of its own. Indeed, the American political process was precisely designed to handle competing agendas through the channels of public deliberation and the voting process – it wasn’t necessarily a quick process, but it made for a lot of underlying deep support as enough voters were won over and persuaded.

But ‘deliberation’ by the Citizens who would then express their will through elections at all levels of government was ‘slow’ and it was an ‘emergency’ and there was so much ‘outrage’ and ‘pain’ … the established processes of democracy were too slow; as they would say nowadays, the democratic deliberational process was “quaint”. It was too slow, and at the end of the day there was no guarantee that the Citizenry would give the new ‘revolutions’ what they wanted.

In the fragile rowboat of human culture and human events, democratic deliberation wasn’t a bad way to proceed; in a rowboat full of folks, a lot of sudden and large movement, especially movements calculated to chop away offending pieces of the boat itself, did not strike many folks as the grown-up way to proceed.

But it was an ‘emergency’ – so knew the Dems looking at their electoral charts, and so loudly plainted the feministicals (joined in due time by other ‘revolutions’ looking to run the same play).
Along comes John Rawls, mid-level philosophy prof at Harvard, who in 1972 produced his theory of justice that pretty much justified everything that the Dems and their new protégés wanted to do.

Needless to say, it caught on like wildfire among the new ‘elites’, who were enjoying unprecedented access to the most powerful levers in Washington.

Rawls basically said that if you simply imagined that you were alive as a Citizen but had no prior commitments or connections to anything, then from the vantage point of that ‘original position’ you would (he assumed) agree with him as to the shape of ‘justice’. And that consequently, the Dems quickly inferred, his way of going about things was the ‘right way and the only way’ to go – and to do All of it Right Now.

Sandel – getting back to his book – puts his finger on the key problem with this approach: no such human being exists, who has reached the stage of adult reason and maturity yet has absolutely no ‘commitments’ of any sort. Human life, Sandel reminds everyone, is a thick and dense and complex skein of commitments and an adult-without-commitments is a pure fantasy.

Rawls had basically undermined the whole concept of a human being having commitments, except those that he or she chooses consciously and deliberately. Any other ‘call’ on a person is unjustified and need not be honored.

(Acutely, Sandel notes that in Rawls’s scheme, ‘patriotism’ in any form cannot be justified, because no human being and no native-born citizen can ever be in the ‘original position’ of being able to choose or not-choose a ‘commitment’ to the country. Neatly, Sandel quotes Rawls himself, who when confronted with that very question, hemmed and hawed until in obscenely convoluted prose he finally allowed as how “it is not clear what is the requisite binding action or who has performed it”.**)

So Rawls asserted that no individual can be ‘held’ to a ‘commitment’ unless s/he purposely chose it.

This was the philosophical equivalent of manna from heaven to a feministical (not to say a genuinely feminist) agenda, in that golden age of Boomer-madness, that was demanding that every ‘woman’ be considered totally free of any obligations or even expectations generated by culture, tradition, reason, or even Nature (that thing about sex, babies – having and raising same).

Which of course justified a comprehensive ‘deconstruction’ (another bit of philosophy, imported from France where it had been yanked off the national stage when they realized that once you started ‘deconstructing’ any single element of a culture, the process could not be stopped until it dissolved the whole kit and caboodle). Which is precisely what it did when imported to these shores and turned loose (with the Dems’ approval and support): American culture, society, tradition, thinking … all unworthy of respect or credibility, and to be overturned ‘yesterday’ in order to liberate from ‘oppression’.

Thus each individual American was to be totally free of any commitments until s/he decided to accept same. And if not, not.

You wouldn’t need a Ph. D. in Anthropology or Political Science or the History of Civilization and Culture to see that any polity which adopted this philosophy would pretty much guarantee its own dissolution, under the acid processes of ‘deconstruction’ in the service of every individual’s total autonomy, liberation, and freedom of choice. It was a teenager’s damp-dream, and the Boomers were just about that age, and there were so many of them that they figured that they either were the new world-majority, or would be as soon as everybody ‘over 30’ died off. Ah, those were the days!***

The deep political upshot of Rawls’s fantasy was that the government would have to be morally and religiously ‘neutral’, since everybody would have his/her own conception of his/her binding obligations, and also would have that ‘total autonomy’ to make whatever choices they felt they wanted to.

There are a couple of problems with this. Really big and deep ones.

First – as Sandel asks – is it even possible for a government to formulate policies and laws that are really and truly ‘morally neutral’? He uses – not irrelevantly – the example of the pro-choice and anti-choice sides of the abortion matter (dating, you recall, from Roe v. Wade in the first weeks of January, 1973): the ‘pro-choice’ position is not describable as ‘neutral’ unless you first make the rather clear moral assessment that the fetus is not human. And if you have so assessed, then you have already lost your ‘neutrality’ in the very act of making that assessment.

But then, how can this abortion matter be approached ‘neutrally’ at all? At its irreducible core is the huge and profound moral conclusion that the fetus is or is not human. There is no way to move forward until you have made your decision about that.

(Still and all, it's a neat scam: if you are 'neutral' then a pro-choice choice will result in abortion. If you are pro-choice, then a pro-choice choice will result in abortion. And as the songster saith, "two outta three ain't bad".)

And what holds true for individuals then holds true for their government: the government must make that decision as well, in order to formulate law and policy in the matter. There’s no way around it, given the fact that in Our modern American reality there are those who hold – through an exercise of their autonomy – that the fetus is human and deserving of protections, and those who – through that same exercise of autonomy – hold that the fetus is not human and thus undeserving of protections.

It’s another question entirely whether any government in its right mind would not only open up this profound crevice in the national life but would actually seek to impose its own (politically motivated) answer upon the entire citizenry.

Because, Sandel says, as members of a national polity We all reside together in a “community of character”. (And if that statement seems a bit odd then you can gauge just how far deranged the national – or at least public – consciousness has become in the past 4 decades.)

But of course, can it be said any longer that We as Americans all inhabit a single “community of character”, whereby We all hold – to use a stock phrase – “certain truths to be self-evident”? That We have all accepted an obligation to live according to the morality flowing from those ‘truths’? (No wonder, perhaps, American moral behavior of late has demonstrated some serious flaws here and around the world; not only the Constitution but ‘morality’ and ‘truth’ have been considered “quaint” if not worse in some circles for quite some time.)

Indeed, Identity Politics would build on the deconstruction of American culture and society by asserting that Citizens’ primary allegiance is to their ‘Identity’ (race, gender, orientation, or whatever) and not to ‘being American’. (Although, I have always wondered, the Identities themselves presume that anybody born into their Identity may be counted for political purposes as a member of the Identity – whether they have officially and freely chosen to be so or not; a neat trick rather very similar to the old Southern gambit of considering their slaves to be less-than-human, but yet each slave would count as three-fifths of a human for census purposes.)

Sandel points out that Rawls’s system must be acknowledged as raising the most profound questions about the “nature of human freedom”. I’d go Sandel one better: you can’t talk about the “nature of human freedom” until you’ve got a grasp on “the nature of being a human”.

Are humans born as utterly and totally independent and Shapeless, ‘blank slates’ waiting like child’s clay to be Shaped into whatever forms the individual human chooses? Whenever in life s/he gets around to it? I don’t think this corresponds to reality at all.

I think humans are more like ships: they are launched – as it were – with a certain shape, and from the beginning must answer to the fundamental dynamic principles of the medium (in the ships’ case, wind-wave-weather) in which they will operate. A ship isn’t going to work on land; it would incompetent to try to drive one up onto a landmass, and if one were responsible for other lives, or one’s own even, then it would be immoral to try.

Human beings share a human nature. That ‘nature’ alone imposes certain dignities and ‘prior obligations’ from birth (or, as above-noted, perhaps even before birth).****

You can certainly have extended discussion as to just what that human nature consists of, and the consequences flowing from its dignity (or lack of it, if you choose to argue that side).

But people can’t – and surely a government can’t – simply try to sidestep the issue in order to pander to a preferred agenda demanded by a politically important constituency. Especially when that agenda demands that everybody else’s beliefs and traditions are “quaint” and even “oppressive” and unworthy of respect.

And surely no democratic government can risk such a hugely dangerous exercise.

But then, a Democratic one did. And succeeded to the point where it got the other Party to go along, sort of.

Thus the ‘liberal’ (only to use this term as it used nowadays) ideal of a ‘morally neutral government’ is a) impossible in theory and b) unable to justifiably impose its (impossible) ‘neutrality’ on all of its Citizens.

What We have had for the past decades is a government trying to govern a nation of human beings, although unable and even unwilling to come to any solid consensus about what it means to have a ‘human nature’ or whether there is any human nature at all.

Except that humans should always have as much ‘autonomy’ as possible.

But the very Shape of the ship limits your ‘autonomy’, even when you enjoy the full authority of the captain to command the vessel.

Embodiment – even the very fact of being a material being – imposes certain limitations from the get-go: as a human being you can’t pass through walls, you can’t fly unaided (unless you’re from Krypton), you can’t live in an airless vacuum (ditto) … And all of this comes before the question of whether, in your authority as captain, you can try to take the ship up onto the coast highway for a spin.

If you want total and perfect and pure autonomy, you pretty much have to get rid of the Matter and become pure unembodied spirit … but then you wouldn’t be a human being (you might qualify as an angel, but they too seem to have certain famous limitations on their autonomy – and there are consequences for trying to go beyond them). Or you might be a ghost – but not a living human being.

So you see the problems with a) seeking ‘total autonomy’ b) with no unwanted or unchosen ‘obligations’ and c) claiming that it’s possible for either humans or human governments to be ‘morally neutral’ with no functioning obligations.

If it might be proposed that the Great Britain lost her empire “in a fit of absence of mind”, what can be said about the United States, that lost its national unity and consensus in a fit of sustained deconstruction in the service of a ‘dream’ that was not only ‘impossible’ to achieve, but so phantasmagoric that it did not correspond to the reality of the human situation in the first place?
The ‘dream’ was impossible, alright: impossible in the sense that it had more in common with the Easter Bunny and tooth-fairies than with any serious effort by a politically mature government responsible to a politically mature People.

It is more accurately characterized as a 'daydream' or a 'dampdream' than to be dignified with the term 'dream' - let alone 'Dream'.

I think that future historians are going to laugh – or at least shake their heads in disbelief – at the project of ‘morally neutral’ government these past Biblical 40 years.

This is the kicker. It’s not best seen as a ‘secular’ problem – that casts it into the culture-war ‘religion’ mode, where the Republicans – whose political maturity is now as debauched as the Dems – have raised up the whackjob Fundamentalists as the representatives of ‘religion’. Rather, it’s the more philosophical ‘moral neutrality’ problem that should be Our focus of concern.

It seems to me that the Framers could construct so limited a government as the American Constitutional one precisely because they realized that the Citizens were being Shaped by a culture and civilization that preceded the government itself by long centuries. All that the American Constitution needed to do was guarantee that the government did not get in the way of those Shaped Citizens’ “community of character” and shared culture.

It was only when the government decided that it needed to ‘deconstruct’ that “community of character”, and all its traditions and assumptions and beliefs and practices, that the whole marvelous machine went off its rocker – literally, like a Ferris wheel breaking loose from its struts.

Thus the government now has not only weakened (‘reformed’, the Beltway elites like to think) the structure of the Constitution itself, but has greatly eroded the ground under the structure, the cultural unity of the People.***** AND the government has placed the Citizenry in the impossible position of maintaining their moral and religious beliefs yet not deploying them in the service of Citizenship and political activity.

Because if it’s impossible to conduct a ‘morally neutral’ government, it’s also impossible for the individual Citizens and the Citizenry as a whole to pretend (‘prescind from’ is the old formal philosophical term) that they don’t have any politically relevant moral beliefs and values.

In other words, the ‘Citizen in the original position’ – dreamed up by Rawls as a slick philosophical way of sweeping away any obstruction to the new demands and agendas – is just that: a mind-game, a ‘dream’, a ‘fantasy’, and an impossible one at that. We come into this world already burdened with claims and expectations made by the human community into which We are born, with limits imposed by Nature itself – and any theory that insists on ignoring that must have its tires most vigorously kicked.

Rawls's theory caught on quickly - it seemed to far too many to be so 'simple' that they took it as a proof of just how dumb Western civilization had been that it had not 'gotten it' earlier, that it had not seen such a clear and simple solution.

Of course, Rawls's solution was 'simple' in the same way that Hitler's plan to invade England might have been made simple: by imagining that the English Channel didn't exist - that those 20 miles of open water were only 20 miles of rolling fields - then a German invasion of England would have seemed simple indeed. And anybody harboring reservations would be derided as somebody who 'just didn't get it'. Yah.

And any government that gives itself over to imposing such a lethal pipedream on the society and culture for which and to which it is responsible must be held strictly to account for its witlessness or its treachery.

Which gives Teddy Kennedy’s “Dream” bit a whole new level of meaning. And now We have to figure out how to re-deploy Our communal national energies currently ‘dreaming the impossible dream’ – that afore-mentioned saccharine song from the 1960s Broadway hit “Man of La Mancha”; We’d best get serious and realize just what the elites have spent the last four decades trying to do with this country.

And let’s not forget that the government itself seems to have developed the delusion that it too has ‘total autonomy’ – which seems too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.

NOTES

*It also didn’t completely escape the public’s notice that the postwar economy – the source of American primacy in the postwar world , whose robust hegemony was presumed to be eternal from 1945 into infinity – was starting to behave oddly: in 1971 Nixon had abrogated the Bretton Woods arrangement of 1946; the dollar was no longer backed by gold (in Fort Knox – google it if you have to); there were sudden shortages of beef and sugar; and some powerhouse American corporations were starting to open up plants in other countries and to close plants here. Some nuts were even starting to predict that the price of a gallon of gas would go up to 50 cents or more. And, of course, the military that had won World War Two was having a hell of a bad time in a relatively small backwater in Southeast Asia. Was this really a good time to be declaring a domestic war on ‘men’ in general? Or to be agreeing that the whole national culture – Western civilization even – was nothing but a hollow excuse for ‘oppression’?

**I think that even more profoundly than being considered ‘soft on defense’, the Dems must have been terrified of being accused of being ‘against patriotism’ – yet their anointed court philosopher had no room for it in his scheme. Fortunately for them (though not for anybody else) the media did not pick up on it, since ‘philosophical’ questions aren’t ‘real’ enough to report about. Yah. But their consequences are real, verrry real indeed.

***The lyrics to Mary Wells’s 1968 or 1969 song “Those Were the Days” say it all: “Those were the days, my friend; we thought they’d never end, we’d sing and dance forever and a day! We’d live the life we choose, we’d fight and never lose, those were the days, oh yes those were the days.” Cast as a middle-aged person’s thoughts, standing on a sidewalk and seeing his/her reflection in the window of a bar where much youthful carousing had gone on a lifetime before, the lyrics – intentionally or unconsciously – issued a warning to the besotted Boomers that there’s a reason why Time and History come with capital letters.

****Just a quickie here on this matter of ‘human nature’. It goes back at least to Plato. He figured that while there are many types of ‘cup’, say, yet there is something that makes you quickly identify any genuine ‘cup’ as a ‘cup’ – regardless of its shape, size, color, the number and placement of handles, the amount it can hold, and so forth (although when does a ‘cup’ become a ‘pail’ because of the amount it can hold?).

And you can tell the difference between a ‘cup’ – no matter how unfamiliar its style or shape – and, say, a ‘helmet’ that for the moment is being used as a cup.

So he figured: there’s some ‘cupness’ that is a key archetypal Form in which all existing cups participate; all the cups have the quality of the Cup.

Now that’s kind of interesting and certainly not nonsensical. Although a ‘realist’ might say: I have seen lots of cups in my life, but I have never seen a (or the) Cup – so it doesn’t exist. To which Plato would respond that there must be some dimension where all these Ideal Forms exist, because everything in existence must have an Ideal Form.

Now then, when you apply this approach to human beings, then you start asking yourself: what is the Human-ness that makes a human being a human being? Such that you can discern it in the many different shapes and forms that it takes in this dimension.

What makes humans Human? What are the essential qualities, capabilities, characteristics of the Human and thus of all actual human beings?

You can go a long way down this road – and you wouldn’t be wasting your time.

*****And with the population’s sense of national identity and cultural unity dissolved and ‘deconstructed’, then the only source of identity and unity and civic order would have to be the government itself; and so the Regulatory-Preventive Nanny State State – what I call the reincarnation of the old Enlightenment illusion (‘dream’?) of Benevolent Despotism as ‘Sensitive Despotism’ – becomes necessary to instill civic ‘character’ and enforce civic order – to essentially Shape the Citizenry – even as the National Security State provides the war and ‘fear of enemies’ which become the only comprehensive common motivation left to the country. This is a recipe for catastrophe as a polity.

And for that matter, I wonder if things aren't so far gone now (the Beltway elites so debauched by their decades of political pandering to their 'bases' and their indenture to corporate PAC money) that the Beltway resembles nothing so much as the Soviet nomenklatura elites in the 1970s: they knew the whole thing was a failure and probably wrong from the get-go and now all they wanted to do was stick around long enough to make their bundle, retire, and get out of town to their dacha on the Black Sea.

And if that's the case, then to those who wonder if Obama has 'betrayed' his promise, I propose the example of the decent Gorbachev: he couldn't clean up the Augean Stable ... he couldn't and didn't 'reform' the Soviet Union, he had to shut it down.

Go thou and have a cuppa joe over that.

COAKLEY LOSS

I have to say a few words because this strikes me as one of the moments that is more than just a Straw in the Wind and may actually constitute a Clue as to what’s starting to happen.

Alexander Cockburn certainly puts it succinctly in the title of his article on the Counterpunch site today: “Coakley Loses and a Good Job Too”.*

The ‘good job too’ bit is from the always-marvelous Gilbert & Sullivan. The operetta was “Trial by Jury”, and the particular song is a send-up of lawyers (England of the 1890s) who are merely in it for the money, climbing the ladder by hook, crook, or judicious marriage to “a rich attorney’s elderly, ugly daughter” who “may very well pass for forty-three in the dusk with the light behind her” (no genderist snark intended here).

As he recounts lyrically his rise to status, position, and fortune – when “the Briefs came trooping gaily” (no sexual orientation snark intended) – he confides to the audience: “It was managed by a job, and a good job too!”. “Job” as it is used in the lyrics means “scam” in modern usage.

In that sense of the word, Coakley stands for much of what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party in the past forty years.

And let me put in this pre-note: there are now several cohorts of adults (chronologically, by age, at least) in this country who have never known this country as it was – in its strengths as well as its deficiencies – before the late Sixties began to do their work. A youngster born after 1958, say (and now 52 or so), does not know the country as it was in that distant era: productive, grounded (as much as a consumer-capitalist country, or any bunch of human beings en masse, can said to be grounded), and possessed of a certain Shape – internally, in substance, as well as in appearance – making its way in the booming, buzzing, chiaroscuro Vale of Tears and Possibility that is this ‘world’ of human beings.

The individual person had a certain Shape, whether socialized into that Shape by conforming to some extent to the culture around him/her, or – less often but still not a rare occurrence – internally, by forming the Self on the Trellis of the culture, ‘internalizing the best values’, and thus fortified conducting life. And not simply for him/herself, but also participating among the society of others similarly formed. And not simply participating with other adults but helping to pass on and Shape their children, who were expected to develop themselves along some sort of Trellis into a worthwhile Shape.

And of course, this dynamic – over the course of generations – would yield also the utterly indispensable substrate of a Republic, and certainly the American Constitutional Republic: a society of mature and competent Citizens who would ground their government, which in Lincoln’s pithy but splendid phrase, was a government that existed not on its own authority nor operated on its own whims, but rather existed “of the People, by the People, for the People”.

All that was swept away as the Sixties and the Seventies – through their assorted ‘revolutions’ and deconstructions and ‘creative destructions’ – by unforeseen or intended consequence – pulled the whole vision and foundation apart. Instead of a symphony (or at least a decent high-school band) the whole American thing dissolved into a cacophony of individual instruments, and even players, blasting away in the sure and certain belief that their instrument, or their individual energy alone, could carry the entire burden of the symphony’s complex score and melody. And in many cases, the kazoo or even lesser instruments, were ‘valorized’, tootling away, often without any music score in front of them, but sorta just riffing.

And all of this was considered ‘good’, in the sense of Genesis: a new ‘creation’, made not by God, of course, but by the myriad excitements and illuminations and inspirations of those myriad ‘players’ and instrument groups.

And it was a Politically Incorrect ‘sin’ to imagine that what one was then hearing was ‘cacophony’. Rather, if you just trained yourself to forget what the Music used to sound like, then you could ‘get it’ and imagine that you were hearing not a cacophony but rather a whole new type of music, one without melody or structure but – of course – even better.

And if you had the ill-grace to observe that it still sounded pretty much like a bunch of kazoo-playing kids just killing time (and wrecking the whole experience and concept of Music) then you ‘just didn’t get it’ and were a fuddy-duddy, a dinosaur whose time was now past and the best thing the country could do was to wait for you and your kind to die off and let the brave new world tootle away (not in a march formation or in step let alone in tune) down Main Street into the broad sunlit uplands of total liberation and sensitivity.

Oy.

I’ve been watching this non-parade for decades now, and its excited but ungrounded visions and its “Dream” (Teddy Kennedy’s shrewd casting of what was happening) have led to all sorts of unhappy consequences (and can you say Iraq War and Af-Pak and deregulated financial sector?).

The Democratic Party – as I’ve often said before on this site – embraced the whole Thing back in the late Sixties, desperate to find (or create) new voting blocs to replace the Old South that had been repelled by that hugely impressive first phase of the Civil Rights Movement (that ended with Watts in July, 1965); and to replace the white working class blue-collar folks who had grave misgivings about turning life upside down by claiming that immaturity was the new maturity; and then ‘men’ as the radical feminists took over the women’s-liberation movement and (having read Mao and his great-grandfather Rousseau) planned a Long March through American institutions to erase the infamy of ‘patriarchal oppression’ and ‘men’ in general in order to replace it all with Sensitivity and ‘knowledge workers’ (and I hold both sensitivity and knowledge in very high esteem as essential to every human being).

Meanwhile, 1970 or so saw the end of the easy American dominance of industrial and economic strength based on its own amazing productivity and its own resources. Competition from newly developing countries and countries finally recovering from the wrack and ruin of World War 2; the inability not only to pump the majority of the world’s oil but even to supply America’s own needs for ‘black gold’; and an increasingly ‘abstract’ nature of American wealth as actual gold-reserves were no longer considered the basis of national and international economy.

Corporations large enough to do it and connected enough to induce the government to let them do it began to outsource; other corporations found themselves unable to compete with rising productivity from other nations whose governments were carefully shepherding their nation’s industrial policy; the dollar began to feel a little queasy as it traced a dizzy path in the ether of ‘international finance’.

A simple recollection of warning signs in the 1970s might remind Us just how things began to slide (beyond the wholesale and gleeful ‘deconstruction’ of American culture and values): in 1971 Nixon abrogated the 1946 Bretton Woods arrangements and floated the dollar (recall now that today anybody under 50 watching “Goldfinger” (1963) would have no idea what was so important about “Fort Knox” or why the evil Auric Goldfinger wanted to grab the “sixteen billion dollars in gold, the entire gold reserves of the United States of America”); instantly there was a ‘sugar shortage’ followed by a ‘beef shortage’; in 1973 oil-producing nations that had previously allowed themselves to be managed by American and British oil corporations formed OPEC, and there were ‘gas shortages’ – the price of gas went over fifty-cents per gallon at the pump (We were told it was temporary and not to worry); in 1978 Chrysler had to be bailed out because it couldn’t compete profitably; by 1979 European upscale cars like Audi were becoming the status symbols for American drivers who had ‘made it’, replacing Cadillac and Lincoln.**

The 1980s didn’t make things any better. Reagan used Nostalgia to assure Americans that the 1940s were back again; but it wasn’t “morning in America” again, it was two in the afternoon and the days were getting shorter on top of that. His solution to Our financial problems was to start borrowing: it was on his watch that this country quietly slipped from being a creditor nation to being a debtor nation.

But politically, it was brilliant: the fake money kept the older Americans thinking – if they were willing to accept the illusion from that Great Illusionist – that the country was still wealthy; it also served a purpose on the Left, allowing the assorted ‘revolutionaries’ to crow that you could have all their favorite deconstructions and still be rich as sin even as they let the productive capacity of the nation slide away since it was all based on “Industrial Age, macho culture” anyway and they would replace it with a ‘woman-friendly’ knowledge economy that the chimpish males were too lumpish to master.

And in the 1990s, as things got even more queasy and shaky, credit was expanded – cards and loans and then finally mortgages. All to give people the (hugely illusory and false) sense that the country was still wealthy and on top and Number One.

Worse, the ‘revolutions’ had undermined the entire structure of a well-informed, deliberative politics and the type of Citizenry needed to participate in such a politics and ground the government. Revolutionary theory doesn’t want to deliberate; it wants to impose. But in a non-shooting revolution, in a long-standing democracy, you can’t just follow Lenin’s and Stalin’s path and liquidate those who dissented or had doubts. No, you had to follow Goebbels’s path to achieve Mao’s goals: you had to manipulate public opinion, soften the public mind, soften individual minds, and make sure that your own cadres’ voices were the only ones who could pass out the Correct line.

As ‘governance feminism’ began to move beyond the support of ‘advocacy journalism’ and actually make inroads in elite academic institutions and government bureaucracy, the Regulatory and Preventive State began to take shape behind the façade of ‘sensitivity’ and ‘concern for victims’; political debate gave way to shouting matches, the purpose not being to inform the Citizenry but to outshout the opposition and spackle up your cadres; education became less a training in critical analytic and evaluative thought based on a careful assessment of realities, and instead became a drill in the Correct mindset by which to make ‘reality’ whatever you wanted it to be (under the guidance of the Correct cadres, of course); justification for ominous public policy change was sought by stampeding public feelings rather than careful deliberation. And that was from the Left.

The Right responded by developing its own ‘bases’, mimicking the Identity Politics of the Left, and deploying those same manipulative Goebbelsian techniques and that same either-or, fundamentalistic mindset that the Left – oy gevalt! – had introduced into the mainstream of American politics the decade before.

As Lincoln might have prayed, echoing the concerns of a lone traveler caught in a powerful thunderstorm out in the dark woods at night: Oh Lord, if it’s all the same to you, a little more light and a little less noise! But ‘noise’ was all that political debate had become.

Nixon had come up with the concept of ‘the Silent Majority’ in the late Sixties. He was trying to get at the reality that while the noise was coming from the revolutionary cadres of the Left (rapidly becoming revolutionary rather than ‘liberal’) the great substrate of American culture, the working class, were by nature and temperament not ‘noisemakers’, but simply put their heads down and – not to put too fine a point on it – worked and produced, steadily and efficiently. And raised their kids and hoped for the best.

But the advocacy media had also become addicted to sensationalism, and there was nothing like a well-honed cadre for the agitprop street-theater in front of the cameras to make the evening news look both jazzy and ‘with it’ and ‘concerned’ – a hat trick!

Anyhoo, back to Coakley: Teddy Kennedy held the Massachusetts elites (though never the mass of its voters) in his beefy paws (increasingly well manicured as he achieved ‘senior status’) to the end. And the Identity Politics and all its pomps and all its works became “The Dream” (Martin Luther King’s noble phrase) and Teddy styled himself as the Old Warrior, fighting for that Dream (a dream hell and gone from Martin Luther King’s when you compare them).

Teddy finally went wherever it is he has gone (after a final shrewd effort to fix the Judge by sending Obama to the Pope asking for prayers last summer – the President as Postman … or perhaps Bagman). The aging feminist elites began to issue a spate of ‘victory-lap’ histories trying to spin their ‘revolution’ as hugely successful and ‘transformative’ (and who can deny that the country – in the past 40 Biblical years – is not indeed ‘transformed’?)

But Teddy was wrong on most actual things and the assorted revolutions of the assorted Identities of Identity Politics and all their deconstructions and all their pomps and all their works have borne huge negative consequences, if anybody wants to look around.

The Democratic – and Beltway – solution has been to amp up the kazoos and start distracting wars – both to keep the public mind off what’s actually going on around them and to provide some sense of a ‘national unity’ that has become so ‘deconstructed’ that the only thing left to unite Americans as a society and a People is an attack and War. (And that overall political strategy cannot end well.)

Martin Luther King’s appeal to American traditional values and religious and spiritual ideals, Lincoln’s appeal to The People – all of these have been ‘deconstructed’ and can’t be publically embraced. What’s left but War and the primal appeal to the beserker glories of military adventure? This is ‘progress’? This is ‘liberal’? What has happened to Us?

When it comes to the economy and the usefulness of ‘service jobs’ instead of the old-school ‘industrial jobs’ – take a look around and compare a Bell Telephone or General Motors employee of 1955 with a Wal-Mart employee or cell-phone seller of 1995 or 2005 or 2010.

The working-class – whether the purportedly chimpish, lumpish ‘males’ or the women in UAW windbreakers – saw it all. And, I think, they very much resembled what Flannery O’Connor had said about Southerners in the late 1950s: we still have enough values to know the freakish when we see it. The whole idea of Political Correctness was that you were not ‘judgmental’ enough to say the emperor had no clothes, and to really ‘get it’ you had to train yourself to see clothes on the emperor even when there were none there; facts, after all, don’t matter – as the cadres always say.

Such massive and sustained illusion has never been the hallmark of the American working class, or of workers anywhere. Even Lenin – watching the Russian workers overthrow the Czar – had to come back half a year later with his own Red revolution TO OVERTHROW THE WORKERS. They, after all, ‘just didn’t get it’ and would need the impositions of his Party cadres in order to see their lives fulfilled.

Yah.

So along comes Coakley – not only a poster-person for all the Revolution of the past 40 years but also a poster-prosecutor, enforcing and enabling the Long March to the Regulatory and Preventive State, where the government can do whatever it wants if it thinks it’s a good idea; the Citizens don’t know what’s good for them … they should just trust the government to be ‘sensitive’ and always right. This is about as far from the American Constitutional vision as you can get without actually hoisting up the Red flag.

The local paper of record – the ‘Boston Globe’ – long enwhored to Teddy and the ‘liberal’ status quo, gave its all to make it seem as if Coakley were a shoo-in (the feminist revolution and Identity Politics were now a ‘success’ and ‘the new normal’, right?). All the Correct elites exerted themselves, consuming vast quantities of Chardonnay – even in plastic cups – to turn out for and tune into the Goddess of … Democratic-hood, if not Democracy.

But – mirabile dictu – the working class had had enough and were finally willing to say it. And there was, I think, no Teddy to place his fat though well-manicured thumb on the electoral scales.

So I would have to say: Wow.

So much more remains to be done (as Ike said in his Farewell Address). I am not yet ready to embrace ‘the Republicans’ – since that Party has also sunk into its primitive ‘bases’ and into primitive politics of Either-Or and of Demonization (as radical feminists demonized ‘men’ Roger Ailes got the idea to demonize ‘liberals’ and sought benefit of clergy from the whackjob Fundamentalists, who were happy to put aside their literal Bible snippets to climb into bed with the divorced and un-religious Reagan).

The country desperately needs, I would say, a ‘mature politics’ before anything else.

The Regulatory and Preventive State needs victims and children, not Citizens. The corporate State needs obedient serfs, not Citizens. The nationalist Rightist State needs ‘patriotic fundamentalists’, not Citizens.

None of the major political positions on offer these days requires the services of Citizens, nor does the Beltway really care to deal with The People.

I would make this suggestion: as an absolutely essential pre-requisite for utilizing what may be modern America’s equivalent of Europe’s 1989 Moment – the beginning of the end of a stifling Political Correctness … as an absolutely essential pre-requisite for that, Americans must begin to accept that the most glorious being in God’s creation is not the Child (!) but the mature, competent Adult.***

And that every American and everybody who aspires to American ideals, must dedicate him/herself to achieving that condition.

So that an increasing number of them (and there are many already here) may create the critical mass that can demand and reintroduce a mature, responsible, democratic politics.

And then We can see what We will do – as best can be managed – with America’s frakkingly weakened situation, domestically and internationally.

In order that We might – as Lincoln put it – “achieve a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations”.

NOTES

*As I am writing, this article is the lead article on the Counterpunch site, therefore it has no individual URL of its own. Should you follow the hyperlink above and not see the article right in front of you, just look at the list of articles to your left as you look at the screen.

**You can find an excellent series of articles on the industrial de-velopment of the US in the past 40 years in the January-February issue of ‘The American Prospect’ magazine, here. And you can find an excellent analysis of the failure of the Clinton 90s’ New Democrats and neoliberalist economic and industrial policy here.

***In the long and far too cheerible history of the past 40 years’ worth of ‘valorizing’ youth We have seen the Boomer ‘Youth’ – fount of wayyy too much uninformed and unshaped energy and ‘confidence’ – then give way to ‘the Child’, that grossly under-examined Image and Symbol that serves numerous ulterior purposes.

While all the panoply surrounding ‘the Child’ ostensibly proves what a sensitive and caring (thus ‘female’ rather than stereotypical macho-chimp) nation America is, it serves as well to a) distract Americans from the rather disconcerting fact that feminism in its most radical but also most politically connected variant requires abortion on demand in order to assure the ‘equality’ of ‘women’; b) provide a telegenic cover for the ominous police-state strategies and policies accompanying the expansion of the Regulatory-Preventive Nanny state; and c) provide a verrry useful distraction for far too many Americans who should be looking to their own individual maturity as persons, adults, and Citizens, rather than too easily applauding themselves for their ‘concern for children’ (which in any case does not extend to Iraqi or Afghani ‘children’ nor will it – I imagine – extend to ‘the children’ in any other targeted country).