Last night in Massachusetts, America didn’t get what it needs. But Democrats got what they deserved.
Republicans lost in 2008 because they’d spent many years implementing clear, extreme economic and foreign policies thoroughly enough for real life to prove them bogus. They hadn’t just won an election in 1980 with “Great Communicator” Ronald Reagan’s terrific campaign on behalf of their ideas; they’d then proceeded to give us enough of what even George H.W. Bush called “voodoo economics” and enough of national-security statism to show everyone what those strategies are actually worth in New Orleans and Baghdad, on Main Street and in a global economy that is no longer an American protectorate.
Democrats are losing now for an entirely different reason. Although in 2008 they, too, won a national election with great communicator riding on the other side’s implosion, the Democrats, unlike Republicans, haven’t even tried to implement their promised strategies seriously enough for real life to prove them bogus – or, like Social Security, indispensable to Americans’ freedom and safety.
Why haven’t they done that?
Why did not only Howard Dean but even Chris Matthews lament last night that Democrats haven’t given Americans an activist government strong enough to build big things that work and to flummox predators who would keep them from working?
Was it because, unlike Ronald Reagan, a simplifier and a believer who surrounded himself with neoconservative and right-wing zealots, Barack Obama is a nuanced thinker and a conciliator who has surrounded himself with operators and naïve, “The World is Flat” neoliberals?
It’s partly that. But even more, I think, it’s that most Americans really do fear proactive, social-democratic solutions more than they fear the Republicans’ easy, negative, market-driven non-solutions. The latter are a kind of default position in American politics. The social-democratic solutions aren’t, and never will be, until people are beguiled or nudged – or forced by crisis — into living with them long enough to realize that some of them are more conducive to freedom and safety than the Republicans’ answers.
Even Social Security, which Americans refused to let George W. Bush privatize, wasn’t as popular as you might think when it was first created. People had to live with it for a generation or two before they realized that it strengthens, not weakens, them. This reflects a problem deep in our political culture.
That’s why I understand but can’t join with those who beat up on Obama as if some failure in his character were to blame. But it’s also why I don’t go all the way with those who want us all to cry, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” “Stand and Deliver!” “No passaran!” “The people, united, will never be defeated!”
Sure, if “the people” can create enough new facts on the ground, as FDR’s Democratic majority did in creating Social Security amid unprecedented disaster, we must strive to do that now, too – and fight to keep it. But beneath the current events run undercurrent events and crises that can be met only with newer, deeper, more potent strategies of persuasion.
I don’t know what those strategies might be – I’ve done my best to sketch some principles at http://www.jimsleeper.com/?p=15 — but they aren’t now on offer from Democrats or the left, and they haven’t yet been driven home to us by a crisis worse than most Americans have encountered since the 1930s.
I do think that such a crisis is coming. But until it gets here or newer, deeper strategies arise, many people in the not-always-right-wing suburbs that went Republican last night will be easily played because they’re still in denial about what it will really take to relieve their anxieties about the country and themselves. Those of us who are social democrats will continue to find ourselves outside the country’s default position, and we’ll be left talking mainly to ourselves and to a thin penumbra that waxes and wanes.
Conservative Republicans were once this marginal, too. But because their ideas found openings in the American default position, their Great Communicator could take them further than ours. Democrats, knowing this, capitulated on policy even before they began to fight.
That’s why, even though America didn’t get what it needs last night, Democrats got what they deserved.
WARSH ON MASSACHUSETTS
The Road Not Taken in Massachusetts
By David Warsh
www.economic principals.com
So a Republican won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat last week. Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley by a solid margin. Before you file away the result as the inevitable consequence of widespread revulsion at health care reform, let me suggest an alternative and, to my mind, much more plausible interpretation.
The Democrats would have won if they had nominated the candidate who came in second to Coakley in the December 8 primary, Congressman Michael Capuano. Capuano, 58, represents the Eighth Congressional District, the constituency which sent John F. Kennedy and Tip O’Neill to the House of Representatives.
Scrappy, sophisticated, politically experienced, Capuano almost certainly would have recognized the threat posed by the little-known Republican challenger and, in all likelihood, turned it aside through a combination of offense and defense. I can’t prove this, naturally, but my sense is that most political sophisticates around the Bay State now would agree (Tea Party enthusiasts excepted).
So why didn’t Capuano get the nomination? A combination of identity politics, a short campaign, and the presence in the race of two other long-shot male candidates: private equity magnate Steven Pagliuca, and City Year founder Alan Khazei.
Coakley inherited the determined support of women’s groups that had campaigned hard for Hillary Rodham Clinton the year before. (Clinton won the Massachusetts primary but lost out at the convention.) In December, Coakley handily won the Democratic nomination with 36 percent of the vote, compared to Capuano’s 21 percent, and 14 percent each for Pagliuca and Khazei,
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A prosecutor for more than twenty years, Coakley turned out to lack strong political instincts. Brown ran a strong campaign, comparing himself to John F. Kennedy as a tax-cutter, and last week defeated her, costing the Democrats their supermajority in the Senate and dramatically altering expectations among members of both parties.
So what’s the moral? Obama should recognize the role that chance played in the event. If the nomination somehow had gone the other way, the election could just as easily have been a victory for him. Certainly he must now make a number of adjustments. But rather than make a slew of concessions, he should seek to stay the course on health care in Congress, where the Democrats still have solid majorities in both houses.
For citizens of Massachusetts, it means staying alert. Conservative Republicans have won several state-wide elections in the last thirty years, as political consultant Mark Horan pointed outlast week in The Boston Globe. Perhaps the most relevant one in the present instance came in 1978, when supply-sider Edward J. King upset first-term Gov. Michael Dukakis in the early stages of what came to be known as the Tax Revolt. The state then voted narrowly for Ronald Reagan in 1980, but Dukakis returned to oust King in 1982, towards the end of a deep recession.
Brown must stand for re-election in 2012 (two and a half years is the remaining portion of Kennedy’s term). Like Ed King before him, Brown is not an old-style moderate Republican, like former Sen. Edward Brooke; nor does he present himself as social liberal in the mold of Mitt Romney and Bill Weld, each of them repudiated by voters in Senate campaigns, in 1994 and 1996.
The unexpected up-for-grabs conditions that governed this year’s Democratic primary campaign won’t obtain in 2012. It will be a very interesting year.
What the Justices said was drowned out by the chatter about President Obama’s big speech to Congress on health care that same day. But the consequences of this undercurrent for the United States, let alone for Obama’s health-care hopes, will now swamp even Scott Brown’s filibuster-boosting victory in Massachusetts.
Just compare this week’s ruling with what the justices said in September, and you see that they didn’t learn anything from the hearing, because they didn’t intend to.
1.Questioning Solicitor General Elena Kagan in September as she defended the federal regulations, Justice Antonin Scalia wondered impishly if he was being “too cynical” to suspect that Congress had enacted curbs on corporate electioneering to shield itself against well-funded challengers. Kagan had to inform him that business gives 10 times more to incumbents, who can and do return the favor many times over.
Kagan couldn’t resist adding that, far from protecting incumbents, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law “may be the most self-denying thing Congress has ever done.” That drew a few chuckles in the court, but outside the hearing that day, Sen. Russell Feingold noted that, indeed, the stench of legislative corruption by business had shamed Congress into passing such laws.
Apparently Scalia had had no idea, and this week’s ruling just drops the subject, asserting simply that “the anti-corruption interest is not sufficient to displace” the corporate right to speech.
2. Outside the September hearing, Feingold’s co-sponsor, Sen. John McCain, rejected “the [conservative majority’s] premise that corporations have rights as citizens” — rights to free speech, for example. McCain is on the mark, for reasons the framers of the Constitution understood so well that they made a specific exemption for “the press,” the only industry named in that document.
But inside the Court, Scalia kept trying to distract attention from the fact that the First Amendment wasn’t written to protect corporate “speech.” He kept emphasizing that 96 percent of the corporations “silenced” by the curbs are single-shareholder, “mom and pop” hairdressers and car dealerships that can’t overwhelm public debate. Kagan had to remind Antonin the Innocent that a small corporation’s sole owner can transfer and use its resources to speak out as a citizen anytime, without offending anyone else involved in the business.
But as the current (or recent) curbs on outright corporate electioneering are removed, big businesses, whose “owners” change hourly at the click of a broker’s mouse, will indeed overwhelm public elections, and to only one end: While living, breathing citizens sometimes rise above their self-interests as corporate employees and consumers to make choices for greater good, a business corporation’s charter and shareholders don’t allow it to do that. (Hence all those corporate PBS commercials pretending that they do.)
Yet this week’s ruling insists that “by taking the right to speak from some,” public regulation “deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to establish… respect for the speaker’s voice” and deprives “the public of the right… to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration.”
3.Scalia even adds, in a concurring opinion, that to “impede corporate speech is to muzzle the principal agents of the modern free economy. We should celebrate rather than condemn the addition of this speech to the public debate.”
I’ve never thought of big corporations as “disadvantaged” in speaking. And, impressed though I am by Scalia’s “modern free economy” these days, I’m a bit reluctant to “celebrate…the addition” of corporate speech to public life. Has it really been missing? Has anyone been depriving you or me of our right to determine that business’ views deserve consideration?
4. In September, Chief Justice John Roberts fretted that the Government was “extraordinarily paternalistic” in assuming that shareholders can’t “keep track “of what corporations are doing with their investments. Kagan reminded this Alice in Wonderland that most people with retirement plans don’t even know which corporations they “own,” let alone whether their investments are being misused.
The ruling now assures us that new technology makes it easier to know and that “corporate democracy” rectifies abuses.
5. At the September hearing, Justice Kennedy became exercised by the deep thought that bans on corporate electioneering silence those who know the most about the very industries that Congress regulates. Kagan reminded him that no law keeps corporate lobbyists from swarming all over Congress, where they even draft legislation. By barring direct campaign expenditures, she said, “we’re only separating persuasion [in lobbying] from coercion.”
Yet now Kennedy, writing for the majority, quotes Scalia’s claim that the legislation “muffles the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.”
This ruling will amplify, many times over, the distortion of our public life by “artificial being[s], invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law,” as Chief Justice John Marshall described corporations nearly 200 years ago. We, the people, create them, regulate them, bail them out, license them for specific purposes, and have every right to bar them from using shareholders’ investments to overwhelm the democratic process.
The ruling thwarts that right with soaring abstractions (see Roberts’ concurring opinion) about corporations as voluntary associations of citizens joined in a “common cause.”
That line of reasoning does free the labor unions and iconic “mom and pop” corporations to campaign for their favored candidates, too. But unions and small businesses get weaker as big businesses’ power over public life gets stronger, because big business doesn’t put the public interest before profits.
So the justices just pretend that the two are the same – even though the biggest corporations are evolving beyond American control, in ways the Court doesn’t mention.
The free speech that corporations already exercise so vigorously and ubiquitously as consumer marketers and trainers of labor is transforming our public life beyond anything envisioned by the framers, whose “original intent” the conservative justices invoke defensively in the ruling but don’t square with the founders’ own suspicion of corporations, as Justice John Paul Stevens shows in the Court minority’s devastating dissent.
Stevens’ dissent also quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s admonition to Congress in 1905 that “All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders’ money for such purposes; and, moreover, a prohibition of this kind would be… an effective method of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts.”
Congress has never gotten that far, but it has tried periodically since 1907, because the stench of money in politics was so great, as Feingold said in September. He warned then that a ruling like this “would prevent us from legislating,” from regulating what we ourselves had created.
Now, “Exxon or any other firm could spend [Michael] Bloomberg-level sums in any congressional district in the country against, say, any congressman who supports climate change legislation, or health care,” as Michael Waldman of the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center lamented to the New York Times.
.Justice is properly blind, but not as blind and small-minded as the men who lifted the hems of their black robes hypocritically above the muck of political and economic life that makes laws like McCain-Feingold so necessary. The September hearing shows them behaving like mere lawyers who, since they already know their client and the side they’re representing, ask only rhetorical questions, not open-minded ones.
Judges are supposed to be better than that, but when Kagan gave the conservative Justices answers that challenged their premises and facts, they simply changed the subject.
Citizens United was never about “freedom of speech.” It was never about “censorship.” Ever since it was taken up by the Roberts Court, it has always been about judicial radicals’ determination to give corporations “rights” a free people should never give them.
I wrote three columns about this case in September, one in the Boston Globe and two right here. But that month’s current events eclipsed the undercurrent event that has now arisen to swamp us.
We won’t have to wait until November, 2010 to know what has hit us. All we have to do is watch our members of Congress change while just thinking about it.
Many “progressives” (even at the ACLU) who’ve sympathized with the Supreme Court’s rollback of almost all public regulation of corporate expenditures in elections accept the Court’s declaration that it’s defending “freedom of speech” against “censorship.”
It isn’t. Nothing in campaign-finance laws that the court is eviscerating ever really barred big business from inundating us with its “speech” and Congress with its lobbyists. This is a coup against something else.
Maybe not, but the bigger danger is that debate among citizens is being skewed and drowned by simulated voices of non-corporeal (often non-American) entities that can’t be swayed by debate, as citizens sometimes can, to rise above their bottom lines. The First Amendment wasn’t written to protect business corporations – a fact that’s strongly confirmed by its specific exemption of “the press” from regulation of speech. Other corporations are fair game. Citizens can speak for business interests anytime. So can corporations’ paid voice-overs – when we, who created them, allow it.
I made this point here below, but not in neon. So I give the floor to “Man’s best friend,” who posted this comment there: “Corporations are a legal invention whose sole purpose is to protect property rights… They can enter into contracts, which govern the exchange of money and property (or services…). They can sue or be sued, impose or have imposed liens on property. There are NO rights of natural persons that appertain to corporations other than those connected with property rights. They can’t vote. They have no 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination. They do not have free speech rights.”
Get it? Conservative justices pretended not to, thereby violating the Court’s and the republic’s most basic principles. So did the Emperor Augustus, who permitted Romans to continue to hold noisy elections with “all the wild inconveniences of democracy” even as he and others drained the fading republic’s offices of power and honor. So now, too, with Roberts court majority and our already enfeebled Congress.
Bill Kristol’s New York Times column was doomed the day it began on January 7, 2008. And, yes, I told you so right here. But when it comes to warning about David Brooks’ brew of intellectual usury and Resentment Lite, I feel a bit like Harry Markopoulos, who tried in vain to alert the SEC to Bernard Madoff’s seductive but dangerous fraudulence, only to find the feds lacking lenses or coordinates to recognize the danger.
At least I have a name for Brooks’ condition: Status/Self-Esteem Disequilibrium Syndrome (SSEDS). It designates a compulsion to cheapen one’s recognized talents and prerogatives with subtle, unnecessary ingratiations and resentments toward people with higher status and/or higher self-esteem. The syndrome runs deepest in those who live well off of it: High status-seeking, driven by low self-regard. Unfortunately, many of Brooks’ editors and fans suffer from this affliction. No wonder he’s syndicated for millions of newspaper readers and on NPR and PBS.
Some symptoms: In his Feb. 3 column Brooks does what he did last week and has done often since Obama’s election. It’s what I warned here in October that he’d do as his candidate John McCain’s instability and incompetence began to swamp his decency with the tragic inevitability of Katrina swamping New Orleans.
Brooks, I explained, would retreat to the high hills of punditry for the rest of the campaign, reverting to comic sociology and lofty recyclings of Malcolm Gladwellesque wisdom about social cognition. After the defeat, I explained, Brooks would “lampoon the inevitable follies in the Democratic recovery plan, playing the traditional role of conservatives in the wilderness who cry ‘Stop!’ without showing any credible way forward. Sometimes he’ll play the friendly conservative uncle and scold, and, when he does it well, he’ll be useful.”
Well, so what? Isn’t that what he’s there to do? But he hasn’t been proving useful in this time of systemic national reconfiguration. He’s still behaving as Nicholas Confessore described unforgettably in the Washington Monthly in 2004: Brooks has a maddening compulsion to see-saw from serious commentary to partisan Republican hackery and back, offering semi-credible analysis in one column but gryrating in the next for Bush operatives such as Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.
Over the next four years, Brooks pirouetted precisely as Confessore had described, trying to maintain his intellectual self-respect, on the one hand, but to shore up his marketable niche as a conservative Republican, on the other. He did it, with forced but often entertaining geniality, through the Republicans’ Iraq War lies, torture and warrantless surveillance, their borrow-and-borrow, spend-and-spend fiscal policy, their bottomless corruption, and even George Bush’s and Hank Paulson’s lurch toward what almost every conservative considers socialism.
Surely the Republican wipe-out and the tanking economy called for Brooks to put his intelligence and patriotism ahead of partisanship. Surely it was time to re-think what’s best for “patio man,” the working- and lower-middle-class American he’d found in all those fast-growing counties he told us were seeding a permanent Republican majority.
Yet last week Brooks rejoined the Republican congressional caucus and noise machine to charge that the new stimulus package is larded with pork and social-welfare spending that promises little recovery. Usually you can’t go far wrong with charges like that in Washington, but a Times editorial soon drew on independent observers to argue persuasively that the package is better than good enough and that it deserves strong, if watchful, support.
Yet Brooks lathered progressive, good-government rhetoric onto his partisan mudslinging against the package, accusing its backers of betraying what he said should have been “a very strong case… for long-term government reform.” He opined piously that “America could fundamentally rethink its infrastructure policies — create a new model adapted to new modes of community-building. It could fundamentally rethink human capital policies — create a lifelong menu of learning options, from pre-K programs to service opportunities for the elderly.”
Can anyone recall Brooks making such a “very strong case… for long-term government reform” and for a fundamental rethinking of our infrastructure and human capital policies to the Congress of Denny Hastert and Bill Frist and to George W. Bush, for whom he’d campaigned so sinuously in 2004?
The more often you notice these unrelenting, unexplained juxtapositions of high-minded thinking with grubby right-wing propagandizing, the more you begin to sense something more weird and dangerous in it than just wily debating. What does Brooks think he’s entitled and obligated to accomplish with the high position and broad audience he’s been given? What, if anything, does the Times expect of him (and of itself), beyond keeping readers’ eyeballs on the page?
Brooks’ answer is clear enough in the Feb. 3 column, which exhibits Status/Self-Esteem Disequilibrium Syndrome perfectly. He opens with a little spoofing of rich people who haven’t yet realized that their arrogant ways are déclassé, if not verboten, in Obama’s America.
This much of the column is good fun, but soon it’s clear that Brooks wants the rich (and the rest of us) to know that they’re about to be ruled by residents of Washington’s Ward Three, a section “where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live. Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.”
It is Ward Three denizens, not the arrogant rich, for whom Brooks harbors his coldest rage, which he sublimates into acid humor: “The good news for rich people is that people in this neighborhood are very nice and cerebral. On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in.”
This is Brooks’ trademark comic sociology, but with a dark tinge: The new rulers of the rich suffer from “Sublimated Liquidity Rage,” he tells us, explaining that “As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.
“Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can’t afford full-time household help…. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure…. and dumb people who are richer than they are.”
Brooks catalogs their resentments without acknowledging that he shares them. And he advises his rich readers that there’ll be “times when Masters of the Universe must be Masters of the Grovel. If you are a hedge fund manager and you find yourself in conversation with a person from Ward Three, apologize for ruining the Hamptons, and subsequently, the entire global economy. What you must realize, above all, is the rich no longer control the economy and its mores. Ward Three people do, and their rule has just begun.”
This is how Brooks writes. It’s really quite perverse. Feint a bit in a progressive direction, and flatter those you’re about to skewer. Set them up by poking fun at the rich; but come down on the side of the latter in the end, dismissing with a subtle downbeat the others, whose number you’ve gotten by bowing piously toward far-reaching reforms you’ve never promoted but can use against today’s Democrats, anyway, because they haven’t promoted them, either.
All this distracts attention from the fact that, like most American conservatives, Brooks can’t reconcile his yearnings for an ordered, almost sacred liberty and national greatness with his knee-jerk obeisance to every whim and riptide of global capital and consumption that are subverting and destroying everything he claims to cherish. Blame the Democrats! Blame Ward Three!
And don’t mention or even imply that tens of millions of Americans, including the patio men you used to celebrate in the fast-growing, Sunbelt counties you told us were seeding a permanent Republican majority, are suffering materially and emotionally from having been duped, gypped, and demagogued by everything you championed so sinuously.
When the mortgage meltdown hit last summer, I noted here that Brooks really stuck it not to predatory lenders and their enablers but to hapless, desperate homeowners who’d sat in their own living rooms listening respectfully to smooth talkers they’d invited in because they offered them fistfuls of “cash back” in exchange for their signing away their paltry savings and hopes.
Brooks explained that these hapless fools had abandoned the “culture of thrift” for a “culture of debt,” and never mind that a 40-year, multi-billion-dollar campaign of easy credit and other come-ons had shown them the way and given them the incentives.
Having blamed the victims, Brooks now crafts today’s column to fan everyone else’s resentment of pointy-headed Democratic bureaucrats, lawyers, and goo-goos who are their only hope.
That’s part of his stock in trade: Resentment Lite. But now that national-greatness conservatism has collapsed under him, something darker and heavier has crept in: Ressentiment, the sublimated, fine-spun rage borne of a gnawing, seemingly ineradicable sense of one’s own inferiority to rich people and, more tellingly, to the decent, competent people of Ward Three whose sense of justice — quite unlike Brooks’– runs stronger and deeper than their resentments.
They aren’t as deftly entertaining as he is. They can’t spin faux-folksy idioms and high-cultural references with anything like his panache. But they are now the only hope of the millions of Americans whom Brooks and his “national-greatness conservatism” beguiled and betrayed and abandoned.
Hurricane Katrina gave Brooks a glimpse into the abyss of the inadequacy and hypocrisy in his and Kristol’s national greatness conservatism. It should have been the beginning of the end of his pirouetting as liberals’ conservative poison pill. As pillar after pillar of the conservative ownership society has fallen, he’s had time to rethink and retool.
What has kept him from learning and growing? Why would someone with the brains of an honorable conservative thinker like Michael Oakeshott and the literary talents of an Edmund Burke remain stuck with the cloying instincts and habits of a neo-con wheedler and war-monger? Why would he grub around among old resentments, gyrating to score dip-slitty little points against the keepers of patio man’s and the poor’s only hope?
Did some primal ressentiment, some unshakeable feeling of smallness and vulnerability, drive Brooks maniacally up the greasy pole in the first place to the perch he occupies? Why, for all his talents and arts of ingratiation, couldn’t he dig deep enough into his doubts to face the challenges before him and the republic?
My diagnosis is that Status/Self-Esteem Disequilibrium Syndrome has kept David Brooks tied to the petty haggling, obsequious huckstering, and intellectual usury in his past. I don’t know the proper prescription. But perhaps he should pause and get to know that past better.
Perhaps he and all acute sufferers from SSEDS should begin with a slow, careful reading of Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. It contains more than a few devastatingly sharp vignettes of the David Brookses of its time and place. (See especially Chapter 9, “War Fever,” about celebrants of German national greatness in 1914. But many of the preceding chapters are equally telling.)
There will be no escaping this reckoning in the long run. It’s going to be more tortuous than anything dreamt of in Bill Kristol’s philosophy. Better now than later.
” [I]t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide… whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitution on accident and force… “
Alexander Hamilton hoped that “reflection and choice” would grow in what we now call the public sphere, a place that could be noisy but luminous, with constellations of respected seers focusing us on key decisions. Instead we’re in outer space, every speaker a shooting star amid whirling swarms of asteroids. Our political universe seems increasingly incoherent and amnesiac, lurching ever more frighteningly toward “accident and force.”
But something very orderly explains it, too: the taboo against serious criticism of business and finance capital. It keeps Tea Partiers from seeing that corporate ‘speech’ and corporate welfare are dissolving the public sphere and their freedom. Michael Moore’s movie Capitalism tried to show it. But the taboo held. Why?
Before I try to answer, let me sketch efforts that I and others made that failed to break the taboo.
1. Corporate “speech”. In several columns, I warned of the Supreme Court’s likely ruling that corporations, as legal “persons,” have rights to free speech that even Hamilton, a friend of business and banking, didn’t intend. I listened to the extraordinary Sept. 9 hearing at which conservative Justices bared willful yet blundering ignorance of original intent and of the fact that, as I put it in the Boston Globe,
“Corporations are creations of the republic, not its equals or superiors. We citizens charter them, protect them legally, subsidize them, and even bail them out – and punish them when, as with Pfizer Chemical, their profit-maximizing violates drug-safety rules.
“We couldn’t do that if a level playing field of ‘robust speech” were overwhelmed by corporate speech, which isn’t free because corporations, unlike individuals, are …. incapable of what the political philosopher Michael Sandel calls ‘a willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the sake of the common good, and the ability to deliberate well about common purposes and ends.’ That’s why corporations can’t vote – and shouldn’t be able to use the wealth we let them amass to inundate our deliberations.”
Few commentators joined in this warning at that time. Not until four months later, when the Citizens United ruling came, did some alarms sound. Amnesia uber alles!
2. Tea Party protests. Similar unconcern is now greeting a question that I and others are trying to pose to and about Tea Partiers: Why don’t they emulate the original Tea Partiers’ direct action against big business, as well as big government?
In 1773, the East India Company, a global capitalist corporation if ever there was, had become too big to fail. So it was rescued and coddled by the British government, not only with a nominal tea tax that prompted colonists’ cry, “No taxation without representation!” but also with subsidies and licenses that enabled the corporation to corner the tea market.
That’s what drove the original tea partiers the dump not just the government but the corporation’s actual commodity. By that standard, I asked here, and then in openDemocracy.net, and the History News Network, shouldn’t the Tea Partiers break into Pfizer headquarters and liberate medicines sold under the Bush prescription drug benefit plan’s bar against buying cheaper generic drugs for Canada?
“I know that that’s awfully radical,” I added. “But Samuel Adams was too radical for his cousin John Adams, until the Tea Party made John exult, ‘This is the most magnificent movement of all. This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, … and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an epoch in history.’ Will today’s Tea Partiers give us a new epoch of independence? ….[W]ill they take direct action against these incompetent and dishonest corporations’ control of government? Or will they just wear revolutionary-era costumes?”
I even posted the column on the Tea Party Patriots’ website, as a comment. It disappeared. Silence everywhere! Thundering, crashing silence. Articles about the Tea Partiers in the New York Times make only glancing references to corporate and finance capital. There is little honesty about the original Tea Party story and its relevance, if any, to democracy today.
So strong is the taboo that the only thing resembling true direct action is the nihilism of flying a plane into a government building, not a corporate one. Why isn’t action directed against the real causes of the chaos that is engulfing this society?
In citing my own posts, I have no interest in saying, “I told you so.” It’s been nice to see them linked – as when, on Twitter, Katrina van den Heuvel called this one a “must-read,” or when Andrew Sullivan linked and responded to this one and asked whether we are really prepared to fight. But I’m worried about the whirling amnesia and passivity that seem to be engulfing us all.
“New media” can’t save us from that. Only breaking the taboo against challenging corporate and finance capital can do it, and most ‘new media’ moguls aren’t heading that way. Corporate and finance capital, far more than government, are the sources of Americans’ political dependency. They and their conservative apologists, not liberals or the left, are the sources of public moral and social degradation and decadence.
It is this “dependency agenda” of finance capitalism and consumer marketing — not the one the “dependency agenda” George Will falsely attributed to liberals in a recent speech to CPAC — that is leaving us too ill to bear our sicknesses or their cures.
In his speech, Will salted his own monumental hypocrisy on this matter with well-scripted jokes and brought a crowd of conservative lemmings to its feet. He’d put his finger on most Americans’ greatest political fear: They fear proactive, social-democratic solutions more than they fear Republicans’ easy, negative, market-driven non-solutions.
These market-worshiping non-solutions truly are the default position in American politics. Social-democratic solutions are not, and probably won’t be until people are somehow mobilized, nudged, or forced by crisis into living with social-democratic programs long enough to realize that many of them are far more conducive to freedom and safety than the Republicans’ or the Tea Partiers’ answers. (Even Social Security, which Americans refused to let George W. Bush privatize, wasn’t as popular when it was first created as you might think. People had to live with it for a generation or more before they realized that it strengthens, not weakens, them.)
This particular American dilemma runs deep in our political culture. It grips even some one-time leftists who are now center-left academics and journalists, having rejected Marxist excesses of their misspent youth. But while Marx’s prescriptions were disastrous and, in the end, despicable, his diagnoses were quite right and seem more accurate with each passing day.
Even more paralyzing than regret about ideological excess, it seems to me, is a complex web of dependency that tethers many of today’s social scientists and professional scribblers and other pundits to the corporate- and finance-capitalist dispensation that our bought-and-paid-for legislators have entrenched around our lives. Even liberals love their unearned income and their real estate, if they have it, and more than a few of them enjoy circulating commodities more than ideas.
I should emphasize that I’ve never believed, as many socialists do, that curbing capitalism’s excesses, let alone removing capitalism tout court, would empower new men and women and liberate them from Evil. I think that the human heart is divided all the way down and that no political economy alone can dispel that fact. The tragedy of the political lies always before us.
Conservatives less hypocritical and pompous than George Will are quite right about this. But their answers to the problem are weak. They prefer dining out on the follies of leftists and liberals who are naive enough to blame all Evil on capitalism, as if it didn’t antedate capitalism. But conservatives who dine out this way too often forget how to cook for themselves, let alone for the rest of us.
How to address what’s serious in their challenge is a question I’ve taken up elsewhere and won’t here. Suffice it to say that conservatives’ objections to “social engineering” don’t alter a countervailing truth: If we truly mean to give Hamilton’s “reflection and choice” a decent chance of ascendancy over “accident and force” and fraud, we’d better curb the excesses unleashed by Republicans and conservatives since 1980 and embraced by corporate Democrats, and we’d better find new ways to affirm the dignity and sovereignty of the polity over the economy.
Short of figuring out how on earth to do that, I’d like to open a more modest inquiry into why so many of us remain complicit in respecting the taboo against challenging what capitalism has become since the time when even Adam Smith was horrified by the specter of big corporations. At least let’s name the ghosts that keep so many Americans afraid to say even as much as Smith did, let alone what Teddy Roosevelt did.
I’m procrastinating. I’m procrastinating so badly that yesterday, in a holiday, end-of year mood, I read Samuel Johnson’s essay on procrastination in the June 29, 1751 edition of The Rambler. That leaves many more essays to read on this subject as I gather my strength and resolution for the greater work I intend to complete in the coming year.
I certainly can’t afford not to complete it. As I read other writers’ richly-sourced, deeply intuited – nay, oracular – work, I’m reminded that this desperate world can’t afford my procrastination any more than it could afford theirs.
Yet even the great Samuel Johnson procrastinated. He even postponed completing his sentences so often that, at times, he sounded like Mark Twain’s German professor, who was so old that he died before he got to the verb. Here is Johnson: “Though to a writer whose design is so comprehensive and miscellaneous that he may accommodate himself with a topic from every scene of life, or view of nature, it is no great aggravation of his task to be obliged to a sudden composition, yet I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.”
So writes Johnson. At least, I’ve been told on good authority that that’s writing. But maybe he was only trying and failing to acknowledge that although his far-ranging interests should have made it easy to pick a topic for a column, he dithered too often to decide. Or so I’ve decided about him.
There, you see? I can complete important work if I must!
Then again, isn’t each of my own columns a kind of dithering or a simulation of bold action on some distant and therefore seemingly manageable problem? Instead of slaying dragons, aren’t I just slaying earthworms, as I do sometimes in Salon — for example, on the eve of the 2020 election.You may wonder which earthworm I’ll slay next. I forbear to answer that question. Before I strike at the next monster, I’ll want to have done the careful, painful preparation necessary to landing the fatal blow.
I’m working on it. As you can see.
Do be patient. Think of all the things you’ve pretended to have done but haven’t. You’ve pretended that you’ve read certain books when, really, you’ve read only the reviews. And then there are things that you really did read but pretend that you haven’t. (My columns here in Salon, for instance,) That isn’t procrastination on your part. It’s merely perversity, a separate subject for another time.
Some journalists believe that curiosity and judgment run in one direction only — from us scribblers to whomever we write about, but never the other way ’round. Behind all the excitement that we generate, we’re distracting your attention from our foibles. Maybe we’re even distracting ourselves. Then again, maybe our sensation mongering is another way of procrastinating against accomplishing whatever we’ve truly been put on earth to do. (Whatever that is.)
George Orwell resisted such distractions when he tried to tell some big, painful truths about the Spanish Civil War – for example, that the left’s Stalinist, Communist heroes in that fateful conflict were murdering the democratic-socialist left as much as they were murdering fascists. Orwell’s truth-telling was suppressed or studiously ignored, his motives questioned by people who didn’t question their own. My own motives may have been questioned that way at times, but what really annoys me is procrastination itself. Once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator, that’s the problem. So, I’d better get back to work. When I’ve completed it, if I ever do, surely someone will be wise and bold enough to publish it.
David Brooks and Leon Wieseltier, whom I’ll politely call “historically neo-conservative” commentators, are singing Kumbaya and shouting whatever is Arabic for “Right on!” to Egyptians pressing for democracy and Hosni Mubarak’s departure.
At least one might think so, reading Brooks in the New York Times and Wieseltier in The New Republic. They aren’t actually there in Cairo with the demonstrators, of course. But they do sound amazingly like liberal Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is in Egypt praising the movement for democracy. All agree that Obama hasn’t done enough to oust Mubarak and hearten the people.
Huh? This from Brooks and Wieseltier, who’ve long countenanced Mubarak and his regime without a murmur? If it was just them, it wouldn’t matter. But they’re exemplars of a mindset that endangers Egypt, Israel, and the United States, especially when it’s opportunistically on the side of what’s best in all three.
Egyptians, Brooks informs us, are no different than Russians, Ukrainians, and South Africans in their quest for dignity. True. Yet Brooks seems almost bizarrely out of character, as if he were channeling The Young Rascals: “All the world over, it’s so easy to see, people everywhere just wanna be free!”
Wieseltier, less rapturous than Brooks, decides that Obama is hesitating because he’s still recovering from Liberal Iraq War Syndrome and We Unjustly-Overthrew-Mossadegh Syndrome and is taking the wrong lessons from history. Although “the rebellion [in Egypt] is still maddeningly obscure, and [Obama] must be careful,” that only makes his “support for the democratizers of Egypt more urgent,” Wieseliter advises us.
He even quotes Kristof quoting demonstrators craving American support. Tahrir Square is Tienanmen; all it needs is a visit from the real Statue of Liberty, instead of a Chinese demonstrator’s poignant model. But I am not making light of the upheavals in the Arab world. I am observing the upheavals in neo-conservatives’ minds.
Wieseltier has determined that “Since the outcome of the revolution is completely unclear, we must do what we can to influence it….. Why should we not put ourselves in a position to retard and to impede the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been cunningly biding its time?” Brooks claims that a Working Group on Egypt, which he cites but doesn’t identify and which includes the neo-cons Robert Kagan and Elliott Abrams, “has outperformed the U.S. government by miles” in “warning of Mubarak’s fragility.”
Kumbaya, this ain’t. But are the neo-cons’ calls for decisive American intervention the better part of realism? Are they drawing the right history lessons, themselves? Or have they contracted a few syndromes of their own? One, actually. But let’s get at it slowly.
I can’t help but recall Wieseltier’s joining with Richard Bruce (Dick) Cheney, Carl Christian Rove, and others, years before George W. Bush was president, to form the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, one of many neo-con outfits over the years (The Committee for the Free World, The Committee on the Present Danger, and other anti-Communist drum-bangers). This one urged war with Iraq long before most Americans even knew where it is.
I also recall Wieseltier’s signing, barely a week after 9/11, a public letter to President Bush from William Kristol’s Project for the New American Century that read, in part, ”even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
I also recall Brooks’ writing to Yale students in 2002, during the run-up to the Iraq War, that since the number of democracies in the world had risen “from a handful to 140,…. You have to be pretty unrealistic to think that this great democratic tide can’t sweep through the Arab world as well. And you have to be pretty cynical to think that those of us who enjoy democracy shouldn’t…champion it everywhere.” Brooks cautioned against thinking that “if we try to champion democracy in Iraq we will only screw it up.”
That was then. Now, nine years later, the memory of our screwing things up undoubtedly fresh in his mind because he had so much to do with it, Brooks writes, “More than 100 nations have seen democratic uprisings over the past few decades. More than 85 authoritarian governments have fallen. Somewhere around 62 countries have become democracies, loosely defined.” But this time he warns that “the United States usually gets everything wrong. There have been dozens of democratic uprisings over the years, but the government always reacts like it’s the first one. There seem to be no protocols for these situations, no preset questions to be asked.”
I’ve written more about Wieseltier’s and Brooks’ protocols here at TPM (the column linked here has links to the PNAC letter and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq) and in The American Prospect, and as I watch them call yet again for American intervention for democracy, I can’t help but wonder what tail keeps wagging this neo-con dog.
Each such movement is unique, of course, its context fraught with different perils. But neo-cons’ democracy promotion strategies are so “flexible” that they’re more than a bit hypocritical.
In 1979, for instance, they won clout with presidential candidate Ronald Reagan after he read “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” by Jeane Kirkpatrick, in their flagship Commentary magazine. She urged the U.S. to stand with traditional autocrats (such as the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet) against democratic (but surely leftist and probably Communist) movements to overthrow them. At the same time, she urged the U.S. to ramp up its pressures on Communist states, whose totalitarian grip on their societies could be dislodged, if ever, only by American power.
The traditional autocrats, while often brutal, were anti-Communist, and unlike totalitarians, they respected their societies’ traditional religious and familial patterns, which preserved stability and, with it, hope of orderly evolution toward democracy. Reagan agreed, and made Kirkpatrick the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
But when the Argentine Jewish journalist Jacobo Timerman revealed that anti-Semitic, semi-fascist ghouls in his country’s military junta had tortured him for his Jewishness as well as his left-of-center politics, Commentary, always quick to spot anti-Semitism on the left and in the Arab world, excused it in a lengthy article by Mark Falcoff that tried to cast doubt on Timerman’s character and credibility.
If neo-cons can go that far, why not stay with the autocrat Mubarak, the cornerstone of Israeli security strategy – or, for that matter, with Saddam Hussein? The point is that did exactly that for years, democracy be damned. They even marginalized democracy-promoters within their own ranks at the American Enterprise Institute, such as Joshua Muravchik, who wrote ardently about helping ordinary Arabs to democratize Egypt.
Part of the reason for this discrepancy between their supporting Pinochet or the Argentine junta back then and their calling more recently for the removal of Hussein and Mubarak is that Communism imploded, denying the neo-cons their chief foil and energizer and confounding Kirkpatrick’s doleful predictions about totalitarianism’s staying power, as well as neo-cons’ hysterical warnings about “the present danger” of imminent totalitarian expansion.
Another part of the reason for their double standard was that the fall of Marcos — with a shove from Reagan, to many neo-cons’ consternation — and of Pinochet, and of the Argentine junta– with a shove from Margaret Thatcher — also discredited Kirkpatrick’s estimation of their reliability and stability.
Fortunately for neo-cons’ psychic equilibrium, however (and unfortunately for the rest of us), a new “present danger” arose: The Arab threat to Israel loomed larger than ever once Iraq’s Hussein, an horrifically brutal autocrat but an American ally of sorts against Iran, invaded Kuwait and sent scud missiles into Israel, which hadn’t joined in the Gulf War.
Suddenly, neo-cons were calling day and night for the democratization of Iraq. It would take only a “cakewalk,” the masses would greet us with flowers, and Brooks scoffed at any who thought that “if we try to champion democracy in Iraq we will only screw it up.”
Now, he writes that the subsequent experience can “teach us a few lessons. First, the foreign policy realists who say they tolerate authoritarian government for the sake of stability are ill informed.”
Take that, Jeane Kirkpatrick! But not all of us needed to learn this and other lessons Brooks offers. I have records only a click away showing that Brooks’ “us” and his “we” are imperial, at best: These were lessons that he and the neocons and AIPAC needed to learn. Others of us had learned them. Let him read my 1982 account of Commentary’s handling of the Argentine junta.
In 2006, as Brooks started to teach “us” the lessons that recent events had taught him, Joshua Muravchik, the ardent neoconservative democracy promoter, labored mightily to show that few lessons needed to be learned at all. In an essay for the American Enterprise Institute, “How to Save Neoconservatism,” he urged neo-cons to make sure that the U.S. would “bomb Iran” and teach the American public about the necessity.
Muravchik also urged the country to “Fix the Public Diplomacy Mess.” How? “The Bush administration deserves criticism for its failure to repair America’s public diplomacy apparatus,” he allowed, but “No group other than neocons is likely to figure out how to do that. We are, after all, a movement whose raison d’être was combating anti-Americanism in the United States. Who better, then, to combat it abroad?”
Who better, indeed! Still more hilariously, Muravchik has claimed recently in the Wall Street Journal that polls in the Muslim world show support for terrorism dropping more under Bush than under Obama. “Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama wanted to drive down support for terrorism among Muslims. Mr. Bush’s approach was to knock heads together and speak bluntly of the need for societal change. Mr. Obama’s approach has been to curry favor with publics and rulers alike. Mr. Bush’s approach may have worked better.
“Of course,” Muravchik concedes, “it may be that the critical factor in changing attitudes has not been U.S. policies but the actions of the terrorists themselves–who regularly turn their bombs against Muslims in Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan and elsewhere.”
May be! Many thousands of Muslims — Sunnis, Shiites, democrats, editors, town-council members – have been slain in Iraq’s public spaces and private homes. Two and a half million have fled the country to escape this mayhem. So maybe Muslim disillusionment with terror owes even more to George Bush’s head-knocking than Muravchik is inclined to credit, and maybe it even owes something to the approach of Bush’s neo-conservative cheerleaders, including Muravchik, who now wants to bomb Iran.
Maybe I’m being a bit too churlish. Democracy is the oxygen of human dignity in society, and we should be glad that neocons agree with Kristof and other liberals this time in urging US support for Egypt’s democracy movement.
Maybe this sudden harmonic convergence can lighten what Yossi Klein Halevi, writing in the Times, calls “the grim assumption” of most Israelis and American neo-cons that “it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power. … Mohamed ElBaradei, the icon of the Egyptian protesters, and many Western analysts say that the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood has forsworn violence in favor of soup kitchens and edical clinics. Even if that is true, it is small comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism.”
True enough, and that’s why many of us find ourselves on the same side of the table with Wieseltier, Brooks, Muravchik, and Halevi, urging American engagement with the democracy movement now. But the neo-cons have come to the table differently than the rest of us, and they’re heading somewhere else, in a tactical maneuver of their own.
They’re touting democracy out of rising desperation to head off horrors that, over the years, they’ve done more than they can admit to make more likely. We can “chicken and egg” this all night, but there’s no escaping that truth. While neo-cons bring the advantage of not being naïve about anyone’s motives, including their own, they also bring the disadvantage of not being trustworthy. They wouldn’t know how to extend trust cannily and bravely enough to elicit it from others if their lives depended on it. And, in a sense, they do depend on it now.
I don’t want to sound as purse-lipped and censorious about this as certain churches do or as curdled English majors at Harper’s and The Nation, swooning over the End of Days in faintly eschatological or ideological prose and displacing their bourgeois self-loathings onto the Jews. Still, for all of Brooks’ rhetoric about dignity and his denials that if we try to spread democracy, we’ll only screw it up, he has shown time and again that he doesn’t really believe it can be done. In 2006 he urged Americans to meet Iraqi insurgents’ “savagery with savagery” because the insurgents had “create[d] an environment in which it is difficult to survive if you are decent.”
Far be it from me to say who created which environment over what period of time. But I doubt that our Iraq invasion was well-advised or that Israel has never missed an opportunity to improve its Middle East prospects. Halevi insists that “Since its founding, Israel has tried to break through the military and diplomatic siege imposed by its neighbors. In the absence of acceptance from the Arab world, it found allies on the periphery of the Middle East, Iran and Turkey. Peace with Israel’s immediate neighbors would wait.”
Yes and no. He glosses too much, as do all these new rhapsodists of democracy. Whether Halevi’s and Wieseltier’s history lessons, Muravchik’s manifestos, and Brooks’ democratic songs and dances are willful deceits or actual delusions, I won’t say, but let me offer a history lesson they’ve overlooked, perhaps for too long now for it to be of any use.
It’s from Hannah Arendt, in 1944, when many Jews felt with good reason that there was no justice for them in the world and that they could trust nothing but vengeful nationalism, dark violence, and cold power politics.
Arendt warned that if Zionists “continue to ignore the [forging of partnerships with neighboring] Mediterranean peoples,” including especially their immediate Arab neighbors, “and watch out only for the big, faraway powers, they will appear only as… the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that… the anti-Semitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of the foreign big powers… but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences… “
No one can credibly accuse of Arendt of being naïve about either the legitimacy or the duplicity of varied Arab grievances and motives. Yet she, who called for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis during the war, decided that it was right-wing Jewish nationalists who were naïve in deploying that strategy in Palestine as they did. These right-wing Zionists were even more naïve, she wrote, in trying to reinforce their strategy through Faustian bargains with the great powers:
“The big nations that can afford to play the game of power politics have found it easy to forsake King Arthur’s Round Table for the poker table,” she wrote, “but the small, powerless nations [the Jews in Palestine] that venture their own stakes in that game, and try to mingle with the big, usually end by being sold down the river.” Arendt understood that the cause of Arab democracy is a pressing one. But I think she would also know that Brooks is sounding so idealistic about it now, and Wieseltier so serious about it, only because they’ve squandered the advantages Israel once had. Now they have no other cards left to play, and they’re scared shitless of being sold down the river.
Many people defer to Fareed Zakaria’s virtuosity and sheer ubiquity as the neo-liberal consciousness-shaper of the moment. An Indian Muslim by background whose parents have been prominent in Indian politics and news media, he owes a lot of his credibility as a journalist to American civic-republican premises and a generosity of spirit that had some force in undergraduate life at Yale when Zakaria was a student there. (He graduated in 1986, then earned a PhD from Harvard). But now that America’s civic-republican premises and practices are waning, Zakaria’s own recent behavior makes me wonder how well they ever “took” with him in the first place.
At age 28, he was managing editor of Foreign Affairs; later, as editor of Newsweek International, he began hosting his Emmy Award-winning CNN program “GPS,” where he holds forth now while writing for Time magazine. Certainly, he has given America a lot, though often by dishing out more “wisdom” than he takes in return as he weans us of what he considers our democratic naivete.
Steely in command of his facts and allusions, he’s as deft as he is disciplined: Asked to assess the Iraq War this year at an inaugural convocation of Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (home now of Stanley McChrystal), he said that while “it’s clear now that costs outweighed benefits and that anyone who says he’d do it over again is not being honest or is not in command of the facts,” we must remember that South Korea, too, seemed “a big mess, a brutal dictatorship, until the 1980s,” when it stabilized and became hospitable to Western values as well as investments. All the same, he added, we should try to “re-balance American foreign policy away from these crisis centers that are riven by 15th-century feuds.”
That strikes me as an example of how Zakaria manages to eat his cake and keep it, too, when parsing the movements of the powerful if myopic titans whose policies he so often and so smoothly defends. So it was something of a surprise to see him lose his cool and his command of the human prospect last week, on the Charlie Rose Show,in an id-like eruption over the political psychologist Drew Westen’s darkly prophetic, potentially game-changing New York Times essay,“What Happened to Obama?”
Like the 13th chime of a clock, Zakaria’s arrogant outburst not only surprised; it cast doubt on the previous 12 chimes of the centrist, high-Democratic bloggery and flummery that he sometimes superintends as concert master of our national orchestra of high-minded liberal opinion.
Understand first what’s at stake in all this. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama – a kindred spirit of sorts to Zakaria (though not an immigrant or a Muslim like him, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding) — was photographed boarding a plane holding Zakaria’s best-selling The Post American World. That book had followed another best-seller, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, and both have been translated into 20 languages.
CNN’s “GPS” stands for “Global Public Square,” but Zakaria is a Global Positioning System by himself, a one-man Davos for the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-bamboozling wrecking ball whose directors, grand strategists, investors, and apologists brandish pennants of their “diversity” as talismans against having to answer to any actual polity or moral code, national or otherwise.
He sits on the governing corporation of Yale University, a career-networking center and cultural galleria for the new global elite so memorably (and scathingly) depicted by Chrystie Freeland in The Atlantic. (Yale is just now establishing a whole new liberal-arts college in Singapore, a city-state that, as Maureen Dowdnoted, thinks and acts more like a global corporation than a republic.)
Although Zakaria is also a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, he considers himself enough a Democrat — and democrat — to tell the masses, via CNN and Time, why the neo-liberal dispensation of Obama, Bernanke, Geithner, et al is inexorable and inescapable and why, with public acquiescence to the judgments of such experts, it’ll probably be all for the best, or at least better than any alternative.
He assesses that dispensation’s costs, benefits, and (limited) opportunities for democratic mitigations in the style of a grand-strategic memo-writer, his rat-a-tat-tat diction issuing in firm, clear judgments graced with felicitous apercus. If he rests, it’s because he’s disarmed all intellectual and moral resistance, at least for the moment.
The New Republic’s American-politics blogger extraordinaire, Jonathan Chait, teamed up with Zakaria on the Charlie Rose show in a show of force against Westen, who is himself the author of a best-seller, The Political Brain. Zakaria and Chait deferred to and praised each another more often than they actually addressed Westen, whom they dismissed as an ivory-tower moralist with no political experience. They dispensed Beltway realism about the filibusters and the fiscal-crisis constraints that supposedly moot Westen’s demand for a President who’ll tell Americans more of the truth about the crisis they face, in an empowering, explanatory, narrative in the manner of FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr., or even Harry Truman.
Rose opened the show with a clip that showed Obama falling well short of the standard that Westen invokes, the President blaming Congress and not the larger powers to whose tunes it dances. “This downgrade you`ve been reading about could have been entirely avoided if there had been a willingness to compromise in Congress,” Obama said. “See, it didn`t happen because we don`t have the capacity to pay our bills. It happened because Washington doesn`t have the capacity to come together and get things done. It was a self-inflicted wound. There is nothing wrong with our country. There is something wrong with our politics.”
Westen counters that Obama’s account isn’t enough of the truth to be even credible: There’s “something wrong” not just with our politics but with that global juggerrnaut that’s distorting and, indeed, dissolving it.
For example, manufacturers that have outsourced their jobs and/or closed their plants were doing fine with, say, a 15% rate of profit before their new, publicly traded conglomerate owners demanded, say, a 22% rate of return. By what God given or natural right? By no right besides a long train of decisions by the corporate bought-and-paid for Congress or the courts and by global market pressures that no polity is permitted to challenge.
That Obama won’t say this clearly is a point of Westen’s essay. Drawing not just on his knowledge as an academic psychologist — as his critics suggest disparagingly — but also from history, anthropology, and his own substantial experience as a Washington political consultant, Westen writes that:
“The stories our leaders tell us matter… because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be…
“When Barak Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters…. Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end….”
Westen tells the story he thinks Obama should have told: “This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out…..”
He sketches the parameters for a solution that Obama should have proposed: “We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back into the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets…”
Such a story, he claims, would have “inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two-and-a-half years of failed government, idled factories, and idled hands. [It] would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities on both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country…. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism and the deficit – a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
“And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative,… that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.
“But there was no story, and there has been none since,” Westen writes.
This was all too much for Jonathan Chait, who told Rose that Westen’s is “a dramatic overestimation of the power of rhetoric to affect policies in Congress and to affect public opinion. There`s just not a lot of evidence that it has that kind of effect, anything like the effect that — that he says.
“I think liberals have a hard time holding on to power and being comfortable with power and the compromise is held with power,” Chait continued. “I think it`s something in the liberal psyche…. I am not the psychologist here, but liberals turn against every single Democratic President with regularity. That was what the whole Nader campaign in 2000 was about, this fury that Clinton was a sell out.
“Now we`ve had a President who`s been vastly more successful in advancing the liberal agenda through Congress and you`ve got liberals angry again…. But the anger at Obama to me is just sort of baffling.”
Zakaria, no slouch at reductio ad absurdum in combat with liberals — and a near-screecher whenever he has to talk about leftists — outdid Chait, even while siding with him:
“Jonathan is entirely right but he doesn`t go far enough for my purposes. As Jonathan says in a very brilliant blog post, [Westen’s] is the version of the American presidency you get from Aaron Sorkin in [the movie] “The American President”: The President gets up, and makes this incredibly moving speech which is, of course, deeply liberal. The entire country cheers and all of a sudden all the problems that are — that he encounters are waved aside.
“You remember, in the movie, of course, it was gun control and environmentalism that was the big problem. Now, the idea that if Barack Obama were to give a speech on gun control, suddenly he would be able to, you know, wave aside the Second Amendment and the — settled convictions of a large percentage of Americans is — is we would recognize nonsense.
“The reality is that Obama is working within a very constrained political environment,” Zakaria continued, citing Obama’s accomplishments against great odds; “I`m a little hard pressed to see what the great liberal betrayal has been other than from some kind of fantasy version of liberalism where the American — you know, finally a Democratic president comes in and America becomes, I don`t know, Sweden.”
Little of this had anything to do with Westen’s argument, and as the discussion got down to political specifics, Chait and Zakaria went on about the filibuster and the self-interest of members of Congress, blaming them and the American people, not the President.
Finally, Rose asked, “….Yes, [Obama] had a difficult Congress to deal with, but if he had a different set of skills and was less of a conciliator, might he achieved more? That`s the question that Drew raises.”
Chait: “I don`t think that`s right. He only had four months in which he had 60 votes in the Senate. Other than that period, Republicans were committed to blocking his entire legislation no matter what, pretty much even if it included ideas that they had once endorsed. The President just has very limited tools at his disposal….
Rose: Drew?
Westen: “Well, I will say that I have more empathy for the President now after feeling like what it`s like to have a filibuster proof super-majority of two against one.”
Then Westen disposed of the filibuster argument: “President [George W.] Bush never had the size of the Senate behind him that President Obama had when he walked into office and that he then had three months later.
“And President Bush ….got through ‘No Child Left Behind,’… tax cuts …. heavily weighted towards the wealthy. He got through an unfunded Medicare plan that gave lots of money to Big Pharma. He got through an unfunded Iraq war, an unfunded Afghanistan war. And where was the screaming about the deficit then? Where was the screaming about the filibuster?
“By January of 2009, when [Democrats] could have changed the rules in the Senate, [they] chose not to…. They knew who they were dealing with. Obama certainly knew who he was dealing with after the first couple of times of banging his head against the wall and realizing, wait a minute, these are not Rockefeller Republicans. So why didn`t they change those rules? Why didn`t he push them to change those rules?”
Zakaria changed the subject, going back to blaming the people. “Look, the American people… they want jobs. They want the budget deficit cut. They, by and large, don`t want much taxes, many new taxes other than on the very rich. They don`t want Medicare cut, they want Social Security preserved, they don`t want the interest deduction on mortgages to be taken away but they want many large cuts. You know, this is a conglomeration of incompatible desires.
“And, to Drew`s point again, why is Obama worried about this? …. We have a budget deficit that is 10 percent of GDP. It`s the second-highest in the industrialized world. We have a gross national debt that will approach 100 percent in three or four years. So, you know, we`re not in the 1930s when — when government debt was minuscule in comparison. We can`t just say let`s spend $5 trillion jump starting the economy and see where that gets us.
“[This] does not show that Obama has been captured by bankers, He is properly concerned that there is some outer limit about how much you can spend and therefore a long-term deficit reduction plan is the right thing….. : I think sometimes being a conciliator is being a leader, particularly in a divided country.”
Westen: “Do you really think, though, that what we need right now, when we`ve got a Tea Party dominating the House, is someone who`s trying to conciliate people who you`ve just said a minute ago can`t be conciliated?”
Zakaria: “Drew, Drew, the stimulus package, such as it was, passed by one vote. The idea that if you had added on another $400 billion it would have sailed through, I mean this is what he could get through…..”
Westen: “Well, I actually was asked by the leadership of the Senate to help out… with Wall Street reform. And one of the things that [we] said was, “Look, do what the Republicans did to you: call votes. If you`ve got 59, call a vote, and … you say, look, we`ve got us voting for Main Street, we`ve got them voting for Wall Street.”
“Harry Reid did that, I think, three days in a row and the 60th vote was there [because some Republicans, frightened by the public criticism, defected.] That was what could have been done… with the stimulus, but was not done.
“And in fact, at that point the President had 80 percent popularity of the American people… He had 57 sure votes in the Senate,… an overwhelming majority in the House. ….I never thought I`d ever say anything good about George W. Bush — but you do what George Bush did,… you go over the heads of members of Congress….
“And you say to [the moderate Maine Republicans] Susan Collins and…. Olympia Snowe, ‘Listen, the story is that 750,000 people a month are losing their jobs right now. I want to show you… a picture of a little girl who just lost the room in her house that was taken away from her. If you`re going to vote against this stimulus package, I`m going to make sure that when we get 58 votes or 59 votes tomorrow, the American people are going to hear about why it is that they`re still losing 750,000 jobs a month.’
“And I`ll bet you it would have taken three votes that he would have gotten the stimulus package he wanted.”
It was at this point that Zakaria, seeing that he wasn’t going to crush what he’d thought was an ivory tower moralist, lost his composure. “Look I — what I would say, and I`m not going to get into the what-ifs of a professor, you know, who has never run for dogcatcher advising one of the most skilful politicians in the country on how he should have handled this. It`s a – “
Rose intervened, saving Zakaria from himself: “The former would be you and the latter would be President Obama? “
Zakaria, deft on the uptake, trying to right himself, said, “Yes, exactly. The whole idea that all of us who`ve never run for anything have you know, have — can brilliantly explain how to maneuver another $400 billion through the Senate. You know, maybe. Maybe.
“But I will say. maybe we would all agree [that] it isn`t clear what you can do. You are facing a very serious economic crisis….. a very deep jobs crisis…. It`s happening because of globalization: It`s happening because of technological change that is causing companies to be much more productive. It`s happening because of a degradation of educational skills of the American work force. It`s happening because of this huge de-leveraging that`s taking place which is making all businesses less risk-seeking…..
“So I`m also a little uncomfortable with people who have facile answers if only he would have waved his magic wand. “
Oops, again.
Rose, again: “I don`t think anybody`s arguing that there`s a magic speech to be made. I do think people can make a legitimate question, which is, Did this president exhibit the kind of skills that he may or may not have that would have produced a different result at various stages in his presidency? These have to do with leadership skills….”
* * *
A day after the show, Zakaria scrambled to cover his gaffe in two blog postings that tried to slam the lid down on it. At 6:35 am on the Saturday after the Thursday night show, he posted on his CNN blog, under the headline, “What Liberals Fantasize About”:
“Thursday night I was on Charlie Rose talking with Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University and Jonathan Chait, a senior editor with The New Republic.
“Drew wrote a provocative article in the New York Times called ‘What Happened to Obama?’ It’s a scathing critique of President Obama’s leadership. Then, in a brilliant blog post, Jonathan Chait called Drew’s argument a fantasy…
“Here’s a lightly edited excerpt of our conversation where I discuss the fantasy of liberals and why many need to grow up.”
But Zakaria edited his transcript of the show heavily, dishonestly. His excerpt is 1588 words long; the actual Rose transcript of the same portion of the show is 5700 words. Zakaria’s version obliterates Westen’s arguments about the missed opportunities in Congress and other political specifics, along with Zakaria’s own condescending response to the professor who’d never run for dog-catcher. In the last half of Zakaria’s version, he and Chait end up talking to each other as if Westen weren’t right there on the show. “Visit CharlieRose.com for the full video,” Zakaria advises piously in a note at the end of his post, knowing that few who’ve read his version will bother.
In another blog post, this one for Time, Zakaria frets that “The air is thick with liberal disappointment. In the days after the debt deal, liberal politicians and commentators took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to mourn the agreement. But their ire was directed not at the Tea Party or even the Republicans but rather at Barack Obama, who they concluded had failed as a President because of his persistent tendency to compromise.
“As the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, this criticism stems from a liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry. In this view, writes Chait, ‘every known impediment to the legislative process–special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion–are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech.’”
Again, Zakaria compounds Chait’s own reductio ad absurdum and contempt for what Westen has actually argued: “The disappointment over the debt deal is just the latest episode of liberal bewilderment about Obama,” Zakaria writes, characterizing Westen as “confused over Obama’s tendency to take ‘balanced’ positions”. Zakaria argues, falsely, that Westen suggests “that his professional experience– he is a psychologist –suggests deep, traumatic causes for Obama’s disease. Let me offer a simpler explanation. Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist who understands that in a country divided over core issues, you cannot make the best the enemy of the good.”
Zakaria then intones that “while banks need better regulations, America also needs a vibrant banking system, and that in a globalized economy, constraining American banks will only ensure that the world’s largest global financial institutions will be British, German, Swiss and Chinese.” He writes that Obama understands “that Larry Summers and Tim Geithner are smart people who, in long careers in public service, got some things wrong but also got many things right.”
This seems to have been written by someone a bit too defensive and full of himself to respect his readers’ intelligence. Sure enough, Zakaria pulls out the elite card:
“Obama’s temperament was eloquently expressed by the late Bart Giamatti, a former president of Yale and former baseball commissioner, when he urged students not to fall prey to ideology from the right or left… ‘My middle view is the view of the centrist,’ he said, before quoting law professor Alexander Bickel, ‘who would … fix “our eyes on that middle distance, where values are provisionally held, are tested, and evolve within the legal order derived … from the morality of consent.’” To set one’s course by such a centrist view is to leave oneself open to the charges, hurled by the completely faithful of some extreme, of being relativistic, opportunistically flexible, secular, passive, passionless … Be of good cheer … To act according to an open and principled pragmatism, to believe in the power of process, is in fact to work for the good.’”
Ah, well. I understand the temptation to wax a bit nostalgic about the wisdom of the Yale president of one’s undergraduate years, as Zakaria has done here. I’ve sometimes done that myself in praising Kingman Brewster, Jr., a descendant of the minister on The Mayflower, who gave a Yale honorary doctorate to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964, when that was a very controversial, not centrist, thing to do. (Giamatti got his own real doctorate the same day).
If it’s enlightened “centrism” we’re looking for, Brewster bucked more than a little alumni resistance when his gesture helped to draw King into the center of his time, a center that otherwise might not have held. Now that our own center is imploding, what would Zakaria do about it?
He and other apologists for the Democratic Party’s neo-liberal paradigm probably haven’t expected to end up looking like the “old Blues” who protested Brewster’s honoring King. But they’re beginning to sound like charter subscribers to the Beltway dog and pony show’s crackpot “realism,” its feints toward an American pragmatism that has succumbed to the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-defrauding premises it no longer questions.
Some dimensions of philosophical pragmatism may actually weaken or distort civic-republican affirmations like Westen’s and, with them, real movements for social justice. What, for example, is pragmatism’s defense against those like Zakaria who confuse the hubbub of free-markets with democratic deliberation and celebrate global capitalism itself as pragmatic, anti-absolutist, inherently democratic, and historically liberating?
The American historians Christopher Lasch and Jackson Lears have warned that the wealthy and powerful sometimes cling not to the old racist, nationalist, or religious nostrums that most people associate with power but to swift market currents that assume the benign mantle of pragmatism even as they destroy the communities and values on which many people depend.
What Zakaria hails as “centrism” becomes, in his hands, little more than an excuse for elites who are wreaking such destruction and are seeking desperately to rationalize it. (No one lamented this more, by the way, than Zakaria’s hero Giamatti, who described a university president’s life as that of a fund-raising song-and-dance man).
Sometimes, adopting such rationalizations does involve telling national governing elites certain hard, “pragmatic” truths that do have to be reckoned with. At Yale’s Jackson Institute, Zakaria told his audience that “A billion people now do jobs that American middle class and workers, blue and white collar, used to do.” And he doubted that either political party could do much about it. Once, Americans had all the capital and the know-how, he said, but, now, other peoples “have the resources, and they know how.”
The audience was silent in gloomy acquiescence, but why? Zakaria’s interlocutor on stage, Yale President Richard Levin, an economist, opined that a bigger stimulus might have a more redemptive multiplier effect on the economy than Zakaria allowed, and that is only the beginning of what ought to have been said. Neither man questioned the rules of the game under which corporations have evolved, not only on their own initiative but through decades of jurisprudence that amounts to an extended lie the United States has been telling itself about the nature of its economy and of itself a republic.
That’s a story for another time; suffice it to say here that an alternative narrative — even a “centrist” one that Giamatti and Brewster might have endorsed — would ask whether and now the rules of global capitalism need to be rewritten.
In other times and places, people with the integrity required for such a challenge led unarmed, seemingly powerless, yet deeply sensible and well-organized movements that, against all expert and elite expectations, brought down vast-national security states anchored in injustice — apartheid South Africa; the segregationist regime of the American South that even Clarence Thomas called “totalitarian;” the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe with a minimum of armed conflict: “How many divisions has the Pope?” Stalin once quipped. When Pope John Paul II stepped off a plane in Warsaw, greeted by a million unarmed Poles, Stalin’s successors got their answer. The best explanation of this kind of power is in Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World. I commend it to Zakaria and Chait for a long, slow reading.
One of the places it worked was, of course, British India, two decades before Zakaria’s birth. But is there a nerve or bone in his body that responds sympathetically to such movements?
“When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice,” Westen writes, “he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend….. He… knew that whether a bully hid behind a [policeman’s billy]club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.”
As Zakaria spoke darkly about the professor who’d never run for dog-catcher and who thought he could wave a magic wand, I thought I saw the face of a bully’s consigliere. Our one-man Davos, usually so camera-ready and composed, morphed into something almost cadaverous, a caricature of a bewigged Tory chiding Levelers. He did it again on his own CNN program, telling “liberals” to “grow up.”
What Westen wants is — in his own words, in the Times essaythat deserves re-reading at the end of this discussion — is “a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative,” one that explains “that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so that they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.”
It would be heartening to see Zakaria, Chait, and other writers — who have more freedom than presidents, yet who seem driven to defend the corporate state and the Democratic Party in their present forms — form their own mouths around the following words:
The global casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-bamboozling juggernaut may feel inexorable and inescapable to most of us. But for that very reason it is becoming illegitimate and is unsustainable. Our responsibility as writers is to help to develop public narratives that pose the right questions and possibilities.
Westen’s courageous essay is especially
gratifying to me because, when he was a freshman in a Harvard expository writing class I taught in 1976, he recounted a story, worthy of the movie “The Insider,” about his own father’s brave but suppressed efforts to get the tobacco company where he worked as a research scientist to come clean about the health risks of its products. I can’t help wondering if Zakaria would have overlooked or minimized those risks had he been around at the time when Westen’s Dad was trying to air them.
Obama himself has written of his debt to “the prophets, the agitators,… the absolutists…. I can’t summarily dismiss those possessed of a similar certainty today.” Why can’t Zakaria and Chait write that, too, especially when the “agitator” is as reasonable and sophisticated as Drew Westen? What drives them to portray him as some kind of naif or crank? Was it the long list of talking-points rebutting Westen that the White House reportedly issued the morning his essay appeared?
The pundits have circled their wagons, but “Thought is not, like physical strength, dependent on the number of its agents,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. “On the contrary, the authority of a principle is often increased by the small number of men by whom it is expressed. The words of one strong-minded man, addressed to the passions of a listening assembly, have more power than the vociferations of a thousand orators….. Thought is an invisible and subtle power, that mocks all the efforts of tyranny.”
And of tyranny’s deniers and obfuscators, too.
Dear Fareed, Jonathan, Barack: What seems inexorable and inescapable to you ma seem illegitimate and unsustainable to millions before long. The more that reasonable truth-tellers like Drew Westen take their stand against it now, the fewer cranks, agitators, and absolutists you’ll have to contend with later.
I really suggestre-reading Westen and, instead of nit-picking and deriding, connecting with the arc of justice as other unlikely but transformative movements in history have done.
“FAREED ZAKARIA is enormously important to an understanding of many things, because he provides a one-stop example of conventional thinking about them all. He is a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle. He was for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it, and now is an active member of the ubiquitous “declining American power” chorus. When Obama wanted to trust the Iranians, Zakaria agreed (“They May Not Want the Bomb,” was a story he did for Newsweek); and, when Obama learned different, Zakaria thought differently. There’s something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment. Most of Zakaria’s appeal is owed to the A-list aura that he likes to give off—“At the influential TED conference …” began a recent piece in The New York Times. On his CNN show, he ingratiates himself to his high-powered guests. This mix of elitism and banality is unattractive. And so is this: “My friends all say I’m going to be Secretary of State,” Zakaria told New York magazine in 2003. “But I don’t see how that would be much different from the job I have now.” Zakaria later denied making those remarks.”
[Author’s note:] This was written during the 2008 near-meltdown of the U.S. economy owing to its excessive financialization, hastened by neoliberal congressional Democrats as well as Republicans who had repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which, since the 1930s, had blocked savings banks’ participation in irresponsible investment practices that precipitated the 2008 crisis.]
I’ve read all the sober explanations of why we must hold our noses and support the bailout. I’ve watched Barack Obama intone the same explanations on the Senate floor. Sorry, but it all fits into a neoliberal paradigm whose adherents haven’t noticed that it’s over. Watching the Senate’s pompous porkers play populist with the package was like watching Hapsburgs greet their subjects in July, 1914.
True, we’re all tethered into the dance: We love our cars; couldn’t imagine reconfiguring our lives to save energy, enhance walking, reduce obesity, end road rage. Yet the car culture is only a sample of what an increasingly manic, drugged, violent, and stupid America of sovereign consumers has been choreographed into “choosing.”
Wait till January, they say, and we’ll straighten things out. Sorry, but with this package America has lost its legitimacy and morale. Its decline will accelerate, even with an uptick in the markets in which, yes, we are all invested.
Unless the populist indignation is translated into a more thorough reform of the consumer-marketing juggernaut that has dissolved our civic culture, this package, coming atop so much else in the Bush years, will be just another a nail in the coffin of the American republic. Stop a minute and consider why.
I’ve recycled John Adams a few times too many, but you can’t be reminded too often that
“[W]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependants and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.” :
Why did he say this in 1787? As soon as King George III was gone, even the most triumphant of the founders took a long look at the American people and found themselves worrying about how a republic ends. History showed them it can happen not with a coup but a smile, a sweetener, and a friendly swagger — as soon as the people tire of the burdens of self-government and can be jollied along into servitude, or scared into it, when they’ve become soft enough to intimidate.
Sound hyperbolic? Even that conservative banker Alexander Hamilton sketched the stakes by writing in the Federalist that history had destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
And Ben Franklin sketched the odds, warning that the Constitution “can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall have become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
How might that happen? “History does not more clearly point out any fact than this, that nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces,” wrote Founder Richard Henry Lee.
The Founders were all reading Edward Gibbon’s then-new account of how the Roman republic had slipped, degree by self-deluding degree, into an imperial tyranny. Leaders could bedazzle citizens out of their liberties by titillating, intimidating, and stampeding them into becoming bread-and-circus mobs that “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army … .”
Gibbon added pointedly that Augustus, the first real emperor, “wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government” and that he knew that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”
Campaigning in an open shirt, as it were, “that artful prince … humbly solicited their suffrages for himself, for his friends and scrupulously practiced all the duties of an ordinary candidate … . The emperors … disdained that pomp and ceremony which might offend their countrymen but could add nothing to their real power…..”
And so Rome became what Gibbon called “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth,” not by conspiracy but thanks to a confluence of deeper currents that had enervated people’s republican virtues and beliefs.
But isn’t this what Bush and the Republicans vowed to save us from, with the help of God and martial valor? Isn’t it big-government liberals who would coddle us into servitude and decadence?
Plenty of liberal big-government folly has reinforced that perception, but so has Americans’ reluctance to admit that the propaganda, seductions, and contractual strangleholds of corporations, driven by anomic finance, have become ever more confining, intrusive, and degrading in our work lives, our entertainments, and even our public discourse controlled as so much of it is by conglomerate-hired editors and op-ed savants.
The founders understood that the people can’t enhance freedom by handing themselves over from their elected officials to their paymasters. Some honorable American conservatives — diplomats, retired generals, even some pundits — want to spare us that fate, but they have found themselves as outnumbered and marginalized as Dennis Kucinich.
So great and justified is the public anger, though, that even the bailout’s apologists are scrambling to acknowledge that something better will have to follow. A Los Angeles Times editorial today knocks proponents of the bailout for trying to buy off the rage
“by larding it with tax breaks, handouts and pet projects. …Others… just seem frivolous. The message, though, was that supporters of the financial industry bailout had given up trying to convince voters that it was in their interests too, and not just Wall Street’s. Instead, they coated the bitter bailout pill with a bunch of end-of-session sweeteners to make it easier to swallow.”
And the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof acknowledges that “…..[C]ritics of the bailout have reason to be furious. It is profoundly unfair that working-class American families lose their homes, their jobs, their savings, while plutocrats who caused the problem get rescued. If the Congressional critics of the bailout want to do some lasting good, they should come back in January — after approving the bailout now — with a series of tough measures to improve governance and inject more fairness in the economy.”
“will be funded by additional federal debt, issued mostly to foreign governments especially the Chinese and in the Middle East. And, strictly speaking, it’s not even a bailout: The Treasury will buy and hold mortgage-backed securities whose value is now unknown because there’s no market for them, until housing prices start rising again…..
“But whatever it’s called and however it’s financed,” Reich continues, “it’s still an outrage. America’s foreign policy is made no more flexible by going into deeper hock to the Chinese and the Middle East. And the deal still subjects American taxpayers to some risk, especially if the housing market doesn’t bounce back for many years. Worse, the bill can’t help but prop up the earnings of many Wall Street executives whose malfeasance, greed, and stupidity got us into this mess in the first place. And it does nothing for average Americans except avoid economic calamity. (The provision ostensibly helping distressed homeowners is to be used at the discretion of the Treasury Department, so it’s mostly a sham.)”
Writer and editor Paul Bass, whose New Haven Independent is running fascinating stories of how people in that medium-sized city are experiencing and responding to the crisis, notes that “In those precious hours after the House bill defeat,” those who had defeated it, including conservative “Republicans, the Congressional Black Caucus, and some progressive white Democrats, should have met for an hour and drawn up the bill they would have supported on commonly agreed upon provisions. It would have been awesome. They had 20 hours or so when they were in the driver’s seat.”
Would-be builders of a serious coalition against the corporatist-statist consolidation of a post-republican America now have not 20 hours, but three months. Let good leaders step forward and help serious republicans convene. One of those leaders may be Barack Obama — if he’s elected, if the crisis worsens, and if populist anger keeps rising and seeking direction.
Many discouraging observations have been made about Americans, some of them clearer than truth: French observers have called us les grands enfants. The late American historian Louis Hartz lamented our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” Those are two of the nicer assessments. Some of the more-accurate ones are scarier.Although millions of us behave encouragingly every day, often in distinctively “American” ways that I assess on this website, this is no time to congratulate ourselves. But it’s also no time to consign ourselves to history’s dustbin by writing post-mortems for the 2024 election and for the republic itself.
The following essay is a highly personal account of my reckonings with these challenges. Before you read it, please read “About This Site” in the left-hand column on this home-page and glance at its survey of challenges now facing an American, civic-republican culture that a mentor of mine, the late literary historian Daniel Aaron, once characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
I’d like to see that civic culture transcend and outlive “woke” corporate neoliberalism, authoritarian state capitalism, right-wing, racist nationalism, Marxoid economic determinism, and post-modernist escapism. All of these are responses to global riptides that are transforming humanity’s economic, technological, communicative, climatic, migratory, and other arrangements. These swift, often dark currents are driven not only by capitalism but also by human inclinations, including by greed and power-lust, that antedate capitalism by millennia and that seem certain to outlast it. Neither the left nor the right seems able to block them or re-channel them, let alone to redeem us from them.
More than a few Americans actually find these currents energizing as well as disorienting. That’s partly thanks to accidents of this country’s history that have enabled Americans to combine faith, innovation, fakery, and force. Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty,” the philosopher George Santayana noted. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”
Well, maybe. The 19th-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck is said to have said that “God protects, fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The ascent of Donald Trump and of Trumpism has reinforced that impression and made many of us doubt and even despair of “American” virtues that we’d taken for granted or dedicated ourselves to upholding. I myself doubted our capabilities along those lines in the 1970s and more deeply in 2014, before I or anyone imagined that Trump would run for the presidency, let alone that tens of millions of Americans would be credulous or cankered enough to elect him. Now, they’ve done it twice, even though he has gotten worse.
But maybe the rest of us have gotten worse, too. “Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture – and that’s a compliment,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, referring to the formidable Puritan “thought leader” of the 18th Century and to my Salon essay “We, the People, are Violent and Filled with Rage,” which you can read later on this site. With Jeremiadic woe, I’d surveyed the civic-cultural damage of the 2008 financial crisis and the run of public massacres, including in Oklahoma City in 1995, Columbine in 1998, and Sandy Hook in 2012. Soon after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I doubted America’s prospects more deeply still in “It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion,”a short essay for Bill Moyers’ website that you can read later on this website’s section, “A Sleeper Sampler.”
Hertzberg’s reference to my cast of mind was fortuitous, not only because the damage I mentioned has been accelerating but also because I’d grown up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town settled by Puritans in 1644 six miles north of the spot where, in 1741, Edwards would preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Some of my Longmeadow public school classmates were direct descendants of the town’s Puritan founders. A few of my teachers seemed to have been writhing in Edwards’ congregation when he preached. Whenever some of them looked at me in school, I felt them looking into me, as if arraigning my soul before something awesome.
Their residually Calvinist, “Yankee” discipline converged with two other cultural currents in my upbringing, inclining me to look into civic-republican society’s ups and downs. The Calvinist current drew on an Hebraic biblical current of law and prophecy that was my inheritance as a grandson of four Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents and that was deepened in my youthful exposure to it. Neither the Christian nor the Jewish current had disappeared in me by 1965, when, at 18, I entered Yale College, founded by Puritans who’d put the Hebrew words Urim V’Tumim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony,” on the seal of the college, which they envisioned as a “school of prophets.” Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale’s president during my undergraduate years, was a lineal descendant of the minister on the Puritan Pilgrims’ ship The Mayflower, and he had been born in Longmeadow.
Fooling around at 19, my freshman yearStill fooling around in Wellesley, MA, age 23, 1971
Beyond Calvinism and Hebraism, two other cultural currents, leftish and civic-republican, followed me and surfaced at around the time I turned 30, in 1977. Like many New Englanders before me, I carried some of the region’s civic and moral presumptions (conceits? innocent hopes?) to New York City, although not to literary Manhattan but to “inner city” Brooklyn, where I ran an activist weekly newspaper before bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge every day to work as a speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy. By 1982 I was writing for The Village Voice, Dissent, Commonweal and other political magazines. From 1988 to 1995, I was an editor and columnist for the daily newspapers New York Newsday and The New York Daily News.
In 1987, my essay “Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism” sketched New York’s changing political culture for a special issue of Dissent magazine that I edited and that was re-published as In Search of New York. The “Boodling” essay was re-published yet again inEmpire City, a Columbia University Press anthology of 400 years of writing about the city, edited by the historian Kenneth Jackson and the master-teacher David Dunbar.
In 1990, W.W. Norton published my The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. The book, a somewhat tormented love letter to the city, sparked public debate in and beyond New York. After 1999, while continuing to live in the city and writing many of the pieces referenced and linked on this site, I taught Yale undergraduates for two decades in political science seminars with course titles such as “New Conceptions of American National Identity” and “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.”
In the late 1970s I has embraced, and I still affirm, a democratic-socialist politics that, unlike Stalinism and orthodox Marxism, has a distinctively American, civic-republican orientation that rejects Communists’ opportunistic (ab)uses of civil liberties, civil rights, and democracy. Democratic socialism in the 1970s steered fairly clear of the racially essentialist “identity politics” that many of its adepts now wrongly embrace by fantasizing about “Black liberation” as the cat’s paw of an advancing Revolution. Sample my offerings in the section “Why a Skin Color isn’t a Culture or a Politics,” and you’ll encounter my conviction that although ethno-racial identities are inevitable and sometimes enriching, they’ll never be wellsprings of social hope in America unless they’re transcended by all of us as citizens in the thicker civic culture of a larger republic, if not of the world. Precisely because The United States is more complex racially, ethnically, and religiously than most “multicultural” categorizing comprehends, Americans need work overtime to identify and, yes, instill, certain shared civic and moral premises and practices that I discuss in many of the pieces on this website.
No longer fooling around. Brooklyn, age 31, 1978
Beginning in the 1990s and ever since, I’ve taken strong public stands against ethno-racialist evasions of the civic-republican mission. In 1991 I wrote a rather harsh assessment of leftist identity politics for Tikkun magazine that was re-published in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. I refined and, dare I say, elevated the argument in civic-republican terms in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay, “Toward an End of Blackness,” that identified the emptiness of American blackness and whiteness as vessels of social hope. I summarized and updated the argument again in 2021, in a Commonweal essay,“Scrapping the Color Code.” (You can find all of the essays on race that I’ve just mentioned in this website’s section on race, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”) I’ve published a lot more along these lines and debated in many public forums, some of them linked in the Commonweal essay and elsewhere on this site. (My two books on the subject are The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997).
Some of this work sparked resentment among activists and academics on the left and among journalists and other writers across the political spectrum. I accused some of them of betraying a civic-republican ethos and creed that’s under assault by capitalist, neoliberal, and even radical-racialist forces, the most dangerous of them white-supremacy, but others of them are unconstructively “woke” or subtly, seductively commercial. Some of my criticisms of writers who’ve ridden these currents have been gratuitously cruel, even when they’ve been accurate.
Civic-republican strengths and susceptibilities
Although many Americans behaved admirably, even heroically, on 9/11 and in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, what matters to a republic’s survival are the little things people do daily, when no one’s looking and no digital tracking device, cellphone camera, or journalist is recording them. Essential though a republic’s wealth and military power are to its strength, they can become parasitical on it pretty quickly if people are feeling stressed, dispossessed, and susceptible to simplistic explanations. Neither a booming economy nor massive firepower can ensure a republic’s vitality, especially if prosperity and power are dissolving civic-republican norms and practices.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against this in his Farewell Address in 1960, condemning what he called a “military-industrial” complex. (An early draft of his address, well-known to historians, called it, rightly, a “military-industrial-academic” complex.) Ike, who was hardly a radical leftist inveighing against capitalism or a rightist railing against “the deep state,” was a deeply decent, heartland American who’d gotten to know the military-industrial-academic complex from within, as its supreme warmaker and then as Columbia University’s president. He didn’t like everything he saw there.
Even more than Eisenhower’s warning or Jonathan Edwards’ and the Hebrew prophets’ jeremiads, several developments since 9/11 have convinced me that Americans who are accustomed to think well of themselves would be better off convicting themselves of complicity in democracy’s decline. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon noted that “a slow and secret poison” had worked its way into the vitals of ancient Rome’s republic, distorting and draining its virtues and beliefs. In our own time, faster, glaringly public poisons have been working their way into our republic. Yet most Americans, “liberal” or “conservative,” have been ingesting and pushing them without naming them honestly.
You may insist that whatever is driving Americans’ increasing resort to force, fraud and mistrust comes from human nature itself. The republic’s founders understood that argument in Calvinist terms and also from reading Gibbon’s semi-pagan assessment of human history as “little more than a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” They tried to devise a republican system of self-government that “doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings,” as one of their legatees, John McCain, put it two and a half centuries later in one of his last addresses to Senate colleagues.
Assessed by these lights, Trump (who cruelly disparaged McCain) is only the most prominent carrier and pusher of poisons that the founders knew were already in us, even in those of us who deny that we’re carriers and pushers. In 2008 Barack Obama reinforced our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” by staging a year-long equivalent of a religious revival rally for the civic-republican faith, across partisan, ideological, and ethno-racial lines. But he wasn’t only a performance artist. He embodied and radiated distinctively American strengths that fascinate people the world over — not our wealth and power or our technological affinities, which are often brutally or seductively unfair, but our classless egalitarianism, which inclines an American to say “Hi” to a stranger instead of “Heil!” to a dictator; to give that stranger a fair chance; to be optimistic and forward-looking; and, from those collective and personal strengths, to take a shot at the moon.
I don’t think that the American republic is sliding irreversibly into Nazi-style fascism, as some on the left fear and some on the alt-right hope, or that it will succumb to leftist totalitarian socialism. More likely is an accelerating dissolution of the civic-republican way of life that Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.” That subtle balance of divergent qualities and of the trust and comity they engender is being routed now by global undercurrents -– economic, technological/communicative, climatic/migratory, and demographic/cultural –- that are sluicing force, fraud, and mistrust into our public and private lives. A bare majority of us are holding on to common ground.
Looking across the tracks.Illustration by Philip Toolin, a film art director/production designer who’s been doing this since he was 15.
In his foreboding 1941 prophecy, What Mein Kampf Means for America, Francis Hackett, a literary editor of The New Republic, warned that people who feel disrespected and dispossessed are easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Edward Gibbon and Jonathan Edwards would have recognized that condition in us now. Yet its causes and subtleties often escape the notice of journalists who are busy chasing “current events” without enough historical and moral grounding to contextualize them within “undercurrent events” that are driving upheavals and horrors around us and within us. I have a thing or two to say about that myopic side of American journalism (and I have some experiences to share) in this website’s sections on “News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public” and on “Scoops and Revelations.”
The undercurrent events that many journalists mishandle aren’t malevolent, militarized conspiracies. They’re civically mindless commercial intrusions into our public and private lives that derange our employment options, public conversations, and daily aspirations and habits. They bypass our hearts and minds relentlessly, 24/7, on their way to our lower viscera and our wallets, to attract eyeballs to their ads, to maximize the profits of swirling whorls of shareholders. These commercial riptides incentivize (and brainwash?) many Americans to behave as narrowly self-interested investors and as impulse-buying consumers, not as citizens of a republic who restrain their immediate self-interest at times to enhance the public interests of a “commonwealth.” That word is still on our legal documents and pediments, but we’re losing its meaning, along with its “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free” ethos.
Decay and Renewal
Imagine a former auto worker, a white man in his mid-50s whose $30-an-hour job and its benefits were replaced a decade ago by a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for less than half the pay and who has lost his home because he accepted a predatory mortgage scam of the kind that prompted the 2008 financial and political near-meltdown. Imagine that he winds up here:
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams (a graduate of the then-still residually Calvinist Harvard College and a self-avowed admirer of Hebrews) in 1774, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, urging ratification of the Constitution, wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1975, two centuries after James Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others designed the republic with dry-eyed wisdom about its vulnerabilities, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” She characterized the then-recently exposed Pentagon Papers, which confirmed the Vietnam War’s duplicity and folly, as an example of the invasion of political life by public relations, of Madison by Madison Avenue – that is, of efforts to separate its public promises of a democratic victory in Vietnam from realities on the ground, until, finally, the official words lost their meaning and, without them, the deeds became more starkly brutal.
March on Pentagon, 1967 (National Archives and Record Administration)
What many Americans should have learned from that debacle, and what I’ve been learning ever since, reinforces Oliver Goldsmith’s warning, in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates and men decay.” A wealthy society may decay and implode not only because its prosperity isn’t distributed fairly but also because it’s only material and therefore weak against profit-maximizing engines such as Rupert Murdoch’s media, which prey upon the susceptibilities and resentments of stressed, dispossessed people such as the former auto worker and the Uber driver. If the manipulative engines aren’t stopped, they’ll grope, goose, titillate, intimidate, track, indebt, stupefy and regiment people, many of whom will crave easy escapes in bread-and-circus entertainments like those of Rome in its decline. They’ll join mobs that demand to be lied to with simplistic story lines that tell them who to blame for their pains and who to follow to fix them.
Perhaps with Gibbon’s slow and secret poison in mind, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself” in the little daily interactions that matter as much as the high moments of national decision. Writing Democracy in America in 1835, he marveled, perhaps wishfully, at an American individualism that was inclined to cooperate with others to achieve goods in common that individualism couldn’t achieve on its own:
“The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety….This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established…. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.”
This civic-republican disposition — to give the other person a fair chance and to back her up as she tries, to deliberate rationally with her about shared purposes, and to reach and to keep binding commitments — relies on the elusive balance of civic values, virtues and body language that’s ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free. You see it in a team sport whenever a player closes in on the action not to show off but to back up a teammate and help him score. You see it in how people in a contentious meeting extend trust cannily to potential adversaries in ways that elicit trust in return.
You used to see it even on Capitol Hill, as I did in 1968 while interning for my western Massachusetts Republican Congressman, Silvio O. Conte:
(That’s me in the dark jacket. standing next to then-astronaut John Glenn, who was visiting Rep. Conte (standing to his right) while planning to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.)
Or maybe you don’t see civic grace like that so often these days. Maybe backbiting, road rage, and the degradation of public space and cyberspace are prompting quiet heartache and withdrawal as trust in other people slips out of our public lives. Without the balance that I’m sketching here and elsewhere on this website, the United States won’t survive as a republic amid the undercurrent events that I’ve mentioned.
Civic-republican grace in writing and public life
Finding a better description of civic republicanism than I’ve offered here would require harder analysis and reportage but also more poetry, faith and, even some fakery. You can develop an ear and an eye for it, and maybe a voice for it. I’ve been following American civic republican culture’s ebbs and flows since around 1970, when I was 23, but really since World War II, because I was born on June 6, 1947, two years after the war’s end and three years, to the day, after D-Day, so and I grew up in a civic culture that seemed, at least to a child, more triumphant and coherent than it actually was or ever had been.
Some of the writing collected here records my and others’ growing disillusionment. A lot of it began for me in journalism, “the first rough draft of history” if a journalist has some grounding in history and isn’t just chasing “breaking news.” Whenever the chattering classes make cicada-like rackets over the latest Big Thing, I’ve tried to assess that noise in its historical and other contexts, remembering Emerson’s admonition “that a popgun is [only] a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”
Contextualizing current events this way sometimes yields scoops and insights that others have missed. (See the “Scoops and Other Revelations” Section for a sampler of what I’ve found.) Some of those pieces spotlight fissures and fragilities in the republican experiment, and some assail public leaders and journalists who I believed had lost their civic-republican lenses and standards, along with virtues and beliefs necessary to wise reporting. (See also “Leaders and Misleaders”)
I’m collecting some of my essays for a book that I’ll call Somebodyhaddasayit. Some my work has prompted people to tell me they were glad that I’d written what they, too, had been thinking but were reluctant to say. Somebody really did need to say it, even when doing so made enemies not only among the “villains” but also, as George Orwell lamented, among editors and other writers who cancel honest speech that might embarrass them. “Saying it’ requires not only sound judgment and tact, but also, sometimes, courage. I’ve sometimes “said it” with too little fact or courage.
Editorial writer and editor at New York Newsday, 1992
But usually I’ve defended people who bear the American republican spirit bravely, against daunting odds. One of my pieces began in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 2006, when I was looking for family background on Ned Lamont, then a little-known computer executive (now Governor of Connecticut) who was making a Democratic primary bid for the Connecticut U.S. Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, in protest against Lieberman’s unbending support for the Iraq War. I ended up writing not about Ned himself but about a long-forgotten uncle of his, Thomas W. Lamont II, whose young life and supreme sacrifice in World War II seemed to me a fata morgana, a fading mirage, of the American republic and of the citizenship that we’re losing, not at its enemies’ hands but at our own. (See the essay “Duty Bound” on this website’s section, “A Civic Republican Primer.”)
Being an American like Tommy Lamont is an art and a discipline. You can’t just run civic grace like his up a flagpole and salute it, but neither should you snark it down as just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations. When the Vietnam War’s brutality and folly were at their worst and when official words had lost their credibility and official deeds had become murderous, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas told protestors “not to burn the American flag but to wash it.” I took his point. I work with it. Americans who consider themselves too sophisticated for that are naïve.
Although one can’t credibly call my writing “nationalist” or “conservative,” more than a little of it has been motivated by my and others’ civic-republican patriotism. I’ve written often for left-of-center sites and journals, challenging much of what’s called “conservative” in American life. But a civic-republican compass points rightward at times, and I’ve written once or twice in right-of-center venues to condemn racialist “identity politics” and ethno-racial banner-waving that passes for progressive politics even when it only compounds a racial essentialism that fuels white superracist politics more than black-power politics.
Although American national identity was developed self-critically and sometimes hypocritically in secular Enlightenment terms, ultimately it relies on something akin to religious faith, even though it doesn’t impose a particular religious doctrine. Living with that paradox requires skill and empathy, as some leftist activists learned while swaying and singing with black-church folk against armed white men in the American South. Precisely because this country is so diverse religiously, racially, and culturally, it needs to generate shared civic standards and lenses, with help from newly potent (and therefore “mythic”) civic narratives. We don’t refuse to ride horses because they’re strong enough to kill us; we learn to break them in. Some liberals need to learn something similar about religion and patriotism instead of refusing them entirely.
How (and How Not) to Think About Left and Right
Both left and right in American life offer distinctive truths that are indispensable to governing ourselves by reflection and choice instead of by accident, force, and fraud. The left understands that without public supports in a village that raises the child, the family and spiritual values that conservatives cherish cannot flourish. But the right understands that unless a society also generates and defends irreducibly individual autonomy and conscience, well-intentioned social engineering may reduce persons to clients, cogs, or cannon fodder. Each side often clings to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
The consequent damage to the public sphere can’t be undone by clinging to the left-vs.-right floor plan that I mentioned at the outset and that still limits many people I know. Analysis and organizing against socioeconomic inequities are indispensable, but they’re insufficient. That’s equally true of conservative affirmations of communal and religious values that bow quickly to accumulated wealth that, as Oliver Goldsmith noted, preys upon and dissolves values and bonds that conservatives claim to cherish. (See this website’s sections, “Folly on the Left” and “Conservative Contradictions.”)
Ever since Madison helped to craft a Constitution to channel and deflect such factions, the republic has needed an open, circulating elite – not a caste or an aristocracy — of “disinterested” leaders whose private or special needs don’t stop them from looking out for the public and its potential to govern itself by reflection and choice. When John McCain voted in 2017 against repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he admonished Senate colleaguesto “learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us…Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible…and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement…. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning.’”
Maybe McCain had a good speechwriter, but he believed what he was saying, even though he hadn’t always lived up to it. (See the section, “Leaders and Misleaders”.) Another flawed but sincere legatee of the founders’ Constitutional project was New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom I assailed for years until I got to know him a little better.
Many Americans still do uphold the civic-republican promise –as moderators of candidates’ debates; umpires in youth sporting leagues; participants in street demonstrations; board members who aren’t afraid to say, “Now wait a minute, let me make sure that we all understand what this proposal is based on and what it entails;” and as jurors who quiet the ethno-racial voices in their own and fellow-jurors’ heads to join in finding the truth. Truth is a process as much as it’s a conclusion. It emerges not from radical pronouncements of the general will or from ecclesiastical doctrines but provisionally, from the trust-building processes of deliberative democracy. “[A]nyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” In politics, unlike science, the vitality of truth-seeking matters as much as the findings.
At any historical moment, one side’s claims can seem liberating against the other side’s dominant conventions and cant: In the 1930s, Orwell sought liberation in democratic-socialist movements against ascendant fascist powers, and his sympathy remained with workers, but sometimes that required him to oppose workers’ self-proclaimed champions, especially Stalinists, as well as their capitalist exploiters. Orwell “never forgot that both left and right tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings against concentrated power and to disappoint in the end: The left’s almost willful mis-readings of human nature make it falter in swift, deep currents of nationalism and religion, denying their importance yet surrendering to them abjectly and hypocritically as Soviets did by touting ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e., while touting Russian nationalism) and preaching Marxism as a secular eschatology” (i.e., as a religion).
The balance that we should hold out for against ideologues is like that of a person striding on both a left foot and a right one without noticing that, at any instant, all of the body’s weight is on only one foot as the other swings forward and upward in the desired direction. What matters is that the balance enables the stride. Again, it requires both a “left foot” of social equality and provision – without which the individuality and the communal bonds that conservatives claim to cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right foot” of irreducibly personal responsibility and autonomy, without which any leftist social provision or engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
A balanced stride can be upset by differences among individuals and by the divisions within every human heart between sociable and selfish inclinations. A strong republic anticipates such imbalances. It sustains an evolving consensus without ceding ground to hatred and violence. It remains vigilant against concentrations of power because it knows how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust and reward it in return. Being ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free, it acts on virtues and beliefs that armies alone can’t defend and that wealth can’t buy. Ultimately, and ironically, a republic’s or democracy’s strength lies in it very vulnerability, which comes with extending trust. “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept,” Kingman Brewster Jr. wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven. “In common place terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
Think of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, presenting herself not only as a black woman craving vindication against racism but also as a decent, American working Everywoman, damning no one but defending her rights. Presenting herself that way, she lifted the civil society up instead of trashing it as irredeemably racist.
Civic grace like that is heroic, and rare. But after forty years of tracking American civic culture’s ups and downs, I believe that, ultimately, it’s all that we have.
