Some supporters of the bailout package that failed on Monday still think that it sank only because a tidal wave of short-sighted, right-wing populist rage topped the levee and swamped the House. Their Exhibit A is Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), who warned, “In the Bolshevik Revolution, the slogan was ‘Peace, land, and bread.’ Today, you are being asked to choose between bread and freedom. I suggest the people on Main Street have said they prefer their freedom, and I am with them.”
Such demagoguery is containable, bailout proponents say: A slightly-more “populist” package will pass the House soon, perhaps with a push from the Senate. And if the economy still worsens, the same angry citizens who scared those representatives who weren’t “with them” as fully as Rep. McCotter into voting Nay will turn against them soon enough for having opposed the bailout.
A small problem: A lot of House “Bolsheviks” and liberals opposed it, too.
“Why aren’t we reducing debt for Main Street instead of Wall Street?” demanded Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich. “Is this the United States Congress or is it the board of directors of Goldman Sachs?”
There was even a “Bolshevik” in the majority of McCotter’s Michigan delegation that opposed the plan, 9 to 6: Detroit’s John Conyers asked, “If injecting credit into our financial industry is the solution to the current supposed credit squeeze, why hasn’t this body been given… other proposals, like giving tax payers a no-risk equity stake in the bailout recipients or supporting the direct injection of capital into the financial industry, as we did during the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s? The likely reason is because Wall Street would have to give up a piece of its wealth…”
Other left-leaners opposed the deal as strongly as conservatives did, including Marcy Kaptur, a comrade of Kucinich in the Ohio delegation, which voted against it 10 to 7. So did dozens of center-liberal Democrats, many from seats safe enough to have survived populist wrath had they backed the bill.
What explains this un-harmonic convergence of left and right? Conservative Republicans will groan to learn that it evokes a world-weary French apercu, Les extremes se touchent: In politics, the opposite extremes sometimes touch, sharing a course of action for reasons antipathetic to each other.
In interwar Europe (to speak of real extremes).apocalyptic Marxists were as eager as fascists to see bourgeois democracy fail, imagining that that would unleash a proletarian revolution. But antipathy to Wall Street isn’t as fantastical or nihilist as that, and it’s nowhere near as irrational and uncontrollable as a tidal wave.
True, we are all wired into the current system, and if layoffs were announced and credit cards frozen we’d be frightened – for about a day, TPM’s own Dean Baker contends, until the Fed took over major banks, as it almost did in the 1980s, bouncing their executives and shareholders and letting the system of payments operate as before.
Serious restructuring would ensue: We could fix credit without giving so much to Wall Street and entrusting so much power to Henry Paulson and other big architects and apologists of what went wrong.
That’s reason enough to discredit a second bailout bill. This is politics, after all, not a storm watch, and better leadership could turn the populist surge into something deeper and wiser. It could craft a stimulus package to boost borrowers’ loan paybacks and credit ratings and, with that, lending and economic growth that are real this time, not imaginary.
Take a second look at what Kucinich and Conyers are saying. Are they really seeking less freedom than the sloganeering McCotter? The extremes are touching here because the statist, corporatist bailout now on the table is itself scary in basic republican terms. Rep. McCotter may see the hand of Lenin, and some on the left the hand of Mussolini, but another, deeper warning comes from the center of the republic itself:
“When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards,” wrote John Adams in 1787. “…. 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.”
A tweaked bailout package won’t change that, especially if it comes from the United States Senate, which is three times further from populism and three times closer to Wall Street. Even Thaddeus McCotter isn’t wrong to say that those who would save the current system really will lose the American people.
“Aren’t you going to say something about David Brooks’ new book, The Social Animal?” a reader-friend e-mailed me yesterday. It was the most recent of several such inquiries, but until I heard Brooks on a book-tour talk show this morning, I wasn’t inclined to add to what’s been said: Thomas Nagel’s New York Times review was eviscerating, if also condescending and churlish; Alan Wolfe’s more thoughtful assessment in The New Republic (subscription required) called it “a book by a conservative in which science is being used to buttress a prior point of view.”
But after listening to Brooks run through his folksy sound bites on the Albany, New York NPR station’s “The Roundtable” with Joe Donahue this morning, I realized that someone should explain why his summaries of recent neuroscience and cognitive science research merely dress up old and important truths as new breakthroughs. Someone should explain why Brooks, that great portraitist of middle class life, is invoking social science to confirm what every mother more decent than Amy Chua has always known.
The reason is that Brooks has spent so many years and so much ink mocking people who already understood these essential truths that he’s trying to achieve a political makeover without having to make an apology. To apologize might remind too many people of all the bloodshed, social degradation and individual dispossession and suffering that he has abetted so genially for twenty years. If Brooks were taking his own book’s message seriously as a writer, he’d admit that The Social Animal is, at bottom, his personal attempt to come in from the cold.
He’ll succeed at this, for reasons both good and bad: As the book should alert its most discerning readers, Brooks’ conscious if artful public penitence rides a powerful undercurrent of opportunistic ingratiation. Only time will tell whether the consequences themselves will be good or bad. I’m willing to wish him well while offering a few cautions.
On the good side, Brooks is quite right to declare — better late than never — that most of what we do in life is a consequence not of rational choices made by us as rugged individuals or the mythical homo economicus; rather, most of it is a consequence of unconscious needs stimulated in us and mediated in our lives by our interdependence with other people. “We’re not individuals who form relationships, we emerge out of relationships,” as Brooks said this morning.
He also rightly disparaged the individualist, free-market model of decision-making, characterizing the global financial crisis as an instance of emotional contagion among clueless bankers taking cues from one another. (The causes could be characterized a bit more systemically than that, but never mind.) Brooks even crooned a few proto-feminist ditties this morning: Not only does social science show that how an infant bonds with its mother foretells whether he or she will graduate high school, it shows that men like Brooks have more trouble than women in talking about their emotions and reading emotional signals in situations.
Who knew? Actually, a lot of people did. All of this is so central to so much feminist and progressive social and economic thinking that we tend to forget that some of it was always understood by certain conservatives, too, from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott. But, as Wolfe notes in the New Republic, America’s “free-market,” corporate-state conservatives have seldom been Burkeans. In fact, they’ve been heavy investors and shills for precisely the “rugged-individualist” thinking that Brooks, who shilled right alongside them, is now so keen to discredit. But I’ll bet that, on the more conservative talk shows, he’s noting that it’s not poverty per se, but the culture of poverty that’s causing social bonds to fray.
Now, he tells us, “I’m less individualistic” than before, and “I believe in early childhood education, I believe that government should help.” Thanks to his readings in social science, he adds, he has become more interested in the emotional and psychological bonds that connect people.
This last observation is a lie, and here we begin to see the disingenuous side of Brooks’ supposed makeover: He has always had a preternaturally keen eye for “the emotional and psychological bonds that connect people.” That was what made his writing so alluring to liberals in the first place. The difference then was that he spun his acute observations to make fun of liberals who took emotions and interdependency too seriously. He never seemed to wonder then — and doesn’t seem to now — whether all those hapless, feckless liberals’ reactions were really just that: reactive, not causal, to daily atrocities that were prompting them, from the contagion of greed among the bankers to the lusts of consumer marketers and warmongers — all of whom Brooks was defending and celebrating, as I showed apropos the Iraq war,predatory lending, and more at the time.
I reprised this harshly when The New Yorker’sGeorge Packer tried to rehabilitate Brooks a few years ago, characterizing both of them as two monkeys grooming each other in the chattering classes’ zoo. A lot of what Brooks published and said in the years after that only confirmed my warnings.
Has he truly outgrown it all now? So we can hope. “The [ideological, left vs. right] labels are crude,” he said this morning, calling for “epistemological modesty” and urging that if we can start with a perception that we don’t have the whole truth, we’ll give greater priority to conversations across the old lines.
I’m reserving judgment, and I wish that people at The New Yorker and all the other places that are welcoming him in from the cold would reserve judgment, too. The “bad” reasons for Brooks’ makeover make its consequences unpredictable.
Toward the end of the 2008 election campaign, as Brooks was writhing and gyrating to maintain some intellectual self-respect without losing hold of his partisan and “market” niche as what Wolfe calls “the frequently interesting and reasonable-even-when-you-disagree-with-him” conservative, I predicted here that he ‘d slip into the posture of a wise, above-the-battle, columnist. I predicted that he would spin what Jonathan Chait of the New Republic has aptly called his “sociological ditties,” descending every so often to shoot the wounded, as he did recently to public-sector union workers in Wisconsin.
Now that the American national and global-capitalist dispensation he championed so sinuously is losing a lot of its legitimacy and sustainability, Brooks wants us to excuse him from the old game of ideological and partisan point-scoring. He’s donning the mantle of social science to say, credibly to the rest of us, what some of us have already been saying for years.
Orwell saw early while both the left and the right have credible claims on certain truths, each tends to cling to its own claims so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right about how the other is wrong. At any historical moment, one side’s claims may be the more liberating in struggle against the other’s institutionalized power and cant: For example, in the dark, proto-fascist Europe of the interwar years, Orwell sought liberation through democratic socialist movements, and indeed his sympathies abided with workers throughout his life, albeit sometimes against their self-proclaimed leaders as well as against Tories.
But he never forgot that both sides tend to get stuck in their imagine upswings and to disappoint in the end. The left’s almost willful misreadings of human nature made it founder in swift currents of nationalism and religion, pitching from sweeping denials of their importance to abject surrender: Stalin’s Russian-nationalist “Socialism in One Country;” Marxism as a secular messianism. Yet neither did Orwell doubt that the corporate capitalist state and its ministries of information could pose Nineteen Eighty-Fourish dangers.
He was always on the left enough to seek solidarity in struggles against capitalist overreach, but he also held to an irreducible personal dignity and responsibility that balk at solidarity itself. Just as a healthy person walks on both a left foot and a right one, a society needs both a left foot of social equality and social provision – without which neither the individuality nor the communal bonds which conservatives honor could exist – and a right foot of personal liberty through responsibility, without which leftists’ social engineering would reduce persons to clients, cogs, or worse.
The tragedy of David Brooks is that he has always known both sides of this but wouldn’t admit to all of it, for unconscious or semi-conscious reasons his new book should have helped him to recognize.
As Nicholas Confessore showed unforgettably in the Washington Monthly in 2004, Brooks has always had a maddening habit of oscillating between serious commentary and conservative hackery: In one column, he’ll stroke his chin like a sober savant; in the next, he’ll gyrate shamelessly for ideologues such as George W. Bush and for partisan operators such as Karl Rove or Scooter Libby.
It’s a little hard to believe that he has shed that habit when you recall his most recent spins on the Republican governors’ public-sector union-busting efforts, or on the causes of the mortgage crisis. This is an especially odd moment for Brooks to be calling for conversations across partisan and ideological lines. As the civil-rights movement understood — but as neither Brooks nor those who are welcoming his overtures give much sign of understanding — dialogue sometimes has to coexist with conflict, with taking firm stands. Sometimes, in other words, it still matters what side you’re on and what you do to maintain credibly a stance from which to converse.
Brooks knows well Reinhold Niebuhr’s warning that social science offers no way out of this challenge. But I suspect that he and his enablers are trying to avoid facing it. When The New Yorkerran an early excerpt of Brooks’ new book, I couldn’t help recalling the critic Robert Warshow’s observation, more than half a century ago that that magazine serves the liberal who is seeking “the most comfortable and least compromising attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into actual conflict….
“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it,” Warshow continued. “This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately. The gracelessness of capitalism becomes an entirely external phenomenon, a spectacle that one can observe without being touched – above all, without feeling really threatened.”
Sorry to be the skunk at the garden party, but there really is something a bit too comfy about David Brooks’ revelations of truths that many have always known and that many have been willing to fight for.
I’ve seen columnists become obsessed; I’ve seen them rage at or swoon over the objects of their obsessions. But nothing – not even my own supposed obsession with New York Times columnist David Brooks — compares with his decade-long, love-hate fixation on the Ivy League, the “love” side of which is on display in his column today celebrating an influx of Clinton Ivy Leaguers into the Obama administration.
Brooks’ “hate” side surfaces and re-surfaces, too, though. In a gloating, 2001 Wall Street Journal essay, “Bush In, Ivy Out,” he ridiculed Clinton Ivy Leaguers who were then being replaced by real Americans “from inland state schools” under two apostate Yalies, Bush and Cheney: “You couldn’t have swung an ax in Bill Clinton’s cabinet room without hitting a bunch of Ivy League grads,” Brooks snarked, getting meaner from then on. To him and all conservative propagandists, they were all liberal elitists.
Now Brooks is stroking many of the very same people as they return to Washington. He begins by teasing them, much as he did in 2001: “If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game [in] the next four years, we’re screwed.” This time his column gets nicer, but something more troubling is driving Brooks than his desire to have these people return his calls.
For years, Brooks’ Ivy fixation has kept him see-sawing: On the one hand, he often displays a pariah’s bitter ressentiment toward Yale and Harvard, borne of attraction to his heart’s lost desire (he went to the University of Chicago, so near and yet so far). On the other hand, in 2002 Brooks began to display a parvenu’s compulsive ingratiation, praising Yale lavishly in the Weekly Standard shortly before its Cold War historian John Gaddis, the Reagan diplomat Charles Hill, and other Yale neo-cons welcomed him for a semester to teach a course, to sell the Iraq War to students, and to promote his hosts’ Bush-worshipping Grand Strategy program in subsequent columns in the Times.
Only a year before, in the Wall Street Journal essay, Brooks had gloated that cleansing Washington of Ivy Leaguers had relieved the republic of their characteristic erudite bluffing, arrogant insouciance, and other presumptions of superiority that arouse “both awe and silent hatred” in regular Americans.
Surveying the Bush team, he’d exulted that Condoleezza Rice had gone to the University of Denver, Colin Powell to the City College of New York, Paul O’Neill to Fresno State, and Dick Cheney to the University of Wyoming after dropping out of Yale, and that “Karl Rove, the brains behind the whole operation, has no college degree at all.”
At last, Brooks enthused, we’d be free of Ivy Leaguers who “know three facts about absolutely everything, and have been taught to weave these meager strands into conversational patter so fluid that it renders their full-of-it-ness irrelevant.” No longer would we suffer the “Paranoiaphilia” of Yalies like Hillary Clinton who assume “that there is a small, tightly knit conspiracy that secretly runs the world” and who, “instead of hating this elite, …love it because they think they are in it.”
Fortunately, Brooks announced, “The skills [George Bush] acquired in the Texas oil business are suited for a world in which success and failure are measured by tangible accomplishments, like oil production levels and after-tax profits” — so unlike Ivy League presumptions “suited to a world in which the definition of success is totally unrelated to tangible accomplishment of any kind.”
Brooks wasn’t far off the mark in spotting what mesmerizes but at the same time galls so many about the Ivy League, often with good reason. In 2003, he devoted his very first Times column, “Bred for Power, to that very subject.
In 2005, Deep Throat’s self-disclosure prompted a nasty Brooks column, supposedly on the lessons of Watergate but really all about the compulsive networking of Ivy grads like Bob Woodward, who as a young reporter had met DeepThroat through just such ingratiation.
Brooks does understand that while America owes a lot historically to Yale’s and Harvard’s once-deep, now iffy civic-republican leadership training, it owes just as much to graduates of “inland state schools” and even of no schools at all. I’ve argued that the Ivies now risk becoming career factories and cultural gallerias for a global ruling class accountable to no polity or moral code. The American republic and the world deserve better.
So what does Brooks say now that the pseudo-omniscient Ivy grads he took down a peg in 2001 are returning to Washington under Obama? He writes that they’re wonderful! Gone are his japes about the know-it-all bluffing, paranoiaphilia, and other presumptions he spotlighted in 2001. Now, he decides that “much as I want to resent these over-educated Achievatrons …, I find myself tremendously impressed…..”
Brooks names many of these impressive people, but some are the same people he had in mind when he lampooned Ivy know-it-alls in 2001.
This time, they “are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists.” This time, they’re “open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence….. They are admired professionals, ….hardheaded and pragmatic.” This time, “They’re thinking holistically — there’s a nice balance of policy wonks, governors and legislators. They’re also thinking strategically.”
Mirabile dictu, they are “the best of the Washington insiders. Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced ‘fresh faces’ to change things.” This time, “Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being.” (Such as Karl Rove, whom Brooks defended to the end?)
Finally, gone is Brooks’ claim that the Ivy definition of success “is totally unrelated to tangible accomplishment of any kind,” unlike Bush’s success (??!!) in the oil fields of Texas. This time, the Ivy grads on Obama’s team approach problems “with practical creativity. Any think tanker can come up with broad doctrines, but it is rare to find people who can give the president a list of concrete steps he can do day by day to advance American interests.”
Have the Ivy stars all had civic-republican epiphanies and moved in Brooks’ direction since 2001? Nope. Has Brooks changed, then? Not really, although it’s fair to say that he’s gotten confused. He knows that the country has repudiated the conservative movement and Republican Party which he defended sinuously for all of his adult life until corruption, Katrina, the revelations of Cobra II about the Iraq War, and the financial meltdown began forcing him to distance himself from most of what he’d championed.
So here he is, a man without a clear partisan position on the media’s color-coded spectrum, fighting for a niche by congratulating the “liberal elitist” victors for not veering too far to the left. Yet his emotional Ivy see-saw continues, and while he’ll purr happily if these people return his calls, he’ll waste no time rediscovering their arrogance and myopia when they don’t. What he won’t do is give up his obsession with Ivies.
What a waste of energy and attention. The moment Obama and the enlarged Democratic Congress take office and try to clean up the mess we’re in, conservatives will pretend that it wasn’t really George Bush, Henry Paulson, and other Republicans who reconstituted themselves literally as Marx’s ruling committee of the bourgeoisie and made “the corporate state” not a shibboleth but a reality. No, conservatives will be back to blaming Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, Barney Frank, and Ivy League elitists for having brought us to statist socialism.
Brooks knows better, and he desperately wants these likely targets of right-wing venom to think well of him and talk to him. But he’ll betray them in the end, because his damning and praising are but two sides of the same coin of obsessive attraction and ressentiment he shares with too many of his readers.
There’s something valid in “great man” versions of history, including those focusing on the diabolically great: Without Adolph Hitler, it’s unlikely that German racism, especially anti-Semitism, would have become as shattering and unspeakable as it did. Without Osama bin Laden, Islamicist terrorism probably wouldn’t have become as maniacally effective and widespread as it has.
But while these men had tremendous catalytic or poisonous effects on the societies they touched, that was partly because they were channeling dark, swift undercurrents that were already running in those societies. And that’s partly why the damage such leaders do in harnessing the dark undercurrents so often outlasts them.
Learning of Osama bin Laden’s demise, I can’t help but recall L. Paul Bremer III’s announcing in Baghdad the capture of Saddam Hussein: “Ladies and Gentlemen, We got him!” And our troubles in Iraq were over, right?
They were only beginning. From the moment we toppled Hussein’s statue in April, 2003, thousands of Iraqis had come forward, knowing, as the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins recalled two years later, “that they had to seize the moment, that it might not come again. And they knew… how difficult it would be to carry their broken and brutalized country with them. So they started newspapers, they organized political parties, they called meetings to start a national conversation.
“And now, today, many of these Iraqis…. have been shot, tortured, burned, disfigured, thrown into ditches, disappeared. Thousands of them: editors, lawyers, pamphleteers, men and women. In a remarkable campaign of civic destruction, the Baathists and Islamists who make up the insurgency located the intellectual heart of the nascent Iraqi democracy and, with gruesome precision, cut it out. As much as any single factor, the death of Iraq’s political class explains the difficulties of the country’s rebirth. The good guys are dead.”
One might ask why this was America’s problem. Saddam Hussein had murdered or terrorized democrats every day, and, after he was gone, it certainly wasn’t American GI’s or the Young Republicans playing at governing in the Green Zone who kept murdering “the good guys.” It was Baathists, terrorists, tribal warlords and gangsters.
But it was George W. Bush, another of history’s “great men” – remember “unitary executive” power? — who had cast Saddam and his loyalists as Baathists, terrorists, tribalists and gangsters, all rolled into one, and who had claimed that we’d liberate Iraqis for democracy by decapitating the regime through which Saddam Hussein had been channeling all those currents.
The currents remained, and they’d been set running in the first place partly because the West, including the U.S., had done a lot to mix and stir them. Decapitation hasn’t gone far toward resolving the consequences.
Last year here I criticized enlightened denizens of the Chattering Classes Zoo for trying to rehabilitate David Brooks, an ingratiating neo-con who’s as doomed as a charming, brilliant vampire to suck the blood of the American republic while thinking he’s in love. (It’s Halloween, okay? But this is dead serious, too.)
In his Times columm today Brooks gives us yet another sinuous warm-up for the strength-sapping passion that drives all his comic lines and phone calls to experts. Linking Afghanistan’s dark prospects to his doubts about Obama’s “tenacity” against real evils, Brooks tries to seduce us into a real war. As with Iraq, he’s sublimating primal fears and resentments that fuel his and other neo-cons’ grand causes.
But mightn’t they be right this time? Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, and Obama isn’t Bush. The problem with writers like Brooks is that, in their bones, they’re jingoists: Their patriotism requires enemies, and they fight wars with other people’s blood while currying Established Power’s favor with all the determination of heat missiles seeking heat. The world is hard, dark, and cruel, as they tell us – and some people do need to be told. But Brooks & Co. have faith in only one way to save it. Watch David run:
In the first year of the Iraq war, Brooks swooned over Bush’s and Rumsfeld’s characterologically ignorant tenacity against insuperable complexities. He denigrated the war’s critics, but as it went bad, he rehabilitated those critics who’d argued that only more troops would prevail.
Then, as the Surge failed to secure very much that could outlast American occupation, Brooks began praising the “deliberative” Obama as Obama moved toward Power. But now Brooks frets over Obama’s characterologically intelligent respect for the insuperable complexities Bush ignored. And Brooks flirts with General (and Possible Presidential Candidate) Stanley McChrystal.
The point I wish his admirers would take from all this is that, characterologically (by which I mean something worse than neurotically), Brooks has to do this. The common thread in all his re-positionings is a supposedly knowing, conservative apprehension of the need to use force against force. We have no choice.
Sometimes, that’s true. But Iraq was a neo-con-abetted war of choice, and a disastrously wrong one for fighting terrorists. It’s one big reason we’ve “lost” Afghanistan, even assuming we could have outdone the British or the Russians in “winning” it. (The Russian defeat has been reprised chillingly, from Soviet archives, in the Times by Victor Sebestyen. The analogies are daunting.)
Brooks tells us he’s spent the last few days calling around to experts who wonder portentously, as he does, whether Obama has the tenacity to sally forth into the doom Brooks unknowingly craves.
“Come on people, let’s get a grip. This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam….. I’ve spent the last few days talking with people who’ve spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. … As Charles Hill, the legendary foreign service officer who now teaches at Yale, observed, ‘I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the boldness and resolve.'” Brooks touted the Rumsfeld “dead-enders” line and assured us tenacity would bring victory.
By 2006, as I’ve noted, Brooks had stopped denigrating critics who’d warned two years earlier of the quagmire he’d assured us wasn’t there. Now,he told us,
“Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but… the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: The US was not in the midst of a conventional war but was in the first days of a guerrilla war [and] that it was time to shelve the rosy scenarios…. In TV studios and on op-ed pages,… retired officers and columnists called for more troops and officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw. Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks saw nothing wrong.”
Neither did Brooks, of course, but by 2006 he was with those who’d called from the beginning for more troops, not less. He and all the neo-cons would support the Surge that has given us the Iraq we see now.
David the vampire had a domestic appetite, too. He’d made his name, in fact, by sidling up to confused, upscale liberals and purring, “C’mon, you know that you really love your real estate and your unearned income, and that you like circulating commodities more than ideas. And… [wink, tickle] it’s okay!“
I’d never before seen a political columnist work himself into deliriums watching other people shop. Brooks seemed almost to have forgotten, except in rhetorical gestures at the end of his Bobos in Paradise, that we must be fellow-citizens as well as consumers, or else we are lost. But to be serious about citizenship is to spend a lot of time and energy nourishing a disposition to rise above narrow self-interest, especially in peacetime, not just in wars that twist and drain the very public strengths the war-makers claim to be mobilizing.
On Brooks’ watch at the Times, his lusts for consumerism, for comic sociology, for war-making, and for baiting liberals who try to cultivate the softer arts of citizenship were ill-timed. His tweaking of do-gooders was accompanied by Katrina, with Blackwater patrolling the streets of New Orleans; by predatory finance capital ‘s transformation of real estate into un-real estate; by a pestilence of executive and Wall Street welfare queens; and — from Enron to Cardinal Law, or from Bernie Madoff to the media’s necrophilia over Michael Jackson — by a riot from the top by America’s multi-problem overclass, whose tangle of pathologies the indulgent Brooks had been too busy deriding liberals to notice.
Abroad, we sowed and reaped a whirlwind borne of displacing our anxieties about these ills into a confrontation with the unquestionably evil Saddam — namely, a battered Iraq that the Surge hasn’t saved and that we have now made ourselves too weak fiscally and morally to expand or reform.
Brooks isn’t quite as far gone as William Kristol, his former mentor at the flagship neo-con Weekly Standard, who has given us such great American leaders as Alan Keyes, Dan Quayle, and Sarah Palin (whom Kristol “discovered” on a Weekly Standard cruise in Alaska and commended to John McCain). I don’t really imagine Brooks bursting into applause and cheers, as Kristol’s staff did, when Obama failed to win America’s bid to host the Olympics in Chicago.
Facing the real disasters I’ve mentioned above, Brooks knew enough to start pirouetting furiously, with prophylactic applications of Malcolm Gladwell in his columns and with cuddly feelers to people who can help him buff up his image among liberals. Yet too many of his columns, especially a breathtakingly sophistical account of the mortgage meltdown, showed him still plying his intellectual usury.
Now he informs us that “Afghan villagers,” unsure of “the state of Obama’s resolve,” are “hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws.”
The options are indeed grisly. But does Brooks really believe that if Obama’s tenacity became as obdurate Bush’s, Afghan villagers would trust thousands more white and black American guys with boots and buzz cuts? Or is he just sucking more American blood and calling it love?
Occasionally people ask me why I’m so hard on New York Times columnist David Brooks, who some find quite insightful and others so irrelevant they can’t understand why I get angry at all.
At last, I’ve found a way to explain it. It’s all there in his column of today, “The Culture of Debt.” I’m sure that many of my correspondents will find the column reasonable on first reading. Yet it captures everything that is wrong with this man and his ideas — and maybe with readers who believe him.
Brooks, a self-described conservative and sometime practitioner of “comic sociology,” author of On Paradise Drive and creator of the all-American working-class “patio man,” knows he has to say something about the devastation raging through countless recently-viable neighborhoods like the one in Cleveland featured on Bill Moyers’ Journal last Friday night.
Brooks knows that millions of the very homeowners he’s been rhapsodizing may lose not only their present homes but any prospect of owning homes again. But he never comments honestly on information such as that presented by The Nation economics editor William Greider and public officials in Ohio, in one of the most riveting and instructive Moyers shows I’ve ever seen.
Brooks makes what we have to presume was an individual, moral decision to deflect the truth and, indeed, to lie. To do it, he shifts from comic sociology to pathetic sociology: With great sobriety, he wrist-slaps predatory lenders, but he really sticks it — more in sorrow than in anger, of course — to the hapless, desperate homeowners who sat in their own living rooms listening respectfully to smooth talkers they’d invited in to offer them fistfuls of “cash back” in return for signing their savings and hopes away.
Citing a Times story about a woman whose home was foreclosed in a tsunami of predatory lending, Brooks frets that Times readers posting comments on whom to hold accountable have been talking past each other: Blame the predatory lenders, one side says. No, says the other side, blame homeowners who lacked enough grown-up self-restraint to say, “I can’t do this deal,” or “I’d better not go there.”
Brooks, fresh from deep reckonings in sociology and political philosophy, announces a way out of this either/or debate by proclaiming a “third position… held in overlapping ways by liberal communitarians and conservative Burkeans.” (Whenever he does this, he’s about to drown some truths in euphemisms and plausible half-truths like the ones predatory lenders tell.)
Brooks’ truism-drenched “third position” starts “with the notion that… individuals don’t build their lives from scratch. They absorb the patterns and norms of the world around them. Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.
“According to this view, what happened to [the borrower who was dispossessed], and the nation’s financial system, is part of a larger story. America once had a culture of thrift. But over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded.”
So blame the culture. Blame the individual decision makers. Blame both. And be sure to step back and remember that the individual and the society are interdependent. This is a shell game on the edge of an abyss, and since Brooks chatters on about our individual responsibility for eroding norms, let’s hold him individually responsible for his decision to play this game.
1. Brooks lies about how the devastation occurred. An “unspoken code has been silently eroded,” he reveals. Silently, David? Marketers of all kinds have spent billions for 40 years telling Americans they deserve a break today and that marketers from McDonald’s and credit-card companies to mortgage lenders will give it to them instantly.
This has been the most monumental, unrelenting, intrusive, mindless and therefore irresponsible campaign in history to destroy a culture, barring perhaps the fascist and communist propaganda juggernauts and worse of the 1930s. We are destroying neighborhoods. We are destroying hearts and minds. Our governments are in on it, not just via de-regulation but via lotteries and big bailouts to shareholders who are never held responsible for their individual decisions to back these scams.
What else does Brooks need to know before he’ll make his own responsible decision to write that decency hasn’t “silently eroded” but has been clamorously assaulted? Hello? Last year in New Haven, we wound up saying “Hello?” four or five times an evening during the dinner hour to callers from local mortgage lending companies. How hard is it for David Brooks to imagine that poorly-educated people, desperate for cash and barely meeting their mortgage payments, would take those calls?
Brooks makes sure to finger, ever so deftly, the specific, real-life weaknesses and moral lapses not of the people who made decisions to design, invest in, and conduct these assaults, but of the woman in the Times story, who, “after her divorce,… went on a shopping spree to make herself feel better.” He tells us nothing about shopping habits and decisions of her many white-collar assailants. Why not?
Ever since I wrote The Closest of Strangers after spending the better part of a decade in black north and central Brooklyn, I’ve had a reputation for not letting poor people off the hook for bad decisions that were ultimately, irreducibly matters of personal responsibility. Drawing from intimate experience you can read about in the book, I’ve rebuked some liberals for refusing to pay disadvantaged people the elementary compliment of holding them to the same standards of decency and self-control to which they’d hold their own children. I don’t need cheap sociology from Brooks; I need the candor of a talented writer’s honest reflections.
2. Brooks lies about the true sources of the devastation. With caveats and cameos, he keeps readers focused on the erosion of norms among us all. There were no “pushers” behind this process. But, in truth, it was unleashed by corporate capital and, politically, by the Republican Party, whose deregulatory, bailout, and other corporate-welfare tactics Brooks has defended shamelessly for a decade. (I’m not letting Democrats off the hook; Chuck Schumer, as a New York Senator, played a big role in deregulating Wall Street and the banks.)
3. Brooks lies about the fact that most of the individual decisions in this crisis were not made by homeowners. He’s fastidious in noting that the foreclosed homeowner hasn’t always behaved responsibly, be he doesn’t find a single instructive anecdote to illustrate the irresponsibility of those who sought her out and zoomed in on her.
Why not? Brooks might tell you that he was quoting a Times story that didn’t provide that information. (Surprise, surprise.) But I’ll bet that that’s not the reason. It’s that he didn’t even think of putting a spotlight on those people. This mental blank, astonishing in so astute a social observer, amounts to a lie, because it’s derivative of his lying about where and how to hold people accountable for the collapse.
Brooks doesn’t tell us about, say, the stressed and, yes, morally irresponsible telemarketer who signed on to accelerate the storm. Not a word about the individual irresponsibility of the mortgage executive and his consultants and lawyers who designed the campaign, or about the sharpie salesmen who visited the homes whose equity they were about to steal while sitting politely on the targets’ sofas, or of the bankers who bought up the mortgages and foreclosed. Nothing about politicians, fed by all these predators, who eased the miscreants’ way in more ways than I can count.
Didn’t these people make any of the individual decisions Brooks claims had ripple effects on social norms? How can a Burkean conservative be silent about this? When Brooks writes that a culture of responsibility has “silently eroded,” isn’t his own silence about that erosion part of the reason for it? What does he think his job is?
The closest he comes to telling the truth is in the following paragraph, which begins by blaming both sides equally, if euphemistically, for irresponsible decisions. But tell me who you think Brooks expects you to leave the paragraph blaming — and then watch the Bill Moyers Journal segment, please, and see how he is lying:
“McLeod [a foreclosed homeowner] and the lenders were not only shaped by deteriorating norms, they helped degrade them. Despite all the subterranean social influences, there still is that final stage of decision-making when individual choice matters. Each time an avid lender struck a deal with an avid borrower, it reinforced a new definition of acceptable behavior for neighbors, family and friends. In a community, behavior sets off ripples. Every decision is a public contribution or a destructive act.”
Again, notice how this has been tilted. Brooks doesn’t wonder about predatory lenders’ and countless other marketers’ own shopping sprees, stealing sprees, or other compulsions. “Norms changed,” he shrugs, “and people began making jokes to make illicit things seem normal. Instead of condemning hyper-consumerism, they made quips about ‘retail therapy’…” Oh, so that’s what really happened.
On the Moyers show, William Greider offers a better explanation of how norms change and cultures decay: He describes the virtual repeal of laws against usury, the kind of predatory lending that, like loan-sharking, virtually enslaves desperate borrowers or squeezes them to death.
Brooks would rather keep us focused on the individual responsibility borne by homeowners and a few of the nastiest predatory lenders than he would make us notice the multi-billion dollar advertising campaign that promoted the culture of debt, or the massive deregulation and government bailouts that have made usury an unstoppable and devastating assault on the America he pretends to defend but on which he really just feeds, week after week. Where is the national greatness? Where is the social contract? Where, indeed, is the intellectual leadership?
The reason Brooks can’t do better is that he is an intellectual usurer. He palms off dollops of Burke and Oakeshott, swathing the people who are destroying the American republic — and all of us who are targets of their systemic depredations — in bromides about a kind of moral responsibility which Brooks does not himself exercise.
His pseudo-scholarly ruminations flatter some readers and make others deferential, but they are always suspiciously easy to follow. They’re the intellectual equivalent of “cash back” on an easy loan of false knowledge that leaves you feeling “had,” empty-handed, and politically paralyzed. That is how Brooks makes his living: He charms you up the garden path toward a politics that is nowhere.
What perversity drives him to it, I don’t know, but the crime itself cannot be doubted. How does this Burkean look at himself in the mirror? How do his employers and talk-show hosts look at themselves?
No good prosecutor would posit a legal connection between the un-wired delusions of Tuscon’s crazed assassin Jared Loughner or the routinized delusions of the Senate candidate Sharon “Second Amendment remedies” Angle. But it’s true that deranged loners such as Loughner, although separated from us in many ways, are sometimes tuned in to our subconscious hatreds and fears more intimately than the law can acknowledge and than most of us care to admit.
Fox News’ Glenn Beck is surfacing those subconscious hatreds and fears, as demagogues have done since Thucydides’ time, poisoning public deliberation despite pious and sometimes weepy claims that he’s rescuing it. One of his targets is Professor Frances Fox Piven, as the New York Times reports. When Beck started in on Piven last year, the clever, sad writer John McWhorter did, too, as did the right-wing provocateur David Horowitz.
Piven’s ideology makes her plausibly guilty of the charge that she has wanted to bring down the capitalist system. But Beck rants at scapegoats precisely because he can’t acknowledge his own obeisance to the casino-finance, corporate-welfare capitalism that’s destroying conservatives’ cherished values and communities faster than any leftist could. That’s what his demagoguery is for: to deflect attention from the fact that he and most conservatives can’t square that obeisance with their moral and cultural claims.
Since I was an early critic of both Piven and this kind of capitalism, most recently here and on NPR, let me reiterate what I think is at stake in all this.
In March The New Republic sounded one of these alarms about the curse supposedly cast on African-Americans by Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward, who were said to have tried to bring on the Revolution by flooding the welfare rolls in the 1960s.
The purveyor of this long-exhausted half-truth at TNR was McWhorter, a young black linguist-turned-conservative racial bargainer. He cast Piven and Cloward among the crackpots he’d love to erase from public memory: “Rarely in American history have people with such a destructive agenda [as Piven and Cloward] had such power over the lives of the innocent….., helping to ruin the lives of, for example, some of my relatives.”
Such power? Wow! McWhorter was certainly on-message with thunderings against Piven and Cloward by Beck and Horowitz, everyone’s source on the horrors supposedly perpetrated by the two radical professors. But there’s a wrinkle: Horowitz’s own source on them was me — in The Closest of Strangers, Chapter 3, “The Politics of Polarization.” Horowitz himself told me this. And thereby hangs a tale and, with it, a sobering lesson.
Many on the left in those years were in thrall to an ideology about American capitalism’s dependence on racism that carried an immense burden of truth. But it needed some deconstruction, as I showed in my Chapter 3 and on pp. 159-162, drawing on long immersion in inner-city Brooklyn. In 1990, soon after it was published, Horowitz, whom I did not know, called to tell me that he loved the book and that he has a black in-law who could testify to its profound truth.
Easing myself off the phone with a polite “Thanks, but no thanks,” I didn’t realize that I was about to learn the danger of racial truth-telling in polarized times. The Closest of Strangers was slammed by the Piven-oriented left and showered with sloppy wet kisses from neo-cons.
I soon understood how George Orwell felt when he tried to tell the London left what was really going on within the anti-fascist struggle in Spain, which wasn’t as pure a social movement as some young idealists believed — and as cynical Stalinist operators wanted them to believe. For telling a more difficult truth, Orwell was promptly accused of giving aid and comfort to Franco and Hitler.
A lot of leftist ideology was similarly disingenuous in presenting black disruptions of America’s postwar bourgeois and white working-class paradise as the cat’s paw of revolutionary change. Most of America had, indeed, consigned blacks to a “reserve army of the unemployed,” making their resistance a humane and liberal as well as progressive imperative.
But Piven and Cloward’s call for a racialized “Politics of Turmoil,” which they celebrated in a book by that name and excerpted in The Nation in 1966, held no solutions for American political culture, unjust and hypocritical though that culture often was. It certainly offered no sound strategy for a socialist agenda by relying on a politics of racial paroxysm.
Neither, however were Piven and Cloward and their admirers the powerful, malevolent conspirators they’re now being made out to be. They weren’t the reasons why the liberal capitalist welfare state, such as it was, damaged its supposed beneficiaries.
The Closest of Strangers shows all this, as it does some deep, formative, and tragic reasons why many on the left still cling to overly racialist strategies for tackling broader structural problems that, we now see, are engulfing millions of whites as well as blacks. Some on the left dismiss, as neo-liberal mystifications, Obama’s reliance on less-confrontational approaches to race like those I’d been commending since the early 1990s.
Obama’s successes (such as they are), including his 2008 election, are maddening to white racist losers. So was the demise of segregation, which drove them to flail at liberals and to bomb black churches. But that was no reason for those who were winning, however painfully and slowly, to behave like the losers, as some racial protest artists did. Piven’s rhetoric sometimes made her seem one of them. That’s why Beck makes her a scapegoat, not for anything her welfare strategy actually accomplished.
Anyone who wants to consider these arguments more seriously than a blog post can do should read The Closest of Strangers, Chapter 3, in which I assess the racialist preoccupations of certain progressives and certain black conservatives such as Shelby Steele and, by implication, McWhorter.
I rather admired Steele’s The Content of Our Character, published in 1990 just before The Closest of Strangers. I quoted observations of his that were and remain profoundly right. Real life is like that.
I rather admired McWhorter’s Losing the Race, too, in a review for The Washington Monthly. But I cautioned McWhorter then against becoming the conservative-movement water-carrier he is now.
Especially so soon after Tuscon, the dangers of conspiracy mongering about Piven should give McWhorter and other conservatives pause. And no decent liberal can hope that the fires being stoked by them will illuminate progressive virtue and wake up everyone to the real dangers facing the country.
But just as George Kennan was right to urge containment of the Soviets rather than a desperate, nuclear-armed “rollback” of the Iron Curtain, we keepers of the American civic-republican faith had better develop wise ways to stand strong against the racist and capitalist abuses without lashing out histrionically and widening William Butler Yeats’ gyre. Kennan rued the fact that his call for “containment” was taken up by ranters who made him feel as if he’d dislodged a boulder from the top of a hill and had no choice but to watch it smash its way down the slope, setting off lethal avalanches.
The morning after I posted most of these observations here in April, a fragment of my post was quoted to Piven on NPR’s New York Station, WNYC, by show host Brian Lehrer. In response, Piven did an old-left dodge, calling me a “wobbler” between “the liberal left and the conservative right.”
She’s still at it. She’ll never understand that, as a civic-republican, I am occasionally scathing of both left and right, not because both sides are equally bad but because Piven’s left plays inexorably into the hands of the more-powerful right. They do it every time, and they know not what they do.
Someone who does understand what’s at risk here posted a comment on the WNYC site. “Jimmy of Staten Island,” a part of New York City where many “Archie Bunkers” live, isn’t fodder for Beck, but neither will he ever be reached by people who think as Piven does or write him off as a racist or “enabler” of racists. Read what he says below. He is our best answer to both Beck and those who make themselves easy scapegoats for Beck. He writes:
“Still a Democrat, still Union, but Lord Almighty, folks like Ms. Piven do little but alienate the folks in my local, and weaken their allegiance to the Democratic Party.
“Her ‘strategy’ to cause rifts within the voting blocs that make up Municipal Democratic Parties, ostensibly to force LBJ’s hand, did nothing but bring about Nixon-Reagan, and the long-term kneecapping of the greater, national Democratic party.
“To still spout that ‘rights’ without ‘responsibilities’ is ‘humiliating’ is just sad, and does nothing to retain a cohesive Democratic majority.”
I rest my case — against Piven & Co. for being so hapless, but, even more, against Beck et al for trying to make political hay out of leftist radicals supposedly holding “such power over the lives of innocents,” as McWhorter puts it.
All Beck is doing is shifting the blame away from where it really belongs: the corporate-welfare, casino-finance system that is strangling the American republic. Only perversely hypocritical conservatives — and perhaps a deranged loner or two — would fall for phony indignation like Beck’s.
Late note: — That’s why, as Michael Tomasky made clear in The Guardian, referencing this column, even those of us who think that Piven was thunderously wrong have to take heed and speak out against the thunder from Beck and Fox News.
I’m not sure of the protocol here on the WNYC website, and since I’ve carried on this kind of discussion in dozens of posts over at TPM and in several daily newspapers (Washington Post “Outlook” and chat session, Boston Globe, etc.) I’ll d refer Chris Malone and others to those columns, posts and the comments. They’re all at www.jimsleeper.com under “Latest Work”. The comments that others have posted in the past day at TPM about my Piven-Cloward column have drawn a number of responses from me, so you can go right there and see them, and if you’d like, join in.
Here let me just say that Piven was more than a little too slick on the show yesterday, claiming twice that she wasn’t presuming to challenge capitalism, while, at the same time, her defenders here emphasize how wrong it is to accuse her of racialism because she’s really going after the big structural issues (as, of course, she is). Anyone who reads my TPM posts (for example, three on corporate “speech” and the Supreme Court’s ruling on it, one of which was tweeted by Katrina Van den Heuvel as a ‘must read’) will decide that I’m more far more scathing of corporate capitalism than the disingenuous Piven who appeared on the show yesterday. So I’ll leave her and her celebrants to untangle themselves
For my own part, I’m all for strong social and political movements from below. But if I were a religious person, I’d get down on my knees and pray that none of them will ever again be like the National Welfare Rights Organization, whose demonstrations were so sadly similar to the Tea Partiers’ “town hall” meetings last summer that it’s no wonder Piven tried to sanitize it more than a little on the air.
Is town-meeting craziness genetic and exclusive to right-wingers? The left-activist historian Rick Perlstein implied as much in an engaging summary of their eruptions over the years. But to really unpack the orchestrated, perverse Tea Party passions that we’ve been seeing recently, analyze this:
As New York Mayor Ed Koch rose to address the American Public Health Association in 1979, demonstrators chanted, “Racist Koch, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.” As they pelted him with eggs, Nayvin Gordon, M.D., 31, and two other doctors emerged onstage and grabbed him before being wrestled down by Koch and others.
An isolated incident? Progressive “boomers” who disrupted public meetings and goosed sensation-hungry media in youth are having senior moments about it all and complaining that journalists now dignify political insanity as never before.
Not quite! To see how current protesters miss the real causes and proper targets of their misspent rage, start with a glance in the mirror. It’ll show that while progressives got some things right that the right gets wrong, those differences weren’t always very clear.
I’m not urging some leftist mea culpa that would give ammunition to Rush Limbaugh or set up false moral equivalencies of left and right. I’m suggesting that only the whole truth can set us free.
• Google “Bright College Years” and “video” and watch a painful but riveting color documentary of Jerry Rubin’s, Abbie Hoffman’s, and other white radicals’ descent upon Yale in 1970 to protest the murder trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale.
No voice-overs in this film obscure the amazingly vacuous, violent mediocrity of rants that will embarrass anyone who’s nostalgic about disruptions at Yale and other campuses. These often preceded and sometimes all-but provoked (without provocateurs!) police crackdowns, such as those at Harvard and Columbia, that still sanctify the students’ follies in some boomers’ memories.
Watching the film, I understood why Dwight Macdonald, the social critic, uproarious iconoclast, and descendant of two early Yale presidents, cautioned Columbia student rebels of 1968, whom he largely supported, that trashing universities would only deepen everyone’s oppression.
• Read about understandable but misdirected black rage in my The Closest of Strangers — about how, for example, in Brooklyn in 1967, Rhody McCoy, a tweedy, pipe-puffing disciple of Malcolm X and chairman of a predominantly black school board, set a precedent for racial mau-mauing by orchestrating menacing appearances by what board minutes call “the community,” in the form of the thuggish militant Sonny Carson and his retinue to intimidate white teachers’ union representatives and other liberals.
This kind of protest, claiming the mantle of nobler, more effective civil disobedience, trashed democratic deliberation about race for years. Justifications for bad strategies and premises were debated earnestly in The New York Review of Books, and, later, charges like Tawana Brawley’s or myths like the black-church arson epidemic were treated with great deference by mainstream journalists.
• Writing in the alternative weekly Boston Phoenix in 1973, I promoted a “tea party” protest designed to disrupt an official bicentennial commemoration of the original Boston Tea Party. A worthy goal, perhaps: Jeremy Rifkin, leader of a radical “People’s Bicentennial Commission” funded by the National Council of Churches, said, “It’s going to be a physical confrontation, obviously, on the docks, How the hell can they arrest people for being revolutionary at a commemoration of the Boston Tea Party?”
Not much came of that effort or of the “Days of Rage” following the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But many such disruptions shocked and briefly paralyzed ordinary, middle-aged Americans, liberal as well as conservative, who weren’t wielding police batons or wearing hard hats but were merely fingering Roberts’ Rules of Order in town-hall rooms where no one had ever called them “Motherfucker” before.
Many of us thought that Roberts Rules was just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations, but, watching the movement spin out of control, TPM contributor Todd Gitlin, an early SDS president, wrote in his book The Sixties of widespread assumptions that — as a Weatherman communiqué put it — “Smashing the pig means smashing the pig inside ourselves, destroying our own honkiness…. We are against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America….”
“No alternative theory or action crystallized from the murk of the collective despair,” Todd lamented. “They’re crazy, one heard [of the worst militants], but you have to admit they’ve got guts. Anyway, are you so sure they’re wrong? And what is going to bring down American imperialism? And what are you, we, going to do about it? It was hard to summon up the standing to criticize.”
I’ll leave aside here the lethal symmetries between leftist terrorists, black or white, and right-wing white militias and segregationist killers, because a politics of death signals only the death of politics. But note Todd’s estimate that between September 1969 and May 1970 there were some 250 “bombings and attempts linkable with the white left…. the explosions amplified, as usual, by the mass media.”
And note the broad atmospherics that incubated violence by crazies such as the 1993 Long Island Railroad gunman Colin Ferguson, a man steeped racial demagoguery whose incredible indulgence by progressives I described at the time. (Scroll to the second pdf on this link.)
We now pretend it wasn’t so. Yet we’re alarmed by the rhetorical violence at Sarah Palin rallies, the GOP 2008 convention, and health-care forums partly because it turns our senior moments about past indulgences into nightmares from a buried or sanitized past.
True enough, while today’s right-wing demonstrators want to block public health care (and, weirdly, to trust vast, bureaucratic engines such as insurance companies and HMOs), most enraged demonstrators in the 1960s were trying to stop mass butchery by a military-industrial juggernaut whose “mad rationalists” were crazier than we. And it can’t surprise us that as the slaughter deepened, anti-war demonstrators succumbed at times — some terminally — to helpless rage.
But many of today’s raging demonstrators feel helpless, too, and betrayed, for reasons that progressives, of all people, should understand.
Most of us who rightly assailed “the corporate state” were young and relatively well-educated. We lived, as SDS’ Port Huron statement put it, “in at least modest comfort” in a society where “going underground” could mean taking a readily available factory job.
Today’s demonstrators are older and more vulnerable than we were when the draft no longer hung over our heads. Today’s 55-year-old former auto or steel worker who has just become a stock clerk or burger flipper with no health insurance isn’t having any senior moments about the high-paying manufacturing or managerial job with full benefits and pensions that he lost, along with a manageable mortgage. He still feels it slipping away.
Can it surprise us if he’s raging at the wrong targets? We did that, too, sometimes — at university scholars, deans, liberal public functionaries, even anyone, including our parents, who was over 30, paying taxes, and therefore as complicit as a “good German” in “fascist Amerika.” Not only that: We didn’t trust government much more than the right does now.
But acknowledging all this only clarifies the two big, instructive differences.
First, while our tactics became terrible, we were right to arraign corporations for wrongs that conservatives still blame almost wholly on the state and “liberals”. We knew then what recent events have confirmed: that conservative and moderate Americans can’t reconcile their yearnings for ordered, almost sacred liberty with their obeisance to every whim and riptide of corporate and finance capital, which mock the capitalism envisioned by a John Locke or an Ayn Rand.
Second, our protests weren’t backed by any big corporations or major political parties. That 1973 “People’s Bicentennial” effort to disrupt the official Boston Tea Party exposed a plastic, corporate-funded simulation of a 1773 rebellion against the true progenitor of the tea tax – the multinational corporate East India Company — and a mercantile, imperial regime.
“‘Tis time to part,” Tom Paine wrote then, as Americans faced the daunting prospect of replacing the only regime they’d ever known with new, untried arrangements. We aren’t yet ready to part with the current regime of finance and big-corporate capital that has arisen to consume our republic.
When push does come to shove, I’ll commend the coercive non-violence I’ve discussed here before, the kind pioneered in the best of the last century by a new politics, from that of Gandhi and the early American Civil Rights movement to that of dissidents of the Soviet bloc, and, we can still hope, in Iran.
Our best responses to the enraged American victims of today’s profiteers would be in this spirit, which takes a lot of discipline, organizing, and courage to sustain. It involves civic-republican vigilance against the corporate state, mobilized public persuasion, and disciplined moral witness — no matter how inadequate and, yes, sometimes maddening, such responses may seem to the young rebels, the ideologues, and the most desperate among us.
About these responses, this summer’s conservative provocateurs haven’t a clue, but they’re the responses that will work best in our time — at least outside of Washington.
Tormented loners aren’t really alone in their rage; they’re separated from the rest of us by their demons but also bound to our subconscious hatreds and fears more intimately than we’d like to admit.
“This week’s issue of the New York Times Book Review ranges over American politics but not, we hope, in a familiar way,” its editors write Upfront. They mean not only that their special February 10 issue, “Politics, Real and Imagined,” is devoted almost exclusively to politics, but also that it ranges across genres, from books about the politics of race, gender, and religion to memoirs and even fiction.
“There are sixteen reviews here,” my tipster wrote on Friday, “but not a one” by Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, David Brooks, Richard Brookhiser, Christopher Hitchens, Joe Klein, Leon Wieseltier, or the other pumped-up assailants of liberals whom I’d accused of turning the Sunday book section into a “neoconservative damage-control gazette” under editor Sam Tanenhaus. (Mediabistro’s Galley Cat called the section a “shadow op ed page.”
So, what gives?
I won’t reprise my critique of the Book Review here; if you’d like the “what” of it — the Book Review’s record as I’ve characterized it — read the Nation essay linked above. If you’d like the “why,” in an exegesis of Tanenhaus’ political odyssey, read (please do read!) The Guardian account. Coming home to roost | Jim Sleeper | The Guardian
This week’s “new” Book Review has some leftish reviews we’ve not seen before under Tanenhaus, if ever — Maurice Isserman and Jill Nelson on books about racial politics, for example. We also see Elsa Dixler, who actually works at the review but had been confined mostly to surveying paperbacks and fiction, reviewing, knowingly, two memoirs by the 1960s activists Carl Oglesby and Susan Sherman.
The few leftish reviewers Tanenhaus has actually published on a semi-regular basis — David Greenberg, Adam Hochschild, Tara McKelvey –are all trundled out this time, too. And Alan Ehrenhalt, a judicious conservative writer and editor who hasn’t been seen here in years, puts the neo-con apostle David Frum in his place — despite the solicitous regard for Frum which Tanenhaus showed while giving a lecture at the conservative American Enterprise Institute which I described here in December. Coming home to roost | Jim Sleeper | The Guardian
This makes the absence of Berman, Brooks, Hitchens, et al from the special Times Book Review edition on “Politics, Real and Imagined” quite striking. They’ll be back, no doubt, but more sparingly, and properly so.
The Times should publish thoughtful conservative writers to keep liberals and leftists honest. To be honest myself here, some of this week’s reviews could use more a bit more of the bite and panache the war hawks sometimes gave us. But most of the reviews are the richer and more rewarding to read for being less sardonic and melodramatic.
Judge for yourself. I’ll add only that the scrutiny the Book Review has received seems to have struck home. Tanenhaus, who I suggested here last fall was having second thoughts about how he’d borne himself politically and had skewed his reviewing assignments, undertook a charm offensive this winter on the occasion of his elevation to the editorship of the Week in Review even as he continues to oversee Books, with hands-on help from others who may have effected some of this marked shift in depth and tone.
The challenge for a general-interest Book Review such as the Times’ isn’t to swing “left,” as it did almost laughably under editor Rebecca Sinkler in the mid-1990s, but to revivify an American civic-republican literary and political spirit that isn’t a muddle between left and right. I hinted at this in The Guardian essay, Coming home to roost | Jim Sleeper | The Guardian and there is more to come.
“Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity fore-e-e-ver, for the union makes us strong.”
—- Neoliberals find the word “solidarity” distasteful. I’m not fond of it myself. Doesn’t solidarity collapse easily into groupthink? Shouldn’t being free mean thinking independently?
Before you answer those questions, review your own life to see if you ever actually, consciously needed the kind of solidarity that West Virginia coal-miners thought they needed when “Solidarity Forever” was written for them in 1914.
Probably, you never did. But is it really only people like the miners who do? True enough, the song’s lyrics aren’t nuanced or pretty; nor are labor unions. I’m not a union romantic. Working as a journalist in New York in the 1990s, I saw and described how badly, even disgustingly, some work-rules and pension scams compromised basic public services.
But I also learned that unions are what they are because their workers’ employers are what they are and because our society is what it is: As my one-time sparring partner Al Sharpton put it one day, “Society is basically a hustle, from top to bottom.”
Neoliberals find that observation distasteful, too. They’ve been shocked, shocked, by all the scamming and greed at the top that they discovered only in 2008 or, more recently, while watching “Inside Job.” Without union solidarity against all this, millions at the bottom would never have become strong enough even just to feed their kids, let alone think clearly.
But don’t union gains strangle job development and innovation? It’s when you look closely at how we set the rules for job-creators and job-destroyers that you really begin to understand how Sharpton can think that society is little more than a hustle at the top as much as at the bottom.
That’s precisely when solidarity’s critics look away from the top and stop thinking freely and hunt for “structural” explanations and scapegoats at the bottom. Witness David Brooks last Friday night on PBS, doing exactly what he did during the mortgage meltdown a few years earlier.
At first, Brooks took the “more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger” approach to union-bashing: Public workers have a right to organize, he said, but collective bargaining makes more sense in the private sector, where employers fight ferociously to keep “their own” money; in the public sector, by contrast, both the “employers” and the employees are fighting over other people’s money. The employers have many incentives to give that money away to the unions, “And if you do that decade after decade, then, finally, the bill comes due.”
All true, but what about the bill for investment bankers’ and CEOs’ selfish and often corrupt mismanagement of other people’s money, including their mortgages, and, with it, the American economy? That bill came due in 2008 and 2009 and 2010 and on, and Brooks wants $40,000-a-year teachers, cops, street-cleaners to play “their part” in paying it, the way private-sector workers have been paying for it by giving up wages and losing their pensions.
Brooks looked a little embarrassed as his PBS counterpart Mark Shields noted that “the only reason we have a five-day workweek, the only reason we have an eight-hour workday, the only reason we have a minimum wage law and child labor laws and pension funds is because of labor unions’ clout and skill.”
While Shields acknowledged that “unions are flawed institutions with imperfect people running them, not unlike businesses, …” he noted that “Organized labor and the G.I. Bill were the bookends of the middle-class prosperity of post-World War II America. America exploded economically, but the only reason that pie was divided was because American veterans returning had a chance to educate themselves like no generation had before…. And the only reason wages rose is because one-third of the work force was organized, and they secured those higher wages and the ripple effect across our economy.”
Most neoliberals who bridle at union “solidarity” are the offspring of people who benefited from all this, even if they weren’t in unions. But these days it often takes someone of Shields’ age to connect these dots, and no sooner had he done it, than Brooks finessed his embarrassment by looking for scapegoats:
“You have got rubber rooms in New York where they can’t fire terrible teachers because of union rules,” Brooks retorted. “You’ve got schools where you can’t — you get rid of all the really good young teachers because of these rules. You have got California prison workers who are retiring at age 55 with $130,000-a-year pensions.”
But then, I suspect, Brooks began thinking of all the rubber rooms we need for the Madoffs, Blankfeins, Rubins, Summerses, and others at the top who’ve never done anything to earn bonuses of $1.3 million, let alone pensions of $130,000. Brooks caught himself: “I’m not against unions, but when things get out of whack, when you have got these sorts of rigidities and unsustainable costs, then you have to adjust it. And I’m not saying you have to bust it the way it’s being tried, but it has to be adjusted.”
Yes, but what adjustments, exactly, David? Have unions gotten fatter and more corrupt than casino-finance and corporate welfare capitalists? Who caused public deficits to balloon? Few Americans are buying the anti-union line of your latest hero, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, let alone the more bare-knuckled gambit of Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
A few days after the PBS program, without Shields to correct him, Brooks charged in a column that unions and their politician-enablers, faced with yawning deficits and angry taxpayers, are cutting services to the young in order to preserve those for the old, who vote in large numbers, as children can’t. “The future has no union,” he declared.
The important question here is why Brooks has a future as a credible commentator if he can’t acknowledge that teachers, firefighters, cops, and other public workers hold more of the “future” in their hands by caring for and protecting children on the job – and that they probably have more children of their own, per capita as well as in absolute numbers, than bankers and corporate “deciders” do. Can Brooks be credible if he can’t even write that, by the way, public-sector workers are taxpayers, too?
Before Brooks shifted his attention from Wall Street bonuses to Wisconsin a couple of months ago, he often talked about the inexorable pressures of global competition upon our economy’s decision makers. He kept neglecting to mention that these deciders are members of a new elite that answers to no American polity or moral code.
They employ managers to squeeze higher rates of profit out of factories and newspapers that were making perfectly decent profits and paying workers decently, too — and were thereby sustaining civil society and “the future” – until, all of a sudden, they were told to produce 22% rates of return.
Is something “out of whack” here, too, David, or did God ordain it? You weren’t challenging the rules of finance when the mortgage meltdown threw millions of people into foreclosure. Instead, you penned a sober column, “The Culture of Debt,” blaming the little people, as usual.
To understand what Brooks and so many others are saying about public employees now, it’s a good idea to revisit what he wrote in that column about the mortgage meltdown.
He made sure to finger the specific, real-life weaknesses and moral lapses not of those who’d designed, invested in, and pushed the duplicitous,predatory “mortgages” which hard-pressed buyers latched onto, but of the buyers themselves. He cited one hapless home buyer one who, “after her divorce,… went on a shopping spree to make herself feel better.”
Actually, the most irresponsible individual decisions in this crisis were not made by homeowners or would-be buyers, but Brooks couldn’t find a single anecdote to illustrate the behavior of those who sought out his divorcee and zoomed in on her with what seemed like irresistible offers.
Ever since I wrote The Closest of Strangers after spending the better part of a decade in black north and central Brooklyn, I’ve had a reputation for not letting poor people off the hook for bad decisions that are ultimately matters of personal responsibility. Drawing from intimate experience you can read about in that book, I’ve rebuked liberals who refuse to pay disadvantaged people the compliment of holding them to the same standards of decency and self-control to which liberals hold their own children.
But Brooks abuses this principle to blame structural injustices and cultural demoralization on people at the bottom who lack the necessary standards and discipline: An “unspoken code [a culture of thrift and discipline, rather than of easy debt] has been silently eroded,” he declared during the mortgage meltdown, as he is declaring now during the public-sector union crisis.
Silently, David? Marketers of all kinds have spent billions for 40 years telling Americans they “deserve a break today” and promising to give them that break instantly. This has been the most monumental, unrelenting, intrusive, mindless and therefore irresponsible campaign in history to destroy a culture, barring perhaps the fascist and communist propaganda juggernauts and worse of the 1930s.
We are destroying neighborhoods. We are destroying hearts and minds. We are destroying our roads, rails, and basic social services. Private and public leaders alike are directing it, not just via giveaways to unions but via de-regulation and lotteries and big bailouts to shareholders who are never held responsible for their individual decisions to back these scams.
What else does Brooks need to know before he’ll make his own responsible decision to write that decency hasn’t “silently eroded” but has been clamorously assaulted from above? Hello? The year of the mortgage meltdown, we wound up saying “Hello?” four or five times an evening during the dinner hour in New Haven to callers from local mortgage lending companies trying to get us to re-finance. How hard was it for Brooks to imagine that poorly-educated people, desperate for cash and barely meeting their mortgage payments, might welcome those calls?
For Brooks, though, it was as if there were no “pushers” behind this process unleashed by corporate and finance capital and, politically, by the deregulatory, bailout, and other corporate-welfare tactics he’d defended for a decade.
Why doesn’t he even think of putting a spotlight on the pushers? In the mortgage crisis, he couldn’t tell us about, say, the stressed and, yes, morally irresponsible telemarketer who’d signed on to accelerate the storm. Not a word about the irresponsibility of the mortgage executive and his consultants and lawyers who designed the campaign.
Not an anecdote about the sharpie salesmen who visited the homes whose equity they were about to steal while sitting politely on the targets’ sofas, or of the bankers who bought up the mortgages and foreclosed.
Nothing about politicians, fed by all these predators, who eased the miscreants’ actions in more ways than I can count.
Didn’t these people make any of the individual decisions which Brooks tells us have ripple effects that produce a “culture of debt”? How can a Burkean conservative like him be silent about decisions by people who hold leadership positions?
The next time Brooks tells you that a culture of responsibility has eroded, whether among home-buyers or public-sector workers, ask him if his own silence about that erosion’s true causes and dimensions has been part of the reason for the erosion itself.
And ask him why he’s been so silent. The answer is that Brooks can’t think clearly or tell the truth because his own biography and insecurities and over-compensations have inclined him to ‘solidarity forever” with hustlers at the top. People with less power and privilege have much better reasons for solidarity with hustlers at the bottom.
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.
