The preacherly cadences in Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech last night in Nashua deepened his two greatest symbolic promises: Domestically, he makes being an American beautiful again because, in him, it makes achievable what is still incredible to many — a 400-year-old hope that we can untangle the race knot we’ve tied ourselves in since 1607. “It’s not something he’s doing,” Dartmouth Professor Joseph Bafumi told the New York Times; “it’s something he’s being.”
Internationally, therefore, Obama reminds multitudes of what has fascinated them about America – not just its wealth and power, which are trashy and brutal even when irresistible, but a folksy universalism that disposes Americans to say “Hi” to anyone rather than “Heil” to a leader, to give the other person a fair shot, and, out of that kind of strength, to take a shot at the moon.
Our wealth and power often subvert what’s best in us. But because Obama knows that human failings make this more complicated than either conservative moralism or leftist anti-capitalism alone can explain, his promise runs deeper than the poetry of campaigning. But can that promise really become the prose of governing? Can we take his symbolism for substance?
Obama says “Yes we can!” arguing that the movement his campaign is building will sustain him as president against countervailing powers. But a campaign isn’t a movement, and experiences of the 1960s taught some of us that even a swelling movement is no substitute for sustainable, organized power in a political party or coalition of parties, and in unions and churches that can mobilize disciplined multitudes in support of a program.
Many have been elected who could not govern. At David Dinkins’ inauguration as New York City’s first black mayor in 1990, the audience teared up as the Rev. Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn’s Concord Baptist Church intoned, “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears.“ But those high sentiments foretold little about what they would accomplish, not mainly because racists crawled out of sewers to help elect Rudy Giuliani. That wasn’t the main reason why Giuliani defeated Dinkins in 1993.
Hillary Clinton, Obama’s chief opponent now for the Democratic nomination, has endured and overcome a great deal, but she knows what governing from a executive position actually entails, and it’s unfair to say, as some do, that she knows too much about it because of all the baggage she carries from her husband’s presidency.
Obama doesn’t yet know enough about governing to discredit Bill Clinton’s argument that electing Obama would be a roll of the dice. Voting for JFK was a roll of the dice, too, but in consequence we got the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam disaster, and Kennedy and his brother Bobby had to learn civil rights on the job, as neither Barack nor Hillary will have to do. Still, Barack’s learning curve is at least as steep as he is smart.
His really impressive personal struggle and the profound intuitions it has given him about public rights and wrongs are refreshing in a politician, much more so than anything was in candidate Jack Kennedy. And Obama’s American self-becoming has made him the catalyst of a campaign that, while it is not yet a movement and may never be a governing coalition, has nevertheless earned him a strong claim to Americans’ critical support.
His campaign confirms many Americans’ yearning to believe again that, unlike that of almost any other nation in history, the national identity of the United States was founded not on myths of primordial kinship, of “blood and soil,” but on a more universal experiment that enjoins all 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,” as Alexander Hamilton put it.
Claiming one’s identity as an American, therefore, means standing up personally as well as politically for this daunting civic-republican challenge, against exclusionary racial, religious, and other strains that have persisted alongside and within our republican framework.
That is what Rosa Parks did, and it is what Obama is doing — first by being what he has made of himself as a man, and second by running for president. And I must say, as one who has argued for years that Americans must let race go as an organizing principle of even progressive politics — because too much of even what passes for anti-racism only ends up recapitulating racism itself — I can’t help feeling that Barack is everything I’ve hoped an American could be.
But Hillary’s claim to be doing some of this American heavy lifting is deep and credible, too. If I vote for Obama, it won’t be because I discount Hillary Clinton’s symbolic and substantive leadership but because my yearning to get beyond race will be strong enough to impel me to try this roll of the dice.
(One of the many posted comments on this column and my response:)
On January 9, 2008 – 11:11am ______ said:
Just a guess (Jim Sleeper will correct me if I’m way off), but the challenge he’s talking about is less Obama’s being black than the reaction and response from “the rest of us” to the participation and leadership that black folk can bring to our civic culture.
The challenge we need to face down is the temptation to essentialize race – so that people continue to think that having a skin color means having a “culture” because that’s what white supremacists and oppressed blacks made of racism, for obvious reasons, across 400 years. The challenge is not only racism itself, in other words, but a lot of what passes for anti-racism – the presentation racial identity as somehow redemptive of personal and public justice.
This is a difficult argument to make well, because blacks, trapped in the race-box whites have kept them in, generally have had no option but to embellish and deepen a protective black racial identity, in ways that are sometimes perverse.
But there is another side of the story. Precisely because most African-Americans were abducted and plunged wholesale into the American experience at no initiative of their own and with scant material or cultural resources to fall back on, they have had the greatest possible stakes in the American republic’s living up to its stated creed. Blacks have been among the most eloquent champions of the republic’s promises but also among the most nihilist of its assailants, for obvious reasons.
I argue in “The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (Norton, 1990)and in “Liberal Racism” (Rowman & Littlefield,2002)that the long struggle of countless blacks to join and champion the republic is “the most powerful epic of unrequited love in the history of the world.” Moreover, even if every broken heart could be mended and every theft of property and opportunity redressed, still there would be a black cultural community based on the memories and virtues of survival in adversity.
But that’s not the same thing as saying that having a color should automatically mean having a culture. That’s reductionist and, at a certain point, it depletes individual dignity more than it enhances it. We all — blacks, whites, including white racists and white liberals who dote on race — have to get over the hump of denying that race should and will recede in importance to the point that it carries no more power in determining your prospects than, say, a difference in eye color among whites.
But to get over that hump of denial about race, we will need transitional figures like Obama, who both embodies and has worked his way through what I am talking about. In Bakke, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that before we can hope to get beyond race, we must first take more account of it, not less. The question is what we mean by “first” — how long and in what ways. Obama strikes that balance perfectly, at least as a campaigner. He is faithful to the collective cultural memory without making it determinative of his and others’ prospects.
I should probably add that I wrote the two books just mentioned after ten years’ immersion in inner-city black life and politics, in Brooklyn. I sketch this in the introduction to The Closest of Strangers. That book and Liberal Racism are available from Amazon, etc, and in libraries.
As GOP presidential hopefuls began preening four years ago, wide excitement about Rudolph Giuliani’s prospects forced me to break a long silence about him. Somebodyhaddasayit: He couldn’t be president, not only because he was too “liberal” on social issues for many Republicans and too “neoconservative” on foreign policy for most people, or because his family life had been messy, or because he was as crass an opportunist as any other contender. Giuliani couldn’t be president for reasons more subtly and profoundly troubling.
Maybe we need to hear those reasons again now that Newt’s meltdown and tonight’s Republican presidential-primary debate will leave some people hungering for Rudy. To understand what’s really wrong here, you need to have watched him at the start of his political career, in 1989 when he ran a losing campaign for mayor of the city, only to come back four years later and win.
Now he’s imagining a presidential comeback analogous to his mayoral comeback of 1993. He thinks that just as conditions worsened in New York City between 1989 and 1993 in ways that disposed more people to his leadership, so conditions have worsened for America in the four years since 2008.
He also imagines that, once he’s been elected president, a future 9/11 will vindicate him as fully as the original did in New York and as the battle of Actium vindicated the crafty Roman general Octavianus, into whose arms a frightened, degraded, desperate Roman republic fell, almost begging him to become its emperor and savior.
Rudy thinks he’s ready, and a President Giuliani would be even scarier than a President Palin. All I’ll do here is make clear what I did four years ago. If and when he does declare his candidacy, it will be time to reprise what we should have learned from his 2008 campaign.
Throughout the 1993 New York mayoral campaign, from my perch at the New York Daily News, and in articles for The New Republic, and on cable and network TV, I probably tried harder than any other columnist I know of to convince left-liberal friends and everyone else that Giuliani would win and that he probably should.
I insisted that it had come to this because racial “Rainbow” and welfare-state politics were imploding, not just in New York and not only thanks to racists, Ronald Reagan, or robber barons. One didn’t need to share all of Giuliani’s “colorblind,” “law-and-order,” and free-market presumptions to want some big shifts in liberal Democratic paradigms and to see that some of those shifts would require a political battering ram, not a scalpel.
I spent a lot of time with Giuliani during the 1993 campaign and his first year in City Hall, and while a dozen of my columns criticized him sharply for presuming far too much, I defended most of his record to the end of his tenure, and still would. He forced New York, that great capital of “root cause” explanations for every social problem, to get real about remedies that work, at least for now, in the world as we know it.
Some of these turned out to be preconditions for progress of any kind: I saw Al Sharpton blink as I told him in a debate that twice as many New Yorkers had been felled by police bullets during David Dinkins’ four-year mayoralty as during Giuliani’s then-seven years and that the drop in all murders meant that at least two thousand black and Hispanic New Yorkers who’d have been dead were up and walking around.
Giuliani’s successes ranged well beyond crime reduction. As late as July, 2001, when his personal and political blunders had eclipsed those gains and he had only a lame duck’s six months to go, I insisted in a New York Observer column that he’d facilitated housing, entrepreneurial, and employment gains for people whose loudest-mouthed advocates called him a racist reactionary. Jim Chapin, the late democratic socialist savant, considered Giuliani a “progressive conservative” like Teddy Roosevelt, who was a New York police commissioner before becoming Vice President and President.
Yet Giuliani’s methods and motives suggest he couldn’t carry his skills and experience to the White House without damaging this country. Two problems run than deeper current “horse race” liabilities such as his social views and family history.
The first serious problem is structural and political: A man who fought the inherent limits of his mayoral office as fanatically as Giuliani would construe presidential prerogatives so broadly he’d make George W. Bush’s discredited notions of unitary executive power seem soft.
Even in the 1980s, as an assistant attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department and U.S. Attorney in New York, Giuliani was imperious and overreaching. He perp-walked Wall Streeters right out of their offices in dramatic prosecutions that failed. He made the troubled daughter of a state judge, Hortense Gabel, testify against her mother and former Miss America Bess Meyerson in a failed prosecution charging, among other things, that Meyerson had hired the judge’s daughter to bribe her into helping “expedite” a messy divorce case. The jury was so put off by Giuliani’s tactics that it acquitted all concerned, as the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus recalled ten years later in assessing Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s subpoena of Monica Lewinsky’s mother to testify against her daughter.
At least, as U.S. Attorney, Giuliani served at the pleasure of the President and had to defer to federal judges. Were he the President, U.S. Attorneys would serve at his pleasure — a dangerous arrangement in the wrong hands, we’ve learned — and he’d pick the judges to whom prosecutors defer.
As mayor, Giuliani fielded his closest aides like a fast and sometimes brutal hockey team, micro-managing and bludgeoning city agencies and even agencies that weren’t his, like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Board of Education. They deserved it richly enough to make his bravado thrilling to many of us, but it wasn’t very productive. And while this Savonarola disdained even would-be allies in other branches of government, he wasn’t above cutting indefensible deals with crony contractors and pandering shamelessly to some Hispanics, neo-conservative and orthodox Jews, and other favored constituencies.
Even the credit he claimed for transportation, housing and safety improvements belongs partly and sometimes wholly to predecessors’ decisions and to economic good luck: As he left office the New York Times noted that on his first day as mayor in 1994, the Dow Jones had stood at 3754.09, while on his last day, Dec. 31, 2001, it opened at 10,136.99: “For most of his tenure, the city’s treasury gushed with revenues generated by Wall Street.” Dinkins had had to struggle through the after-effects the huge crash of 1987.
Remarkable though Giuliani’s mayoral record remains, it’s complicated by more than these socio-economic circumstances and structural constraints. Ironically, it was his most heroic moments as mayor that spotlighted his deepest presidential liability. Fred Siegel, author of the Giuliani-touting Prince of the City, posed the problem recently when he wondered why, after Giuliani’s 1997 mayoral reelection, with the city buoyed by its new safety and economic success, he wasn’t “able to turn his Churchillian political personality down a few notches.”
I’ll tell you why: Giuliani’s 9/11 performance was sublime for the unnerving reason that he’d been rehearsing for it all his adult life and remained trapped in that stage role. When his oldest friend and deputy mayor Peter Powers told me in 1994 that 16-year-old Rudy had started an opera club at Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, I didn’t have to connect too many of the dots I was seeing to notice that Giuliani at times acted like an opera fanatic who’s living in a libretto as much as in the real world.
In private, Giuliani can contemplate the human comedy with a Machiavellian prince’s supple wit. But when he walks on stage, he tenses up so much that even though he can strike credibly modulated, lawyerly poses, his efforts to lighten up seem labored. What really drove many of his actions as mayor was a zealot’s graceless division of everyone into friend or foe and his snarling, sometimes histrionic, vilifications of the foes. Those are operatic emotions, beneath the civic dignity of a great city and its chief magistrate.
I know a few New Yorkers who deserve the Rudy treatment, but only on 9/11 did the whole city become as operatic as the inside of Rudy’s mind. For once, New York re-arranged itself into a stage fit for, say, Rossini’s “Le Siege de Corinth” or some dark, nationalist epic by Verdi or Puccini that ends with bodies strewn all over and the tragic but noble hero grieving for his devastated people and, perhaps, foretelling a new dawn.
It’s unseemly to call New York’s 9/11 agonies “operatic,” but it was Giuliani who called the Metropolitan Opera only a few days after 9/11 and insisted its performances resume. At the start of one of one of them, the orchestra struck up a few familiar chords as the curtain rose on the entire Met cast, stage hands, administrators, secretaries, and custodians — and Rudolph Giuliani, bringing the capacity audience to its feet to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” with unprecedented ardor. All gave the mayor “an ovation worthy of Caruso,” as The New Yorker’s Alex Ross put it.
A few days later, Giuliani proposed that his term be extended on an “emergency” basis beyond its lawful end on January 1, 2002. (It wasn’t, and the city did as well as it could have, anyway.)
The columnist Jimmy Breslin once mocked Giuliani as “a small man in search of a balcony,” but I’m not so sure that that will be his epitaph. Should this country suffer another devastating attack, in retaliation for Bin Laden’s killing, before this year’s primaries are over, Giuliani’s prospects for the Republican nomination could soar beyond recall. And a frightened, economically desperate country might give him his balcony.
He is crafty. He’s intrepid, and even a stopped clock is right twice a day: Giuliani was right in some ways for his time, on a mayoral stage with built-in limits. But Augustus knew no limits – and, in ancient Rome at the dawn of a new millennium, he found none. Neither might a President Giuliani in the country America could become if conditions continue to worsen.
All my friends are laughing at me for posting “Ready for Rudy’s Comeback?” not least because the only other bloviator who thinks that Giuiliani will run, and that it matters, is William Kristol.
Now, whenever Kristol makes an electoral prediction, you can bet the ranch on its not coming true. We were reminded of this very well last week by Alex Klein in The New Republicand Adam Clark Estes in The Atlantic, both of them (Sorry, guys!) trolling in the expansive wake of my devastating take-down of this neo-conservative field marshal back when The New York Times’ fickle and perverse publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., gave him an op ed column. Kristol lasted only a year there because it was one of the most hideously clueless columns the Times ever ran.
And now he’s telling us that Rudy is running? And I’m saying so, too?
Wait, wait; I don’t mean it like that! Kristol is writing wishfully, in his customarily serpentine way, because he actually wants Rudy to run. I, in contrast, dread the prospect, but I believe that it will materialize, precisely because conditions in this country are becoming as scary as Rudy is. In other words, it’s a match made in hell, and hell is straight where we’re heading, faster than you can shout “Rudy!”
Predictably — but with the fine exception of today’s strong New York Times editorial exposing the emptiness of the GOP candidates’ debate — the orchestra of high-minded opinion has followed that debate by playing its usual medley, “This Is the Best of All Possible Worlds.” Our professional political musicians expect that the Republican roster will resolve itself somehow into a credible campaign.
But I expect something different: The fatal attraction between a candidate like Rudy and millions of increasingly desperate, angry Americans is coming, as I showed here recently in “American Journalism in the Coils of Ressentiment,” an essay about swift, dark political undercurrents that have been driving conservative attacks on The New York Times. That essay was commended by Columbia Journalism Review managing editor Justin Peters, by Ben Smith at Politico, and by editors of Bookforum, but no one had time to read it, because it’s far too long
So keep laughing, if you must. And I, unlike Kristol, will keep hoping that I’m wrong and that I’ll be able to join you. But I can’t help fearing that we’ll find ourselves tuning up pretty soon to play a medley far grimmer than the one I’m hearing now.
Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 marked the debut of a strategy to “starve the beast” of big government by ballooning its deficits and the national debt. That would generate a crisis severe enough to force drastic rollbacks of Social Security, Medicaid, and other programs that most Americans had come to regard as foundational to a healthy society. Conservatives were determined to uproot that consensus, which Franklin D. Roosevelt had consolidated half a century earlier, in ways that had come to seem irreversible; “We have come to a clear realization,” FDR had said in 1944, “that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” Quoting an English common-law dictum that “‘Necessitous men are not free men,’” Roosevelt warned that “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
But people who only fear becoming hungry and unemployed can become that “stuff, “too, as supporters of Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Glenn Beck, and other demagogues who’ve been sprouting like mushrooms make clear. They’re a godsend to conservatives who’ve dreamed since 1932 of “starving the beast,” as the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist reminded us by quipping that he’d like to shrink government “to a size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
But why has this strategy won so many millions of reasonably intelligent people’s support, or at least acquiescence? Let’s sideline for a moment the familiar explanations of class warfare or false consciousness and consider two others:
First, certain personality types are drawn to such appeals, even though they’re fairly prosperous and smart. Second, deep undercurrents in America’s political culture have always inclined even political moderates to share conservative aspirations, as Reagan showed by striking those mystic chords so effectively for so many.
The Gipper and his successors also transformed their Republican Party from a champion of fiscal restraint into a pusher of fiscal profligacy. They displaced despised Democrats’ “tax and tax, spend and spend” policies with “borrow and borrow, spend and spend” policies, accelerated by crowd-pleasing tax cuts, all to create the emergency that would require us to do drastically to the administrative state what we wouldn’t do rationally and moderately.
By the time George W. Bush left office, any new taxation was verboten and the country had embarked — with collaboration from market-chastened Democrats — on expensive new tax cuts, unnecessary wars, a huge Medicare prescription boondoggle for Big Pharma, and the virtual de-regulation of finance that has ballooned public deficits, too.
All this was accelerated by an intimidatingly strong conservative noise-machine that, thanks to the deregulation of media ownership and of corporate “speech” which the First Amendment was never intended to protect, became adroit at touching the raw, jangling chords in stressed, angry citizens. So we’ve had Tea Party eruptions, stagey rollbacks of public and private workers’ security, and the elections of dozens of members of Congress who’ve held the federal debt ceiling hostage to more rollbacks. They have neither the intention nor the civic courage to resolve the crisis they’ve created by substituting more balanced approaches, as Barack Obama, one of their hostages, and Joe Biden have been importuning them to do.
What kind of people have made themselves impervious to Obama’s and Biden’s appeals? Here are some of the types they represent, although I should emphasize that any politician who seems to incarnate a particular one of these types, he or she probably shifts back and forth among more than one of them.
Greedheads and Opportunists. Most obvious (and, to me, the least interesting) are people who’ve become rich or richer dishonestly and destructively but legally, thanks to the deregulation of finance, war-profiteering and other public boondoggles, and to massive tax cuts. They’ve been reenacting the Gilded Age, constructing gargantuan, arboreal castles and estates and funding lavish, elitist preparatory schools, some of which were founded in the 1880s to secure the prerogatives and graces of a plutocracy that fancied its sons Platonic Guardians of the republic.
“To serve is to rule,” reads the motto of the Groton School, whose alumni loathed fellow graduate Franklin D. Roosevelt as a traitor to his class. Today, the Koch brothers, graduates of the kindred Deerfield Academy, are among many who’d have loathed FDR, too. (That these schools, sometimes despite themselves, also did produce Roosevelts, Harrimans, Kennedys, and Vances is an irony that I’ve assessed here but that few care to hear anymore, much less ponder.)
It’s hardly necessary to name current exemplars of the Greedhead/opportunist strain — the Goldman-Sachsers and Citi-Groupers and hedge-fund hustlers who are in and out of government management posts — or to identify the cash-and-carry lawmakers who take these people’s instructions even when they’re giving them or forging grand bargains.
Fountainheads. This group is named for The Fountainhead, the perennial best-selling novel by the libertarian zealot, Ayn Rand. They aren’t in it just for the money. From Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan to Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, and Eric Cantor, they’ve been true believers in Rand’s doctrine that human dignity is a lonely, Lockean-in-the-wilderness achievement and that “society” must constantly be pared back to liberate it.
Aristotle considered humans the noblest of animals with politics and the most depraved of beasts without it, but Fountainheads think that government, with its rational social engineering, is the beast. They think that society’s foundations are pre-political — divine or ordained in Natural Law — and that much of what passes for democratic and republican politics violates those foundations and is depraved. Their vociferous populism disguises their conviction that most people are barely fit to govern themselves as individuals, let alone one another: Only Nietzschean, or at least Randian, generators and facilitators of wealth are fit to govern them.
Godheads. Close to Randians in some ways, but not as assuredly libertarian, are religious conservatives who emphasize the divine inspiration behind individual materialism. Listen to James Lucier, an assistant to conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms in 1980, talking to Elizabeth Drew just after Ronald Regan’s election:
“The liberal leadership groups that run the country — not just the media but also the politicians, corporate executives … have been trained in an intellectual tradition that is … highly rationalistic. That training excludes most of the things that are important to the people who are selling cars and digging ditches. The principles that we’re espousing, have been around for thousands of years: The family …, faith that … there is a higher meaning than materialism. Property as a fundamental human right … and that a government should not be based on deficit financing and economic redistribution … . It’s not the ‘new right’ – people are groping for a new term. It’s pre-political.”
To keep on believing this, you really need to have God at your elbow, or you’ll need beliefs in ethno-racial destiny on sacred soil that were potent and wildly popular in the deranged Europe of the 1930s, when Woodrow Wilson’s liberal-nationalist imaginings had collapsed into capitalist exploitation and when godless Communism was baring the ugly underside of a universalism that hadn’t reckoned deeply enough with nationalist and religious yearnings.
When Americans curb such fantasies of ethno-racial or dialectical materialist destiny, it’s quite often by turning to God; even Martin Luther King did that, as Glenn Beck reminded everyone at his big rally at the Lincoln Memorial. But this religious turn can become idolatry, as too many Republican candidates demonstrate every day. Who’s to decide? The only way out is to diffuse and displace such currents. But how? And with what?
The Liberal Conundrum. FDR’s answer was that a healthy society, like a healthy person, walks on two feet: The left one is the foot of social provision (public education, health care, retirement insurance), without which the values that conservatives say they cherish couldn’t flourish: It does take a village to raise a child. The right one is the foot of irreducibly personal responsibility without which even the most assiduous social engineering (and, indeed, especially that) would turn persons in to cogs, clients, or worse.
The problem with this dichotomy is that each side emphasizes its favored foot until it swells, hobbling the other foot’s and, with it, the society’s stride. Fountainhead Paul Ryan thought that our safety net had become a hammock, lulling people into complacency and dependency. Yet he and other true believers, and the Greedheads and opportunists who back them, can’t reconcile their calls for individual and family virtue with their obeisance to every whim and riptide of capitalism that’s dissolving everything they mean to defend. (“All that is solid melts into air, everything holy is profaned,” as an observer of capital put many years ago, but never mind….)
Faith in God or Rand can’t deliver anyone from the growing irreconcilability of spiritual and material values in our present dispensation. Nor can the targeting of scapegoats that always accompanies conservatives’ failures to deliver. Their course becomes so hard and confused that Greedheads, Fountainheads, and Godheads become Airheads, or they’re supported by airheads — by the Sarah Palins and Michelle Bachmans (and an astonishingly large number of other women, such as Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Linda McMahon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene), who’ve been standard-bearers for the Absurd in several elections.)
One of the saddest truths of human history is that delusional escapes become stampedes, in ways that some conservative zealots who foment them anticipate more clearly and cynically than liberals who are caught by surprise and rendered speechless by surges of Greedheads, Fountainheads, Godheads, and Airheads, whether in Monkey trials, McCarthyism, “Bomb ’em Back Into the Stone Age” war-mongering, or sanctimonious authoritarian, “pre-political” pronouncements.
A republic depends on citizens resisting such impositions and rising above the rats-in-a maze scramble for individual security and distinction into which they’ve been driven by a casino-finance, corporate welfare, consumer-marketing juggernaut that presses them to buy more guns and burglar alarms and to hire more private tutors, leaving them clueless about how to cultivate public safety and wisdom. A republic depends on citizens who know how to advance enlightened self-interest and achieve their highest and best selves by finding their personal advantage in pursuing a common good.
Not all citizens need to do this, and not even a majority need to. Some will always commit their energies to generating wealth or contributing to religion, art, entertainment, and recreation. But in a healthy republic, a critical mass of citizens will indeed advance a common good by setting standards, a tone, and an idiom of mutual obligation, respect, and reasoned deliberation that dampens the allure of empty rhetoric and brutal actions.
Republics need citizens who are committed to exercise public virtues, because, unlike monarchies, theocracies, or ethno-racial tribal societies, republics have “no other adhesives, no bonds holding themselves together, except their citizens’ voluntary patriotism and willingness to uphold some public authority,” as the historian Gordon Wood put it.
American Quirks. Conservatives are quite right to insist on the importance of that right foot of irreducibly personal autonomy responsibility: The voluntarism in republican self-sacrifice can’t be coerced by the state or incentivized by markets. It’s what makes a republic free. An American republican ethos has embodied such voluntarism well enough at times to inspire and sustain it with a mix of pragmatism, faith, and fakery that’s better exemplified by Jack Nicholson than by John Roberts. Some of its voluntarism came originally from Protestantism, common-sense moral reasoning, and Enlightenment affirmations of Natural Law. The American, wrote the early 20th Century philosopher George Santayana, is “an idealist working on matter…. There is an enthusiasm in his sympathetic handling of material forces which goes far to cancel the illiberal character it might otherwise assume.” Such an American was “successful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies.”
Santayana added that because the American is an individualist, “his goodwill is not officious. His instinct is to think well of everybody, and to wish everybody well, but in a spirit of rough comradeship, expecting every man to stand on his own legs and to be helpful in his turn. When he has given his neighbor a chance, he thinks he has done enough for him; but he feels it is an absolute duty to do that. It will take some hammering to drive a coddling socialism into America.”
Santayana’s American — like many Americans I grew up with in an old, residually Puritan, western Massachusetts town — favored not much redistribution of the material but lots of inner renewal of the spiritual to temper self-aggrandizement with social obligation and to re-centering oneself in commitments to society. “This linkage of American material productivity with an outpouring of the spirit over the whole world, of material with spiritual blessings, is and remains the key to American self-justification,” wrote Sacvan Bercovitch, a scholar of the Puritan mission.
The very fragility of republican voluntarism’s reliance on cooperative rather than coercive power is its strength, as Jonathan Schell shows in his book The Unconquerable World: Because cooperative power grows from give-and-take in everyday interactions that organize and reorganize themselves informally, it’s too elusive for enemy armies to destroy, too independent of markets for their wealth to buy off.
A Hunger for Myths. A society enhances its capacity to sustain trust by generating strong, shared ideas and story lines that sift the deluge of infotainment and inspire citizens to find themselves in an ever-evolving common good. A gnawing hunger for spiritually deep myths has driven young Americans to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, which teach courage and loyalty to friends and to a higher, common good in adversity. But both of these were literary creations, first as novels whose creators drew some of their inspiration from English mythic wellsprings whose pre-market depths and expressions were still widely, intimately shared. Even as they became corporate investments in publishing and then in films, they held power for myth-starved young American moviegoers,
But “Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities,” as John Dewey warned in the roaring 1920s, a decade whose widespread frenzy, disorientation, and loss we’re recapitulating. The story lines or myths of a shocked and stressed society may sour and metastasize into something alien and frightening to citizens who are still trying to keep the civic faith. If such a society loses its humane consensus, its words and deeds part company, as Hannah Arendt warned, leaving words empty and deeds to become unguided missiles, advancing no commitments a people can trust enough to trust anyone to be faithful to them.
Without a more wholesome consensus and trust, a polity is vulnerable to manipulation by the few who are filled with passionate, factional intensities. The left as well as the right flirt with the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt’s expectation of decisive, sovereign actions that cut through liberal democratic dithering. Widening gyres of violent, directionless infotainment unleash more shouts and undercurrents, driving public deliberation into a vortex from which ever-starker mis-leadership springs, promising clarity and security and reaping millions of people’s swooning desperation to obey it.
The more demagoguery, surveillance, police and prisons a society deploys, the less civic oxygen it has and the weaker it is, because it can’t depend any longer on commitments that people feel motivated to keep even when no one’s looking, motivated by irreducibly personal responsibility and by a love of society cultivated in a way of life that seeds and nourishes trust, thereby eliciting it.
The faith, arts, and disciplines of such cooperative power are being undermined by conservatives and liberals alike who confuse today’s casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-marketing juggernaut with the Lockean capitalism and free markets they imagine they’re defending. The more often they get this wrong, the more they become Greedheads, Fountainheads, or Godheads, ending as Airheads in the public forum, which they destroy as their numbers grow. That’s the real cost of the three-decade-long campaign that conservatives waged and that liberals accommodated and often abetted.
The people who’ve seeded and deepened this crisis haven’t the intention or the civic courage to resolve it through the “balanced approach” which most Americans would support decisively if only they had a chance to see it in action and to think about it. But how can they think about it in any decisive way if the court of public opinion has been disbanded and is no longer capable of reaching consensus and decisions?
The Capitalization of Communication is critical here. The determined minority that I’ve mentioned has deprived Americans of chances to think by trading shrewdly on many people’s disinclination to think much in the first place. The real scandal in Rupert Murdoch’s communications empire isn’t its obvious political and moral corruption; it’s his news outlets’ relentless drive to make citizens fear and mistrust one another, drip by drip, deploying excellent “production values,” that disassociate increasingly empty slogans about self-governance from increasingly brutal images of mob-like behavior. This willful, systematic degradation of public discourse, which turns a society from cultivating cooperative power to legitimizing and glorifying coercive power, hasn’t been seen on a scale like Murdoch’s since the 1930s, except, perhaps, in the worst excesses of Cold War anti-Communism.
Essential to this transformation has been deregulation of the massive invasion of the republican deliberative processes by the supposedly protected “speech” of incorporeal (and, increasingly, un-American) “speakers” in election campaigns, in legislative drafting sessions, and, of course, in every television commercial and virtually every highly visible debate forum, including those staged by media conglomerates themselves. News organizations break “news” as bread-and-circus entertainment for audiences assembled and re-assembled on any pretext whatever – erotic, ethno-racial, ideological, nihilist — solely for the production of maximum profit. See this website’s section, “News Media, Chattering Classes, and the Phantom Public.”
Although the digital revolution has expanded everyone’s ability to break news, as in the video of George Floyd’s murder, it has also deranged our capacity to break and sustain ideas that are good enough and shared widely enough to make sense of the deluge of “news” and entertainment that’s separating us from one another and thereby plunging us into ourselves in troubling ways.
During the Iraq War, the columnist Paul Krugman noted that although 60 percent of Americans believed wrongly that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked, that W.M. D. had actually been found, or that world public opinion favored the war with Iraq, only 23 percent of PBS and NPR audiences “believed any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News…. [T]wo-thirds of Fox devotees believed that the U.S. had ‘found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.’”
When deliberative democracy is sidelined like this, it won’t be long before the determined, powerful few can administer more shocks and palliatives to an atomized body politic that’s too frightened to challenge them and that, indeed, becomes disposed to embrace them.
In a moment of pique, Obama called the debt-crisis mongers of 2011 “hostage takers” for refusing to approve even six months of unemployment benefits in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts. But Obama himself exhibited a hostage’s Stockholm syndrome by praising his captors’ patriotism even though, in their own mystical confusion, they are actually serving powers and patrons foreign to any republican polity or moral code.
A civic republican alternative? For decades after Roosevelt’s 1944 speech about what is required for “necessitous men” to achieve freedom, the non-rational, “pre-political” currents in American political life that James Lucier characterized were sublimated, and even elevated, by liberal education and assiduous civic-republican pedagogy. Against the darker currents of McCarthyism and Cold-War anti-Communist hysteria, they became something worth cherishing but seldom understood or appreciated by Marxist or post-modernist leftists any more than it is by Paleolithic, religious, and proto-fascist conservatives.
Can the small-“r” republican center hold? The conservative strategy to direct the capitalization of irrational undercurrents that too many liberals have dismissed has become the context or straight-jacket within which Obama has been trying to renew FDR’s reasonable, evolving balance between a left foot of social provision and a right foot of irreducibly personal responsibility and dignity.
If liberals don’t acknowledge the right foot, they’ll never regain power or deserve to regain it. And if conservatives can’t sideline their Greedheads, Fountainheads, Godheads, and Airheads enough to give the left foot its turn, they’ll keep turning the right foot into a staggering, suppurating limb that drags the republic to its doom.
Asked recently to compare Harvard and Yale undergraduates, I quipped that a Harvard student studying the German sociologist Max Weber will ask, “What were his main points, and how will they help me when I’m Secretary of State or founder and CEO of Without-a-Tracebook?”
A Yale student, meanwhile, will come to class with a copy of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, heavily underlined and scribbled on, pondering its implications for something he or she witnessed the day before during a soulful walk in New Haven.
I was only joking; the caricatures are really just that, and Harvard-Yale rivalry interests no one outside those two colleges, and not even that many within them. But it is worth noting that Yale was founded, in 1701, to stop a Harvard based social-network from degrading the Puritans’ holy “errand into the wilderness” into a scramble toward “carnall lures,” in a society increasingly connected and flattened by commerce.
The world isn’t flat, Yale’s founders insisted. It has abysses, and students need a faith that’s deep enough to plumb them, strong enough to face the demons in them, and bold enough to defy earthly “powers that be” at times in the name of a Higher one.
And now?
You don’t have to care for Puritan theology to be sorry that the old colleges have lost much of their spiritual and moral mission and its civic sequels — and, with that, the capacity they sometimes had to teach young leaders to temper republican Power-wielding and capitalist Wealth-making with humanist Truth-seeking.
Yes, they really did do that at times. And it mattered, not only at society’s margins but at its heart. What matters even more now is that the story of what has happened to that kind of teaching may never be told.
It can’t be tweeted or blogged, after all, and I’m not sure that it can still be sketched even in thoughtful journals, or that it still has any place at all in our tail-chasing, tail-spinning trade-book-publishing industry, which can’t produce profit-and-loss projections rosy enough to carry the Children of Internet across publishing’s own Red Sea.
But the real reasons for silence about colleges’ lost civic mission aren’t technological and economic. They’re political and cultural. We’re losing what every democratic or republican polity since ancient Athens has needed to curb power’s insidious, irresistible corruptions: a public that’s coherent and decisive enough to take well-founded warnings about its leadership training as wake-up calls. That’s how Americans eventually took the civil-rights movement, which opened the hearts of astonished Northern WASPs and Jews, in part because their forebears had made history of the same Exodus myth that Martin Luther King, Jr. was enacting in the 1960s.
Barack Obama touched the mystic chords of memory in 2008 for those who still had them and weren’t just cheering his campaign as an extended Michael Jackson performance. But Obama is beached in the White House now because Americans didn’t give him a Congress anyone can work with. And that’s because too many who voted for him have been too busy “connecting” to plumb the abysses of politics that yawn beneath our data points and “need-to-know” relationships and twittery, metrics-driven apercus.
The court of public opinion has disbanded. It has morphed into an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of consumer audiences, assembled and re-assembled not by writers or activists but by financiers and marketers on whatever ideological, religious, erotic, or nihilist pretexts might draw eyeballs and profits.
Sure, every canny politician has always operated a kaleidoscope of some sort. And, sure, the internet has liberated a thousand points of light and of noise from a ponderous thrall to the licensed pontificators of the past. But it probably won’t take long for the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure that every stake in new media — and hence in public discourse — is traded “publicly” (that is, privately) in markets committed only to bottom-lining and, with that, to dumbing-down and tarting-up news and opinion into products that bypass our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets.
The problem isn’t censors; it’s market sensors, groping and prodding us into impulse buying even before we can tweet about what’s happening to us, much less think about it.
In this widening gyre of casino financing, corporate welfare, and consumer marketing, more of us are networking more and more frenetically. Everyone is self-publishing, but no one is really reading what anyone else is writing. Who has the time – or the discipline? We bookmark whatever it is, RSS it, or pass it on unread (or only virtually read), to someone we hope will thank us for thinking of them. Or we link it or tweet it in exchange for someone else’s tweeter’s linking us.
The more frenetically we connect, the less we bring to the connection. And the less we find that’s connecting with us from the other end.
Apostles of this whirlwind assure us it’s sweeping away authoritarian and repressive hierarchies, stodgy conventions, and grandiloquent ideologies, and that each of us can soar above all that now. But sooner or later, every soaring Icarus discovers that “current events,” upheavals, and pop-cultural happenings are riding undercurrent events and yearnings that can be reckoned with only off-line.
So, how to tell the daily media monster that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom”? How contribute to a civic-republican story line that’s compelling enough to draw admirers and newcomers into a power that’s more cooperative than coercive, a civic-republican ethos that’s strong enough to deflect the demons riding the undercurrents of demagogy and plutocracy?
A few years ago, a gnawing hunger for story lines this good was driving young Americans to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings – spiritually deep story lines that teach courage and loyalty to friendship and a higher, common good in adversity. These began as literary creations, not corporate investments, because their individual creators were able to draw from mythic and religious wellsprings whose symbols were widely and intimately shared.
The creators of Harry and Lord tapped British cultural depths whose universal appeal had more staying power than American republican ones still do. “Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities,” warned John Dewey of America in the roaring 1920s, a decade whose widespread frenzy, disorientation, and loss that we’re recapitulating now.
What next, then? “All attempts to project and establish a cultus, with new rites and forms, seem to me in vain,” Emerson cautioned. “Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms.” He urged Americans to “do what we can to rekindle the smoldering, nigh-quenched fire on the altar.” But Emerson’s “ancient and honorable of the earth” have been swamped by the digital deluge, leaving web-surfers to mistake even real cracks of doom for virtual ones or for popguns.
The old colleges, and liberal education generally, were about meeting lasting challenges to politics and the spirit like this. They were about rousing the faint of heart. When their teaching was at its best (which was seldom, okay? and never for most of the students), they showed a saving remnant of young people how to live with an authorial voice or two or three, and to do so long and intimately enough to find guidance through those yawning abysses.
Some of the colleges also provided what anthropologists call “rites of passage” to adulthood — intense bonding experiences, in initiation rituals that expose students to danger and even to experiences of terror, rendered symbolically as well as physically, testing not only their personal courage and prowess but also their dedication to a community worth loving and defending across generations.
Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter dramatize such rites, but they can’t actually put readers and viewers through them. The communal depth and urgency of the real thing have to come from much closer to a young person’s home. But serious reading, inevitably both personal and communal, can help more than you might think.
“Literature does not deal in information or announcement,” notes the literary critic Michael Wood. “Literature is embodiment, a mode of action; it works over time, on the hearts and minds of its readers or hearers. Its result in us… is the activation of …. knowledge of others and ourselves; knowledge of stubborn, slippery or forgotten facts; knowledge of old and new possibilities…..”
Harvard’s Timothy Leary carried this a bit far in the 1960s by urging students to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” He meant to break up the casino-finance, consumer-marketing juggernaut. But so many people followed his advice so crudely and selfishly that they left the public square open to hustlers who turned their counterculture into the over-the-counter culture. The latter’s only doctrine is, “Connect,” and Harvard’s Mark Zuckerberg has made that command a virtual way of life.
A better answer, at least for undergraduates, might be: Log off, dig deep, and, only then, reach out. If you just twitter and data-point your way around the abyss, you’ll fall into it, with no coordinates or lifelines to shore. To avoid the emptiness of mere”connection,” learn to read as quietly and well as those students who marked up books that tapped wellsprings in the republic and the human heart.
A lot depends on a certain number of us doing it. A liberal capitalist republic always needs a decisive number of citizen-leaders, even if not a majority, who uphold public virtues and beliefs that establish a positive tone in public spaces and decision-making – virtues and beliefs that the liberal state itself and markets alone don’t nourish or defend.
Somehow, a liberal society has to train its public leaders and citizens all the more intensively. It can do it on Little League lots, in immigrant settlement houses, in inner-city church basements, in great state universities. But it has to know what it’s doing, and neither markets nor the state have enough wisdom or virtue to do it.
The mid-20th-century theologian-activist Reinhold Niebuhr read and wrote in ways he hoped would deepen the reckonings of citizen-leaders who read him. George Kennan, Henry Luce, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. did read him, King citing Niebuhr in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Even though I never shared his religious beliefs, I lived beneficially with Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society for almost a year in the early 1970s, marking up my copy on almost every page, absorbing his chastening criticisms of both Marxists and capitalists in the interwar years of the last century. A decade after I lived with Niebhur this way, Barack Obama did the same. (I reviewed John Patrick Diggins’ book, Why Niebuhr Now?in Bookforum in 2011.)
A liberal education encourages such reckonings as few other places do or can. But the corporations that universities have become are turning their campuses into career-networking centers and cultural gallerias for global managers accountable to no polity or moral code. Liberal education itself, struggling to survive in the widening gyre, is becoming a game of money, power, and public relations.
Conceding a little to this reality, I’ve compressed Niebuhr into 900 words in a review of the late John Patrick Diggins’ Why Niebuhr Now?, in Bookforum, which is a portal to many other books you can live with. Another that helped me in writing this little piece is Geoffrey Harpham’s The Humanities and the Dream of America.
But, btw: Please tweet and link this column to every person and website you know, so that I’ll have enough unique page views and mentions to stimulate a trade-market book contract good enough to let me tell you more. (You have just passed through JOKE, population 40 words….)
Breathtaking accounts like this of the Murdoch meltdown by Don Van Natta Jr., Sarah Lyall, and others are precisely what the New York Times is on earth to do.
And that the Times is doing it is doubly gratifying if you enjoyed the exposes here and in the Washington Monthly in May of how Murdoch fellow traveler William McGowan, author of the Times-bashing book Gray Lady Down, got assistance from many Murdoch minions and from the conservative Earhart Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Revere Advisers, Manhattan Institute, and Social Philosophy and Policy Center in scolding the Times for its lapses, including some that, as I showed, the paper never committed.
To read about the still-unfolding horrors at Murdoch’s News Corporation in the Times now is to taste the purest justice, with just a hint of delightfully naughty revenge. Horrific though the phone-hacking and police corruption are, it’s almost amusing to watch Murdoch and his News Corporation minions scrambling to cover their butts alongside the politicians and police officers they corrupted.
Over at the New Republic, using well-chosen slides and wicked pens, Gabriel Debenedetti, Alex Klein, and Matthew Zeitlin are baring the inside skinny on the butt-covering — and the angry butt-bumping — going on at News Corp.
And it’s even more gratifying still to watch the empire being rocked by the scrappy little British newspaper The Guardian – whose “bulldog reporting,” as Times media critic David Carr put it, broke open this vast scandal. In 2007, when few people cared, I wrote this warning in The Guardian about “Murdoch’s Enablers” thanks to its American editor at the time, Michael Tomasky. The lesson is that we who are sometimes faint of heart should take heart almost despite ourselves even when Power and Indifference seem indomitable.
Now for the hard parts:
First, the scandal has yet to take its proper toll on its perpetrators, some of whom will surely wriggle away. The Times story on the arrest of Murdoch’s powerful former editor Rebekah Brooks is making many wonder whether the police have arrested her partly to give her an excuse not to testify fully to a Parliamentary panel about her dealings with with police officers who were complicit in the phone hacking and who squelched investigation of it.
David hasn’t slain Goliath just yet, and surely Murdoch has more cards (and coins) up his sleeve.
Second, and, to my mind, far more important: Even if no phone had ever been hacked and no police officer ever paid off, Murdoch’s “news” outlets have been mugging every body politic they touch, inducing their readers and viewers to fear, mistrust, and sneer at fellow citizens by scaring, goosing, and titillating them every day. This I think was the point of Joe Nocera’s belated but welcome mea culpa in a Saturday Times column establishing what I long ago warned Murdoch would do to the Wall Street Journal.
He’s still at it, and, as long as he and his minions remain in charge of any news media, they’ll always be at it. Not because they’re evil geniuses, although Murdoch is that, but because they’re banal carriers of a social disease called ressentiment, whose spread through Murdoch journalism I sketched here in May apropos McGowan’s attacks on the Times. .
It’s almost in the nature of the Murdochs of this world to be the carriers of that sickness, as the Columbia Journalism Review made clear when he was charming and elbowing the Bancroft family out of its stewardship of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.
I’ve known quite a few people who’ve worked for Murdoch but are wholly innocent of his organization’s crimes and wholly free of ressentiment. But most of them have left his employ, and perhaps the hardest lesson of this mess, in these hardest of times for job-holders, is that those who haven’t yet left the News Corporation and its outlets should find ways to do so.
In 2009, one of my former Yale students, Cameron Abadi (now, in 2022, deputy editor at Foreign Policy magazine), was in his parents’ native Tehran, writing about the emergence of that year’s “Green Revolution” against the theocratic regime. The uprising was suppressed, but I wrote a few columns relaying Cameron’s brave observations about its prescience, and I saw in its perils some portents of what is becoming more likely right here in the U.S.
From a temporarily secure and undisclosed location (when not in the streets), a former student of mine who’s freelancing in Tehran for a European newspaper and two online publications is telling the untold story behind the opposition demonstrations. I won’t light up his name by linking him right now, but here’s his find: Many Iranians who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voluntarily and with a clear conscience are deciding that he used them to consolidate power in ways they don’t like.
Yes, Ahmadinejad had legitimate electoral support. But where is it now? The answer, almost literally, is blowin’ in the wind: The next 24 hours should tell whether the regime can suppress the rising anger. The clerks and teachers my former student describes aren’t all taking to the streets; they’re asking neighbors with friends in the thuggish militia, “Don’t the Basij have parents, don’t they have children?”
Such appeals to decency from Ahmadenijad voters matter in nationalistic, “revolutionary” Iran. Yes, the opposition is more classically liberal, or civic-republican, than it is revolutionary, let alone “progressive” as many Americans use that term. It says it wants to redeem the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah. The American Revolution was conservative in some of the ways the current Iranian opposition is: It was a civic-republican revolution, not as radically democratic as the French Revolution (or as President Sarkozy’s rhetoric about Tehran). It sought to confirm as many things as it overthrew.
Never mind that the usual infestation of neocon revolver journalists and provocateurs, such as Elliott Abrams,Daniele Pletka, and Robert “Boom Boom” Kagan, are touting the opposition because they want it to lose. Partly that’s because it’s in their nature: Most of the causes that they attach themselves to lose, in ways and for reasons the writer Walter Benjamin described in the 1930s, but I’ll save that for another time. The main reason the neocons are jumping up and down in unison this time is that they want Iranians’ opposition to the theocracy to experience a glorious defeat (which the neo-cons’ support for the democratic insurgency helps to ensure) that will darken the current regime as a foil for neocons’ latest, most stupid war-mongering.
Ignore them. The current regime is odious, but who was defending it? Anyone in America with power, and not just a big mouth, should back the opposition to it without the scorching rhetoric of “Boom Boom” and John McCain as a prelude to war — and without searching for an Iranian Ahmed Chalabi to awaken what we laughingly call “the intelligence community.” Anyone with power has to behave moderately, as Obama is doing. At this stage, change really will have to come from within the Iranian people, in ways my former student in Tehran is describing and in ways that neocons, creatures that they are of the national-security state, viscerally can’t understand.
The regime behind the Iranian elections was anticipated by Edward Gibbon, who wrote that when Augustus, the Roman emperor who posed as a savior of the republic, “framed the artful system of Imperial authority, his moderation was inspired by his fears. He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government… In the election of the magistrates, the people, during the reign of Augustus, were permitted to expose all the inconveniences of a wild democracy. That artful prince, instead of [showing] the least symptom of impatience, humbly solicited their [votes] for himself, for his friends and scrupulously practiced all the duties of an ordinary candidate…”
Beneath the smiles, of course, was the iron fist. I don’t know whether the Iranian Augustus who tried to play the “wild democracy” card in Tehran is the smiling Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or the smiling Ahmadinejad, or both, as the latter moves to try to “share” power with the former. But while the crackdown may silence democratic voices, millions of Iranians have made irreversibly clear they aren’t settling for a grinning Augustus. The courage, pride and discipline of these crowds – and, I must add, their sheer civility — is palpable partly because most Iranians are “conservative” and wise in the sense that, far from challenging religion, they are drawing on it and claiming to purify it, as the American civil-rights movement did.
The operative principle here, as in the American South, Gandhi’s India, and even in Poland in 1989, is that although religion is dangerous and odious whenever it tries to rule in states, it is indispensable as an inspiration to the body politic, especially in an insurgency against great odds. Without it, republics often falter, but when religion oversteps, they are lost.
In economics, most demonstrators in Tehran aren’t Marxists any more than they’re atheists. Nor, really, are they ardent capitalists. Right now, the economic crisis has been overshadowed by something more basic. While before the election, Iranians spent a lot of time and energy debating the country’s rate of inflation and alternative names for the Persian Gulf, my student notes, “That’s forgotten now. The fight for more elemental aspects of political life has superseded the issues of the election; in the streets there is a desire to name simple facts and to call them such and treat them such: facts like election ballots, facts like gun shots fired at innocent bystanders. The demonstrators are bound together by their desire for truth.”
Call it God’s truth, or natural law, or human rights: This movement of its ordinary bearers may be asphyxiated tonight or tomorrow by the crackdown that keeps me from mentioning my former student’s name. Or it could be perverted and derailed, as it was in Iraq, by its would-be neocon champions. But something irreversible and, I think, more constructive, has happened, and it will be vindicated, even if not tonight or tomorrow.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speech gives a virtual green light to the thuggish — and massive — Basij militia. It also raises the “moral” and Iranian constitutional ante on future demonstrations. From now on, demonstrators aren’t legitimately petitioning for redress of grievances. They’re civil disobedients – and, to a dishearteningly hate-filled part of Iranian society, they’re something worse.
In civil-disobedience, you break a law non-violently and accept the legal punishment to show that it’s the unjust law that has betrayed the constitution, not your breaking that bad law publicly in order to defend the very rule of law. That strategy is risky enough in the U.S., but in Iran, it’s inconceivable. Even just demonstrating peacefully will now demand more moral and physical courage than it did yesterday, or than civil disobedience usually does here. It will be cast as disobedience to the constitution itself – to the “Supreme Leader.” Watch the first 20 seconds of his speech and see his listeners’ quintessentially fascist salutes, and you know what’s coming.
But consider that the U.S. hasn’t always been better, and that some Americans still aren’t. Here in America, in what even Clarence Thomas called “the totalitarian regime of segregation,” peaceful civil-rights marchers were met with fire hoses, police dogs, and murder — but also with a new birth of open journalism and a federal government that began to back up them up.
Many Republicans still don’t get this. At their 2008 convention, the “Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!” chanters responded to their leaders almost as the Ayatollah’s listeners have. Such people are everywhere, even next to you at work. You have to work on them, bit by bit, as has been happening in Iran. Republicans and neocons who saw nothing wrong in their party’s 2008 speeches and crowds are now piously praising the Tehran demonstrators. But in their hearts, neocon supporters of the street marchers want the regime to crush them, because that would justify another war. They’ve forgotten that the last one, in Iraq, boosted the Iranian mullahs’ power. Even the neocon rhetoric is doing that again right now; the regime in Iran is capitalizing on it.
The regime is odious and should be overthrown. Even many Ahmadenijad voters now see this, but an American or Israeli military reaction would reverse those perceptions and boost the regime. Liberation must come somehow from the brave, disciplined, civilized Iranians we’ve been watching, as it did come in India, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. They need both more and less than bellicose American rhetoric and war-mongering, and as John Kerry insisted.
So why do the war mongers keep falling into the trap of thinking that the time for intervention is at hand? A hint comes from the recovering neocon David Brooks, who is skirting that trap this time: “The core lesson of these events is that the Iranian regime is fragile at the core. Like all autocratic regimes, it has become rigid, paranoid, insular, insecure, impulsive, clumsy and illegitimate. The people running the regime know it, which is why the Revolutionary Guard is seeking to consolidate power into a small, rigid, insulated circle. The Iranians on the streets know it. The world knows it….. “
“The nations of the West will have to come up with multi-track policies that not only confront Iran on specific issues, but also try to undermine the regime itself. This approach is like Ronald Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union, and it is no simple thing. It doesn’t mean you don’t talk to the regime; Reagan talked to the Soviets. But it does mean you pursue many roads at once.
“There is no formula for undermining a decrepit regime. And there are no circumstances in which the United States has been able to peacefully play a leading role in another nation’s revolution. But there are many tools this nation has used to support indigenous democrats: independent media, technical advice, economic and cultural sanctions, presidential visits for key dissidents, the unapologetic embrace of democratic values, the unapologetic condemnation of the regime’s barbarities.”
Brooks also knows, but stops short of saying, that Republicans and neocons just don’t get this. They hated Reagan’s negotiations with Gorbachev. And George W. Bush, for whom Brooks campaigned ardently, refused to talk to Iran. As early as 2006 Brooks could have rewritten one of his paragraphs above to read: “The core lesson of these events is that the Republican majority is fragile at the core. Like all autocratic regimes, it has become rigid, paranoid, insular, insecure, impulsive, clumsy and illegitimate. The people running the regime know it, which is why the Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Alberto Gonzales are seeking to consolidate power into a small, rigid, insulated circle. Americans on the streets know it. The world knows it…..”
The world now is rightly, breathlessly focused not on Republicans but on Iran, as it was on Eastern Europe twenty years ago. Now, as then, our war-mongers are trying to insinuate themselves into the action. The better strategies are the ones that Brooks mentions but that the party of his youth and early middle-age hasn’t learned any better than has the audience cheering the Ayatollah. The next 24 hours may tell whether the rest of Iran can stand up to them and the terrifying division in the country which their saluting represents.
Meanwhile, let’s face down their American counterparts and find other ways to support the brave democrats of Iran.
On a quiet street in Tehran one night last week, the Iranian-American writer Cameron Abadi was stopped by a teenaged Basij militia member. The youth, still growing his first beard but armed and quite full of himself, demanded in rough provincial dialect that Abadi exhale enough to show if he’d been drinking.
Abadi, clean, was told to move on. But if the boy had had the wit to ply him with a few questions, he might then have cried, “Take him in!” and doomed this New York-born-and-bred Yale graduate. Unbeknownst to Abadi, a colleague from a website he was writing for had just been arrested at the airport trying to leave.
Abadi, lucky a second time two days ago, got a Turkish Airlines flight via Istanbul to Dusseldorf, where he caught a train to Berlin. Even as the regime was letting the streets fill with peaceful citizens by day, it was sowing the menace Abadi faced by night. Iranians were shocked because Tehran has so little street crime – and so few cops — that people walk at all hours without looking over their shoulders. It’s a bit like New York City 70 years ago, when the novelist Howard Fast and a girlfriend slept in Central Park on hot summer nights to escape moral strictures as stifling as their airless apartments. They feared not muggers but an occasional police officer.
In Tehran now, too, the main public menace is the state, but the Iranian state teaches oppressed, angry young men to cling to guns and God — both dispensed by the state itself, including by that senior boy and ex-traffic engineer, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad. Yet some U.S. neocons and lefties seem to like having him around. Neoconservatives have been gloating about him. “See? We warned you,” they say, jabbing at silly liberal moralists, who’ve temporized about Ahmadenijad because they’ve fixed their righteous fury on Israel and admire or excuse its would-be annihilators, Hamas and Hezbollah, which are funded by fellow theocrats in Iran.
Silly though some liberals indeed are (Don’t get me started!), neocons have become the other side of the coin, recognizing in Ahmadenijad a perfect foil for their embrace of an American political party that engages in chillingly similar preachments and practices. Sound fantastical? We’ve had Blackwater mercenaries patrolling the streets of New Orleans on contract to the federal government. We’ve had torture protocols that turn honorable conservatives’ stomachs. We’ve had unconstitutional surveillance, renditions, and inexplicable detentions. We’ve had predatory capitalists unleashed to crush the hopes, health care, and home-ownership prospects of millions of heartbroken poor and lower-middle class Americans. As those Americans become desperate and angry, we have Fox News showing them day and night whom to hate and make war on. We even have pastors telling parishioners to bring guns to church, and Texas legislators working to let University of Texas students do likewise in classrooms.
And we have neo-cons like Bill Kristol, who discovered Sarah Palin while taking a Weekly Standard fund-raising cruise along the coast of Alaska and commended her to John “Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran” McCain. At the 2008 Republican convention, Kristol and other neo-con war-mongers found themselves staring into a horror-house mirror of the Basij-style populism that they’d helped, semi-wittingly, to foment.
Neocons saw nothing wrong because, like their preternaturally insecure forebears in Europe, they’d made themselves creatures of the national-security and corporate state by becoming its apologists, strategists, myth-spinners, and flag wavers and thinking that, at last, they’d arrived. As in France in the 19th century and the Kaiserreich and Austria-Hungary in the 20th, neocon creatures of the state always wake up only when their “national greatness” mythmaking and yahoo populism have left them high and dry, hated by the very people they thought they were rousing.
It will happen to them here, too — all the more quickly if, as seems increasingly likely to Paul Krugman, the Obama administration fails to undo the lasting, scarring, damage that neocons and their patrons have already done to people’s hopes, health, and homes. This month, Iranians — encouraged, undoubtedly, by our 2008 election and by Obama’s address to them and his speech in Cairo — tried to have their own Obama moment.
“It’s hard right now to remember,” Abadi writes poignantly, “that before dread settled over the country, before violence and fraud tore the threads that bound Iranian society together, the Islamic Republic enjoyed several weeks of unprecedented vibrancy. There was, of course, the joyous green-clad tidal wave that swept over Tehran in the days prior to the vote. But the streets of the capital were also home to many earnest, if mundane, displays of democracy….. in a spirit of generosity and optimism….
“[These Iranian democrats] were college-age volunteers who canvassed undecided voters,” Abadi continues. “They were strangers who staged impromptu public debates on street corners. They were tens of millions who waited long hours in the summer heat to cast their ballots. And they were all Iranians who wanted their voices heard. It was the feeling that their devotion had been betrayed, that their claim to fairness had been violated that sent Iranians onto the streets.”
There, they were met by something like what Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative cheerleaders have tried to foster right here. Isn’t it time we sensed what’s at stake and what kind of American civic-republican (and even religious) energy it will take to make Obama deal wisely with the thugatollahs and those in our midst who count on them as backstops or as foils?
If anyone abetted Iranians’ brave, breathtaking defiance of the anti-republican rot in the “Islamic Republic” of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month, it was Barack Obama.
George W. Bush had strengthened that regime by offending Iranians’ national pride, but Obama challenged regime with his March 19 Persian New Year speech and his June 4 Cairo speech eight days before Iran’s elections. “The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations,” he said on March 19, “but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization.”
Enough Iranians took him up on this to remind the world that sometimes America’s strength lies more in its civic depth than in its armed might.As the Turkish scholar Ibrahim Kalin put it, “People see in [Obama – and, I’d add, in our 2008 election] something they would like to see in their own leaders, and that, in itself, creates huge expectations.” Those expectations are still rising: Yesterday, major Iranian clerics called the election and the regime “illegitimate.”
But now comes Vice President Joe Biden, raising different expectations. Today on ABC’s “This Week,” Obama’s vice president called the president’s responses to Iran “pitch-perfect” — but then he added that we wouldn’t block an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program. “Israel can determine for itself — it’s a sovereign nation — what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else,” he said, answering a question from George Stephanopoulos. These are truisms, but why speak them at all, if that will help the regime in Iran to rally support, as Bush & Co. helped it to do?
You can read the standard neocon line on this sort of diplomatic dilemma in a New Republic post by Nader Mousavizadeh, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He sounds like Ahmed Chalabi, the would-be liberator of Iraq who had been in exile a bit too long to be credible in his claims about what a stronger American hand would accomplish. Mousavizadeh, who makes sure to inform us that his grandfather was a justice of the Iranian Supreme Court under the Shah, does not bring himself to say what, exactly, Obama should do to take a stronger hand, but he accuses him of having been rolled by the thugatollahs.
That is also being said by many others who’ve shown us repeatedly and disastrously that they don’t really understand American strengths or how to manage them. The question is why Biden threw them a crumb and Khamenei a new lease on life. For a much richer, more nuanced report on what is actually happening inside Iran now and on how and how not to respond to these developments, read Mahmood Delkasteh in OpenDemocracy.
I can’t vouch for Delkasteh’s claim to have participated in the 1979 revolution, but his stunning piece also links an Open Democracy symposium and other commentaries published there on Iran that are among the very best I’ve found. Here is a website that has earned its distinction because its contributors believe in democracy intelligently, not ideologically, opportunistically, or in terms of Wilsonian power-wielding that so often asphyxiates the democratic power it claims to promote.
Biden is an experienced foreign-policy operator who should understand when to hint at the military option and when not. But maybe he’s not yet used to being Vice President of the United States rather than one of a hundred senators. Someone should have him read Delkasteh before he opens his mouth again on Iran.
Because that’s the kind of thing that TV ‘news’ does.
The Washington Post reports that “CBS News’s decision to hire former Trump administration official Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor is drawing backlash within the company because of his history of bashing the press and promoting the former president’s fact-free claims.” CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani gave away at least part of the game in a staff meeting with the explanation: “Being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms … A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.” The Post notes that CBS’s new journalist hire, Mulvaney, has insisted that media coverage of the growing coronavirus pandemic was meant to “bring down the president,” and defended a Trump administration decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine, among other egregious lies and attempts to undermine our system of laws and accountability.
The unnamed CBS producer who told the Post that “it makes no sense to hire a guy whose entire job was to lie to us on behalf of Trump” clearly needs to go back to TV journalism school. The people who run the network—any television network, and pretty much any news division of any television network—don’t care what the journalists who work for them think. Those journalists are paid the big bucks not to think—or, in most cases, even to report. Rather, their job is to radiate likable personalities on the air while, at the same time, to make the kind of “news” that can potentially go viral on social media. A lie is as good as the truth for these purposes.
CBS sought to elide the problem of having hired a professional liar by introducing Mulvaney to viewers only as “a former Office of Management and Budget director,” rather than telling them what they needed to know to judge his standards of honesty: that he was a long-term Trump appointee who rose to become his acting chief of staff. But the people who think of themselves as journalists at CBS—or any of our commercial television networks—can only lose their virginity so many times. The networks are going to keep booking and hiring liars, insurrectionists, and the people who are purposefully seeking to destroy our democracy because that’s the only way they know how to do their jobs. They need “access,” especially to those officials who will make “news” by saying mean things about their opponents. Obvious lies will be met with only the gentlest opposition, lest an anchor’s crucial “Q-rating”—that is, his or her measured likability quotient among the audience—take a dip due to overaggressiveness. What’s more, right-wingers watch TV news at least as much if not more than almost anyone else. (They also tend to own its advertisers.) One often hears people say that Trump’s presidential campaign “rewrote” the rules about how much lying, obvious racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, etc. a politician could get away with. That’s not quite true. He simply exploited the fault lines that had already been put in place. (See under: “Is Obama a Muslim?”) That’s why the former CBS chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves—later forced out for allegations of “sexual misconduct”—was not spilling any secrets back in 2016 when, speaking of the Trump phenomenon, he explained, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” The same words could easily have been spoken about ABC, NBC, CNN, and, of course, Fox.
And speaking of both Fox and CBS, we note that Lara Logan, the employee of the former and alumna of the latter, recently reported that the “Rothschilds paid Darwin to invent evolution theory.” (It’s a wonder she managed to scoop Marjorie Taylor Greene on this news.)
Finally, if you suspected that American conservatives actually prefer lies to truth on their news broadcasts, well, yes, of course. But they also like money. It turns out if you pay them to accept the truth, they get a little better at it. That’s one conclusion from this study. The introduction of filthy lucre into the equation “improved accuracy and reduced partisan bias in belief in news headlines—especially for conservative participants.” Even so, “Replicating prior work, conservatives were substantially less accurate than liberals at discerning true from false headlines. Yet, this gap between liberals and conservatives closed by 60% when conservatives were motivated [by cash payments] to be accurate.”
Late actor and former National Rifle Association President Charlton Heston held a rifle aloft at a 2002 get-out-the-vote rally. AP Photo/Jim Cole
“All civil charms and priestly spells…., these like a dream dissolve, and man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.” — Herman Melville, 1863
In the year following the 2012 horror at Sandy Hook, I gave an NPR interview and wrote seven columns — in Huffington Post, The Atlantic, and ThePhiladelphia Inquirer. Each of these explores a different but related cause or symptom of our very American gun disease.
As the untamed 19th century frontier succumbed to the consolidating power of railroads over real estate and commerce, individuals kept their guns and imagined themselves free. Today, as the “Wild West” of the Internet succumbs to serving the profits of conglomerate owners of technology and speech platforms, individuals keep their laptops and cellphones – andtheir guns. This “American Way” of teetering between immense concentrations of power, including the gun lobby, and violent fantasies of personal liberty is undermining our freedoms and making some us rethink First and Second Amendment jurisprudence:
“Gun control comes first. But we’re not going to get there until we also talk about violent culture.” — Jim Sleeper http://wny.cc/VkQVAm
TV Violence Can Make You… Violent!, New York Daily News, 1994. Don’t try to convince me that rising violence in public life isn’t accelerated by the degradation of public discourse in “fictional’ TV movies and videogames as much as is by “reality TV.” This column was one of my early warnings.
Third Thoughts About the 2011 Tuscon Massacre Deranged loners are more tuned in to a society’s subliminal hatreds and fears than most of us admit. So, yes, there was a connection between the rampage and the condition of public discourse.
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.
