August 18, 2011, TPMCafe and The Washington Spectator

Fareed Zakaria’s Problem — and Ours

By Jim Sleeper

Many people defer to Fareed Zakaria’s virtuosity and sheer ubiquity as the neo-liberal consciousness-shaper of the moment. An Indian Muslim by background whose parents have been prominent in Indian politics and news media, he owes a lot of his credibility as a journalist to American civic-republican premises and a generosity of spirit that had some force in undergraduate life at Yale when Zakaria was a student there. (He graduated in 1986, then earned a PhD from Harvard). But now that America’s civic-republican premises and practices are waning, Zakaria’s own recent behavior makes me wonder how well they ever “took” with him in the first place.

At age 28, he was managing editor of Foreign Affairs; later, as editor of Newsweek International, he began hosting his Emmy Award-winning CNN program “GPS,” where he holds forth now while writing for Time magazine. Certainly, he has given America a lot, though often by dishing out more “wisdom” than he takes in return as he weans us of what he considers our democratic naivete.

Steely in command of his facts and allusions, he’s as deft as he is disciplined: Asked to assess the Iraq War this year at an inaugural convocation of Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (home now of Stanley McChrystal), he said that while “it’s clear now that costs outweighed benefits and that anyone who says he’d do it over again is not being honest or is not in command of the facts,” we must remember that South Korea, too, seemed “a big mess, a brutal dictatorship, until the 1980s,” when it stabilized and became hospitable to Western values as well as investments. All the same, he added, we should try to “re-balance American foreign policy away from these crisis centers that are riven by 15th-century feuds.”

That strikes me as an example of how Zakaria manages to eat his cake and keep it, too, when parsing the movements of the powerful if myopic titans whose policies he so often and so smoothly defends. So it was something of a surprise to see him lose his cool and his command of the human prospect last week, on the Charlie Rose Show, in an id-like eruption over the political psychologist Drew Westen’s darkly prophetic, potentially game-changing New York Times essay, “What Happened to Obama?”

Like the 13th chime of a clock, Zakaria’s arrogant outburst not only surprised; it cast doubt on the previous 12 chimes of the centrist, high-Democratic bloggery and flummery that he sometimes superintends as concert master of our national orchestra of high-minded liberal opinion.

Understand first what’s at stake in all this. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama – a kindred spirit of sorts to Zakaria (though not an immigrant or a Muslim like him, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding) — was photographed boarding a plane holding Zakaria’s best-selling The Post American World. That book had followed another best-seller, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, and both have been translated into 20 languages.

CNN’s “GPS” stands for “Global Public Square,” but Zakaria is a Global Positioning System by himself, a one-man Davos for the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-bamboozling wrecking ball whose directors, grand strategists, investors, and apologists brandish pennants of their “diversity” as talismans against having to answer to any actual polity or moral code, national or otherwise.

He sits on the governing corporation of Yale University, a career-networking center and cultural galleria for the new global elite so memorably (and scathingly) depicted by Chrystie Freeland in The Atlantic. (Yale is just now establishing a whole new liberal-arts college in Singapore, a city-state that, as Maureen Dowd noted, thinks and acts more like a global corporation than a republic.)

Although Zakaria is also a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, he considers himself enough a Democrat — and democrat — to tell the masses, via CNN and Time, why the neo-liberal dispensation of Obama, Bernanke, Geithner, et al is inexorable and inescapable and why, with public acquiescence to the judgments of such experts, it’ll probably be all for the best, or at least better than any alternative.

He assesses that dispensation’s costs, benefits, and (limited) opportunities for democratic mitigations in the style of a grand-strategic memo-writer, his rat-a-tat-tat diction issuing in firm, clear judgments graced with felicitous apercus. If he rests, it’s because he’s disarmed all intellectual and moral resistance, at least for the moment.

The New Republic’s American-politics blogger extraordinaire, Jonathan Chait, teamed up with Zakaria on the Charlie Rose show in a show of force against Westen, who is himself the author of a best-seller, The Political Brain. Zakaria and Chait deferred to and praised each another more often than they actually addressed Westen, whom they dismissed as an ivory-tower moralist with no political experience. They dispensed Beltway realism about the filibusters and the fiscal-crisis constraints that supposedly moot Westen’s demand for a President who’ll tell Americans more of the truth about the crisis they face, in an empowering, explanatory, narrative in the manner of FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr., or even Harry Truman.

Rose opened the show with a clip that showed Obama falling well short of the standard that Westen invokes, the President blaming Congress and not the larger powers to whose tunes it dances. “This downgrade you`ve been reading about could have been entirely avoided if there had been a willingness to compromise in Congress,” Obama said. “See, it didn`t happen because we don`t have the capacity to pay our bills. It happened because Washington doesn`t have the capacity to come together and get things done. It was a self-inflicted wound. There is nothing wrong with our country. There is something wrong with our politics.”

Westen counters that Obama’s account isn’t enough of the truth to be even credible: There’s “something wrong” not just with our politics but with that global juggerrnaut that’s distorting and, indeed, dissolving it.

For example, manufacturers that have outsourced their jobs and/or closed their plants were doing fine with, say, a 15% rate of profit before their new, publicly traded conglomerate owners demanded, say, a 22% rate of return. By what God given or natural right? By no right besides a long train of decisions by the corporate bought-and-paid for Congress or the courts and by global market pressures that no polity is permitted to challenge.

That Obama won’t say this clearly is a point of Westen’s essay. Drawing not just on his knowledge as an academic psychologist — as his critics suggest disparagingly — but also from history, anthropology, and his own substantial experience as a Washington political consultant, Westen writes that:

“The stories our leaders tell us matter… because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be…

“When Barak Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters…. Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end….”

Westen tells the story he thinks Obama should have told: “This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out…..”

He sketches the parameters for a solution that Obama should have proposed: “We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back into the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets…”

Such a story, he claims, would have “inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two-and-a-half years of failed government, idled factories, and idled hands. [It] would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities on both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country…. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism and the deficit – a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.

“And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative,… that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.

“But there was no story, and there has been none since,” Westen writes.

This was all too much for Jonathan Chait, who told Rose that Westen’s is “a dramatic overestimation of the power of rhetoric to affect policies in Congress and to affect public opinion. There`s just not a lot of evidence that it has that kind of effect, anything like the effect that — that he says.

“I think liberals have a hard time holding on to power and being comfortable with power and the compromise is held with power,” Chait continued. “I think it`s something in the liberal psyche…. I am not the psychologist here, but liberals turn against every single Democratic President with regularity. That was what the whole Nader campaign in 2000 was about, this fury that Clinton was a sell out.

“Now we`ve had a President who`s been vastly more successful in advancing the liberal agenda through Congress and you`ve got liberals angry again…. But the anger at Obama to me is just sort of baffling.”

Zakaria, no slouch at reductio ad absurdum in combat with liberals — and a near-screecher whenever he has to talk about leftists — outdid Chait, even while siding with him:

“Jonathan is entirely right but he doesn`t go far enough for my purposes. As Jonathan says in a very brilliant blog post, [Westen’s] is the version of the American presidency you get from Aaron Sorkin in [the movie] “The American President”: The President gets up, and makes this incredibly moving speech which is, of course, deeply liberal. The entire country cheers and all of a sudden all the problems that are — that he encounters are waved aside.

“You remember, in the movie, of course, it was gun control and environmentalism that was the big problem. Now, the idea that if Barack Obama were to give a speech on gun control, suddenly he would be able to, you know, wave aside the Second Amendment and the — settled convictions of a large percentage of Americans is — is we would recognize nonsense.

“The reality is that Obama is working within a very constrained political environment,” Zakaria continued, citing Obama’s accomplishments against great odds; “I`m a little hard pressed to see what the great liberal betrayal has been other than from some kind of fantasy version of liberalism where the American — you know, finally a Democratic president comes in and America becomes, I don`t know, Sweden.”

Little of this had anything to do with Westen’s argument, and as the discussion got down to political specifics, Chait and Zakaria went on about the filibuster and the self-interest of members of Congress, blaming them and the American people, not the President.

Finally, Rose asked, “….Yes, [Obama] had a difficult Congress to deal with, but if he had a different set of skills and was less of a conciliator, might he achieved more? That`s the question that Drew raises.”

Chait: “I don`t think that`s right. He only had four months in which he had 60 votes in the Senate. Other than that period, Republicans were committed to blocking his entire legislation no matter what, pretty much even if it included ideas that they had once endorsed. The President just has very limited tools at his disposal….

Rose: Drew?

Westen: “Well, I will say that I have more empathy for the President now after feeling like what it`s like to have a filibuster proof super-majority of two against one.”

Then Westen disposed of the filibuster argument: “President [George W.] Bush never had the size of the Senate behind him that President Obama had when he walked into office and that he then had three months later.

“And President Bush ….got through ‘No Child Left Behind,’… tax cuts …. heavily weighted towards the wealthy. He got through an unfunded Medicare plan that gave lots of money to Big Pharma. He got through an unfunded Iraq war, an unfunded Afghanistan war. And where was the screaming about the deficit then? Where was the screaming about the filibuster?

“By January of 2009, when [Democrats] could have changed the rules in the Senate, [they] chose not to…. They knew who they were dealing with. Obama certainly knew who he was dealing with after the first couple of times of banging his head against the wall and realizing, wait a minute, these are not Rockefeller Republicans. So why didn`t they change those rules? Why didn`t he push them to change those rules?”

Zakaria changed the subject, going back to blaming the people. “Look, the American people… they want jobs. They want the budget deficit cut. They, by and large, don`t want much taxes, many new taxes other than on the very rich. They don`t want Medicare cut, they want Social Security preserved, they don`t want the interest deduction on mortgages to be taken away but they want many large cuts. You know, this is a conglomeration of incompatible desires.

“And, to Drew`s point again, why is Obama worried about this? …. We have a budget deficit that is 10 percent of GDP. It`s the second-highest in the industrialized world. We have a gross national debt that will approach 100 percent in three or four years. So, you know, we`re not in the 1930s when — when government debt was minuscule in comparison. We can`t just say let`s spend $5 trillion jump starting the economy and see where that gets us.

“[This] does not show that Obama has been captured by bankers, He is properly concerned that there is some outer limit about how much you can spend and therefore a long-term deficit reduction plan is the right thing….. : I think sometimes being a conciliator is being a leader, particularly in a divided country.”

Westen: “Do you really think, though, that what we need right now, when we`ve got a Tea Party dominating the House, is someone who`s trying to conciliate people who you`ve just said a minute ago can`t be conciliated?”

Zakaria: “Drew, Drew, the stimulus package, such as it was, passed by one vote. The idea that if you had added on another $400 billion it would have sailed through, I mean this is what he could get through…..”

Westen: “Well, I actually was asked by the leadership of the Senate to help out… with Wall Street reform. And one of the things that [we] said was, “Look, do what the Republicans did to you: call votes. If you`ve got 59, call a vote, and … you say, look, we`ve got us voting for Main Street, we`ve got them voting for Wall Street.”

“Harry Reid did that, I think, three days in a row and the 60th vote was there [because some Republicans, frightened by the public criticism, defected.] That was what could have been done… with the stimulus, but was not done.

“And in fact, at that point the President had 80 percent popularity of the American people… He had 57 sure votes in the Senate,… an overwhelming majority in the House. ….I never thought I`d ever say anything good about George W. Bush — but you do what George Bush did,… you go over the heads of members of Congress….

“And you say to [the moderate Maine Republicans] Susan Collins and…. Olympia Snowe, ‘Listen, the story is that 750,000 people a month are losing their jobs right now. I want to show you… a picture of a little girl who just lost the room in her house that was taken away from her. If you`re going to vote against this stimulus package, I`m going to make sure that when we get 58 votes or 59 votes tomorrow, the American people are going to hear about why it is that they`re still losing 750,000 jobs a month.’

“And I`ll bet you it would have taken three votes that he would have gotten the stimulus package he wanted.”

It was at this point that Zakaria, seeing that he wasn’t going to crush what he’d thought was an ivory tower moralist, lost his composure. “Look I — what I would say, and I`m not going to get into the what-ifs of a professor, you know, who has never run for dogcatcher advising one of the most skilful politicians in the country on how he should have handled this. It`s a – “

Rose intervened, saving Zakaria from himself: “The former would be you and the latter would be President Obama? “

Zakaria, deft on the uptake, trying to right himself, said, “Yes, exactly. The whole idea that all of us who`ve never run for anything have you know, have — can brilliantly explain how to maneuver another $400 billion through the Senate. You know, maybe. Maybe.

“But I will say. maybe we would all agree [that] it isn`t clear what you can do. You are facing a very serious economic crisis….. a very deep jobs crisis…. It`s happening because of globalization: It`s happening because of technological change that is causing companies to be much more productive. It`s happening because of a degradation of educational skills of the American work force. It`s happening because of this huge de-leveraging that`s taking place which is making all businesses less risk-seeking…..

“So I`m also a little uncomfortable with people who have facile answers if only he would have waved his magic wand. “

Oops, again.

Rose, again: “I don`t think anybody`s arguing that there`s a magic speech to be made. I do think people can make a legitimate question, which is, Did this president exhibit the kind of skills that he may or may not have that would have produced a different result at various stages in his presidency? These have to do with leadership skills….”

* * *

A day after the show, Zakaria scrambled to cover his gaffe in two blog postings that tried to slam the lid down on it. At 6:35 am on the Saturday after the Thursday night show, he posted on his CNN blog, under the headline, “What Liberals Fantasize About”:

“Thursday night I was on Charlie Rose talking with Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University and Jonathan Chait, a senior editor with The New Republic.

“Drew wrote a provocative article in the New York Times called ‘What Happened to Obama?’ It’s a scathing critique of President Obama’s leadership. Then, in a brilliant blog post, Jonathan Chait called Drew’s argument a fantasy…

“Here’s a lightly edited excerpt of our conversation where I discuss the fantasy of liberals and why many need to grow up.”

But Zakaria edited his transcript of the show heavily, dishonestly. His excerpt is 1588 words long; the actual Rose transcript of the same portion of the show is 5700 words. Zakaria’s version obliterates Westen’s arguments about the missed opportunities in Congress and other political specifics, along with Zakaria’s own condescending response to the professor who’d never run for dog-catcher. In the last half of Zakaria’s version, he and Chait end up talking to each other as if Westen weren’t right there on the show. “Visit CharlieRose.com for the full video,” Zakaria advises piously in a note at the end of his post, knowing that few who’ve read his version will bother.

In another blog post, this one for Time, Zakaria frets that “The air is thick with liberal disappointment. In the days after the debt deal, liberal politicians and commentators took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to mourn the agreement. But their ire was directed not at the Tea Party or even the Republicans but rather at Barack Obama, who they concluded had failed as a President because of his persistent tendency to compromise.

“As the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, this criticism stems from a liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry. In this view, writes Chait, ‘every known impediment to the legislative process–special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion–are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech.’”

Again, Zakaria compounds Chait’s own reductio ad absurdum and contempt for what Westen has actually argued: “The disappointment over the debt deal is just the latest episode of liberal bewilderment about Obama,” Zakaria writes, characterizing Westen as “confused over Obama’s tendency to take ‘balanced’ positions”. Zakaria argues, falsely, that Westen suggests “that his professional experience– he is a psychologist –suggests deep, traumatic causes for Obama’s disease. Let me offer a simpler explanation. Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist who understands that in a country divided over core issues, you cannot make the best the enemy of the good.”

Zakaria then intones that “while banks need better regulations, America also needs a vibrant banking system, and that in a globalized economy, constraining American banks will only ensure that the world’s largest global financial institutions will be British, German, Swiss and Chinese.” He writes that Obama understands “that Larry Summers and Tim Geithner are smart people who, in long careers in public service, got some things wrong but also got many things right.”

This seems to have been written by someone a bit too defensive and full of himself to respect his readers’ intelligence. Sure enough, Zakaria pulls out the elite card:

“Obama’s temperament was eloquently expressed by the late Bart Giamatti, a former president of Yale and former baseball commissioner, when he urged students not to fall prey to ideology from the right or left… ‘My middle view is the view of the centrist,’ he said, before quoting law professor Alexander Bickel, ‘who would … fix “our eyes on that middle distance, where values are provisionally held, are tested, and evolve within the legal order derived … from the morality of consent.’” To set one’s course by such a centrist view is to leave oneself open to the charges, hurled by the completely faithful of some extreme, of being relativistic, opportunistically flexible, secular, passive, passionless … Be of good cheer … To act according to an open and principled pragmatism, to believe in the power of process, is in fact to work for the good.’”

Ah, well. I understand the temptation to wax a bit nostalgic about the wisdom of the Yale president of one’s undergraduate years, as Zakaria has done here. I’ve sometimes done that myself in praising Kingman Brewster, Jr., a descendant of the minister on The Mayflower, who gave a Yale honorary doctorate to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964, when that was a very controversial, not centrist, thing to do. (Giamatti got his own real doctorate the same day).

If it’s enlightened “centrism” we’re looking for, Brewster bucked more than a little alumni resistance when his gesture helped to draw King into the center of his time, a center that otherwise might not have held. Now that our own center is imploding, what would Zakaria do about it?

He and other apologists for the Democratic Party’s neo-liberal paradigm probably haven’t expected to end up looking like the “old Blues” who protested Brewster’s honoring King. But they’re beginning to sound like charter subscribers to the Beltway dog and pony show’s crackpot “realism,” its feints toward an American pragmatism that has succumbed to the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-defrauding premises it no longer questions.

Some dimensions of philosophical pragmatism may actually weaken or distort civic-republican affirmations like Westen’s and, with them, real movements for social justice. What, for example, is pragmatism’s defense against those like Zakaria who confuse the hubbub of free-markets with democratic deliberation and celebrate global capitalism itself as pragmatic, anti-absolutist, inherently democratic, and historically liberating?

The American historians Christopher Lasch and Jackson Lears have warned that the wealthy and powerful sometimes cling not to the old racist, nationalist, or religious nostrums that most people associate with power but to swift market currents that assume the benign mantle of pragmatism even as they destroy the communities and values on which many people depend.

What Zakaria hails as “centrism” becomes, in his hands, little more than an excuse for elites who are wreaking such destruction and are seeking desperately to rationalize it. (No one lamented this more, by the way, than Zakaria’s hero Giamatti, who described a university president’s life as that of a fund-raising song-and-dance man).

Sometimes, adopting such rationalizations does involve telling national governing elites certain hard, “pragmatic” truths that do have to be reckoned with. At Yale’s Jackson Institute, Zakaria told his audience that “A billion people now do jobs that American middle class and workers, blue and white collar, used to do.” And he doubted that either political party could do much about it. Once, Americans had all the capital and the know-how, he said, but, now, other peoples “have the resources, and they know how.”

The audience was silent in gloomy acquiescence, but why? Zakaria’s interlocutor on stage, Yale President Richard Levin, an economist, opined that a bigger stimulus might have a more redemptive multiplier effect on the economy than Zakaria allowed, and that is only the beginning of what ought to have been said. Neither man questioned the rules of the game under which corporations have evolved, not only on their own initiative but through decades of jurisprudence that amounts to an extended lie the United States has been telling itself about the nature of its economy and of itself a republic.

That’s a story for another time; suffice it to say here that an alternative narrative — even a “centrist” one that Giamatti and Brewster might have endorsed — would ask whether and now the rules of global capitalism need to be rewritten.

In other times and places, people with the integrity required for such a challenge led unarmed, seemingly powerless, yet deeply sensible and well-organized movements that, against all expert and elite expectations, brought down vast-national security states anchored in injustice — apartheid South Africa; the segregationist regime of the American South that even Clarence Thomas called “totalitarian;” the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe with a minimum of armed conflict: “How many divisions has the Pope?” Stalin once quipped. When Pope John Paul II stepped off a plane in Warsaw, greeted by a million unarmed Poles, Stalin’s successors got their answer. The best explanation of this kind of power is in Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World. I commend it to Zakaria and Chait for a long, slow reading.

One of the places it worked was, of course, British India, two decades before Zakaria’s birth. But is there a nerve or bone in his body that responds sympathetically to such movements?

“When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice,” Westen writes, “he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend….. He… knew that whether a bully hid behind a [policeman’s billy]club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.”

As Zakaria spoke darkly about the professor who’d never run for dog-catcher and who thought he could wave a magic wand, I thought I saw the face of a bully’s consigliere. Our one-man Davos, usually so camera-ready and composed, morphed into something almost cadaverous, a caricature of a bewigged Tory chiding Levelers. He did it again on his own CNN program, telling “liberals” to “grow up.”

What Westen wants is — in his own words, in the Times essay that deserves re-reading at the end of this discussion — is “a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative,” one that explains “that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so that they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.”

It would be heartening to see Zakaria, Chait, and other writers — who have more freedom than presidents, yet who seem driven to defend the corporate state and the Democratic Party in their present forms — form their own mouths around the following words:

The global casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-bamboozling juggernaut may feel inexorable and inescapable to most of us. But for that very reason it is becoming illegitimate and is unsustainable. Our responsibility as writers is to help to develop public narratives that pose the right questions and possibilities.

Westen’s courageous essay is especially

gratifying to me because, when he was a freshman in a Harvard expository writing class I taught in 1976, he recounted a story, worthy of the movie “The Insider,” about his own father’s brave but suppressed efforts to get the tobacco company where he worked as a research scientist to come clean about the health risks of its products. I can’t help wondering if Zakaria would have overlooked or minimized those risks had he been around at the time when Westen’s Dad was trying to air them.

Obama himself has written of his debt to “the prophets, the agitators,… the absolutists…. I can’t summarily dismiss those possessed of a similar certainty today.” Why can’t Zakaria and Chait write that, too, especially when the “agitator” is as reasonable and sophisticated as Drew Westen? What drives them to portray him as some kind of naif or crank? Was it the long list of talking-points rebutting Westen that the White House reportedly issued the morning his essay appeared?

The pundits have circled their wagons, but “Thought is not, like physical strength, dependent on the number of its agents,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. “On the contrary, the authority of a principle is often increased by the small number of men by whom it is expressed. The words of one strong-minded man, addressed to the passions of a listening assembly, have more power than the vociferations of a thousand orators….. Thought is an invisible and subtle power, that mocks all the efforts of tyranny.”

And of tyranny’s deniers and obfuscators, too.

Dear Fareed, Jonathan, Barack: What seems inexorable and inescapable to you ma seem illegitimate and unsustainable to millions before long. The more that reasonable truth-tellers like Drew Westen take their stand against it now, the fewer cranks, agitators, and absolutists you’ll have to contend with later.

I really suggest re-reading Westen and, instead of nit-picking and deriding, connecting with the arc of justice as other unlikely but transformative movements in history have done.

_____________________________________________________

From The New Republic’s list of ‘overrated thinkers’:

“FAREED ZAKARIA  is enormously important to an understanding of many things, because he provides a one-stop example of conventional thinking about them all. He is a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle. He was for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it, and now is an active member of the ubiquitous “declining American power” chorus. When Obama wanted to trust the Iranians, Zakaria agreed (“They May Not Want the Bomb,” was a story he did for Newsweek); and, when Obama learned different, Zakaria thought differently. There’s something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment. Most of Zakaria’s appeal is owed to the A-list aura that he likes to give off—“At the influential TED conference …” began a recent piece in The New York Times. On his CNN show, he ingratiates himself to his high-powered guests. This mix of elitism and banality is unattractive. And so is this: “My friends all say I’m going to be Secretary of State,” Zakaria told New York magazine in 2003. “But I don’t see how that would be much different from the job I have now.” Zakaria later denied making those remarks.”

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Talking Points Memo Café

October 2, 2008, 12:00 PM

By Jim Sleeper

[Author’s note:] This was written during the 2008 near-meltdown of the U.S. economy owing to its excessive financialization, hastened by neoliberal congressional Democrats as well as Republicans who had repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which, since the 1930s, had blocked savings banks’ participation in irresponsible investment practices that precipitated the 2008 crisis.]

I’ve read all the sober explanations of why we must hold our noses and support the bailout. I’ve watched Barack Obama intone the same explanations on the Senate floor. Sorry, but it all fits into a neoliberal paradigm whose adherents haven’t noticed that it’s over. Watching the Senate’s pompous porkers play populist with the package was like watching Hapsburgs greet their subjects in July, 1914.

True, we’re all tethered into the dance: We love our cars; couldn’t imagine reconfiguring our lives to save energy, enhance walking, reduce obesity, end road rage. Yet the car culture is only a sample of what an increasingly manic, drugged, violent, and stupid America of sovereign consumers has been choreographed into “choosing.”

Wait till January, they say, and we’ll straighten things out. Sorry, but with this package America has lost its legitimacy and morale. Its decline will accelerate, even with an uptick in the markets in which, yes, we are all invested.

Unless the populist indignation is translated into a more thorough reform of the consumer-marketing juggernaut that has dissolved our civic culture, this package, coming atop so much else in the Bush years, will be just another a nail in the coffin of the American republic. Stop a minute and consider why.

I’ve recycled John Adams a few times too many, but you can’t be reminded too often that

“[W]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependants and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.” :

Why did he say this in 1787? As soon as King George III was gone, even the most triumphant of the founders took a long look at the American people and found themselves worrying about how a republic ends. History showed them it can happen not with a coup but a smile, a sweetener, and a friendly swagger — as soon as the people tire of the burdens of self-government and can be jollied along into servitude, or scared into it, when they’ve become soft enough to intimidate.

Sound hyperbolic? Even that conservative banker Alexander Hamilton sketched the stakes by writing in the Federalist that history had destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

And Ben Franklin sketched the odds, warning that the Constitution “can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall have become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

How might that happen? “History does not more clearly point out any fact than this, that nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces,” wrote Founder Richard Henry Lee.

The Founders were all reading Edward Gibbon’s then-new account of how the Roman republic had slipped, degree by self-deluding degree, into an imperial tyranny. Leaders could bedazzle citizens out of their liberties by titillating, intimidating, and stampeding them into becoming bread-and-circus mobs that “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army … .”

Gibbon added pointedly that Augustus, the first real emperor, “wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government” and that he knew that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”

Campaigning in an open shirt, as it were, “that artful prince … humbly solicited their suffrages for himself, for his friends and scrupulously practiced all the duties of an ordinary candidate … . The emperors … disdained that pomp and ceremony which might offend their countrymen but could add nothing to their real power…..”

And so Rome became what Gibbon called “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth,” not by conspiracy but thanks to a confluence of deeper currents that had enervated people’s republican virtues and beliefs.

But isn’t this what Bush and the Republicans vowed to save us from, with the help of God and martial valor? Isn’t it big-government liberals who would coddle us into servitude and decadence?

Plenty of liberal big-government folly has reinforced that perception, but so has Americans’ reluctance to admit that the propaganda, seductions, and contractual strangleholds of corporations, driven by anomic finance, have become ever more confining, intrusive, and degrading in our work lives, our entertainments, and even our public discourse controlled as so much of it is by conglomerate-hired editors and op-ed savants.

The founders understood that the people can’t enhance freedom by handing themselves over from their elected officials to their paymasters. Some honorable American conservatives — diplomats, retired generals, even some pundits — want to spare us that fate, but they have found themselves as outnumbered and marginalized as Dennis Kucinich.

So great and justified is the public anger, though, that even the bailout’s apologists are scrambling to acknowledge that something better will have to follow. A Los Angeles Times editorial today knocks proponents of the bailout for trying to buy off the rage

“by larding it with tax breaks, handouts and pet projects. …Others… just seem frivolous. The message, though, was that supporters of the financial industry bailout had given up trying to convince voters that it was in their interests too, and not just Wall Street’s. Instead, they coated the bitter bailout pill with a bunch of end-of-session sweeteners to make it easier to swallow.”

And the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof acknowledges that “…..[C]ritics of the bailout have reason to be furious. It is profoundly unfair that working-class American families lose their homes, their jobs, their savings, while plutocrats who caused the problem get rescued. If the Congressional critics of the bailout want to do some lasting good, they should come back in January — after approving the bailout now — with a series of tough measures to improve governance and inject more fairness in the economy.”

But former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich was more candid, right here in TPM, noting that the bailout

“will be funded by additional federal debt, issued mostly to foreign governments especially the Chinese and in the Middle East. And, strictly speaking, it’s not even a bailout: The Treasury will buy and hold mortgage-backed securities whose value is now unknown because there’s no market for them, until housing prices start rising again…..

“But whatever it’s called and however it’s financed,” Reich continues, “it’s still an outrage. America’s foreign policy is made no more flexible by going into deeper hock to the Chinese and the Middle East. And the deal still subjects American taxpayers to some risk, especially if the housing market doesn’t bounce back for many years. Worse, the bill can’t help but prop up the earnings of many Wall Street executives whose malfeasance, greed, and stupidity got us into this mess in the first place. And it does nothing for average Americans except avoid economic calamity. (The provision ostensibly helping distressed homeowners is to be used at the discretion of the Treasury Department, so it’s mostly a sham.)”

Writer and editor Paul Bass, whose New Haven Independent is running fascinating stories of how people in that medium-sized city are experiencing and responding to the crisis, notes that “In those precious hours after the House bill defeat,” those who had defeated it, including conservative “Republicans, the Congressional Black Caucus, and some progressive white Democrats, should have met for an hour and drawn up the bill they would have supported on commonly agreed upon provisions. It would have been awesome. They had 20 hours or so when they were in the driver’s seat.”

Would-be builders of a serious coalition against the corporatist-statist consolidation of a post-republican America now have not 20 hours, but three months. Let good leaders step forward and help serious republicans convene. One of those leaders may be Barack Obama — if he’s elected, if the crisis worsens, and if populist anger keeps rising and seeking direction.

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Talking Points Memo Cafe

September 30, 2008, 11:02PM

By Jim Sleeper –

Some supporters of the bailout package that failed on Monday still think that it sank only because a tidal wave of short-sighted, right-wing populist rage topped the levee and swamped the House. Their Exhibit A is Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), who warned, “In the Bolshevik Revolution, the slogan was ‘Peace, land, and bread.’ Today, you are being asked to choose between bread and freedom. I suggest the people on Main Street have said they prefer their freedom, and I am with them.”

Such demagoguery is containable, bailout proponents say: A slightly-more “populist” package will pass the House soon, perhaps with a push from the Senate. And if the economy still worsens, the same angry citizens who scared those representatives who weren’t “with them” as fully as Rep. McCotter into voting Nay will turn against them soon enough for having opposed the bailout.

A small problem: A lot of House “Bolsheviks” and liberals opposed it, too.

“Why aren’t we reducing debt for Main Street instead of Wall Street?” demanded Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich. “Is this the United States Congress or is it the board of directors of Goldman Sachs?”

There was even a “Bolshevik” in the majority of McCotter’s Michigan delegation that opposed the plan, 9 to 6: Detroit’s John Conyers asked, “If injecting credit into our financial industry is the solution to the current supposed credit squeeze, why hasn’t this body been given… other proposals, like giving tax payers a no-risk equity stake in the bailout recipients or supporting the direct injection of capital into the financial industry, as we did during the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s? The likely reason is because Wall Street would have to give up a piece of its wealth…”

Other left-leaners opposed the deal as strongly as conservatives did, including Marcy Kaptur, a comrade of Kucinich in the Ohio delegation, which voted against it 10 to 7. So did dozens of center-liberal Democrats, many from seats safe enough to have survived populist wrath had they backed the bill.

What explains this un-harmonic convergence of left and right? Conservative Republicans will groan to learn that it evokes a world-weary French apercu, Les extremes se touchent: In politics, the opposite extremes sometimes touch, sharing a course of action for reasons antipathetic to each other.

In interwar Europe (to speak of real extremes).apocalyptic Marxists were as eager as fascists to see bourgeois democracy fail, imagining that that would unleash a proletarian revolution. But antipathy to Wall Street isn’t as fantastical or nihilist as that, and it’s nowhere near as irrational and uncontrollable as a tidal wave.

True, we are all wired into the current system, and if layoffs were announced and credit cards frozen we’d be frightened – for about a day, TPM’s own Dean Baker contends, until the Fed took over major banks, as it almost did in the 1980s, bouncing their executives and shareholders and letting the system of payments operate as before.

Serious restructuring would ensue: We could fix credit without giving so much to Wall Street and entrusting so much power to Henry Paulson and other big architects and apologists of what went wrong.

That’s reason enough to discredit a second bailout bill. This is politics, after all, not a storm watch, and better leadership could turn the populist surge into something deeper and wiser. It could craft a stimulus package to boost borrowers’ loan paybacks and credit ratings and, with that, lending and economic growth that are real this time, not imaginary.

Take a second look at what Kucinich and Conyers are saying. Are they really seeking less freedom than the sloganeering McCotter? The extremes are touching here because the statist, corporatist bailout now on the table is itself scary in basic republican terms. Rep. McCotter may see the hand of Lenin, and some on the left the hand of Mussolini, but another, deeper warning comes from the center of the republic itself:

“When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards,” wrote John Adams in 1787. “…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependants and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”

A tweaked bailout package won’t change that, especially if it comes from the United States Senate, which is three times further from populism and three times closer to Wall Street. Even Thaddeus McCotter isn’t wrong to say that those who would save the current system really will lose the American people.

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By Jim Sleeper – March 28, 2011, 2:13PM

“Aren’t you going to say something about David Brooks’ new book, The Social Animal?” a reader-friend e-mailed me yesterday. It was the most recent of several such inquiries, but until I heard Brooks on a book-tour talk show this morning, I wasn’t inclined to add to what’s been said: Thomas Nagel’s New York Times review was eviscerating, if also condescending and churlish; Alan Wolfe’s more thoughtful assessment in The New Republic (subscription required) called it “a book by a conservative in which science is being used to buttress a prior point of view.”

But after listening to Brooks run through his folksy sound bites on the Albany, New York NPR station’s “The Roundtable” with Joe Donahue this morning, I realized that someone should explain why his summaries of recent neuroscience and cognitive science research merely dress up old and important truths as new breakthroughs. Someone should explain why Brooks, that great portraitist of middle class life, is invoking social science to confirm what every mother more decent than Amy Chua has always known.

The reason is that Brooks has spent so many years and so much ink mocking people who already understood these essential truths that he’s trying to achieve a political makeover without having to make an apology. To apologize might remind too many people of all the bloodshed, social degradation and individual dispossession and suffering that he has abetted so genially for twenty years. If Brooks were taking his own book’s message seriously as a writer, he’d admit that The Social Animal is, at bottom, his personal attempt to come in from the cold.

He’ll succeed at this, for reasons both good and bad: As the book should alert its most discerning readers, Brooks’ conscious if artful public penitence rides a powerful undercurrent of opportunistic ingratiation. Only time will tell whether the consequences themselves will be good or bad. I’m willing to wish him well while offering a few cautions.

On the good side, Brooks is quite right to declare — better late than never — that most of what we do in life is a consequence not of rational choices made by us as rugged individuals or the mythical homo economicus; rather, most of it is a consequence of unconscious needs stimulated in us and mediated in our lives by our interdependence with other people. “We’re not individuals who form relationships, we emerge out of relationships,” as Brooks said this morning.

He also rightly disparaged the individualist, free-market model of decision-making, characterizing the global financial crisis as an instance of emotional contagion among clueless bankers taking cues from one another. (The causes could be characterized a bit more systemically than that, but never mind.) Brooks even crooned a few proto-feminist ditties this morning: Not only does social science show that how an infant bonds with its mother foretells whether he or she will graduate high school, it shows that men like Brooks have more trouble than women in talking about their emotions and reading emotional signals in situations.

Who knew? Actually, a lot of people did. All of this is so central to so much feminist and progressive social and economic thinking that we tend to forget that some of it was always understood by certain conservatives, too, from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott. But, as Wolfe notes in the New Republic, America’s “free-market,” corporate-state conservatives have seldom been Burkeans. In fact, they’ve been heavy investors and shills for precisely the “rugged-individualist” thinking that Brooks, who shilled right alongside them, is now so keen to discredit. But I’ll bet that, on the more conservative talk shows, he’s noting that it’s not poverty per se, but the culture of poverty that’s causing social bonds to fray.

Now, he tells us, “I’m less individualistic” than before, and “I believe in early childhood education, I believe that government should help.” Thanks to his readings in social science, he adds, he has become more interested in the emotional and psychological bonds that connect people.

This last observation is a lie, and here we begin to see the disingenuous side of Brooks’ supposed makeover: He has always had a preternaturally keen eye for “the emotional and psychological bonds that connect people.” That was what made his writing so alluring to liberals in the first place. The difference then was that he spun his acute observations to make fun of liberals who took emotions and interdependency too seriously. He never seemed to wonder then — and doesn’t seem to now — whether all those hapless, feckless liberals’ reactions were really just that: reactive, not causal, to daily atrocities that were prompting them, from the contagion of greed among the bankers to the lusts of consumer marketers and warmongers — all of whom Brooks was defending and celebrating, as I showed apropos the Iraq war, predatory lending, and more at the time.

I reprised this harshly when The New Yorker’s George Packer tried to rehabilitate Brooks a few years ago, characterizing both of them as two monkeys grooming each other in the chattering classes’ zoo. A lot of what Brooks published and said in the years after that only confirmed my warnings.

Has he truly outgrown it all now? So we can hope. “The [ideological, left vs. right] labels are crude,” he said this morning, calling for “epistemological modesty” and urging that if we can start with a perception that we don’t have the whole truth, we’ll give greater priority to conversations across the old lines.

I’m reserving judgment, and I wish that people at The New Yorker and all the other places that are welcoming him in from the cold would reserve judgment, too. The “bad” reasons for Brooks’ makeover make its consequences unpredictable.

Toward the end of the 2008 election campaign, as Brooks was writhing and gyrating to maintain some intellectual self-respect without losing hold of his partisan and “market” niche as what Wolfe calls “the frequently interesting and reasonable-even-when-you-disagree-with-him” conservative, I predicted here that he ‘d slip into the posture of a wise, above-the-battle, columnist. I predicted that he would spin what Jonathan Chait of the New Republic has aptly called his “sociological ditties,” descending every so often to shoot the wounded, as he did recently to public-sector union workers in Wisconsin.

Now that the American national and global-capitalist dispensation he championed so sinuously is losing a lot of its legitimacy and sustainability, Brooks wants us to excuse him from the old game of ideological and partisan point-scoring. He’s donning the mantle of social science to say, credibly to the rest of us, what some of us have already been saying for years.

As I put it in an anthology of essays on George Orwell in 2004,

Orwell saw early while both the left and the right have credible claims on certain truths, each tends to cling to its own claims so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right about how the other is wrong. At any historical moment, one side’s claims may be the more liberating in struggle against the other’s institutionalized power and cant: For example, in the dark, proto-fascist Europe of the interwar years, Orwell sought liberation through democratic socialist movements, and indeed his sympathies abided with workers throughout his life, albeit sometimes against their self-proclaimed leaders as well as against Tories.

But he never forgot that both sides tend to get stuck in their imagine upswings and to disappoint in the end. The left’s almost willful misreadings of human nature made it founder in swift currents of nationalism and religion, pitching from sweeping denials of their importance to abject surrender: Stalin’s Russian-nationalist “Socialism in One Country;” Marxism as a secular messianism. Yet neither did Orwell doubt that the corporate capitalist state and its ministries of information could pose Nineteen Eighty-Fourish dangers.

He was always on the left enough to seek solidarity in struggles against capitalist overreach, but he also held to an irreducible personal dignity and responsibility that balk at solidarity itself. Just as a healthy person walks on both a left foot and a right one, a society needs both a left foot of social equality and social provision – without which neither the individuality nor the communal bonds which conservatives honor could exist – and a right foot of personal liberty through responsibility, without which leftists’ social engineering would reduce persons to clients, cogs, or worse.

The tragedy of David Brooks is that he has always known both sides of this but wouldn’t admit to all of it, for unconscious or semi-conscious reasons his new book should have helped him to recognize.

As Nicholas Confessore showed unforgettably in the Washington Monthly in 2004, Brooks has always had a maddening habit of oscillating between serious commentary and conservative hackery: In one column, he’ll stroke his chin like a sober savant; in the next, he’ll gyrate shamelessly for ideologues such as George W. Bush and for partisan operators such as Karl Rove or Scooter Libby.

It’s a little hard to believe that he has shed that habit when you recall his most recent spins on the Republican governors’ public-sector union-busting efforts, or on the causes of the mortgage crisis. This is an especially odd moment for Brooks to be calling for conversations across partisan and ideological lines. As the civil-rights movement understood — but as neither Brooks nor those who are welcoming his overtures give much sign of understanding — dialogue sometimes has to coexist with conflict, with taking firm stands. Sometimes, in other words, it still matters what side you’re on and what you do to maintain credibly a stance from which to converse.

Brooks knows well Reinhold Niebuhr’s warning that social science offers no way out of this challenge. But I suspect that he and his enablers are trying to avoid facing it. When The New Yorker ran an early excerpt of Brooks’ new book, I couldn’t help recalling the critic Robert Warshow’s observation, more than half a century ago that that magazine serves the liberal who is seeking “the most comfortable and least compromising attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into actual conflict….

“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it,” Warshow continued. “This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately. The gracelessness of capitalism becomes an entirely external phenomenon, a spectacle that one can observe without being touched – above all, without feeling really threatened.”

Sorry to be the skunk at the garden party, but there really is something a bit too comfy about David Brooks’ revelations of truths that many have always known and that many have been willing to fight for.

Somebodyhaddasayit.

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November 21, 2008

Look Who Loves Ivy Neoliberal Leadership Now!

By Jim Sleeper

I’ve seen columnists become obsessed; I’ve seen them rage at or swoon over the objects of their obsessions. But nothing – not even my own supposed obsession with New York Times columnist David Brooks — compares with his decade-long, love-hate fixation on the Ivy League, the “love” side of which is on display in his column today celebrating an influx of Clinton Ivy Leaguers into the Obama administration.

Brooks’ “hate” side surfaces and re-surfaces, too, though. In a gloating, 2001 Wall Street Journal essay, “Bush In, Ivy Out,” he ridiculed Clinton Ivy Leaguers who were then being replaced by real Americans “from inland state schools” under two apostate Yalies, Bush and Cheney: “You couldn’t have swung an ax in Bill Clinton’s cabinet room without hitting a bunch of Ivy League grads,” Brooks snarked, getting meaner from then on. To him and all conservative propagandists, they were all liberal elitists.

Now Brooks is stroking many of the very same people as they return to Washington. He begins by teasing them, much as he did in 2001: “If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game [in] the next four years, we’re screwed.” This time his column gets nicer, but something more troubling is driving Brooks than his desire to have these people return his calls.

For years, Brooks’ Ivy fixation has kept him see-sawing: On the one hand, he often displays a pariah’s bitter ressentiment toward Yale and Harvard, borne of attraction to his heart’s lost desire (he went to the University of Chicago, so near and yet so far). On the other hand, in 2002 Brooks began to display a parvenu’s compulsive ingratiation, praising Yale lavishly in the Weekly Standard shortly before its Cold War historian John Gaddis, the Reagan diplomat Charles Hill, and other Yale neo-cons welcomed him for a semester to teach a course, to sell the Iraq War to students, and to promote his hosts’ Bush-worshipping Grand Strategy program in subsequent columns in the Times.

Only a year before, in the Wall Street Journal essay, Brooks had gloated that cleansing Washington of Ivy Leaguers had relieved the republic of their characteristic erudite bluffing, arrogant insouciance, and other presumptions of superiority that arouse “both awe and silent hatred” in regular Americans.

Surveying the Bush team, he’d exulted that Condoleezza Rice had gone to the University of Denver, Colin Powell to the City College of New York, Paul O’Neill to Fresno State, and Dick Cheney to the University of Wyoming after dropping out of Yale, and that “Karl Rove, the brains behind the whole operation, has no college degree at all.”

At last, Brooks enthused, we’d be free of Ivy Leaguers who “know three facts about absolutely everything, and have been taught to weave these meager strands into conversational patter so fluid that it renders their full-of-it-ness irrelevant.” No longer would we suffer the “Paranoiaphilia” of Yalies like Hillary Clinton who assume “that there is a small, tightly knit conspiracy that secretly runs the world” and who, “instead of hating this elite, …love it because they think they are in it.”

Fortunately, Brooks announced, “The skills [George Bush] acquired in the Texas oil business are suited for a world in which success and failure are measured by tangible accomplishments, like oil production levels and after-tax profits” — so unlike Ivy League presumptions “suited to a world in which the definition of success is totally unrelated to tangible accomplishment of any kind.”

Brooks wasn’t far off the mark in spotting what mesmerizes but at the same time galls so many about the Ivy League, often with good reason. In 2003, he devoted his very first Times column, “Bred for Power, to that very subject.

In 2005, Deep Throat’s self-disclosure prompted a nasty Brooks column, supposedly on the lessons of Watergate but really all about the compulsive networking of Ivy grads like Bob Woodward, who as a young reporter had met DeepThroat through just such ingratiation.

Brooks does understand that while America owes a lot historically to Yale’s and Harvard’s once-deep, now iffy civic-republican leadership training, it owes just as much to graduates of “inland state schools” and even of no schools at all. I’ve argued that the Ivies now risk becoming career factories and cultural gallerias for a global ruling class accountable to no polity or moral code. The American republic and the world deserve better.

So what does Brooks say now that the pseudo-omniscient Ivy grads he took down a peg in 2001 are returning to Washington under Obama? He writes that they’re wonderful! Gone are his japes about the know-it-all bluffing, paranoiaphilia, and other presumptions he spotlighted in 2001. Now, he decides that “much as I want to resent these over-educated Achievatrons …, I find myself tremendously impressed…..”

Brooks names many of these impressive people, but some are the same people he had in mind when he lampooned Ivy know-it-alls in 2001.

This time, they “are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists.” This time, they’re “open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence….. They are admired professionals, ….hardheaded and pragmatic.” This time, “They’re thinking holistically — there’s a nice balance of policy wonks, governors and legislators. They’re also thinking strategically.”

Mirabile dictu, they are “the best of the Washington insiders. Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced ‘fresh faces’ to change things.” This time, “Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being.” (Such as Karl Rove, whom Brooks defended to the end?)

Finally, gone is Brooks’ claim that the Ivy definition of success “is totally unrelated to tangible accomplishment of any kind,” unlike Bush’s success (??!!) in the oil fields of Texas. This time, the Ivy grads on Obama’s team approach problems “with practical creativity. Any think tanker can come up with broad doctrines, but it is rare to find people who can give the president a list of concrete steps he can do day by day to advance American interests.”

Have the Ivy stars all had civic-republican epiphanies and moved in Brooks’ direction since 2001? Nope. Has Brooks changed, then? Not really, although it’s fair to say that he’s gotten confused. He knows that the country has repudiated the conservative movement and Republican Party which he defended sinuously for all of his adult life until corruption, Katrina, the revelations of Cobra II about the Iraq War, and the financial meltdown began forcing him to distance himself from most of what he’d championed.

So here he is, a man without a clear partisan position on the media’s color-coded spectrum, fighting for a niche by congratulating the “liberal elitist” victors for not veering too far to the left. Yet his emotional Ivy see-saw continues, and while he’ll purr happily if these people return his calls, he’ll waste no time rediscovering their arrogance and myopia when they don’t. What he won’t do is give up his obsession with Ivies.

What a waste of energy and attention. The moment Obama and the enlarged Democratic Congress take office and try to clean up the mess we’re in, conservatives will pretend that it wasn’t really George Bush, Henry Paulson, and other Republicans who reconstituted themselves literally as Marx’s ruling committee of the bourgeoisie and made “the corporate state” not a shibboleth but a reality. No, conservatives will be back to blaming Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, Barney Frank, and Ivy League elitists for having brought us to statist socialism.

Brooks knows better, and he desperately wants these likely targets of right-wing venom to think well of him and talk to him. But he’ll betray them in the end, because his damning and praising are but two sides of the same coin of obsessive attraction and ressentiment he shares with too many of his readers.

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By Jim Sleeper – May 2, 2011, 10:45AM

There’s something valid in “great man” versions of history, including those focusing on the diabolically great: Without Adolph Hitler, it’s unlikely that German racism, especially anti-Semitism, would have become as shattering and unspeakable as it did. Without Osama bin Laden, Islamicist terrorism probably wouldn’t have become as maniacally effective and widespread as it has.

But while these men had tremendous catalytic or poisonous effects on the societies they touched, that was partly because they were channeling dark, swift undercurrents that were already running in those societies. And that’s partly why the damage such leaders do in harnessing the dark undercurrents so often outlasts them.

Learning of Osama bin Laden’s demise, I can’t help but recall L. Paul Bremer III’s announcing in Baghdad the capture of Saddam Hussein: “Ladies and Gentlemen, We got him!” And our troubles in Iraq were over, right?

They were only beginning. From the moment we toppled Hussein’s statue in April, 2003, thousands of Iraqis had come forward, knowing, as the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins recalled two years later, “that they had to seize the moment, that it might not come again. And they knew… how difficult it would be to carry their broken and brutalized country with them. So they started newspapers, they organized political parties, they called meetings to start a national conversation.

“And now, today, many of these Iraqis…. have been shot, tortured, burned, disfigured, thrown into ditches, disappeared. Thousands of them: editors, lawyers, pamphleteers, men and women. In a remarkable campaign of civic destruction, the Baathists and Islamists who make up the insurgency located the intellectual heart of the nascent Iraqi democracy and, with gruesome precision, cut it out. As much as any single factor, the death of Iraq’s political class explains the difficulties of the country’s rebirth. The good guys are dead.”

One might ask why this was America’s problem. Saddam Hussein had murdered or terrorized democrats every day, and, after he was gone, it certainly wasn’t American GI’s or the Young Republicans playing at governing in the Green Zone who kept murdering “the good guys.” It was Baathists, terrorists, tribal warlords and gangsters.

But it was George W. Bush, another of history’s “great men” – remember “unitary executive” power? — who had cast Saddam and his loyalists as Baathists, terrorists, tribalists and gangsters, all rolled into one, and who had claimed that we’d liberate Iraqis for democracy by decapitating the regime through which Saddam Hussein had been channeling all those currents.

The currents remained, and they’d been set running in the first place partly because the West, including the U.S., had done a lot to mix and stir them. Decapitation hasn’t gone far toward resolving the consequences.

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By Jim Sleeper 

October 30, 2009, 3:53PM

Last year here I criticized enlightened denizens of the Chattering Classes Zoo for trying to rehabilitate David Brooks, an ingratiating neo-con who’s as doomed as a charming, brilliant vampire to suck the blood of the American republic while thinking he’s in love. (It’s Halloween, okay? But this is dead serious, too.)

In his Times columm today Brooks gives us yet another sinuous warm-up for the strength-sapping passion that drives all his comic lines and phone calls to experts. Linking Afghanistan’s dark prospects to his doubts about Obama’s “tenacity” against real evils, Brooks tries to seduce us into a real war. As with Iraq, he’s sublimating primal fears and resentments that fuel his and other neo-cons’ grand causes.

But mightn’t they be right this time? Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, and Obama isn’t Bush. The problem with writers like Brooks is that, in their bones, they’re jingoists: Their patriotism requires enemies, and they fight wars with other people’s blood while currying Established Power’s favor with all the determination of heat missiles seeking heat. The world is hard, dark, and cruel, as they tell us – and some people do need to be told. But Brooks & Co. have faith in only one way to save it. Watch David run:

In the first year of the Iraq war, Brooks swooned over Bush’s and Rumsfeld’s characterologically ignorant tenacity against insuperable complexities. He denigrated the war’s critics, but as it went bad, he rehabilitated those critics who’d argued that only more troops would prevail.

Then, as the Surge failed to secure very much that could outlast American occupation, Brooks began praising the “deliberative” Obama as Obama moved toward Power. But now Brooks frets over Obama’s characterologically intelligent respect for the insuperable complexities Bush ignored. And Brooks flirts with General (and Possible Presidential Candidate) Stanley McChrystal.

The point I wish his admirers would take from all this is that, characterologically (by which I mean something worse than neurotically), Brooks has to do this. The common thread in all his re-positionings is a supposedly knowing, conservative apprehension of the need to use force against force. We have no choice.

Sometimes, that’s true. But Iraq was a neo-con-abetted war of choice, and a disastrously wrong one for fighting terrorists. It’s one big reason we’ve “lost” Afghanistan, even assuming we could have outdone the British or the Russians in “winning” it. (The Russian defeat has been reprised chillingly, from Soviet archives, in the Times by Victor Sebestyen. The analogies are daunting.)

Brooks tells us he’s spent the last few days calling around to experts who wonder portentously, as he does, whether Obama has the tenacity to sally forth into the doom Brooks unknowingly craves.

He was, craving it in 2004, a year into the Iraq war:

“Come on people, let’s get a grip. This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam….. I’ve spent the last few days talking with people who’ve spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. … As Charles Hill, the legendary foreign service officer who now teaches at Yale, observed, ‘I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the boldness and resolve.'” Brooks touted the Rumsfeld “dead-enders” line and assured us tenacity would bring victory.

By 2006, as I’ve noted, Brooks had stopped denigrating critics who’d warned two years earlier of the quagmire he’d assured us wasn’t there. Now,he told us,

“Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but… the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: The US was not in the midst of a conventional war but was in the first days of a guerrilla war [and] that it was time to shelve the rosy scenarios…. In TV studios and on op-ed pages,… retired officers and columnists called for more troops and officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw. Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks saw nothing wrong.”

Neither did Brooks, of course, but by 2006 he was with those who’d called from the beginning for more troops, not less. He and all the neo-cons would support the Surge that has given us the Iraq we see now.

David the vampire had a domestic appetite, too. He’d made his name, in fact, by sidling up to confused, upscale liberals and purring, “C’mon, you know that you really love your real estate and your unearned income, and that you like circulating commodities more than ideas. And… [wink, tickle] it’s okay!“

I’d never before seen a political columnist work himself into deliriums watching other people shop. Brooks seemed almost to have forgotten, except in rhetorical gestures at the end of his Bobos in Paradise, that we must be fellow-citizens as well as consumers, or else we are lost. But to be serious about citizenship is to spend a lot of time and energy nourishing a disposition to rise above narrow self-interest, especially in peacetime, not just in wars that twist and drain the very public strengths the war-makers claim to be mobilizing.

On Brooks’ watch at the Times, his lusts for consumerism, for comic sociology, for war-making, and for baiting liberals who try to cultivate the softer arts of citizenship were ill-timed. His tweaking of do-gooders was accompanied by Katrina, with Blackwater patrolling the streets of New Orleans; by predatory finance capital ‘s transformation of real estate into un-real estate; by a pestilence of executive and Wall Street welfare queens; and — from Enron to Cardinal Law, or from Bernie Madoff to the media’s necrophilia over Michael Jackson — by a riot from the top by America’s multi-problem overclass, whose tangle of pathologies the indulgent Brooks had been too busy deriding liberals to notice.

Abroad, we sowed and reaped a whirlwind borne of displacing our anxieties about these ills into a confrontation with the unquestionably evil Saddam — namely, a battered Iraq that the Surge hasn’t saved and that we have now made ourselves too weak fiscally and morally to expand or reform.

Brooks isn’t quite as far gone as William Kristol, his former mentor at the flagship neo-con Weekly Standard, who has given us such great American leaders as Alan Keyes, Dan Quayle, and Sarah Palin (whom Kristol “discovered” on a Weekly Standard cruise in Alaska and commended to John McCain). I don’t really imagine Brooks bursting into applause and cheers, as Kristol’s staff did, when Obama failed to win America’s bid to host the Olympics in Chicago.

Facing the real disasters I’ve mentioned above, Brooks knew enough to start pirouetting furiously, with prophylactic applications of Malcolm Gladwell in his columns and with cuddly feelers to people who can help him buff up his image among liberals. Yet too many of his columns, especially a breathtakingly sophistical account of the mortgage meltdown, showed him still plying his intellectual usury.

Now he informs us that “Afghan villagers,” unsure of “the state of Obama’s resolve,” are “hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws.”

The options are indeed grisly. But does Brooks really believe that if Obama’s tenacity became as obdurate Bush’s, Afghan villagers would trust thousands more white and black American guys with boots and buzz cuts? Or is he just sucking more American blood and calling it love?

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David Brooks resorts to it often

By Jim Sleeper – July 22, 2008, 4:56AM

Occasionally people ask me why I’m so hard on New York Times columnist David Brooks, who some find quite insightful and others so irrelevant they can’t understand why I get angry at all.

At last, I’ve found a way to explain it. It’s all there in his column of today, “The Culture of Debt.” I’m sure that many of my correspondents will find the column reasonable on first reading. Yet it captures everything that is wrong with this man and his ideas — and maybe with readers who believe him.

Brooks, a self-described conservative and sometime practitioner of “comic sociology,” author of On Paradise Drive and creator of the all-American working-class “patio man,” knows he has to say something about the devastation raging through countless recently-viable neighborhoods like the one in Cleveland featured on Bill Moyers’ Journal last Friday night.

Brooks knows that millions of the very homeowners he’s been rhapsodizing may lose not only their present homes but any prospect of owning homes again. But he never comments honestly on information such as that presented by The Nation economics editor William Greider and public officials in Ohio, in one of the most riveting and instructive Moyers shows I’ve ever seen.

Brooks makes what we have to presume was an individual, moral decision to deflect the truth and, indeed, to lie. To do it, he shifts from comic sociology to pathetic sociology: With great sobriety, he wrist-slaps predatory lenders, but he really sticks it — more in sorrow than in anger, of course — to the hapless, desperate homeowners who sat in their own living rooms listening respectfully to smooth talkers they’d invited in to offer them fistfuls of “cash back” in return for signing their savings and hopes away.

Citing a Times story about a woman whose home was foreclosed in a tsunami of predatory lending, Brooks frets that Times readers posting comments on whom to hold accountable have been talking past each other: Blame the predatory lenders, one side says. No, says the other side, blame homeowners who lacked enough grown-up self-restraint to say, “I can’t do this deal,” or “I’d better not go there.”

Brooks, fresh from deep reckonings in sociology and political philosophy, announces a way out of this either/or debate by proclaiming a “third position… held in overlapping ways by liberal communitarians and conservative Burkeans.” (Whenever he does this, he’s about to drown some truths in euphemisms and plausible half-truths like the ones predatory lenders tell.)

Brooks’ truism-drenched “third position” starts “with the notion that… individuals don’t build their lives from scratch. They absorb the patterns and norms of the world around them. Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.

“According to this view, what happened to [the borrower who was dispossessed], and the nation’s financial system, is part of a larger story. America once had a culture of thrift. But over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded.”

So blame the culture. Blame the individual decision makers. Blame both. And be sure to step back and remember that the individual and the society are interdependent. This is a shell game on the edge of an abyss, and since Brooks chatters on about our individual responsibility for eroding norms, let’s hold him individually responsible for his decision to play this game.

1. Brooks lies about how the devastation occurred. An “unspoken code has been silently eroded,” he reveals. Silently, David? Marketers of all kinds have spent billions for 40 years telling Americans they deserve a break today and that marketers from McDonald’s and credit-card companies to mortgage lenders will give it to them instantly.

This has been the most monumental, unrelenting, intrusive, mindless and therefore irresponsible campaign in history to destroy a culture, barring perhaps the fascist and communist propaganda juggernauts and worse of the 1930s. We are destroying neighborhoods. We are destroying hearts and minds. Our governments are in on it, not just via de-regulation but via lotteries and big bailouts to shareholders who are never held responsible for their individual decisions to back these scams.

What else does Brooks need to know before he’ll make his own responsible decision to write that decency hasn’t “silently eroded” but has been clamorously assaulted? Hello? Last year in New Haven, we wound up saying “Hello?” four or five times an evening during the dinner hour to callers from local mortgage lending companies. How hard is it for David Brooks to imagine that poorly-educated people, desperate for cash and barely meeting their mortgage payments, would take those calls?

Brooks makes sure to finger, ever so deftly, the specific, real-life weaknesses and moral lapses not of the people who made decisions to design, invest in, and conduct these assaults, but of the woman in the Times story, who, “after her divorce,… went on a shopping spree to make herself feel better.” He tells us nothing about shopping habits and decisions of her many white-collar assailants. Why not?

Ever since I wrote The Closest of Strangers after spending the better part of a decade in black north and central Brooklyn, I’ve had a reputation for not letting poor people off the hook for bad decisions that were ultimately, irreducibly matters of personal responsibility. Drawing from intimate experience you can read about in the book, I’ve rebuked some liberals for refusing to pay disadvantaged people the elementary compliment of holding them to the same standards of decency and self-control to which they’d hold their own children. I don’t need cheap sociology from Brooks; I need the candor of a talented writer’s honest reflections.

2. Brooks lies about the true sources of the devastation. With caveats and cameos, he keeps readers focused on the erosion of norms among us all. There were no “pushers” behind this process. But, in truth, it was unleashed by corporate capital and, politically, by the Republican Party, whose deregulatory, bailout, and other corporate-welfare tactics Brooks has defended shamelessly for a decade. (I’m not letting Democrats off the hook; Chuck Schumer, as a New York Senator, played a big role in deregulating Wall Street and the banks.)

3. Brooks lies about the fact that most of the individual decisions in this crisis were not made by homeowners. He’s fastidious in noting that the foreclosed homeowner hasn’t always behaved responsibly, be he doesn’t find a single instructive anecdote to illustrate the irresponsibility of those who sought her out and zoomed in on her.

Why not? Brooks might tell you that he was quoting a Times story that didn’t provide that information. (Surprise, surprise.) But I’ll bet that that’s not the reason. It’s that he didn’t even think of putting a spotlight on those people. This mental blank, astonishing in so astute a social observer, amounts to a lie, because it’s derivative of his lying about where and how to hold people accountable for the collapse.

Brooks doesn’t tell us about, say, the stressed and, yes, morally irresponsible telemarketer who signed on to accelerate the storm. Not a word about the individual irresponsibility of the mortgage executive and his consultants and lawyers who designed the campaign, or about the sharpie salesmen who visited the homes whose equity they were about to steal while sitting politely on the targets’ sofas, or of the bankers who bought up the mortgages and foreclosed. Nothing about politicians, fed by all these predators, who eased the miscreants’ way in more ways than I can count.

Didn’t these people make any of the individual decisions Brooks claims had ripple effects on social norms? How can a Burkean conservative be silent about this? When Brooks writes that a culture of responsibility has “silently eroded,” isn’t his own silence about that erosion part of the reason for it? What does he think his job is?

The closest he comes to telling the truth is in the following paragraph, which begins by blaming both sides equally, if euphemistically, for irresponsible decisions. But tell me who you think Brooks expects you to leave the paragraph blaming — and then watch the Bill Moyers Journal segment, please, and see how he is lying:

“McLeod [a foreclosed homeowner] and the lenders were not only shaped by deteriorating norms, they helped degrade them. Despite all the subterranean social influences, there still is that final stage of decision-making when individual choice matters. Each time an avid lender struck a deal with an avid borrower, it reinforced a new definition of acceptable behavior for neighbors, family and friends. In a community, behavior sets off ripples. Every decision is a public contribution or a destructive act.”

Again, notice how this has been tilted. Brooks doesn’t wonder about predatory lenders’ and countless other marketers’ own shopping sprees, stealing sprees, or other compulsions. “Norms changed,” he shrugs, “and people began making jokes to make illicit things seem normal. Instead of condemning hyper-consumerism, they made quips about ‘retail therapy’…” Oh, so that’s what really happened.

On the Moyers show, William Greider offers a better explanation of how norms change and cultures decay: He describes the virtual repeal of laws against usury, the kind of predatory lending that, like loan-sharking, virtually enslaves desperate borrowers or squeezes them to death.

Brooks would rather keep us focused on the individual responsibility borne by homeowners and a few of the nastiest predatory lenders than he would make us notice the multi-billion dollar advertising campaign that promoted the culture of debt, or the massive deregulation and government bailouts that have made usury an unstoppable and devastating assault on the America he pretends to defend but on which he really just feeds, week after week. Where is the national greatness? Where is the social contract? Where, indeed, is the intellectual leadership?

The reason Brooks can’t do better is that he is an intellectual usurer. He palms off dollops of Burke and Oakeshott, swathing the people who are destroying the American republic — and all of us who are targets of their systemic depredations — in bromides about a kind of moral responsibility which Brooks does not himself exercise.

His pseudo-scholarly ruminations flatter some readers and make others deferential, but they are always suspiciously easy to follow. They’re the intellectual equivalent of “cash back” on an easy loan of false knowledge that leaves you feeling “had,” empty-handed, and politically paralyzed. That is how Brooks makes his living: He charms you up the garden path toward a politics that is nowhere.

What perversity drives him to it, I don’t know, but the crime itself cannot be doubted. How does this Burkean look at himself in the mirror? How do his employers and talk-show hosts look at themselves?

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By Jim Sleeper – January 22, 2011

No good prosecutor would posit a legal connection between the un-wired delusions of Tuscon’s crazed assassin Jared Loughner or the routinized delusions of the Senate candidate Sharon “Second Amendment remedies” Angle. But it’s true that deranged loners such as Loughner, although separated from us in many ways, are sometimes tuned in to our subconscious hatreds and fears more intimately than the law can acknowledge and than most of us care to admit.

Fox News’ Glenn Beck is surfacing those subconscious hatreds and fears, as demagogues have done since Thucydides’ time, poisoning public deliberation despite pious and sometimes weepy claims that he’s rescuing it. One of his targets is Professor Frances Fox Piven, as the New York Times reports. When Beck started in on Piven last year, the clever, sad writer John McWhorter did, too, as did the right-wing provocateur David Horowitz.

Piven’s ideology makes her plausibly guilty of the charge that she has wanted to bring down the capitalist system. But Beck rants at scapegoats precisely because he can’t acknowledge his own obeisance to the casino-finance, corporate-welfare capitalism that’s destroying conservatives’ cherished values and communities faster than any leftist could. That’s what his demagoguery is for: to deflect attention from the fact that he and most conservatives can’t square that obeisance with their moral and cultural claims.

Since I was an early critic of both Piven and this kind of capitalism, most recently here and on NPR, let me reiterate what I think is at stake in all this.

In March The New Republic sounded one of these alarms about the curse supposedly cast on African-Americans by Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward, who were said to have tried to bring on the Revolution by flooding the welfare rolls in the 1960s.

The purveyor of this long-exhausted half-truth at TNR was McWhorter, a young black linguist-turned-conservative racial bargainer. He cast Piven and Cloward among the crackpots he’d love to erase from public memory: “Rarely in American history have people with such a destructive agenda [as Piven and Cloward] had such power over the lives of the innocent….., helping to ruin the lives of, for example, some of my relatives.”

Such power? Wow! McWhorter was certainly on-message with thunderings against Piven and Cloward by Beck and Horowitz, everyone’s source on the horrors supposedly perpetrated by the two radical professors. But there’s a wrinkle: Horowitz’s own source on them was me — in The Closest of Strangers, Chapter 3, “The Politics of Polarization.” Horowitz himself told me this. And thereby hangs a tale and, with it, a sobering lesson.

Many on the left in those years were in thrall to an ideology about American capitalism’s dependence on racism that carried an immense burden of truth. But it needed some deconstruction, as I showed in my Chapter 3 and on pp. 159-162, drawing on long immersion in inner-city Brooklyn. In 1990, soon after it was published, Horowitz, whom I did not know, called to tell me that he loved the book and that he has a black in-law who could testify to its profound truth.

Easing myself off the phone with a polite “Thanks, but no thanks,” I didn’t realize that I was about to learn the danger of racial truth-telling in polarized times. The Closest of Strangers was slammed by the Piven-oriented left and showered with sloppy wet kisses from neo-cons.

I soon understood how George Orwell felt when he tried to tell the London left what was really going on within the anti-fascist struggle in Spain, which wasn’t as pure a social movement as some young idealists believed — and as cynical Stalinist operators wanted them to believe. For telling a more difficult truth, Orwell was promptly accused of giving aid and comfort to Franco and Hitler.

A lot of leftist ideology was similarly disingenuous in presenting black disruptions of America’s postwar bourgeois and white working-class paradise as the cat’s paw of revolutionary change. Most of America had, indeed, consigned blacks to a “reserve army of the unemployed,” making their resistance a humane and liberal as well as progressive imperative.

But Piven and Cloward’s call for a racialized “Politics of Turmoil,” which they celebrated in a book by that name and excerpted in The Nation in 1966, held no solutions for American political culture, unjust and hypocritical though that culture often was. It certainly offered no sound strategy for a socialist agenda by relying on a politics of racial paroxysm.

Neither, however were Piven and Cloward and their admirers the powerful, malevolent conspirators they’re now being made out to be. They weren’t the reasons why the liberal capitalist welfare state, such as it was, damaged its supposed beneficiaries.

The Closest of Strangers shows all this, as it does some deep, formative, and tragic reasons why many on the left still cling to overly racialist strategies for tackling broader structural problems that, we now see, are engulfing millions of whites as well as blacks. Some on the left dismiss, as neo-liberal mystifications, Obama’s reliance on less-confrontational approaches to race like those I’d been commending since the early 1990s.

Obama’s successes (such as they are), including his 2008 election, are maddening to white racist losers. So was the demise of segregation, which drove them to flail at liberals and to bomb black churches. But that was no reason for those who were winning, however painfully and slowly, to behave like the losers, as some racial protest artists did. Piven’s rhetoric sometimes made her seem one of them. That’s why Beck makes her a scapegoat, not for anything her welfare strategy actually accomplished.

Anyone who wants to consider these arguments more seriously than a blog post can do should read The Closest of Strangers, Chapter 3, in which I assess the racialist preoccupations of certain progressives and certain black conservatives such as Shelby Steele and, by implication, McWhorter.

I rather admired Steele’s The Content of Our Character, published in 1990 just before The Closest of Strangers. I quoted observations of his that were and remain profoundly right. Real life is like that.

I rather admired McWhorter’s Losing the Race, too, in a review for The Washington Monthly. But I cautioned McWhorter then against becoming the conservative-movement water-carrier he is now.

Especially so soon after Tuscon, the dangers of conspiracy mongering about Piven should give McWhorter and other conservatives pause. And no decent liberal can hope that the fires being stoked by them will illuminate progressive virtue and wake up everyone to the real dangers facing the country.

But just as George Kennan was right to urge containment of the Soviets rather than a desperate, nuclear-armed “rollback” of the Iron Curtain, we keepers of the American civic-republican faith had better develop wise ways to stand strong against the racist and capitalist abuses without lashing out histrionically and widening William Butler Yeats’ gyre. Kennan rued the fact that his call for “containment” was taken up by ranters who made him feel as if he’d dislodged a boulder from the top of a hill and had no choice but to watch it smash its way down the slope, setting off lethal avalanches.

The morning after I posted most of these observations here in April, a fragment of my post was quoted to Piven on NPR’s New York Station, WNYC, by show host Brian Lehrer. In response, Piven did an old-left dodge, calling me a “wobbler” between “the liberal left and the conservative right.”

She’s still at it. She’ll never understand that, as a civic-republican, I am occasionally scathing of both left and right, not because both sides are equally bad but because Piven’s left plays inexorably into the hands of the more-powerful right. They do it every time, and they know not what they do.

Someone who does understand what’s at risk here posted a comment on the WNYC site. “Jimmy of Staten Island,” a part of New York City where many “Archie Bunkers” live, isn’t fodder for Beck, but neither will he ever be reached by people who think as Piven does or write him off as a racist or “enabler” of racists. Read what he says below. He is our best answer to both Beck and those who make themselves easy scapegoats for Beck. He writes:

“Still a Democrat, still Union, but Lord Almighty, folks like Ms. Piven do little but alienate the folks in my local, and weaken their allegiance to the Democratic Party.

“Her ‘strategy’ to cause rifts within the voting blocs that make up Municipal Democratic Parties, ostensibly to force LBJ’s hand, did nothing but bring about Nixon-Reagan, and the long-term kneecapping of the greater, national Democratic party.

“To still spout that ‘rights’ without ‘responsibilities’ is ‘humiliating’ is just sad, and does nothing to retain a cohesive Democratic majority.”

I rest my case — against Piven & Co. for being so hapless, but, even more, against Beck et al for trying to make political hay out of leftist radicals supposedly holding “such power over the lives of innocents,” as McWhorter puts it.

All Beck is doing is shifting the blame away from where it really belongs: the corporate-welfare, casino-finance system that is strangling the American republic. Only perversely hypocritical conservatives — and perhaps a deranged loner or two — would fall for phony indignation like Beck’s.

Late note: — That’s why, as Michael Tomasky made clear in The Guardian, referencing this column, even those of us who think that Piven was thunderously wrong have to take heed and speak out against the thunder from Beck and Fox News.

A Comment by Michael Tomasky on this post:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2011/jan/24/us-politics-fox-news

Comments re: WNYC clip [15]

jim sleeper from nyc

I’m not sure of the protocol here on the WNYC website, and since I’ve carried on this kind of discussion in dozens of posts over at TPM and in several daily newspapers (Washington Post “Outlook” and chat session, Boston Globe, etc.) I’ll d refer Chris Malone and others to those columns, posts and the comments. They’re all at www.jimsleeper.com under “Latest Work”. The comments that others have posted in the past day at TPM about my Piven-Cloward column have drawn a number of responses from me, so you can go right there and see them, and if you’d like, join in.

Here let me just say that Piven was more than a little too slick on the show yesterday, claiming twice that she wasn’t presuming to challenge capitalism, while, at the same time, her defenders here emphasize how wrong it is to accuse her of racialism because she’s really going after the big structural issues (as, of course, she is). Anyone who reads my TPM posts (for example, three on corporate “speech” and the Supreme Court’s ruling on it, one of which was tweeted by Katrina Van den Heuvel as a ‘must read’) will decide that I’m more far more scathing of corporate capitalism than the disingenuous Piven who appeared on the show yesterday. So I’ll leave her and her celebrants to untangle themselves

For my own part, I’m all for strong social and political movements from below. But if I were a religious person, I’d get down on my knees and pray that none of them will ever again be like the National Welfare Rights Organization, whose demonstrations were so sadly similar to the Tea Partiers’ “town hall” meetings last summer that it’s no wonder Piven tried to sanitize it more than a little on the air.

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By Jim Sleeper – August 25, 2009, 9:35AM

Is town-meeting craziness genetic and exclusive to right-wingers? The left-activist historian Rick Perlstein implied as much in an engaging summary of their eruptions over the years. But to really unpack the orchestrated, perverse Tea Party passions that we’ve been seeing recently, analyze this:

As New York Mayor Ed Koch rose to address the American Public Health Association in 1979, demonstrators chanted, “Racist Koch, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.” As they pelted him with eggs, Nayvin Gordon, M.D., 31, and two other doctors emerged onstage and grabbed him before being wrestled down by Koch and others.

An isolated incident? Progressive “boomers” who disrupted public meetings and goosed sensation-hungry media in youth are having senior moments about it all and complaining that journalists now dignify political insanity as never before.

Not quite! To see how current protesters miss the real causes and proper targets of their misspent rage, start with a glance in the mirror. It’ll show that while progressives got some things right that the right gets wrong, those differences weren’t always very clear.

I’m not urging some leftist mea culpa that would give ammunition to Rush Limbaugh or set up false moral equivalencies of left and right. I’m suggesting that only the whole truth can set us free.

• Google “Bright College Years” and “video” and watch a painful but riveting color documentary of Jerry Rubin’s, Abbie Hoffman’s, and other white radicals’ descent upon Yale in 1970 to protest the murder trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale.

No voice-overs in this film obscure the amazingly vacuous, violent mediocrity of rants that will embarrass anyone who’s nostalgic about disruptions at Yale and other campuses. These often preceded and sometimes all-but provoked (without provocateurs!) police crackdowns, such as those at Harvard and Columbia, that still sanctify the students’ follies in some boomers’ memories.

Watching the film, I understood why Dwight Macdonald, the social critic, uproarious iconoclast, and descendant of two early Yale presidents, cautioned Columbia student rebels of 1968, whom he largely supported, that trashing universities would only deepen everyone’s oppression.

• Read about understandable but misdirected black rage in my The Closest of Strangers — about how, for example, in Brooklyn in 1967, Rhody McCoy, a tweedy, pipe-puffing disciple of Malcolm X and chairman of a predominantly black school board, set a precedent for racial mau-mauing by orchestrating menacing appearances by what board minutes call “the community,” in the form of the thuggish militant Sonny Carson and his retinue to intimidate white teachers’ union representatives and other liberals.

This kind of protest, claiming the mantle of nobler, more effective civil disobedience, trashed democratic deliberation about race for years. Justifications for bad strategies and premises were debated earnestly in The New York Review of Books, and, later, charges like Tawana Brawley’s or myths like the black-church arson epidemic were treated with great deference by mainstream journalists.

• Writing in the alternative weekly Boston Phoenix in 1973, I promoted a “tea party” protest designed to disrupt an official bicentennial commemoration of the original Boston Tea Party. A worthy goal, perhaps: Jeremy Rifkin, leader of a radical “People’s Bicentennial Commission” funded by the National Council of Churches, said, “It’s going to be a physical confrontation, obviously, on the docks, How the hell can they arrest people for being revolutionary at a commemoration of the Boston Tea Party?”

Not much came of that effort or of the “Days of Rage” following the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But many such disruptions shocked and briefly paralyzed ordinary, middle-aged Americans, liberal as well as conservative, who weren’t wielding police batons or wearing hard hats but were merely fingering Roberts’ Rules of Order in town-hall rooms where no one had ever called them “Motherfucker” before.

Many of us thought that Roberts Rules was just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations, but, watching the movement spin out of control, TPM contributor Todd Gitlin, an early SDS president, wrote in his book The Sixties of widespread assumptions that — as a Weatherman communiqué put it — “Smashing the pig means smashing the pig inside ourselves, destroying our own honkiness…. We are against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America….”

“No alternative theory or action crystallized from the murk of the collective despair,” Todd lamented. “They’re crazy, one heard [of the worst militants], but you have to admit they’ve got guts. Anyway, are you so sure they’re wrong? And what is going to bring down American imperialism? And what are you, we, going to do about it? It was hard to summon up the standing to criticize.”

I’ll leave aside here the lethal symmetries between leftist terrorists, black or white, and right-wing white militias and segregationist killers, because a politics of death signals only the death of politics. But note Todd’s estimate that between September 1969 and May 1970 there were some 250 “bombings and attempts linkable with the white left…. the explosions amplified, as usual, by the mass media.”

And note the broad atmospherics that incubated violence by crazies such as the 1993 Long Island Railroad gunman Colin Ferguson, a man steeped racial demagoguery whose incredible indulgence by progressives I described at the time. (Scroll to the second pdf on this link.)

We now pretend it wasn’t so. Yet we’re alarmed by the rhetorical violence at Sarah Palin rallies, the GOP 2008 convention, and health-care forums partly because it turns our senior moments about past indulgences into nightmares from a buried or sanitized past.

True enough, while today’s right-wing demonstrators want to block public health care (and, weirdly, to trust vast, bureaucratic engines such as insurance companies and HMOs), most enraged demonstrators in the 1960s were trying to stop mass butchery by a military-industrial juggernaut whose “mad rationalists” were crazier than we. And it can’t surprise us that as the slaughter deepened, anti-war demonstrators succumbed at times — some terminally — to helpless rage.

But many of today’s raging demonstrators feel helpless, too, and betrayed, for reasons that progressives, of all people, should understand.

Most of us who rightly assailed “the corporate state” were young and relatively well-educated. We lived, as SDS’ Port Huron statement put it, “in at least modest comfort” in a society where “going underground” could mean taking a readily available factory job.

Today’s demonstrators are older and more vulnerable than we were when the draft no longer hung over our heads. Today’s 55-year-old former auto or steel worker who has just become a stock clerk or burger flipper with no health insurance isn’t having any senior moments about the high-paying manufacturing or managerial job with full benefits and pensions that he lost, along with a manageable mortgage. He still feels it slipping away.

Can it surprise us if he’s raging at the wrong targets? We did that, too, sometimes — at university scholars, deans, liberal public functionaries, even anyone, including our parents, who was over 30, paying taxes, and therefore as complicit as a “good German” in “fascist Amerika.” Not only that: We didn’t trust government much more than the right does now.

But acknowledging all this only clarifies the two big, instructive differences.

First, while our tactics became terrible, we were right to arraign corporations for wrongs that conservatives still blame almost wholly on the state and “liberals”. We knew then what recent events have confirmed: that conservative and moderate Americans can’t reconcile their yearnings for ordered, almost sacred liberty with their obeisance to every whim and riptide of corporate and finance capital, which mock the capitalism envisioned by a John Locke or an Ayn Rand.

Second, our protests weren’t backed by any big corporations or major political parties. That 1973 “People’s Bicentennial” effort to disrupt the official Boston Tea Party exposed a plastic, corporate-funded simulation of a 1773 rebellion against the true progenitor of the tea tax – the multinational corporate East India Company — and a mercantile, imperial regime.

“‘Tis time to part,” Tom Paine wrote then, as Americans faced the daunting prospect of replacing the only regime they’d ever known with new, untried arrangements. We aren’t yet ready to part with the current regime of finance and big-corporate capital that has arisen to consume our republic.

When push does come to shove, I’ll commend the coercive non-violence I’ve discussed here before, the kind pioneered in the best of the last century by a new politics, from that of Gandhi and the early American Civil Rights movement to that of dissidents of the Soviet bloc, and, we can still hope, in Iran.

Our best responses to the enraged American victims of today’s profiteers would be in this spirit, which takes a lot of discipline, organizing, and courage to sustain. It involves civic-republican vigilance against the corporate state, mobilized public persuasion, and disciplined moral witness — no matter how inadequate and, yes, sometimes maddening, such responses may seem to the young rebels, the ideologues, and the most desperate among us.

About these responses, this summer’s conservative provocateurs haven’t a clue, but they’re the responses that will work best in our time — at least outside of Washington.

Tormented loners aren’t really alone in their rage; they’re separated from the rest of us by their demons but also bound to our subconscious hatreds and fears more intimately than we’d like to admit.

Tags: Uncategorized by Jim Sleeper
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